The Education of a Journalist ｜ Rex Murphy

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7Yrrm5qccig

Hello everyone. It’s my great pleasure to introduce all of you to Mr. Rex Murphy, who’s my guest today. Rex is a Canadian commentator and author who deals primarily with Canadian political and social matters. He began his lengthy career as the main interviewer and commentator for Here and Now, the Canadian broadcasting corporation’s nightly TV news program in the province of Newfoundland. He was the regular host of CBC Radio 1’s cross-country checkup, for a good while the only nationwide call-in show in Canada and one that was avidly listened to across the country, for 21 years before stepping down in September 2015. He has been a columnist for two of Canada’s most influential newspapers. First, he wrote a weekly Saturday column in the Globe and Mail for most of the first decade of the century and is currently writing an influential column three times weekly for the National Post. All the newspaper readers in Canada look forward to those columns. Mr. Murphy is one of Canada’s most well-known figures. He writes and speaks with a witty, intense, informed, acerbic style. His capacity to lampoon, satirize and think critically makes him the bane of unprepared politicians and other public figures across the country. Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me, Rex. Well thank you very much for having me on and before we get into any of the chat, let me say on Zoom what I said in private. It’s very good to see you back and I know I’m giving the giving words to about 20,000 times 20,000 other people when I say that. Well I appreciate that very much and it’s it is I’m very pleased to be able to be doing this again. It’s it’s it’s been it’s increasingly a treat to do. Well I’m very pleased to hear that. I’m spoiled treat though. You picked the wrong person for a treat. Go ahead. Yeah, well I guess it depends on your taste. So I thought we might start by walking through your professional career, your career, your life for that matter. You were born on the East Coast. Yeah I was born on the East Coast by the Newfoundland standard, fairly large town, it’s called Carpeneer. My father worked on the American base which was one of the five in Newfoundland that Winston Churchill kind of traded to the Americans. You remember the lease for ships. He worked there from the very beginning in 1941. We moved closer to that place. I mentioned this for a reason when I was about 10, a much smaller town, but because I was adjacent to the base, I had some American influence even as a kid in Newfoundland in the 50s and that precipitated after I finally finished walking around universities. I actually taught American students one to 12 in the Naval Station School and I spent a whole year there back and forth drawing up curriculum and teaching Canadian studies believe it or not to American kids. It was an experience that for the last 10 or 15 years when American politics has become so dominant, that little visitation to the Argentia School has proved, I won’t say useful, but it gives me a deeper context I think. So where did you go to university and what did you study? I went to university two places. I went to Memorial University. I stayed there for five years. I studied English literature and I was blessed. If you want to talk to what I am pleased to call my life, I think a cardinal experience, and I’m not just saying it, is that the English department at the time, Memorial University, the university was quite small then, 3,000 people, and by the time you got to your fourth year if you were in an honors program, you had maybe 15 or 16 students, so you really did get to meet and know the faculty. And three or four of them, one of them in particular, Dr. G.M. Storey, who wrote over 20 years in collaboration with others, the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. And let you know this is not some silly remark. Dr. G.M. Storey was also one of the editorial advisors for the great Oxford English Dictionary, all 22 volumes of it. So here was a man of tremendous talent and controlled enthusiasm, but impeccable taste and a knowledge of English literature that I haven’t encountered since. I know I’m rambling on, but it’s the nature of my mind. Then I went off to Oxford. I only spent a year there. I signed up for law and actually ended up going to all the English classes. Helen Gardner was the editor of Dawn, the friend of T.S. Eliot, and Helen Gardner would be giving a lecture. It would be like if you were a rap fan or something and you avoided all the big names. So I basically read a lot for that year. I came back and I figured out then I’ve been going to school. I went to school very young at the age of four. I’ve been going to one form of school or other for about 20, I’m sorry, about 17 or 18 years straight. And I decided to kind of just stop for a while. By the way, you’ll already have noticed this. I talk too much. So stop me when I ramble on. Well, good. We’ll have a good competition that way, because one of the things that people constantly comment about is me. You’re going to lose. Well, that would be good. It would be good for me to lose that particular battle now and then. So I have something to ask you about that particular comment. So I talked to Yeonmi Park. Yes, Yeonmi Park a week ago. Now you may know the name. She escaped from North Korea. Yes. And she wrote a book called In Order to Live, which is an amazing book. And the book ends in 2015. But after 2015, she enrolled in Columbia University, which was a dream of hers and a dream of her father that she be an educated person. And she studied humanities at Columbia. And I asked her what that was like. And she said that it was a complete waste of time and money and that she felt that she was completely unable to utter an opinion that was genuine the whole time she was there. And it shocked me. And so I asked her very specifically, I said, come on, come on, you’re not going to tell me that the entire time you spent in Columbia, you didn’t have at least one professor or two professors who stood out, who really taught you. Now, she had told me during the interview that she had encountered George Orwell’s work when she was in South Korea, particularly Animal Farm. And that was what partly what influenced her to start speaking and writing. And so and she had read a lot when she was educating herself in South Korea prior to going to South Korean University and then to Columbia. So it’s not like she was unfamiliar with the potential impact of, let’s say, the classics on on on on on her life, on her philosophy. But when I pressed her, the best she could do was to identify a single biology class which dealt with evolution, which was a complete mystery to her given her background, because history sort of started when her dynastic totalitarians were born. But she said even that took a wicked turn to the politically correct direction by the time she was done. So but your experience at university, go into that a little bit more detail. Well, I’m glad you elaborated that as you did. And I suppose not, I suppose I know I brought up that university experience in the hope that when we do it now down the road in this conversation, I think outside of family, that is always principle and will never be superseded. Outside of family, if there’s anything that that contributed to the way that I look at things and have given me lasting benefit, OK, you may be familiar with Samuel Johnson’s remark about literature, it applies to all the arts, that it exists better to help us endure life or to enjoy it. It fixes the mind. And when you have a real university, you get these things. Professor, I mentioned, for example, when he found a book, it was one of Arthur Kessler’s, I won’t bother to name it. He actually walked to my house on a Saturday afternoon. I was just a kid and in all of them. But he came to the little studio, sorry, the student house and wanted me to have this book for a week so I could read. I mean, this kind of almost genuflection to the emergent or emerging mind of a young person is something that stays forever. That long winded again, the university experience was the strongest because the universities then had values. They worshiped, and that’s a good word, not to be backed off from. They worshiped the best creations, the best fashions, the best styles of thought, the best scientific finesse. And they made you, not made you, they induced you