Spenser’s Art of Sinking

My three favourite English poets, in rank order are Milton, Pope, and Spenser.

(I would add James Thomson, except for the fact that he was technically a Scot. I would also add Rochester, except that he is too uneven; when he is good he is great, but when he’s bad he’s wretched).

My love for Milton is based almost solely on Paradise Lost and the odd sonnet or two (though I should mention that much of his prose is also well worth the reading). Paradise Lost is always grand, and I never read it without coming away from it feeling ennobled somehow. No poet is perfect, though each may be imperfect in his own way. With Milton, his imperfections lie in his coinages and his Latinate vocabulary, which are not always elegant or felicitous, sounding a little too much of the learned chit-chat at the college High Table.

In Pope, I admire his wit. He is at his best when he is being funny, which is why it was a shame that my college professors had us spend so much time studying An Essay on Man rather than The Dunciad. Pope was no philosopher, and the Essay on Man reads like a cheap verse bowdlerization of Shaftesbury or Bolingbroke. He was a master of comedic irony and a vicious and brutal satirist (I mean this in a good way). If he has one major drawback, for me, it would be his tiresome heroic couplets, which were unfortunately the characteristic vice of the age and by no means peculiar to Pope. They are often clever, but over long stretches they are tiresome. Still, to blame him for this is about as useful as blaming your parents for the platform shoes or velour tracksuits they wore in those old family photographs; one must look past them.

And then we come to Spenser. His language is earthy, his vocabulary is English (except where he focuses on the minutiae of chivalric deeds and accoutrement, wherein he has recourse to a bastard French lexicon). Whether he is describing shepherds or battle wounds, his images are striking — someone should do a count of how often he uses the word “grisly” in The Faerie Queene. He loves to use archaisms, and although this could seem rather contrived and intrusive in a poet of lesser skill, in Spenser it is more often charming.

As for faults, Spenser has two that are, to my mind, only excusable by the fact that he wrote in an age when English criticism was still in its infancy. On the other hand, he was a Cambridge man and had a decent classical education, so he would have had ample opportunity to know about the poetic sins he was committing from such authorities as Horace, Quintilian, and perhaps Longinus. He cannot, I think, plead ignorance.

Spenser’s “Sinking”

In 1727, Pope published his humourous essay “Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry”. Its subject was the ways in which writers of his time commonly failed to hit at the level of sublimity or loftiness they were aiming at in their work, instead sinking into the commonplace, the bombastic, or the anticlimactic.

Sometimes a poet, whilst singing of great themes, goes on too long, until the reader is simply wearied. Or else, although not exactly wearied, the reader’s expectations are built up to such a height that the tension created is out of all proportion to the actual issue. Here I think of the Earl of Roscommon’s line in An Essay on Translated Verse (1685), echoing Horace:

“The Mountains Labour’d and a Mouse was Born” (p. 6)

When Spenser sinks, he more often does so by cramming his verse with commonplaces unworthy of his skill. Perhaps the best example of this is the following stanza from The Faerie Queene, in which Florimell is chased by the Foster:

“So as they gazed after her a while,
    Lo where a griesly Foster forth did rush,
    Breathing out beastly lust her to defile:
    His tyreling iade he fiercely forth did push,
    Through thicke and thin, both ouer banke and bush
    In hope her to attaine by hooke or crooke,
    That from his gorie sides the bloud did gush:
    Large were his limbes, and terrible his looke,
And in his clownish hand a sharp bore speare he shooke.”
[Bk. III, Canto I, stanza xvii]

This is ugly stuff, no? If the only way one can fill out a stanza is by stuffing it with such peasantries as “through thick and thin”, “over bank and bush”, and “by hook or crook”, then it were better never writ.

In fairness, we might excuse Spenser on this occasion, since perhaps it was done intentionally, in keeping with the Foster’s bestiality and rustic clownishness. It may also be a feeble attempt at archaism, a monstrous facsimile of what Spenser thought was traditional Middle English alliterative verse. But still, there are other instances of such sinking in the book where no reason can be plausibly offered other than sheer laziness on the poet’s part. What it most commonly achieves is a combination of the serious with the frivolous, to the detriment of the former.

Spenser’s “Ten-Monosyllable Heroicks”

In his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Lord Shaftesbury described his impression of the effect that too many consecutive monosyllables will have on the ear:

“I see no reason why… an un-interrupted Succession of these well-strung Monosyllables might not be allow’d to clatter after one another, like the Hammers of a Paper-Mill, without any breach of Musick, or prejudice to the Harmony of our Language. But if Persons who have gone no farther than a Smith’s Anvil to gain an Ear, are yet likely, on fair trial, to find a plain defect in these Ten-Monosyllable Heroicks; it wou’d follow, methinks, that even a Prose-Author, who attempts to write politely, shou’d endeavour to confine himself within those Bounds, which can never, without breach of Harmony, be exceeded in any just Metre, or agreeable Pronunciation.” (III.265-266)

Technically speaking, the basis of heroic verse — the “Heroicks” to which Shaftesbury refers — was the rhyming couplet composed of ten-syllable lines in iambic pentameter, as in the opening lines of Pope’s Iliad:

“Achilles’ Wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heav’nly Goddess sing!
That Wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The Souls of mighty Chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unbury’d on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.”

