Politics
Consultancy Euphemisms
I’ve worked for a few digital media agencies during my career as a web monkey. As with all such consultancies, schedules are sometimes hectic and madness often reigns. Out of this culture of organized chaos come some pretty clever euphemisms, though. Here are two of my favorites:
“Creative Solutions” – When a project has crashed and burned beyond all hope of recovery but the stakeholders staunchly refuse to accept that fact, they will ask you to salvage the situation with some “creative solutions.” This is just a friendly way of requesting the impossible while placing the onus for delivering it entirely on you.
“Aggressive Timeline” – This describes a project’s schedule in which double the work has been squeezed into half the time required. Nervous breakdowns, missed deadlines, and shoddy results are pretty much guaranteed, but you can always try to offset those negative effects with some “creative solutions.” (See above.)
In other news, I saw Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis shopping at Mountain Equipment Co-op today. I still intend to read her book.
Arabian Superheroes
I read an article in Saturday’s Globe & Mail about AK Comics, an Egyptian comic book publisher credited with introducing the first genuine Middle Eastern superheroes. The creator, himself a fan of venerable American icons such as Superman and Wonder Woman, felt strongly about creating an Arabic pantheon of heroes to emulate Arabic values of peace, justice, and cultural pride. Driven by compassion and morality, each of AK Comics’ four superheroes endeavor to protect the innocent from extremism and injustice.
Aside from a renewed love of comics, the story about AK Comics interests me because it serves as yet another reminder that the likes of Osama Bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi do not speak for the Arab world. Growing readership for stories about a nonpartisan superheroine named Jalila, who defends the “City of All Faiths” from extremist violence, suggests that the values gap between “us” and “them” is just as fictional as superheroes are.
Stronach Switcheroo
This week Canadian Politics experienced a deliciously dramatic upheaval when Belinda Stronach, credited with facilitating the new Conservative Party of Canada, “crossed the floor” to the Liberal cabinet. The bold move left her colleagues in supposed dismay and her lover, deputy leader Peter MacKay, in real heartache. What surprised me, however, was that Stronach’s swticheroo surprised anyone.
Belinda Stronach had no future in the Conservative Party. She knew it. We knew it. Even Stephen Harper knew it. A moderate voice like Stronach’s could never be heard above the din of social conservatism and religious tradition dominating the Tories ever since their assimilation by the Canadian Alliance. By all accounts (hers, MacKay’s, Harper’s) she’d become unhappy with the direction the Tories were heading in. Mere days before a budget vote that she believed needed to pass to let a hounded government get on with the business of governing, she could not have chosen a more strategic moment.
She’s been accused of careerism by her former colleagues, which is an ironic thing for politicians to accuse each other of. Did ambition influence Stronach’s defection to the Liberals, as Harper claims? Absolutely. Ambition is what drives each of us to achieve our goals. Stronach is no less ambitious than Harper himself, who seems ready to sell his own mother just to take over the country. (He’s certainly willing to sell Quebec, as evidenced by his complicity with the separatists.) But it’s not really about ambition. Stronach joined the Grits for the same reason the “ugly duckling” joined the swans: because that’s where she belongs.
But I’m not trying to glorify Belinda Stronach or the Liberals, really. I’ve grown too cynical for that. Rather, I simply take delight in the unexpected turns that fool parliament into serving the public while bickering with itself. The government needs to focus on passing some kind of budget some time this term so that Canadians can receive some kind of benefit. Even if the Stronach swticheroo doesn’t ultimately make that happen, at least it entertained us in the process.