to be grateful, to be grateful for what other first rate minds have contributed to the temper of the entire human race. And now when I see, and I know this perhaps not quite as well as you because you are a professor and you’ve gone through some of the grinder, universities now at the humanities level from everything I read are a disgrace, the treason of the clerks. They are so suffocated by these arch and empty philosophies that have no logic and are punitive. I would not, I’m a person that was so taken by the university, I almost worshiped it. And now I tell people that have younger people, younger children, 20, 21, 22, don’t go to the damn university unless you’re taking science. Go to a trades college or just go out on your own. It’s the saddest thing that has happened in the Western world that we’ve allowed second rate minds, political agents, propagandization as instruction. We have decimated the soul of the university. By the way, I totally agree with you. You said somewhere, and I probably will not be quoting it correctly, burning down and started all over again. Western, one of the way, one little footnote. If the first world, as we’re accustomed to calling it, wants to keep its precedence, I often think of students in Asia, in India, in China even. They are so intent on really learning something and they’ll in an Indian school that maybe plays a hundred dollars a pupil, they’re doing so much better than the schools, that’s the schools are in this game too, than schools getting 10 and 15 thousand dollars per student. The West is trivializing its main dynamic that has always been intellectual and it always will be. Anyway, sorry we’re there. So let’s zero in on that. So yesterday I talked to Paul Rossi and Paul Rossi is the high school teacher, math teacher. You remember he wrote a letter a week and a half ago, a column that Barry Weiss published in her sub stack. I read it. Right. And he talked about his time in university studying with the post, studying postmodern philosophy. Yes. And he said that he was very much attracted to it at the time, but then he unpacked why. And he believed that he was resentful at that point about lacking a genuine creative voice and that the postmodern philosophy that he was taught gave him and the professors that were teaching him and his peers a weapon with which they could, a weapon to undermine what it was that they were not capable of doing themselves. And so instead of the worship that you described, which characterized your professors and fortunately for me, my professors as well, who taught me a tremendous amount, especially in my junior college, they were taught a method of dispensing with literature. Yes. Treating it as if it was something else and I suppose morally superseding it in some sense. Oh no, absolutely. The idea that, especially by the way, postmodernism and the League of Structure and all those attendant pseudo philosophies, you read Milton to find out if he mistreated his daughters, not this miracle that we call Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes. You read Homer to find out if he’s a blood worshiper. This whole game of taking the great documents of Western civilization as a hunting ground for moral woke offense. Well, first of all, it’s catastrophically stupid. If you have the Forte and Symphony of Mozart or the Beethoven’s Fifth, the only reason you’re playing it is to find out if either Mozart or Beethoven had a sexist attitude. You’re out of your mind. Self-stop this. And the idea that one of the great proportions of a certain segment of Western society is simple envy and resentment of its success, even as those who are envious and resentful are basically being fed and kept by it. They go into these institutions with some sort of childish, immature animosity towards If you think of it, the rise of thought is the greatest thing we have. And in the richest part of the world, the most prosperous, the highest institution. Have you been reading some of these whiteness things, the new rules? And it’s like the ones the federal government are using to train the civil servants. You mean those? Yeah. And the epidemic of anti-racism, which is a kind of racism, diversity, which is monosyllabic. If you don’t have our ideas, you don’t have any, or you’re a racist, or you’re this, or you’re that. I don’t know how a free people have succumbed so easily and so lethargically to a kind of — it’s not physical, but it’s a metaphysical restraint. And the cowardice about some of these universities that apologize for some professor, the New York Times guy, 49 years columnist, and in an explicatory conversation using that n-word, editor said, no, nothing wrong with him, but then he fired him. The universities — damn them — were the place that this other pandemic began. And while we’re living through COVID, we should also understand that the intellectual pandemic, this goes to our heart and core. We are displacing ourselves by allowing charlatans to wreck the intellectual standards of the Western world. So what did your education, your education in English literature, what did that do to you and for you? So you were one person when you went in and you were a different person when you came out. So what has been the advantage? And I also mean, so I interviewed Jocko Willink on my podcast a while back and he talked about going to take an English literature degree after he had finished his military training. And then he explained for 20 minutes the unbelievable potency that being able to communicate gave him as an individual, but also as a military leader. And so it was very striking because he made a practical case as well as a metaphysical and intellectual case. So personally, what did this education do for you while you were having it, but then also afterwards in your life? Well, I actually have fairly retentive memory for the entire experience, especially at Memorial University. The first thing I’ll give you an anecdote. I’m not usually biographical, by the way. Well, I’ll do this. There was an English professor, he was from England and he was one of those collaborators with Dr. George Storey on this dictionary. He was a dialectician. His name is John Whiddeson. I haven’t said that name in 35, 40 years. But he came into, it was only my first year, yeah. In the first year, we had an excerpt from Paradise Lost. It was one of the great epic similes in the very first book. He scarce and seized from the superior fiend was walking towards the shore. I could do the whole damn thing, but we won’t bother you with that. But Whiddeson, as opposed to saying, now you should read this thing, it’s very complicated. It’s one of those deeply ramifying similes that only Milton ever wrote. And he read it out loud. And he had a good voice. And even though Milton is a very difficult poet, by the way, even though it was difficult, the sound of it, Milton is the genius of the auric sensations of the English verse, even better than Shakespeare. And I’m telling you the truth here, I am. When he finished that, I hadn’t heard of it. That’s how bad I was. We had very few books in our house growing up. I went over to the library because the simile was so exciting, I had to read Paradise Lost. This wasn’t prompted by anybody else. And I could repeat instances of that kind, where the sharpness of what was being related, or the beauty of it, the very underestimated aesthetics, the beauty of it, the precision of it, the ability to find words that have depth of meaning, that echo their own etymology, to marshal them in patterns of order. The intellectual aura that comes out of it, and one other little tiny note I’ll give you, we read John Donne a lot later. And some of John Donne’s love poems are extremely complex. They’re so-called metaphysical, but they’re intellectual in a real sense. They’re hard to understand. I remember wrestling with one poem of John Donne’s from about a day, I mean, only 14, 15 lines. Wasn’t the sonnet, but it was an insane poem. And I finally got it. I can still see the light bulb over my head in the library. In other words, I come from an outport background, more or less, in a cutoff culture. This is not a criticism, it’s just fact. Not, as I said, a lot of material growing up in the house. And then all of a sudden, it was like a series of benign explosions. And the second thing that the university did, and I think properly so, by their example, less than by their preaching, the professors that I met, they really did value language. They