Whether arranged in rhyming couplets or not, the ten-syllable iambic pentameter line is common in English verse. Spenser’s stanzas are typically composed of ten-syllable pentameter, with a final twelve-syllable alexandrine. Having ten syllables to a line is no sin. Having ten monosyllables only to a line is.

Shaftesbury’s nephew, James Harris, noted in his Philological Inquiries (1780) that “It has been called a fault in our Language, that it abounds in MONOSYLLABLES. As these, in too lengthened a suite, disgrace a Composition; Lord Shaftesbury, (who studied purity of Stile with great attention) limited their number to nine, and was careful, in his Characteristics, to conform to his own Law” (Works, vol. II, p. 340).

In prose, the auditory effect of ten or more consecutive monosyllables is rather akin to the clattering hammers of a paper mill. Indeed, as his nephew notes, Shaftesbury took pains to excise examples of it from his own prose for the second edition of Characteristicks (compare, for example, volume I, page 66 of the first and second editions). It has a somewhat different effect in poetry, but just as jarring. In his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), Jonathan Swift also remarked on “how much our Language was already overstocked with Monosyllables” (p. 21). The bad effects of this on poetry was, he claimed, exacerbated by the Restoration poets’ habit of contracting words to make them fit the measure, effectively rendering polysyllabic words monosyllabic.

Let us look at an example of a ten-monosyllable line in one of these Restoration poets. I mentioned earlier that when Lord Rochester is good he is great, but when he’s bad, he’s wretched. At line 109 of Rochester’s “Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country,” we come across the following literary atrocity:

“They still find out why what may, should not please”

True, the line does not contain one of the contractions of which Swift complained. But in other respects it serves to illustrate the effect of the ten-monosyllable string on a line of verse. In this case, if we imagine the line to move along, like a horse, at a trot, the horse seems to stumble somewhere around the “what may”, a little before or a little after it, depending on how you scan it. (Notice that I have violated the nine-monosyllable rule myself in the foregoing sentence, to what effect I’ll leave you to judge). The same distance is travelled, but with confused steps, making the journey seem longer than it should.

Rather than clattering or hammering, for Pope the ten-monosyllable heroic was a creeping thing. Again, we are given the image of something at the same time ungraceful, ignoble, and unduly slow:

“Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.”
[An Essay on Criticism (1711), p. 21, ll. 345-349]

More than nine consecutive monosyllables make a line seem longer than it is, and more than one such line in a stanza outright kills it. Spenser is more than once guilty of this kind of murder. Stanza xix of Bk. III, Canto V of The Faerie Queene is disfigured by two lines of ten consecutive monosyllables. Actually, there are three such lines if you believe, as I do, that Spenser intended “powre” to be pronounced as one syllable rather than two, as indicated by the altered spelling, allowing it to be crammed into a ten-syllable line. Thus, I end with this supreme example of Spenser’s art of sinking in poetry:

With that at him a quiu'ring dart he threw,
    With so fell force and villeinous despighte,
    That through his haberieon the forkehead flew,
    And through the linked mayles empierced quite,
    But had no powre in his soft flesh to bite:
    That stroke the hardy Squire did sore displease,
    But more that him he could not come to smite;
    For by no meanes the high banke he could sease,
But labour'd long in that deepe ford with vaine disease.
(Bk. III, Canto V, stanza 19)


Bibliography

HARRIS, James. Philological Inquiries (1780). In The Works of James Harris, Esq. (2 vols.). London: F. Wingrave, 1801.

POPE, Alexander. An Essay on Criticism. London: W. Lewis, 1711 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

—— Poetical Works. Herbert Davis (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

ROCHESTER, John Wilmot, Earl of. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. David M. Vieth (ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968.

ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of. An Essay on Translated Verse. London: Jacob Tonson, 1685 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols.). Birmingham: John Baskerville, 1773.

SPENSER, Edmund. The Faerie Queene (2 vols.). J. C. Smith (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.

SWIFT, Jonathan. A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1969).

Living off the Avails...

Inside a government-sponsored anti-gambling initiative

When the government becomes the people’s pander, when it actively and consciously encourages vice, immorality, and plain folly among them, then that people is nigh doomed — it is not necessarily the end of civilization, but it is certainly VIP seating for the event.

My home city is deep in debate about whether it should approve a giant casino and “entertainment complex”. I use the word “debate” with a sense of reservation, since it implies that there are roughly an equal number of people on both sides of the issue. In truth, I have yet to personally meet a single person who supports this casino, though I’m sure such people are out there somewhere, especially among assorted developers and those city councillors who are deep in their pockets. I do after all run in rather rarefied circles.

Rather than argue over all the pros and cons of the casino, I would simply like to consider one argument offered in support of it, since it is the argument that is most commonly trotted out when the discussion comes up. The argument — let us call it the Revenue Argument — at its simplest is this:

THE REVENUE ARGUMENT: The gambling revenue that will flow into city coffers from a casino will allow us to finance badly needed infrastructure, such as new subways.

