Look Out! Nationalist on the Rampage . . . in Canada

In Ottawa, the niggling, penny-pinching, mean-spirited Conservative government is approaching a National Portrait Gallery in its own inimitable way: it wants the gallery to be housed somewhere - not Ottawa - in a building that is not a gallery. A space in an office tower would be nice, they say. Those who steer the party in power - i.e. the Harper Gang - are pompous, self-important, uncouth Philistines who don't understand art and will never make an effort to do so, who look upon artists of all disciplines as some sort of failed businesspersons, some sort of failed human beings, some sort of freeloaders.

They are the ones who cannot conceive of the value of sitting and just thinking.

They are the ones who want to quantify and monetarize every action and who believe that nothing is worthwhile if it does not have financial value. They think the Holy Grail is business and that the saints among us are the business people.

Let us forget for a moment that some business people are not artistically minded - how can they be, you say, they are business oriented. Being an artist is to travel a very different track, indeed. True. But many business geniuses like the late Ken Thomson do have an appreciation for art, develop connoisseurship, realize that the human being needs not just sport, not just business, not just politics, but also art. All art, that flows from creative expression be it dance, music, sculpture, painting or any of another good handful of disciplines.

And what is this nonsense about locating the National Portrait Gallery anywhere other than in the capital of the country??? What about

the National Portrait Gallery? it's in London
Scottish National Portrait Gallery? Edinburgh
the National Portrait Gallery? Canberra
the National Portrait Gallery? Washington, D.C. . . . does anyone see a pattern here?

Canada does have an online Portrait Gallery of sorts, courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, but you will note that 1) the word "National" is omitted (bad word according to the PCs - and that does include the politically correct) and 2) it sends out travelling exhibitions to far-flung corners of the Canadian empire, er . . . the Canadian landscape.

"The gallery's collection of portraits is currently housed out of public view in a climate-controlled Gatineau, Que., building operated by the national archives," according to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report that quoted an assessment that keeping the gallery in Ottawa would save $2.5-million per year. (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/01/07/ot-portrait-gallery-080107.html)

Hey Steve! Hey, Harper, you there in the ever-more-boring suits and with the beginnings of a venal, suspicious look about you, did you actually pay attention to that report? One wonders whether this insistence on locating our country's National Portrait Gallery somehwere else -Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary or Vancouver, I bet, to mollify the electorate out there who are always carping that the rest of Canada does not give a damn about them - has anything to do with scratching one another's backs, greasing one another's palms, or some such anatomical tit-for-tat (Sgt Fordy, take note! -- see column below: ROBERT PICKTON - Scapegoat) Personally I don't care if you want to locate the gallery in Pile-O-Bones, Manitoba, but then don't call it "National". For those of you government types who missed English classes because you were too busy in the political club or Junior Toastmasters, here's what it means:

"owned or maintained for the public by the national government"

and wouldn't you know it, the national government of Canada happens to be located in Ottawa.

Yours Truly worked for a number of years in the bureaucracy, in Ottawa, Fortress of Darkness. Yours Truly could - but won't - tell you things about tax spending that would make the enamel slide right off your teeth. Yours Truly tried unsuccessfully to fight the inertia that brings stupidity to any bureaucracy - and failed. But in all that time Yours Truly never once disagreed with the idea that the "National" institutions - National Arts Centre, National museums etc - should remain in the national capital. Ottawa even has its own government entity, the National Capital Region, that jealously guards the make-up of businesses along its various streets of prominence.

Well, Yours Truly also put forth this idea over 20 years ago, and stands by it:

Move the Capital to WINNIPEG.

All sorts of people have expressed the opinion, over the decades, that Members of Parliament are in it largely for the money and the prestige and not to be true servants of the public. Moving the capital, lock-stock-and-barrel, to one of the more godforsken locations in the country, albeit virtually smack in its middle, would weed out the self-interested from the altruistic. Anyone who voluntarily got him- or herself elected or appointed or hired to work in Winnipeg would be understood to be going there for the love of all things Canadian, not Mammon. And nobody from any of our three coasts could complain that the national government was playing favourites to the centre (read the behemoth Greater Toronto) because, being smack in the middle, equidistant from the perimeter, would inform the national debate and spending and ministers' travels etc. etc. etc. We could acquire a new national anthem - by the Weakerthans - "I Hate Winnipeg.
And then you could move all cultural and military and other institutions to Winnipeg and still correctly call them National this and National that.

But back to the National Portrait Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

I want someone from the political party in power, which is trying at this moment to demolish the country, which cheapens and makes small everything it touches, which is too cowed and too weak-assed to tell their glorious micromanaging leader to back off because he is being an ignorant putz, to leave an answer to this article that rationally and logically convinces the readers of this page, and Yours Truly, of a compelling reason to de-nationalize our national institutions.

It ought to make for a laugh or two.

c2008 bluemlein.blogspot.com