did value the great resource of poetry that exists, by the way, over the centuries. And they also said, they also taught a certain courtesy of mind that you can have your disagreements, but based them on the material at hand, that don’t float the matter of the year. If you want to talk about John Milton, you talk about his poetry, you talk about, if you want, you talk about his prose, but very few do. But you don’t go into the poem to find something that, in some sort of deeply infantile manner, offends you now. When you write Paradise Lost, I’ll listen to you criticizing it. And anyway, once again, but yeah, here’s what I did. I memorized a lot, and that’s something I would recommend to all of the people who are listening to you when they do listen to you. That a lot of education should be just that, should be simple retention. Put poetry and prose in your head and in your heart. The Harrow Bloom used to point it out, and I agree with him, that learning by heart is more than just a trite phrase. Once you put it in there, it expands your person. And to answer your question now directly, the difference was this. Went in callow, immature, well, that’s standard for the age. But I came out with something that was permanent, and then as far as I’m concerned, at least, had the most enduring value outside of, as I said, domestic circumstance that I’ve ever had. It’s still here. And so you’ve talked us a fair bit specifically about poetry, and you just made a case for memorizing it so that you can recite it. And you did recite some, and I’ve often found it surprising and remarkable to hear someone, I haven’t memorized a lot of poetry. And I’m struck, not infrequently, by someone’s capacity to recite. There’s something unbelievably impressive about it. But you’re really making a case for, first, poetry, and epic poetry, and second, for memorizing it. So first, let’s go to the poetry. What’s it done for you? You talked about aesthetic experiences first. So that was a marker, right? These series of benign explosions. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what’s it done for me? One of the great things it’s done for me, yeah, this is consistent. I’m being correct on this. If you read Oscar Wilde, these are the easier prose writers, or Walter Pater, or Samuel Johnson, or Sir Thomas Brown, some of the later essays of the 20th century, but I give you Charles Lamb. You’ll never write as well as they, and understand that, if you’re inclined to do this writing stuff. But by God, they set the standard. They set you something. I can’t do that. Nabokov is probably my best in the mind. He’s the best modern prose writer. Never be able to write a sentence like Nabokov. Never. But having read him, I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed when I’m sloppy or lazy. And you always aim at the high ground. And what it did, it set an ideal in the mind. And words, by the way, are very precious things. I mean, you teach the Bible in many ways, and the Bible is, apart from its obvious spiritual, it is a textbook of the highest forms of language. And even Milton put it before Greece. But it sets a standard. It gives you a wrestling match. If you read a Nabokov essay, and there are some, and then you look at, in my case, some damn scribbled column, you’re still trying. I try to find the right word because I’ve been prompted by all these people I’ve read before. And I’m glad you did memorization. Here’s what that does. You can get meaning. You can get the meaning of a line or the meaning of a verse. But there’s a secondary engine or energy attached to poetry and great prose. And you bring it into your mind so that you have, you know, into your living sensibility. So that in some weird osmosis, it will lift your style or your attempts. And the second thing is, especially Sir Thomas Brown in Hyderia Tapia, if you have a model of high prose and it sits in your head, and you’ve, I do, I know several lines of it, I think somehow or other it contaminates you. This is a good word to use in the play, but it contaminates you in a rich way. You get something from it, this osmotic imitation that will only take place if you’ve lodged it in your in your consciousness. And one final point, if you wish to memorize poetry and things, your best years are 15, 16 to 25, whatever you learn then and learn by heart, as I call it, I can give you dreams of Hamlet. They stay. It’s a lot harder to memorize at 50 or 60 or God knows 70. I hate it even to say the word. I’m rambling on again, Jordan. This is bad of me. JL No, it’s exactly right. It’s exactly right. And it’s definitely not rambling. And maybe that’s because you’ve been infected with the poetic spirit. I mean, I have to let all our listeners and watchers know that, I mean, Rex’s column is very, very influential in Canada. And it’s not least because of the manner in which he crafts his words. And so how much poetry do you know by heart, do you think? JL In my prime, I, this is not sound like a boast, it is a boast. I memorized all of John Donne because his poems, apart from the immortality, the soul, that those are very long, but all his songs and sonnets, the love poetry and the religious sonnet, the divine sonnets of John Donne, by the way, are marvelous things. So also is his sermons. I wish people would read them today. Just for the glory of the rhetoric, it’s phenomenal. I mean, it is phenomenal. I read, did a lot of Milton memorizing most of the sonnets. He thought I saw my lady spells and saint, Vigilode by saints, whose bones I scattered on the Alpine. I can go on and on. I memorized the ones that most impressed me and had impact. And I listened to Richard Burton and John Gielgud on record. And after listening, by the way, that’s the easiest way. If you listen five or six times and it lodges in your mind, it will never go out. And so the recordings in those days, you get the seven ages of Shakespeare with Gielgud reading it with his infinitely nuanced articulation. No one could speak a word better than you. It stays with you. The only thing, the easier to remember, of course, is music and music plays in your head. If you play the sonata or something enough on the record, that’ll be alive 25 years later. But to memorize poetry, do it when you’re young. And what you memorize at that period becomes permanently installed. It fades if you memorize later. Would you recite something for us? I probably stumbled. I’m glad you put me on the spot. But I just started with the Milton poem. Me thought I saw my latest spousal saint brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, whom Joel’s great son to her glad husband gave, rescued from death, though pale and faint. And the thing there is, me thought I saw my latest spousal saint, that was Milton’s second wife, brought to me like Alcestis from the grave. Here’s a place to stop. We’ll see we’re doing this. Alcestis was a Greek woman. I forget her husband’s name, but the husband was told that he was shortly to die. And he was very, very young. They were both friends of Hercules. Okay. And so Hercules came to their house after the wife had died. But he didn’t know that Alcestis had died. And he didn’t know the house was in mourning. And after nine days of feasting, as only Hercules could, me thought I saw my wife. The husband came and told him the story that he had been told by the gods that he was going to die young. And he went to his parents and he said to them, you are very old, so therefore if you take my place, you will not lose many years, but I will be saved. And his parents turned him down and his friends turned him down. And Alcestis, his wife, without even being asked, she submitted herself to mortality. She died for him. So when Hercules heard the news and that he’d been treated so well, he, Hercules, he determined to repay the hospitality by going into the underworld. He picked Alcestis away from Dece and he brought him back. I forget the husband’s name for some reason, but he would not, he wanted to make it a surprise. So he put a veil over the returned wife’s face. And when he came to the husband, he gradually undid the veil and gave him back from the dead, his living wife. Now go back to the couple of sentences I gave you. Me thought I saw my late espousal saint brought to me like Alcestis from the grave. There’s a few lines down, her face was veiled yet to my fancy sight. Love’s sweetness, goodness in her face shined as in no face with more delight. So when Milton throws out Alcestis, there’s only one word. There’s an entire train of secondary thought and mythology just in that one little line. This is why you would study him so that you get in tremendous range and depth. All within these are sonnets. What? Anyway, that’s the me thought I saw my latest about the saint. Avenge your Lord thy slaughtered saints whose bones I scattered on the Alpine mountains. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I know we could do this all day, but there’s no need. Well, it’s so interesting to me to see you reflect on your education and your poetic education given the track of your career. Well, because it was also so practical. Yeah. And you’re making a very strong and personal case for the utility of English literature. Now, you said you grew up in a house that didn’t have a lot of books. I don’t make any depression stories. We never missed a meal, but we didn’t have books. Once in a while, one of those Reader’s Digest condensed books, my father Harry would get them on the base or something. In the school we went to, there was a library that consisted mainly of the lives of the saints. But there weren’t, there was, you know, if there were five or six, by the time I was 13, 14, I was buying the novels in the drugstore. The drugstores used to have the little book racks in those days, but it was only when I got in university and it all came on, I devoured. I did about 14 out of 20 courses in those days, 20 was a BA, 14 or 15 of them were English. I even added a couple of subjects, English studies in the fourth year. I was up to seven when you did five a year in those days. But in the university, like I told you about the Paradise Lost, you go over, you went to the library, you can pick up what you wanted. And those days you walked the stacks, so you would often be prompted merely by the title of a book and pick it up. So no, there weren’t many, but that’s not unusual in Newfoundland. But in other ways, Newfoundland education would be looked upon as very backward. Now, we missed some things. I was Catholic and we were brought up in a nun’s school, Presbyterian Sisters. And one of the benefits of the Catholic education was the catechism. This is something you had to memorize. So we’re back to this again. The Butler’s catechism, you had it for seven or eight years continuously. It started off, who made you? God made you, why did he make you to know and love him here on earth and afterwards serve with him forever in heaven? It got more complicated as it went through. Now, you were being taught religion, but when you got old enough to see it, it also had taught you slyly logic because it was a question. It was a catechism. How do you know that there’s a purgatory? They had a great long, I can almost do that one too, a great long answer to that. They said, if this is this and that’s that, then there must be this. So it was inferentially teaching you logic. And because it was using scholastic terms, these were old books. It was basically building your vocabulary, you paid attention to it. We often get the best benefits from certain kinds of learning, inadvertently and insidiously, benignly insidiously. They come at us. I never understood why the catechism held such power, but it was just that. It was essay writing too. You didn’t do things sloppily or loosely. So what would be looked about over there teaching them rote, and this is terrible, or treating them like robots. You never know what’s going in and the chemistry that forms. Anyway, it’s really interesting to me that you’re making a case for it as an advanced form of imitation. Yeah, I mean, when children play, when they play being a dad, for example, when they’re playing house, they don’t mimic the father, but by which I mean, they don’t precisely duplicate with their body the actions they saw their father take. What they do is they view the father’s actions across a broad range of situations and they extract out the gist and then they embody the gist. That play development is incredibly important and it’s based on a very complex mimicry. And the case you’re making is that by embodying the poetry, which is to memorize it, that you’re also imbibing the gist essentially. So there’s a living spirit there that inhabits you as a consequence of the mimicry. I’ve never heard that case made before. Makes sense to me because, of course, poetry, especially declaimed poetry, is a dramatic art. And so it is a performance. It’s even more than that. It’s incantatory in both senses. Here’s another little, this is my, here’s a better key to it. There’s a line in, again, another line of Milton, Sweet is the breath of morn, who arising sweet, with charm of earliest birds. Now, you know what a charm is, it’s a spell. It casts you over. He uses another word, another place, enchanted. We speak of poetry. When he says the word, the charm of early, he’s talking about song. But it’s interesting that song and charm are actually synonyms that when we speak of charming, we’re speaking of an invisible power of allure. And when we speak of a poem as incantatory or spell, we’re doing the same thing. There’s an aura that you use in slightly different terms. Once you absorb it, there’s a sheen that propels some part of the motor of your consciousness. But only if you imitate the best, because only the best contain this particular, here’s an awful ugly word, battery. Okay. All right. So I’m going to have to think about that some more. We’ll return to it. So you took an excess load of courses. What did your parents think about your choice of university education? How did you manage to fortify yourself psychologically, let’s say, to go commit yourself to an English literature degree? Well, again, I was very young. It was the lowest mark I had in high school. There was a little bit of a paradox, and it was only in the university. But it came on as a by my own metaphor, with very sudden, powerful attraction and action. And the more I got into it, the better it was. But also, there was another dynamic factor, because you spoke of parents and seeing that that’s the territory that you often enter, I’ll volunteer, but normally I wouldn’t. My father, he came from very hard circumstance. Mother not alive. Won’t go into all of it. But he basically got to grade two or three in Newfoundland. He was a smart man, and he did all sorts of hard work when he was a teenager. And when he finally went to work on the base, it was as a dishwasher. But he met some people on the American base. He knew, and he was again one of these stoics, which I much more appreciate than the gush merchants of the day in the Oprah vacation. The thing was, he knew, and he never made a point of it, that had he had school, could he have been able to attend a real one, that he had this facility. In this case, by the way, he was with language. Even though he was not a reader, because of reasons I’ve given you, he had a taste for words and compressed experiences. And he met one or two very well educated Americans. And I think just by being there with him, knowing how much, I think it must have been a great pain, actually, knowing how much he knew that he had missed, and how how how amputated were his ambitions by the non-education, that it seeped down to me that getting one was was just something formidably insistent. And I suppose we all, as you say, your parents, I suppose I was trying out of some sort of devotion to kind of by surrogacy, pick up what he could never have gotten because of time and circumstance. Well, it would also imply, I would say that he, at minimum, didn’t interfere with the manifestation of that spirit in you, and I suspect would have encouraged it. Both parents had great belief in one thing. I love the old phrases, by the way, we should bring it back. Do your books. If you don’t make it through the school, you’ll be digging ditches. Marie, my mother, was like Harry, my father. They had a justifiably dutiful respect, even in some of the more ignorant instructors that were in those presentation schools. But they knew that there was one way up. And I’m not speaking commercially, not speaking, it was something attached to the dignity of the person, and the amplitude of the personality only gets released by trying to imitate, listen to, walk your mind around the minds of other people whose minds are better than your own. And that’s what philosophy, literature, I would expect your specialty. It is always those who have thought more deeply, more profoundly, and have a better equipment that