Presumably, that revenue will come in the form of either (i) levies on gamblers, or (ii) levies on the winnings of casinos, or else (iii) from the enlarged tax base created by the new jobs casinos will provide. These are not mutually exclusive revenue streams, and the city may derive funds from all of them. However, in truth they are all reducible to (i). For example, in order for those new jobs to become a reality, the casino must make money from gamblers sufficient to pay the workers (I leave aside the very real question of the quality of these jobs and whether there aren’t better ways of creating better jobs). So the new jobs are funded ultimately from the losses of gamblers. Similarly, and more obviously, in order for a casino to be able to pay taxes, it must make profits; these profits ultimately come from — wait for it — the losses of gamblers.

Thus, the new revenue must come one way or another from the gamblers themselves. The only question is whether the money will come from their losses (via taxation of the house’s revenue and/or the revenue of its employees) or from their winnings (via direct taxation of gamblers’ gains). Again, because these are not mutually exclusive, it doesn’t really matter whether gamblers win or lose, since the government will get its cut either way. Just as the house never loses, so neither it seems does the government. This puts the government in the less than upright position of having to positively encourage gambling, since they make their end by having people gamble (win or lose); they make nothing when people do not gamble. Call it government as public croupier.

So who is the net loser? Well, since both the house and the government must always make their end, it is necessarily the gamblers who must lose. Hence, what the Revenue Argument proposes, in essence, is that public projects be funded by gamblers, and that gamblers ought to open their pockets to pay for our city’s subways. This naturally leads us (or should lead us) to the question: What justifies forcing gamblers to pay for our services? There are a few possible justifications, each of them dubious, to say the least. Let us consider them in turn.

1.    Gamblers are Vicious and Immoral

Many often see gambling as a vice and therefore the people engaging in it as somehow vicious. They might characterize the very folly of gamblers as a kind of vice in itself. Or they might characterize gamblers as wastrels, idly throwing away unjustifiable amounts of their time, talent, and treasure on activities of no social benefit when they could be better employed elsewhere to the common good.

Of course, it may not be simply that gambling is of no net benefit at all, since the gambler can be assumed to derive some pleasure from gambling, no matter how small and fleeting it may be. Instead, let us think of it in opportunity cost terms: although gambling is pleasurable to the gambler himself, the resources he devotes to it could have been better employed elsewhere and therefore represents net social loss.

I think there is a good case to be made for this view of gambling as wasteful and vicious, but I won’t make that case here. I will simply assume it to be true for the sake of argument. What tends to follow from viewing gambling as immoral is that it is now seen as justified to pick gamblers’ pockets to pay for public projects. This picking of pockets can either be done directly, through taxing his winnings, or indirectly, through taxing his (more certain) losses, which represent the winnings of the house. In either case, the money ultimately comes out of the pockets of gamblers, as has already been explained.

The main differences between taxing gamblers and taxing the general citizenry are that (i) this subset of citizens derives some pleasure from the activity taxed, (ii) they engage in it willingly, and (iii) they are viewed ex hypothesi as immoral and their activity is therefore to be discouraged. These characteristics of taxation of gamblers generally lead observers to view the taxation more favourably. After all, we can discourage bad behavior and make the bad people pay for public goods as a sort of penance for their voluntary sins. And it magically makes wastefulness efficient. This favourable view is wrong.

First, if the activity is truly immoral and if gamblers are by extension guilty of vice, then wouldn’t the logical answer to be to make the activity illegal? We certainly shouldn’t be encouraging it by building flashy new gambling facilities with attached “entertainment complexes” for the whole family. As I said before, in order for the government to make its end in this racket it must encourage more gambling, which is rather inconsistent with the claim that it is justified in taxing gambling because such taxation will discourage it. The government’s position here is at bottom incoherent.

Secondly, assuming gamblers are somehow vicious, I don’t see a close rational connection between mulcting them and rewarding non-gamblers with the proceeds, which is what we are doing when we purchase public goods for the latter with wealth confiscated from the former. The gambler may deserve punishment, but it does not logically follow from this that non-gamblers deserve to profit from his vice. Criminal sanctions may be appropriate for certain vicious behaviours, but it seems to me that redistribution from gamblers to non-gamblers would have to be justified on the basis of the latter somehow being victims of the former. This is a stretch. But even if it’s not, we come back again to my earlier point: when someone commits a crime and there is a victim involved, it may be appropriate to penalize the criminal by making him pay compensation to the victim. But we do not make it part of public policy to positively encourage crime and make it attractive so that more victims can be created and more money be paid to them. That is what is commonly called a “racket”, and a very degenerate one at that (more on rackets later). Yet this is precisely what we are doing when we purposely create more casinos, encourage more gambling, and then tax it on the basis that it does harm to society. Either gambling is morally tainted or it isn’t. If it is tainted, society ought not to avail itself of the proceeds of the crime, any more than a pimp ought to avail himself of the proceeds of his prostitutes.

