"‘There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it; duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’" (George Orwell, 1984)
Stephen Harper is fond of Orwellian duckspeak, because he is always speaking to his group (which is quite like a gaggle – and often not high in flight). Prorogation is massive duckspeak, because it avoids having to do anything with lips, and it prevents any public feeding; there is just a lot of waddling, here and there. Conservative television ads are full of duckspeak, as they squawk a lot, and they leave droppings on their opponents almost to the point of no return: remember the unfortunate Mr. Dion, and to a lesser extent there is Mr. Ignatieff who flies too high (according to his imagination).
Parliament is about duckspeak (and it can sound that way), but Harper and the Conservative Party have honed it to a fine art. Early in January I wrote my MP James Moore with complaints about prorogation (see my blog entry). I did receive a reply, within a few weeks, but there was no mention of a prorogued Parliament, and quite frankly the letter did not say anything much ... until I came across the word duckspeak. Mr. Moore was sticking to script, according to his group, even though a Minister, and avoiding any accountability to his constituents: duckspeak. I do wonder who actually wrote the letter. If it were Rick Mercer’s guess, the office plants had a say.
Another word comes to mind when considering Stephen Harper: “egological” (a deceased friend of the late Pope John Paul II came up with the term). Forget the environment, save for the office plants, Mr. Harper also puts new meaning the notion of ‘head count.’ I thought we had surpassed the ‘Me’ generation, but can the Prime Minister be a holdover from the age of bellbottoms? No, that would be an Orwellian thought-crime. Think way back, I mean, way back, to the age of the Saints, of never doing any wrong, you know, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Paul, and so on.
“Saint” is an ostentatious title for most of us, if not all. It can suggest incompatible thinking, or Orwellian doublespeak, as if there were nothing better, supposedly (and everybody else is considered a "sinner"), but that is how Stephen Harper was indoctrinated at Richview Collegiate Institute in Toronto. In other words, Mr. Harper still thinks he is one of the “Saints,” the nickname for his High School (where Church and State unite), and he persists in believing he is the head boy. (Incidentally, Margaret Atwood went to the Harper family's old area of haunt, the Leaside "Lancers"). So Harper has finally figured out a way of overriding the Senate (the teachers); in his own day it would have been by old-fashioned student strike. However, prorogation is a pretentious high school kid’s answer to getting one’s own way. Only he has succeeded in closing down the school because initiation rites may have gotten out of hand. Given that Harper is so egological, it really is like water off an Orwellian duck’s back.
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