Mike Puffy and Lord Russell's Teapot

Phil Burpee, Columnist

"Truth I have no trouble with - it's the facts I get all screwed up."  Farley Mowat
"It is a hard thing to speak the truth. It is difficult to make hidden forces appear."  Horqarnaq - Inuit shaman

Ah, indeed - what a pesky business is the truth. How smooth and simple life would be if everybody would just believe anything we say for the very fact that we simply say it. If, for instance, I say I have blue socks when any fool can see that they are orange and lime green, then guaranfreakingteed some nit-picking busybody is going to call me out on my assertion. "Yer wrong, dude - they're orange and lime green."-  and so the wreck begins. For the truth, you see, is a slimy and slippery thing - the proverbial greased pig of philosophical discourse.


     The Oxford dictionary defines a 'lie' as an intentional false statement. But is it an untruth, or merely an incomplete or altered portrayal of some greater truth? And 'truth' in turn is defined as 'quality or state of being  true or accurate or honest or sincere or loyal or accurately shaped or adjusted'. Fairly open to interpretation it seems to me. What might be true for you could well be highly suspect to me - viz. "No, dude - they're definitely blue!" Next it's the chromatograph machine and a panel of colour experts - and then we're into legal fees.

"There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."  Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

So, consider Senator Mike Duffy. Stretching is a thing well understood by the honourable gentleman's gaunchies perhaps, but it is clear that he nonetheless deploys a rather flexible regard for, shall we say, facts. 'This may indeed be this', he seems to say, "but who's to say it isn't also that?" Gee - got us flummoxed there Mike. I guess we're not in Kansas anymore either - or PEI either come to that. But one must be sympathetic towards the honourable Senator - apparently the devilish bureaucratic forms in question pertaining to certain expenditures and deductibilities are quite confoozing and compuldecated to figger out - had the poor fellow's head all a-spinning. It's hard enough as it is to remember where your backside actually spends most of its time (especially when your brain apparently lives on Sesame Street), but to expect such a busy and important man to squander his time on such piffling matters as making accurate expense claims, for which the Taxman would descend on us mere mortals like the veritable Attila the Hun, is clearly an outrage and a gross impingement upon his ability to do whatever it is that he and his snoozy cohorts purport to do shuffling around the hallways of the Red Chamber - soberly reflecting by all accounts. Yeah well, sober reflection is otherwise typically done under the gloom of a half-blind hangover the morning after down in the drunk tank at the cop-shop. Same bleary muzz as that experienced by the Senate on a typical working day. And perhaps Marg Delahunty gets the last best word on the underlying moral issue here, as she accosted the Senator one day on Parliament Hill - "If brown-nosing suckholery goes above a hundred dollars a barrel", she asked the fleeing Senator, "can I have drilling rights on your head?" Contempt is indeed the order of the day.

But really, the Puffy One himself is small change in all this, though hardly without a certain drippy, sluggardly culpability. So too the unfortunate and scuttling Ms. Wallin, and that cocky little wife-beater Brazeau. For larger powers are at play here. Out of the murky smog that is the customary fug of Conservative Party Newspeak, we see the hoary spectacle of the Prime Minister himself on some distant Peruvian stage making small noises about transparency, accountability and - oh, yes - his own absolute non-involvement with any of the wretched malfeasance of his squalling underlings. And then we are comfortingly assured that Canadians have scant concerns for such inconsequential things as ethics, morality, propriety and due process before the law anyway, and are primarily focused on - well, surprise, surprise - 'jobs, growth and prosperity'. It is, after all, Canada's Economic Action Plan that sweeps aside silly, touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy details such as right and wrong. Jurisprudence becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for (or possible impediment to) the further, unfettered extraction of wealth from a compromised body politic and a groaning ecology.