On the other hand, if gambling is a vicious though victimless activity, then assuming that we are conservative enough to want to punish victimless crimes, we ought to do so without rewarding people who are not victims, otherwise we make the general citizenry share in the proceeds of vice, which is wrong. (Of course, in a more liberal approach, we shouldn’t be punishing victimless crimes at all. But that’s a debate for another day.)

If you and I want things like new subways, we ought to be willing to pay for them. We are not justified in paying for them with the money of gamblers except insofar as their behavior is somehow either unjustly depriving us of those subways (which it is not) or insofar as they will be the exclusive users of the subways (which they won’t be). To make them pay for our subways is — pardon the pun — free riding, a shakedown.

Far from justifying the Revenue Argument, viewing gambling as a vice makes the Revenue Argument an instrument of our own corruption, insofar as it would have us living off the avails of immorality.

And yet, the way governments and casino developers typically present it, the Revenue Argument sounds like a wonderful alchemical method for turning base vice into golden virtue. And much like the claims of alchemy, this one is too good to be true.

2.    The Casino Industry is Vicious and Immoral

I once had a professor in a class on probability and inductive logic explain to us that lotteries are a government’s way of taxing people who can’t do math. We may be neutral on whether or not gamblers themselves are immoral, while still believing that the industry that profits from them is immoral. Maybe gamblers are gullible, or sick, or weak, and therefore shouldn’t be taken advantage of. If so, it may be argued that it is hence justifiable to mulct casinos in order to penalize them for fleecing the sick, the weak, and the stupid.

Notice that on this account, much of what I argued above would still apply. First, as I’ve already explained, the money mulcted from casinos ultimately comes from the putatively sick, weak, and irrational gamblers themselves. If casinos prey on the weak, then when governments impose “punitive” taxes on casinos they are ultimately skimming the profits of an injustice rather than addressing it. Again, we — through the agency of our government — become the casinos’ accomplices in wrongdoing.

Second, if what casinos are doing is immoral, then we ought not to be encouraging the building of new ones. By advocating for new casinos, we are advocating for more vice and making ourselves complicit in the immorality of the gambling industry. We further implicate ourselves by offering tax breaks and incentives to casino developers. Far from being high-minded in our taxing of evildoers to create public good, we are creating and encouraging public ill and then spending some of the ill-gotten gains on public works to expiate our sins, so that we may continue to sin. Actually, that view is too flattering, for we actually derive benefit from this expiation of our sins, which means it is no expiation at all, no matter how much we fool ourselves into believing we’re righting a wrong.

Third, again, I’m not sure the public has the right to profit from casino owners’ putative wrongdoing. If their actions create victims, then it is the victims that ought to be compensated. Who are the victims? Well, ex hypothesi they would be the poor gullible gamblers whom the casinos take advantage of. I do not gamble, and if I am not harmed by what casinos do, then what right have I to demand my cut of the “compensation” to spend on projects I happen to favour, such as subways? If I want subways, I ought to pay my own fair share for them rather than shaking down third parties to fund them for me, especially when those third parties are sick, weak, or mentally disadvantaged. If the activities of casinos cause harm to certain people, then those people ought to be compensated. I’m not sure why I would deserve compensation (barring, of course, certain vague and indirect negative spillover effects I may be said to suffer from the presence of casinos — but I highly doubt that an honest costing of these would be enough to fund subways).

3.    Gambling is an Inefficient Economic Activity

Maybe gamblers are not vicious. And maybe casinos aren’t either. Perhaps gamblers are not weak or stupid, but rather they knowingly and willingly gain satisfaction from engaging in self-destructive or plain wasteful activity. They make a choice, even though from the standpoint of economic efficiency it is a bad one. And maybe casinos don’t necessarily take advantage of them, but are simply helping them satisfy their reasoned preferences, and making effective use of the knowledge that there is a certain market created by the inefficient choices of gamblers. Maybe, just maybe, there is no immorality in gambling per se, but rather that it represents an economic problem. In other words, instead of being a moral issue, perhaps gambling is just an issue of misallocated resources that needs correcting through policy instruments like taxation.

Well, again, we run into the following problem: If the government aims to discourage gambling by taxing it, then it seems counter-productive to do so by positively encouraging the building of new casinos, complete with exciting new “entertainment complexes”.

In any case, leaving morality out of it, and viewing gambling as an economic problem of misallocated resources, I would argue that if we want a public good like new subways, we should tax the public (i.e. ourselves) in order to pay for them. Once that is done, if gamblers want to spend some of their remaining disposable income on slot machines or ponies, then let them. Once the subways are paid for through general taxation, that particular misallocation of resources has been rectified and the justification for taxing gamblers falls away.

Government Racketeering

We can roughly define “racketeering” as the sale of a solution to a problem that perpetuates the problem it claims to solve, thereby promoting continued recourse to the solution. The textbook example is the protection racket, whereby an organization terrorizes you (creating a problem) and then offers you its “solution” in the form of protection from the organization. Normally, if you have a problem, say cockroaches, you pay an exterminator, who hopefully eliminates the cockroaches; an actual problem has thereby been solved through the purchase of an actual solution. However, in a protection racket, the problem never goes away, because the problem and the solution are essentially the same thing.