give us things. That’s why I invite them back now to the university. That’s why it’s so deplorable that this, this, this, this, this, this, this, just to use their words, this is petty fascism of wokeness is suffocating, the number one energy of any free society. So, no, they didn’t- So how do you think your parents, it’s, it’s interesting. How, how do you think your parents developed that respect and why did they hold it? Well, Harry, my father, because he was, he was certainly bright enough to know when he heard other people, I’m speaking chiefly now with the Americans, with sophisticated understandings and sophisticated things. He saw the goal in the rift, but he never had a chance to reach for it. So, but, and he, and he was willing to admire it rather than to be resentful about it. Absolutely. He would, he would listen to these people. He would remember some of their sharpest lines, got a great sense of humor. He was, he was himself a very good talker. Most Newfoundlanders are, I suppose. And they often have a very good sense of humor, which is appreciation for words. Well, I think, you know, that, that’s the second context. I do remember the older guys that I knew and not just these folklore stories either. They could talk about going into buy a plug of tobacco and hold you spellbound. That’s actually something I’ve noticed about extremely intelligent people who aren’t educated. They have a facility to dramatize their lives. That’s really quite spectacular. Where I grew up, I had friends who were really not literate, a number of them, but they weren’t stupid and they could spin a story, man. It was impressive. And in a way I couldn’t in some sense, I think I lost the drama, dramatic sense of my own life because of the books I’d been exposed to, but they were very good at that. Your point, I’ve made this myself. You might want to tell us that there’s a whole lot of illiterate Newfoundlanders. That may well be your choice, but do not think, do not think that they’re not the most verbally intelligent. I’ll tell you as a fact, I’ve done, I don’t know, a hundred, two hundred documentaries and I did a documentary on the Newfoundland fishery about 25 years ago and I met a guy up in Lantz Meadows, fisherman, hard case, heavy drinker, I would guess. I’d give him a grade two or grade three, but he walked out of his house on a cold frigid February Saturday morning on with the wind coming off the water and the air flaps out and he gave an answer to one of my questions, a five-minute aria. I, you know, I can’t remember, you see that boat over there? It gives me a, there’s a knob in me guts and a tear in me eyes, how it began. And I tell you, outside of Shakespeare going on, that was the most, that was the most verbally charged anecdote that I ever put on film for, when we brought it back to the national, people were coming into the edit room to watch this guy and as I said, he may have been illiterate, but by God, he knew his words. And that’s another one, by the way, I always admired. I think we called him an uneducated, that’s nonsense. So the smartest people I know probably couldn’t sign their name, but by God, if you felt them, if you moved around them, I was always afraid of fishermen because they were always smarter, not all of them. But if you do an interview with one of them, you better be on your toes. Anyway, I’m going on again. Okay, and you took an excess of courses at Memorial, so you were very highly motivated. What about your peer group at that time? No, that was, they were more or less again, they had a bit more, I think, commitment to the idea of real education, as I’m calling it, than perhaps today. I think there’s a lot of just going for the credential, but moving on again, I’ll give background to more than particularly. I’m going to interrupt there. I would say one thing about undergraduates that I’ve observed, because I love teaching the undergraduates I had contact with, they would come into class with a veil of cynicism. And sometimes that was, well, we’re doing this for the grade, or we have a practical reason in mind. But if you could get under that and communicate something to them that was genuinely philosophical and meaningful, they would drop that surface level cynicism and dive into it like people who were starving. Well, that, if you will forgive a reference back to you, the explosion that you set off, once the controversy had propelled you into this world arena, and the number of otherwise cynical minds, I told you when you and I had a previous interview on that silly channel that I have, I had this call, I’m not going to name him because it would be embarrassing, a 55-year-old working in a really hard job, no big money. And he actually called me up, I hadn’t met you or anything. He called me up to say that, you know, when I’m reading Jordan Peterson, this is, if the teacher, if the guide offers something that is real, depth, dignity, spirit, points towards, you know, you are better than you are, speaks honestly, there’s another thing. So that’s the advantage to something of higher value. It’s like, of course, you’re lesser in relationship to it, but it’s what you could become to offer people what they could become is the best possible thing you can do for them. Well, I’ve seen, again, maybe mischaracterizing, I don’t think it’s deliberate, but insofar as there is a standing champion leading something of a counter rebellion against a degradation of analysis and thought and the casting aside of cultural verities, you’re it. And you have, by example, and also true to great tribulation, you’ve given solace to a hell of a lot of people. And I think it has a lot to do with something general in the air. There’s a lot of suffocated minds because they feel the walls coming in, they wonder if they’re alone. And then someone comes by and says some, in some cases, nothing insulting, some very obvious things, but with a lot of thought and energy and commitment behind it. And as you know, it did half the world’s arenas are still waiting to hear an honest voice. That’s pretty good, by the way. You went from Memorial to Oxford. How did that happen? I won the Rhodes Scholarship. There was Newfoundland because it had been a colony. Sorry, you won a Rhodes Scholarship. Yeah, I won Rhodes Scholarship. 68. And again, it was a bit from my father. I thought I wanted to study law for some reason. When I got over there, as I think I told you before we started here, I entered into second year studies with any break. I would trust land law, I mean, just terrible stuff and weekly assignments. But you’re in Oxford, you got Blackwoods, you got some of the greatest lecturers on English literature, some of the editors, some of the prime editors of some of the great voices. Helen Gardner was TS Eliot’s friend for God’s sake. And she’s giving a lecture on DUNN. She edited DUNN’s songs and sonnets. So I became completely absorbed in, I did the law stuff, but I spent more time reading. I never read this much in my entire life. What was it like for you to go to Oxford? Had you traveled at all? No. This is the first time you’d been to Europe. The reason I’m asking in part is because I’ve met some very educated Englishmen, like Stephen Fry. And it’s really something to meet an educated Englishman because they have a depth of education that’s just quite stunning. And it’s so impressive when you see it manifest itself. And I’ve been fortunate enough to talk with people at Cambridge and Oxford, who are scholars from the old school, let’s say. And it’s so impressive to watch them talk and to watch them think. And so you pulled yourself out of Newfoundland and went over to Oxford. How old were you and what was that like? I was 19, I think. I went to university, I said, very early. What was it like? I’d had, as I mentioned, five years of memorial studying literature. I should have kept at it, but I should have picked up a D film, stayed away from law. I met like you did. I met some extremely keen minds. I met a guy who could play the Boccata on the great organs. I met them in all fields. That was the only advantage of it to me. By then, maybe a bit young, but nonetheless, I’d settled in pretty well to English literature. And it was that that kept dragging me away, as I was just about to say. I don’t think I’ve ever read more in a single year than I did that year there. Well, that’s the thing about university, and I suppose also about those English universities in particular, because you imagine what the