And yet there is further opening here for the cynic. Because we can only look at the gaudy business of such bizarre and inappropriate Senate appointments in one of two ways. Either Mr. Harper is so uncharacteristically unaware of the implications of his actions with such appointments, an unlikely thing for such a cerebral control-freak, or there is actually method to such apparent madness. For what better way to tank the current format for the institution that is the Senate than to pad it with moral reprobates and ethical degenerates such as these folk now so prominent in the news? Can it be that perhaps the PM has decided that the best route to Senate reform is to render it so repugnant to the public sensibility that anything he offers by way of fixing the wallowing hulk will be happily seized upon by the electorate? Who's to say me nay? It seems, under the circumstances, entirely plausible. It would be like putting Don Cherry on an Intergovernmental Panel for the Societal Advancement of Women, Gays and Immigrants - pretty much guaranteed to blow that whole shitteree out of the water too. If this is so, it is indeed cause for the deepest concern, for such conniving caprice on the part of a Prime Minister would be tantamount to a constitutional putsch. Or maybe he has simply thrown caution to the wind and is dreamily anticipating the Rapture. No less discomforting a prospect. One is creepily reminded of the musing of Louis XIV - "L'etat c'est moi."

But what of Lord Russell's teapot then? It refers to a famous tenet of the great English philosopher and mathematician Sir Bertrand Russell. The quip is most often used as a tonic to religious dogma, and it avers that any burden of proof must always fall to those who are inclined to make scientifically unfalsifiable claims - such as propagators of so-called received scripture, which is ultimately and always perforce a subjective experience. One might as well claim that a china teapot, too small to be viewed by even the most powerful telescope, is in orbit somewhere between Earth and Mars, as to make claims to the existence of some supernatural being whose manifestation is only made in the mind of the beholder/believer, etc., etc. Neither can be quantifiably disproved and both are therefore removed beyond the realm of reasoned debate and/or analysis. And so I suggest that Mike Duffy is just such a teapot, short and stout - a thing supposedly representative of some loftier power, yet in truth really just a dumpy little crock adrift in the inky backwaters of the Void (along with that wandering beer tankard known as Rob Ford). Were I to claim that he is in fact in an elliptical orbit somewhere between Earth and Mars, you would be hard-pressed to prove me wrong. And I think he would be similarly challenged, especially as he seems already sorely-pressed to determine his own  actual location on the surface of this planet. Senator Duffy, whose very genesis hails back to the deep recesses of Prime Minister Harper's unfathomable cosmic perceptions, is the perfect paradigm for the amoral scrabblings of this current federal government - self-aggrandizing, self-congratulatory, leech-like in outlook, smarmy, smug, and utterly devoid of any nuanced regard for that which could be our once-admired country. What this puffed-up fellow represents is a hollow and pathetic claim to an existence which is otherwise unverifiable in the normal pantheon of human certainties. And behind him lies a governmental ethos that seeks to so disenfranchise the electorate through a combination of apathy and moral revulsion, that the State itself could ultimately, and horribly, become the sole arbiter of what might otherwise be viewed as the public conscience.

A pox on Mike Puffy I say then - and a pox on the glib and lizardy political mind that foisted him upon us. I see in all of this a further attempt to disconnect the citizenry from the legislative machinery of the State through a prolonged onslaught of dull-wittedness and moral lassitude. Why bother to even vote we increasingly say? It's all a grisly wreck. Yes, the sandbox has got lumpy with all the sordid little droppings that have escaped the britches of the over-indulged toddlers we call our government in Ottawa. They can't even figure out what all that crunching is in their grubby little sand sandwiches anymore.

Meanwhile, Lord Russell's teapot sails serenely through the Cosmos, secure in its unassailability, and benignly dismissive of our petty woes. Well would we be advised to make such dabblers in the ruins of our trust pay a steep price. For it is not enough to make claims of purpose and position based on worthless chatter. By the actions of such folk shall we know their true place - and their true intent.

"I pull in resolution, and begin
             to doubt the equivocation of the fiend
             that lies like truth......"   William Shakespeare - Macbeth


Phil Burpee
May 25, 2013