Let us assume, as we have been all along, that gambling is a problem because it constitutes either a vice, a sickness, or a net social waste. The Revenue Argument is predicated on characterizing gambling this way, since that is the only plausible way to justify taxing gambling without it amounting to a blatant shakedown. The government’s “solution” to the problem is to build a shiny new casino to encourage gambling, and then to tax the gamblers it creates and/or provides with new opportunities to gamble.

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing more than racketeering. To put it another way, when the government builds casinos it is creating or expanding a “problem” (assuming it is one), by creating gamblers or expanding the opportunities of existing gamblers to gamble. It then profits from this by selling a “solution” to the social problem of gambling, by claiming to tax gamblers to supposedly discourage their behavior, which was encouraged by the government in the first place.

Furthermore, in this case the racketeer takes some of its winnings and pays off the public by spending some of that revenue on public goods like subways, in much the same way that criminal racketeers pay police officers to “look the other way”. When the racket becomes this systemic and this insidious, we call it corruption. More people now have a stake in making sure that a purported social ill continues. Once casinos are built, gambling will not be eliminated, because it has become counterproductive for the government to do so. If anything, it will be expanded.

If gambling is neither a vice nor a sickness nor an inefficiency, then gambling is simply the consumption of a product, much like any other product. It is then hard to see how it is legitimate for the government to discriminate against gamblers in its taxation policies. Gamblers should pay taxes, of course, but for the same reasons and in the same amount that the rest of us should.

On the other hand, if gambling is a vice or a sickness, then any scheme to purchase public goods from its proceeds amounts to nothing more than a racket. I fail to see how it is that racketeering is antisocial and criminal when engaged in by older Italian gentleman, while suddenly becoming a praiseworthy and public-minded endeavour when engaged in by the government (once it has used its monopoly of force to muscle out its Italian competitors).

The racket is not made legitimate by the fact that some of the proceeds are funneled to public works, for that only makes the public complicit in racketeering. If subways are truly a public good, then we all ought to pay our fair share of the taxes necessary to purchase them, gamblers and non-gamblers alike. I should add that as a city grows and its roads become more congested, subways become more of a public good, since even non-users benefit from the positive externality created by having fewer drivers on the road. Toronto has grown well beyond that point.

Addendum

All of the arguments I have offered here against the claim that we should use gambling revenue to pay for public goods have been at bottom moral arguments, not economic ones. In part this is because I have an aversion to merely economic arguments that violate moral principles. I believe that economics and policy analysis are incomplete disciplines insofar as they fail to incorporate and be constrained by our moral values and principles. Of course, there’s room for manoeuver here, since those moral values and principles can themselves be contested. But economics and policy analysis cannot be value-free endeavours.

Maybe this privileging of morality is just mere prejudice on my part. It may very well be the case that it makes economic sense to use gambling revenue to pay for public goods, and if so, then who am I to stand in the way of progress and the “public good”? All I can say to this — besides questioning whether violating moral principles can truly be part of the public good — is that if you attempt to make this argument, then the onus is also on you to provide a further argument: You will have to convince me that not only does it make economic sense to use gambling revenue to pay for public goods, but also that there is no other way the same goal can be achieved without violating moral principles. If we are to violate morality, it must be because there is no other way. (And if there is no other way, then are we really violating morality?)

In any case, I am confident that the casino debate poses no such dilemma. If things like subways are truly public goods, then as long as we could be funding subways by imposing an equitable tax (or fee) on all users to pay for them there will always be an option that is less immoral than building more casinos. Casino mania only becomes a public policy option when politicians lack integrity, courage, and imagination.

The State of/and Canadian “Culture”

As a rule, professional sports players are not notable for their Ciceronian eloquence. They get paid to play a game of some kind, though a small part of their job does involve being able to construct the odd platitude for media consumption. Although there have been poets who wrote eloquently about sports (e.g. Hemingway), there are no great poets that I can think of who are also professional sports players, with the possible exception of Yogi Berra. But by far the least articulate athletes around have got to be hockey players.

My mother had an interesting theory about this. According to her, in most sports, players would compete for scholarships to some college or university, from which they would hope to be drafted into a professional league. They may not have been scholastically inclined, but they had to at least attend an institution of higher learning for some period of time, which also meant that they had to get accepted into one. If they were lucky, the rudiments of something resembling an education could be instilled into them, if only by accident. Hockey players on the other hand, could be drafted straight out of high school, before they even got their diplomas, so they were less likely to have two IQ points to rub together. And this, my mother thought, explains those moronic and utterly tautologous interview exchanges with hockey players that are completely devoid of content or basic intelligibility:

INTERVIEWER: So, you’re a goal ahead coming out of the first period. What’s the plan for the second period, Gordie? [Substitute Dougie, or Bobby, or Donnie, or other typically Canadian name]

HOCKEY PLAYER: Well, you know, uh, like, we’re gonna get out there and, you know, play, eh? We’ll just go out there and give ‘er, eh? We’re gonna, you know, like, skate down the ice, and shoot the puck, and score goals. And then, you know, if we do that more than the other guys out there, we should, like, be able to win this, eh?