university, because I’ve tried to think, well, what is the university? Part of it is, well, it’s this continuous conversation across centuries. Part of it is the exposure to the greatest thinkers. For the purpose of mimicry, essentially, I believe that’s central to it, because you can pick your peers in some sense. That’s what you do when you read great books, is you make these people your peers, at least insofar as you’re capable of doing that. Yeah, I agree with you. And but then there’s also an identity that it provides you with, is you’re a student, you’ve got this time that’s cut out, and now you can go throw yourself into the study, and society has built a wall around you that says, you can stay in this room and you’re good. Read away, we’re happy about it. Well, that’s it. The one thing I will remark, and I don’t care how pretentious it sounds, in one area, I was a little disappointed. I thought because of the reputation of the university, that it would have a surplus, it would have an excess of over-bright people who listened to the late quartets of Beethoven as they got out of bed. I had a false notion that reality is often just day to day, and while there will be great exceptions, and there were, and people are so bright that they embarrassed you if you were standing in front of them. But a lot of it was part of the architecture and the grounds, which was first class. It was nice to be there as a kind of a visitor, but the intellectual level, as I said, I probably didn’t get out as much as I should, but once I got near the libraries, I became enthralled, and that’s the same word as enchanted and charm. I keep reminding people that the art has magic. I think it’s really useful to point out the connection between those words, because they all point to the possession, to the capacity to be possessed by this spirit, and it is the spirit that inhabits the university when it’s properly conducted. It’s the spirit that manifests itself as the creative and communicative conversation that’s gone across centuries, that you can now immerse yourself in and become a part of. And there isn’t anything better than that. That’s as good as it gets. That’s also why it’s so wonderful often to be a university professor or teacher, is because you can play a role in transmitting that to young people who will benefit immensely from it in all possible ways. Yeah, it’s very true. It’s also true, again, I’m sure you have, because you’re in the university context. I’ve met two or three. I’d almost compare them to some of the great medieval monks. One or two or three people who are so completely immured in the dignity of learning from the past and pursuing great minds, truly learned people. They’re almost always in a kind of personal cloister, but there’s one or two or three in the course of a lifetime, and you say there’s some, almost priestly, about the human being that gives to inquiry, to learning, to the development and fulfillment of mind. And you just know you’re in a very special place. Now, when I went to teach at Harvard in the 90s, and I was privileged to have a position there for five years, six years, I guess. And Harvard pulled in senior professors from everywhere who were at the top of their profession. And so there was a handful of senior psychology professors there when I was there. And it was wonderful to talk to these people. I had never been anywhere where there wasn’t anything I could say that they weren’t familiar with. It was so amazing. There wasn’t a topic I could possibly bring up that these… And it would have been six or seven people, which is actually a lot. It was a small department. The senior faculty were absolutely outstanding people, especially the older ones, because they weren’t only great psychologists. They were really educated. And they weren’t afraid of ideas at all. And my mind ranges across ideas. And I often encounter people with whom I could have a conversation about one thing, but definitely not about another. And I just never ran into that barrier among the older senior faculty members at Harvard. The junior faculty members were impressive in their own right. They hadn’t had the whole advantage of a lifetime of study yet. They were headed in that direction. But the senior faculty were remarkable. And you couldn’t help but be immensely… What would you say? To be possessed by immense respect in their presence. And it was a privilege to be there. Well, there’s the other thing for the people today that if the universities become proselytizers and semi-political adjunct prompt, wokeness and all this garbage, they’re stealing a lot of joy. I mean, a real university, as you just said, dealing with people that are better than you. That’s the great thing, incidentally. It’s such a pleasure. And you don’t have… As you said, you’re given freedom to do this and get credit for it as well, and you’ll advance in society. But the simple joy of taking in, and especially in the humanities. I know science has its ecstasies as well, and they’re probably even more powerful. But the joy of the humanities, as you said, you’re talking to Charles Lab. I often want to read his letters because he had a very hard life. I almost owe him. I’m allowed, not allowed, I’m capable of reading what a person in the early 19th century actually thought and how he’s in the room. That’s a great privilege, too. See what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah, we throw away so many things that are at our elbow, and we search in vain for things that are 20 miles away. It’s awful. Okay, so you were at Oxford and you were there for one year? Yeah, one year. And then what? What happened next? Well, it’s probably very foolish. As I said, I started to think about it. I went to school at four, and I’d been going continuously. Oxford was the sixth year of university, I think it was. And when I got home to Newfoundland during the summer break, I decided I’d take another break. And that’s when I said, I gotta stop going to schools. And there was a job, I did some teaching. I went on the American base and taught some American kids. And then, literally, and I know the meaning of literally, I stumbled into a radio station in St. John’s when I was doing some work on a master’s thesis, just idle work. I had no money. And they gave me a job for the afternoon in the newsroom. Monday, they signed me up for a month to fill in for an Open Line host. And a month later, I was working at CBC. So here, that’s it. My so-called career was as accidental as walking into that newsroom because I had a friend there. I needed a bit of money. I took on the Open Line show with no experience. And this is a Newfoundland Open Line show, by the way. And I started to write editorials for the radio station. So why could you do it? We talked about your education. Obviously, that played a role. And it’s accidental in a sense. But I mean, you’ve been preparing to use words for a long time. Yeah, I had. I mean, it was an accident waiting to happen in some sense. So you walked into the radio station. But what was it about what you were capable of that opened up the doors? Well, I tell you, Newfoundland had another advantage. Newfoundland is a large part of every Newfoundlander in a way that other provinces, and I’m not being parochial, or perhaps not, perhaps not. And Newfoundland politics when I was growing up was the politics of this. Rather, he was legendary for sure. Joey Smallwood, he brought us into Confederation. He was mercurial. He was another autodidact. He was another self-taught man. In the old sense, oratorical. Tommy Douglas kind of oratory. And Newfoundland politics was both a curse and an entertainment. And I often said, I often wrote this, that we put up with it because on other planes, it gives us continuous amusement. Newfoundland has weather and politics, and they both exist as a form of conversation and entertainment. My father, again, was speaking the words, listening to Joey giving some great tirade. He just loved to listen to when Smallwood let loose. And a lot of Newfoundlanders did as well. It is a verbal culture. I have no doubt about that whatsoever. But journalism per se, I never aspired to it. But once I got in there, I found that, if you’ll forgive this, I found it very easy and natural that you should write things. I didn’t think much in the writing, by the way, and not being shy, not being coy. I always, because I have examples, Flannery O’Brien would be yet another one. And Malcolm Ugridge, I met him