Tuesday, July 5, 2022

UPDATED: This Left Me Feeling Queasy

I confess, making it to the 3:27 mark was a real effort, one fortified by a pre-dinner libation(s) last evening. However, eventually I steeled myself to watch the remaining minute, the entire video experience leaving me feeling a tad bruised.

The following production is unbelievably cheesy but at the same time somewhat unsettling. For example, Pierre Poilievre's opening in which he lovingly fondles wood inevitably leads one into all kinds of Freudian speculations, but I'll leave those to more learned minds. However, as you will see, his very strained wood metaphor(?) eventually leads into a revisionist, completely false, history of the signing of Magna Carta.

The Great Charter was 

agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.[b] First drafted by Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. 

To hear unlucky Pierre's version, the commoners forced King John to sign the Great Charter, thereby reclaiming their freedom, the central theme and fiction of this risible production. And if you have the intestinal wherewithal to watch the entire video, you will likely note that this historical falsehood is consistent with the false narrative he draws about the awful Liberals, who, he claims, want to take away our few remaining freedoms in a fruitless quest for a socialist utopia.  He astutely reminds his listeners that utopia means no place.

No doubt some will be impressed by Poilievre's apparent respect for the intelligence of his followers and would-be acolytes. By using an extended and laboured metaphor, by seeming to be referring to historical fact, he is trying to flatter their intellectual vanity, while at the same time shamelessly and ruthlessly exploiting their credulity.

But of course, that really is what propaganda is all about, isn't it?


In times of war, it is said that truth is the first casualty. Obviously, the same is true of CPC leadership battles.

UPDATE:  I see I am not the only one who noticed Pierre's relationship with wood. Heather Mallick writes,
Do you like wood? Sure. I like wood as much as the next guy. But not as much as Conservative Party leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre, who has dropped another unhinged video and it’s all about wood because wood is what this strange man really likes.

Plaid-shirted Poilievre greets us inside his wooden house caressing a vertical exposed wooden beam with his fingertips and enthusing, with theatrical pauses and little bursts.

 Is that erotic? Someone thinks it is.

Twitter certainly did. “Find someone who looks at you the way Pierre Poilievre looks at an antivaxxer or a piece of wood,” it advised. “Poilievre seems to be trying to take a piece of wood on a date.”

She goes on, but I think you get the picture. The unsavoury picture, that is.


 


8 comments:

  1. Bile rising. He has some decent writers. Pierre Poilievre, "hewer of wood." Somehow I don't see PP wielding either adze or draw knife. The "patina" he purports to treasure has been removed by a thickness planer.

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    1. I believe Pierre speaks of many things he knows nothing about, Anon, both in this video and in his other efforts at communicating his 'freedom' message.

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  2. One wonders who taught Pierre history.

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    1. I believe it was the School of Political Expediency, Owen. Apparently they have campuses worldwide.

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  3. Pierre has some effective writers on his team. A touching piece with the background music. Carl Bernstein ...or was it Bob Woodward.. said on CNN the other night when commenting on the Jan 6 commission...'the facts don't matter'...and he's correct.

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    1. The mutability of 'facts' is one of the saddest signs of our debased age, Anon, and one the likes of Pierre is more than happy to take advantage of.

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  4. This enduces the state of being ill. Anyong

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    1. A perfectly understandable reaction, Anyong.

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