(For those unfamiliar with its dubious charm, the “eh” sentence ending is common among poorly educated, mostly white, Canadians — as professional ice hockey players tend to be. It is not entirely clear whether this locution, when uttered, is intended to be declarative or interrogative, but the rising intonation makes it sound like the latter. It is a most unattractive Canadian linguistic marker. What I cannot reproduce in written form, however, is the distinctive sound made as these words pass through the sweating, bleeding, and largely toothless mouth of a hyperventilating hockey player.)

I think my mother’s theory had some merit when I was a kid, though I don’t know if her political economy of sports recruitment still holds water today. Perhaps hockey players are now drafted out of colleges and universities, and perhaps, though not obviously, hockey players are getting incrementally more intelligent over time. But I can tell you that their fans only seem to get stupider by the day. In support of this latter claim, and especially for the benefit of non-Canadian readers, allow me to produce Exhibit A: the appeal of Don Cherry.

Although Mr. Cherry is a Canadian institution (to our eternal shame), I honestly don’t know how to adequately describe what he is for the benefit of my non-Canadian readers. Nominally, he is a hockey announcer and colour commentator. But I suppose one could better think of him as a one-man “whiteface” minstrel show. He wears loud suits made from your great auntie’s curtains, complete with Edwardian collar. The ensemble is often accented by those wrap-around sunglasses so favoured among working class Canadian white men. The sunglasses are a wise choice, since they serve to shield his audience from his dull and brutish eyes, the low brows of which frequently furrow like a confused or enraged chimpanzee’s. He speaks (“tirades” would be a better word, if I could pass it off as a verb) in a bellowing cascade of monosyllables, interspersed with grunts, and accented by the chopping motion of his hands.

Inexplicably, Canadians of the lower orders cannot get enough of Mr. Cherry’s shtick. Traditionally, his cretinous minstrelsy has consisted largely of obnoxious shouting and misogynistic and homophobic railing against assorted wimps, pinkos, tree huggers, and the perceived effeminacy of the style of hockey supposedly favoured by European players (“ballet dancers” as he charmingly calls them). In Don Cherry's world, Europeans need to do less playing and more punching, slashing, and bludgeoning.

However, lately Mr. Cherry has added considerably to this limited repertoire. First, as Canada’s late military adventure in Afghanistan escalated, he took to maudlin displays of “sympathy for the troops”, replete with pre-game puck-dropping ceremonies involving much waving of flags and fawning over veterans of various wars.

To this new routine he added the role of comic political mascot to his growing curriculum vitae: having been invited for no apparent reason to the inauguration of Toronto’s mayor and council, he proceeded to denounce the various “pinkos” and their media who had opposed the mayor’s electoral bid. (Full disclosure: I too despise mayor’s “progressive” opponents and the well-organized media vendetta against him. But Cherry’s display was shameful and the occasion chosen was utterly tasteless.)

This foray into politics having gone so well, Mr. Cherry now feels himself qualified to enlighten the public with his views on Canadian foreign policy. In his opinion it is “nuts” that Canada has donated $50 million in aid to Haiti. The man is a true polymath, wise in hockey, wise in international relations. I see an ambassadorship to the UN in his future. Or at least a Senate seat.

In all seriousness though, there is a not-so-subtle melding of hockey, politics, and citizenship in Canada that I find disturbing. I watched television two nights ago (something I rarely do), and was treated to a commercial wherein it was more than implied that a “true Canadian” plays hockey. I wish this message was new to me. Unfortunately, I cannot count the number of times in a given week on the airwaves of the CBC — our nation’s once venerable public broadcaster — that I am glibly assured that all Canadians love hockey, that hockey is “what makes us Canadian”, that all Canadians yearn for an end to the NHL hockey lockout, that all Canadians spend every spare moment during our long winters on some backyard rink playing shinny, etc. etc.

Contrary to CBC and establishment mythology, the overwhelming majority of Canadians live in urban areas. Few of us have backyards big enough to contain a hockey rink. A sizable chunk of the Canadian population are immigrants, many of whom come from countries where a snowflake is about as common a sight as a unicorn. I was born in Canada, but I can barely skate, and I have not attempted to do so since sometime in the early 1990s. The simple fact is, more Canadians in my city (the largest in Canada) follow soccer than hockey. Last year one of our national newspapers, admittedly a relatively highbrow one, The Globe and Mail, conducted a poll. It was hardly scientific, and I conveniently can’t find it now. It asked readers how they felt about hockey, but it was clearly framed in such a way as to elicit answers favourable to hockey (e.g. asking “How often do you watch hockey?” without offering the option of answering “Never”). And yet, the long and short of the results was that more than two-thirds of readers actually couldn’t care less about hockey; they neither follow it, watch it, nor play it. This tallies with my suspicion that hockey spectatorship is largely the bastion of white, undereducated males, who find its goonery and insensate violence appealing, and who are not inclined to follow any sport or other event that involves too much strategic thought. Hockey is not a thinking man’s game. It is the sporting equivalent of a monster truck show.