once or twice. These were masters. So there was always a kind of, not a chill, but a holding back. But as you get older, there’s not much to hold back anymore. So no, it was accidental, but it just happened. I then ended up at CBC, that here and now program, you reference at the very beginning, and did that for seven or eight years. Went to a few other places. But I always came back. And obviously, once I came to Toronto in the middle 90s, this is about 23 or 24 years. This has been the kind of most furious commitment to the cause, because I’m very lethargic in thinking of it in terms of any great series. I like to think that, I just as soon you were amused with something I said, is to think I was right. Well, often there’s not that much difference between those two things. Very true, very true. So, okay, so you were working at here and now, and how often were you broadcasting a show? Every night, I did usually one or two interviews a night. They were much briefer in those days. I was the only one who did, actually, commentary. I did two or three a week. I wrote, I covered, reviewed concerts for certain national radio programs and write reviews of concerts. On and off, I had a lot of fires and, you know, for irons and a lot of fires. But it just seemed more of a hobby. It’s an easy word. I don’t know why I couldn’t find it. This is like, you know, something you were half pleased to be doing and was paying your rent. That’s been journalism to me. I do not have this high compulsive, sanctified idea of the great worth of the journalists of the earth. They’re the only people that I think could be put in competition with the politicians. There are certain exceptions. I think Glenn Greenwald right now, for example, in the last seven or eight months, in covering a lot of the mistruths of journalism is doing a great job. But it was there. I did enjoy doing it. I like politics as a drama. And I was there for, and I like books. So you could OK. I did book reviews as well. So it all just came together and a non planned, but by inertia and and taste, something I stuck with to this moment. I’m talking with you. And so why do you think you had public appeal? That’s a really good question. I was always chastised in the earliest part of so-called racket. Why don’t you? I remember writing one one column for the radio station. Other people read it before I get to CBC and the owner of the station. He called me in afterwards. He hired me to write. He had his announcer read and I did this call and he calls me into his office. He said, What was all that about? And so in informal conversation, I gave him the gist of what I had written and structured for the announcer. And then he looked at me. Why can’t you do that all the time? That was a problem. That was a problem with CBC as well. They kept telling me that you can’t write like that. I have the totally different understanding of communication. Here’s another one. This is true. I did a particularly savage thing one night. In Newfoundland, you can be much more savage than you can in the delicate altitudes of Toronto and CBC. Believe me, you can’t. You can draw blood on here if you have the skill. Do you think that’s a consequence of it being a fund, fundamentally a working class culture in Newfoundland? Yeah, you’re exposed more. You actually tasted more reality. Yeah, well, I know where I grew up was a working class culture. And like the verbal barbs and exchanges were quite brutal. Generally very, very funny. And also when you were in my case, because you got really well known in the island. If you said something the previous night and you went out the next morning, I almost got chased a couple of times. But to go back to this one point about communication, I did this savage thing, attacked mercilessly, a lot of phone calls before the internet registering reaction. When I came into CBC, one of the cleaners was there. And he looks at me, Rex, he said, why? He said, that was some going over there last night. I said, yeah. He said, by the way, he said, whose side were you on? Here’s the point. Communication, even when it’s verbal, carries a lot more tone, I’ll tell you. Your sensibility goes under the text. Manner of delivery gives an index of where it’s going. I’ve had people from Pakistan and don’t give me any old racist bullshit, but Pakistan and Africa meeting in the cabs of Toronto. And I know they can’t understand this because they haven’t yet picked up the English. Okay. Don’t come back with any complaints. And they say, oh, that was so good. It always reminds me that even with hyperverbal law, I might be in certain ways that it is a deeper communication, especially in the mass media, that has never taken account. So what I was by their standards, doing a little bit of high style, you’re communicating by your manners, by your eyes. Well, that’s one of the things that makes you somewhat singular among Canadian journalists, is that not only are you very able with your words and witty with them and powerful with them, but you’re also markedly a dramatic character. And I don’t know exactly how to separate the character from the person. And maybe there is no separation, but I watched you on CBC and listened to you. And there’s always drama in your presentation. There’s a performative aspect. So it’s romantic, I suppose, is the right way of thinking about it is because that’s the effective union of emotion and rationality. And you embody that. So it’s like watching someone put on a performance, although it’s well, and then I suppose you’ve been doing this for so long. I don’t know how much of it is a performance and how much of it is you. It’s very effective. Well, I know one thing that that long use has given. I found the hardest, and this was the only conscious part, I think the hardest thing to do if you’re in the television business, don’t go into it now, it’s on its way out. But if you’re in there, is to gradually reduce to extinction. The gap between, I use this phrase in the column on recently, preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet. The gap between, oh, I’m on a camera and therefore I got to do this, I got to say it this way and all this stuff. When you can bring the prepared remark identically with a totally relaxed being. And if you mean it, I used to say this, I did five or six columns a year or commentaries that I really meant. And if you really mean it, you could go on stammering and people will listen to you. Reducing the gap between the posture or the posturing. And I’m talking to a neighbor. Okay, so well, so one of the things I’ve really observed because I’ve done a lot of television interviews now. And I’ve done a lot of this sort of discussion, which I radically prefer, which I think is immensely superior. But so in the typical television interview, I would walk into the studio and I would meet the interviewer and we would have a cordial and professional conversation. But I was actually talking to the person more or less. And then the cameras would go on and the person was no longer there at all. I know. And so then I was trying to figure out, well, what’s exactly there? And well, part of it was the person in some sense didn’t dare to be there because the bandwidth was extremely expensive. And if you’re there being spontaneous, you can make spontaneous errors and that can be very costly to you and to your network. And so so frequently I was just talking to whoever it was acting out the role of the journalist they thought their station demanded. And so there was no conversation. And some of the conversations, interviews that I’ve had that have gone viral were exactly like that where it wasn’t a conversation. Whatever it was, was something completely different. But there’s something essential about what you said with regards to this diminishment of the gap between the persona and the person. And so the persona, this is from the psychology of Carl Jung. Jung thought about the persona as a crafted presentation that you used for expedient purposes. Yes, absolutely. And so maybe you walk into a bank and you do a transaction and you’re the customer and she’s the teller or he’s the teller. And there’s a script there and that’s fine. That’s where a persona works because you don’t want to get personal while you’re just exchanging business information. But in a conversation, it’s a different thing because the persona is something that isn’t genuine. And what that means is the questions aren’t genuine. And if the questions aren’t