(If you are reading this and you love hockey but don’t fit into that demographic because you are affluent, well-educated, well-spoken, you won’t get an apology or a retraction from me. I feel it my duty to tell you that you suffer from a condition known as localized stupidity, a form of mental retardation that only manifests itself in certain areas of one’s life. The good news is that everyone suffers from some form of this malady, so you are not alone. For example, localized stupidity is partly the explanation for my love of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The good news is that it can be cured. In your case, the first steps are to stop watching hockey and to stop spending time with people who watch it, especially if said people suffer from generalized stupidity. Generalized stupidity is indeed a terrible disease. It is highly contagious, and I understand that it has become endemic in rural areas of Canada.)

The equating of hockey with Canadian citizenship used to be something to chuckle at. It was a kind of joke we Canadians told ourselves, in our ongoing vain attempts to form a cohesive national identity. However, it is no longer amusing. It is pathological. Media propagated hockey-worship manages to alienate from their own national culture the two-thirds of Canadians who don’t care for hockey. Ironically, these very people whose claim to citizenship is called into question by their indifference to hockey are arguably better citizens precisely because they don’t care for the violence, gracelessness, and stupidity the sport epitomizes. And because of the constant harping on this myth that you are not a real Canadian if you don’t like hockey, some of us — some 66% of us, if the Globe and Mail poll is any indication — are learning to despise our putative Canadian identity because we are being taught to equate it with such a shameful and degrading spectacle.

The Three Pillars of Harperism

If fascism ever comes to Canada, it will come wrapped in a hockey jersey. I submit that we’re already nearly there. Ominously, the sport seems to have become one of the Three Pillars of the political philosophy (or iconography) of Harperism:

1. Military

2. Monarchy

3. Hockey

For years now, we have been given to believe that our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is beavering away at a book about hockey. I doubt this, simply because I doubt that he has what it takes to write a book all by himself. We are, after all, talking about a man whose speeches are written for him by others or are plagiarized from former Australian Prime Ministers. We’re talking about a man who took nine years to finish a one-year Master’s degree in political science, but who gives it out to the media that it’s an economics degree so that they can refer to him as an economist — which he clearly is not. No, I don’t think we’ll see Harper’s Book of Homespun Hockey Wisdom in my lifetime, but it’s a convenient myth. To the hockey-loving plebeian class of Canada, it lends his carefully cultivated persona the right mixture of man-of-the-people and intellectual. But not too intellectual, mind, for that would be a sign of effeminacy his electoral base will not tolerate. You can almost see him there, by the quiet fireside of a winter’s eve, wearing his powder blue sweater vest, scribbling away after a long day spent protecting virtuous rural Canadians from the hordes of pot-smoking communists, urban tree huggers, and homosexual intellectuals waiting to steal their hard-earned paychecks to pay for subsidized heroin and free abortions for all.

Fig.1

The connection between Harperism’s Three Pillars of Military, Monarchy, and Hockey is patent. One need only begin by looking at the roundel of the Royal Canadian Air Force [Fig. 1], which has in the past couple of years been appearing inexplicably on winter coats across the land. It is obviously a military symbol (First Pillar). But less obvious is the fact that this roundel also invokes the Second Pillar of Harperism: Monarchy. You see, up until August 2011, Canada’s army, navy, and air force were part of the same umbrella military organization. Stephen Harper’s government separated the three branches and renamed them. Canada’s former Air Command was officially renamed the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), and the Maritime Command was renamed the Royal Canadian Navy. In case you dared forget that we are a proud quasi-independent subaltern of the British Crown, our military is royal and presumably at the Queen's disposal.

Now compare this RCAF roundel with the logo of Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada [Fig. 2]. There is obviously more than a passing resemblance, no?

Fig. 2

But perhaps more disturbing is the comparison between both of these figures and the two-year-old logo for the Winnipeg Jets hockey team [Fig. 3], which, incidentally, Harper is known to be inordinately fond of. Indeed, he likes it so much that a 25 cent piece has been issued by the Royal Canadian Mint and is in general circulation, so that each and every Canadian in this wide land can have her very own reminder of the Three Pillars of Harperism in her pocket or purse. It can be fondled, like a rosary. Or it can be spent on beer.

Fig. 3

Other nations, proud and great nations, put the faces of their founding fathers, national liberators, great writers, orators, or Nobel Prize winners on their currency. Canadians apparently prefer to put hockey players and team logos on theirs. And that, ladies and gentleman, is the current state of what passes for Canadian “culture” in the Year of Our Harper 2013.

The Spectacled Avenger’s Reading List, 2012

In keeping with established tradition, and to satisfy the curiosity of those readers who wish to know how the Spectacled Avenger passes the long winter nights, he offers below his list of books read over the course of the preceding year. It is rather a mixed bag.

As with previous annual lists, bolded entries denote those books that the Avenger particularly enjoyed and would recommend without hesitation. If he could “half bold” something, it would be the Schulman volume, the first half of which he thought was one of the most fascinating, sad, and beautiful things he has read in a long time, while the second half managed to annoy, infuriate, and ultimately bore him to tears.

*    *    *    *    *

ADDISON, Joseph and Richard STEELE. The Spectator (Vol. 3). Edinburgh: J. and J. Ruthven, 1809.

AINSLIE, George. Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

ALEXANDER, Gregory S. and Eduardo M. PEÑALVER. An Introduction to Property Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

BACON, Francis. The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis. Thomas Case (ed.).Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

BERRYMAN, Jeffrey. The Law of Equitable Remedies. Toronto: Irwin Law, 2000.

BERTELLI, Anthony Michael. The Political Economy of Public Sector Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

BIX, Brian H. Contract Law: Rules, Theory, and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

BODANSKY, Daniel. The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

BOLDRIN, Michele and David K.  LEVINE. Against Intellectual Monopoly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

BOLINGBROKE, Henry St. John, Viscount. Political Writings. David Armitage (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

BRANDOLINI, Aurelio Lippo. Republics and Kingdoms Compared. James Hankins (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

BUCHANAN, James M. The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 7). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000.

BUCHANAN, James M. Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal Institutions and Individual Choice (Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 4). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999.

BURKE, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works of Edmund Burke, Vol .2). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999.

CALDWELL, Peter C. Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

CICERO. Pro Milone, In Pisonem, Pro Scauro, etc. N. H. Watts (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.

CLARENDON, Edward Hyde, Earl of. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (Vol. I, Part II). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1816.

COWLEY, Abraham. A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy. London: Henry Herringman, 1661 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1969).

DE LOLME, Jean-Louis. The Constitution of England. London: Baldwyn and Co., 1821.

DICEY, A. V. Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982.

FLOOD, Colleen M. and Lorne SOSSIN. Administrative Law in Context. Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2008.

FOLEY, Elizabeth. Price. The Tea Party: Three Principles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

[FRANCIS, Sir Philip]. The Letters of Junius (Vol. I). Dublin: J. Beatty, 1787.

[FRANCIS, Sir Philip]. The Letters of Junius (Vol. II). Dublin: J. Beatty, 1787.

GOLDSMITH, Oliver. Essays. London: W. Griffin, 1765 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

GORDLEY, James. Foundations of Private Law: Property, Tort, Contract, Unjust Enrichment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

GRANT, George. Lament for a Nation (40th anniversary edition). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.

GRIBELIN, Simon. A Book of Ornaments Engraved by Simon Gribelin II in the Year MDCCIV. Philip Hofer (ed.). Meriden, CT: Timothy Press, 1941.

HAMILTON, Alexander, James MADISON, and John JAY. The Federalist. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

HARRIS, William V. War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327-70 BC. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

HEUSTON, R. F. V. Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 1885-1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

HOBBES, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1967.

HOLMES, Oliver Wendell. Collected Legal Papers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920 (reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007).

HUME, David. The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. A. Wayne Colver and John Valdimir Price (eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

HUTCHINSON, Allan C. Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

JACOBS, Alan M. Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

KAMES, Henry Home, Lord. Elements of Criticism (Vol. I). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005.

LOXLEY, John. Public Service, Private Profits: The Political Economy of Public-Private Partnerships in Canada. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2010.

MAITLAND, F. W. The Forms of Action at Common Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

MALTHUS, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Donald Winch (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

MARTIN, Lawrence. Harperland: The Politics of Control (updated edition). Toronto: Penguin, 2011.

McMAHAN, Jeff. Killing in War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009.

MENCKEN, H. L. Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series. New York: Library of America, 2010.

MENCKEN, H. L. Prejudices: Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Series. New York: Library of America, 2010.

MOLESWORTH, Robert. An Account of Denmark. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011.

MORTON, F. L. and Rainer KNOPFF. The Charter Revolution and the Court Party. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000.

NEDHAM, Marchamont. The Excellencie of a Free-State. Blair Worden (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011.

NICHOLAS, Barry. An Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Unfashionable Observations (Complete Works, Vol. 2). Richard T. Gray (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

PAINE, Thomas. Collected Writings. New York: Library of America, 1955.

PLUTARCH. Lives (Vol. VIII): Sertorius and Eumenes, Phocion and Cato the Younger. Bernadotte Perrin (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.

POLLOCK, Sir Frederick and Frederic William MAITLAND. The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (Vol. I). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898.

PRATT, James. Ethics as Integrity: The Moral Psychology of Character. PhD dissertation. York University (Toronto), 2007.

PRICE, Richard. A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals. D. Daiches Raphael (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.

RAPHAEL, D. D. The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.

RAWLS, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

RESCHER, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

ROBBINS, Caroline (ed.). Two English Republican Tracts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

ROSE, H. B. The Economic Background to Investment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

SAMUELS, Warren J. Essays on the Economic Role of Government, Vol. 2: Applications. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1992.

SANTE, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

SCHMITT, Carl. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. George Schwab (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

SCHULMAN, Sarah. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Vol. II). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Vol. III). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.

SHAVELL, Steven. Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

SOSA, Ernest. A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.

SPENCE, Michael. Intellectual Property (Clarendon Law Series). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

SWIFT, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub. London: John Nutt, 1710 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

TAYLOR, Charles. Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada. Toronto: Anansi Press, 2006.

THOMSON, James. The Seasons. London, 1730 (facsimile, Meston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

ZAJAC, Edward E. The Political Economy of Fairness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.