genuine, then it’s not interesting. You said you can stammer and stumble about as long as you mean it. And you can. And what do you think about what is it? Well, you talked also about the nonverbal component. What do you think is carrying the sense that you mean it? What are people observing in the performance, let’s say, or in the presentation? There’s an intensity. Yes, it really is. I know this is straight. That’s a really good question. I always knew, it’s intuition, that when you showed up on television, especially in the role of commentator and interviewer, and so on and so forth, that if I was pretending, it bled out through the screen. Now, of course, there are times you’re having fun and you’re not being serious. You do all sorts of fun. In the ones I used to like to say, the ones that really count, if you put on a face the radar of human beings, the radar of every human being, especially again in this public thing, they know it’s wrong. Politicians, I remember I did a thing on the national. Every time a politician comes to an election, this was true of Mr. Harper, whom I like, as it was of Mr. Trudeau in particular, that the voice that starts to come out of them in their commercials is like something that’s never been heard on heaven or earth before. They actually change their vocal tone when they give out their… They may as well hang a sign around their neck saying, I’m lying to you now because you can hear the way I talk. In the cases that you’re describing, there’s so much in television and media interviews that’s simply dishonest. These little conversations you described having before you started the interview, and I know you must have experienced this. I know a lot of journalists who use those as a kind of a set up for a sucker punch, put the smiley face on, oh, I love you, Jordan, etc. Oh, yes, that’s happened many times. As soon as the lights go on, the lack of integrity in these things is just savage. But those people, maybe intellectuals, it’s something like Orwell’s famous thing, only intellectuals could believe it. Sometimes it’s only intellectuals who can’t see the point, educated in a formal sense but not in a real sense. There’s something so stupid that you had to be extremely intelligent to perform it. And news guys and news ladies who think that they can out-cute the guest and get them. See, they’re not even not going for a conversation. They’ve decided in advance that they’re constructing a moment. Factitious is the covering word for that. It’s constructed. And they only want that so you can be passing off the wisdom of Plato, Socrates, and Jesus in a single sentence. And they’re still grinding in their heads. I have the net ready. I’m going to drop it on them any minute. Not even listening to you. It’s not an interview, it’s a plot. Well, that’s why I’m hoping that these long-form videos are transformative. I’ve interviewed a couple of, or interviewed, I’ve had a discussion with a couple of political figures and that is going to continue, I hope. I believe that in a two-hour discussion, you reveal yourself. I don’t think you can help it. And you might reveal yourself as someone who’s covering up so they can’t, won’t reveal themselves. Yeah, I know. But that’s revealing in and of itself. It is. I used to say that when, especially doing political interviews in Newfoundland, I remember one cabinet minister in particular said, well, he said, you asked me a lot. He said, but you never got me to say it. And I told him, I said, you’re not saying it was the interview. There’s always a reality. And unfortunately now in public communications from when I started, and this is not nostalgia to the present moment, the press have completely, not completely, so many of the press organs have just dropped all the essential attributes of news gathering and information and have become partisans, have become propagandists, are advancing agendas all under all we are the guardians of the democracy. Okay. Well, so from the postmodern perspective, at least how it’s generally put forward with its neo-Marxist surround, the proposition is something like all language games are games of power. And so whether you’re doing it or not, you’re putting forward an agenda. And if you can’t see that, that’s just a sign that you’re- Yeah. So, but now you made a distinction between real journalism and this false journalism that you’re decrying. What do you think are the characteristics of genuine journalism? Well, the first of it is the old bromide that everyone has a bias. Well, of course they have a bias. They have a life. But we talked at the very beginning of this for a long time about education. And what education is in another domain is fashioning, deliberately fashioning your mind to be able to stand beside itself, to be able to stand outside and look at those things that by temperament or disposition or social situation, you have automatically come to accept. We have the power of self-scrutiny. And so let us, let me make it easy. I love John Diefenbigger. I’m going to deliberately going back as a person and I’m going to vote for him as a citizen. But I’m a journalist and he comes to my town of St. John and he does a bad stumble and he makes a novel mess of this and whatever. And I say to myself, well, this is Don Diefenbigger. I love him. So I’m going to hold that one back. Well, no, you’re a journalist and you say, even though on a personal level, I’m going to go with him. I have the capacity to see that he really messed up here. This was stupid. This was wrong. So I’m going to report it. That’s the interior of every person has control over their bias. And while we will never be perfect in expunging it, we all have a responsibility to examine where we are on our own personal domain. And if that’s the case, then if you’re covering politics and you let yourself be agitated by the emotions of either hatred or love and do damage to the ones you hate and puff up the ones you love, you’re lying. And the idea that you, because we all have bias, therefore you go to the ridiculous extreme of not only indulging it, but injecting it into everything, every story and every story meeting that you have. Journalists want to have a vote with him. I tell you what, one of the silliest phrases in Western journalism is speaking truth to power. This is when I always go back to your hero, Solzhenitsyn. If you want to know what speaking truth to power is, have 10 years in Siberia, have a tyranny, visit your family, that’s speaking truth to power. These are sacred words. And you get it over here when someone makes a jab at Donald Trump. Dear God, it’s a comedy. So you were eight years with Here and Now? Yeah, eight years in Newfoundland every night, five nights a week. And I traveled all over the province. Right, so you’re traveling everywhere. You’re doing book reviews, you’re doing classical music reviews. So you’re continuing your education in a major way. Yeah, that’s why I have one most that I’m not ashamed of. I’ve never stopped liking English literature. It wasn’t the door to close when you walked into the university. I’m reading Sir Thomas Brown right now. I read him 45 years ago, I suppose. The enthusiasm and energy that comes from the best writers, you’ve adverted to the best, Matthew Arnold, the best that has been thought and said, is still there. And that’s almost a surprising thing that even at this very nocturnal hour, the kind of exuberance that you had at 20, still lingers in the chambers of music and literature. Yes, I would say so. Obviously, something indicating the lasting benefit of a genuine education in the humanities. It’s an inexhaustible source of what exactly? Well, we said mimicry of the great spirit that animates the ages. How could that possibly get old? No, I like your description because it’s not often presented as that. And now, of course, the idea that education is for the job. I do know how important jobs are. I come from Newfoundland, but there’s a whole set of spirits, as you know, you’ve met them, that also say that there’s another target in education. And that’s it. You just spoke of it. You remember always, John, the better to enjoy life or the better to endure it. I don’t think there’s a better short description of what education is. No, I had a vision at one point of the people, many people who were influential to me in my life. These were this particular vision mostly involved men. And so it was like a review in my mind of men that I had seen that had been influential to me. And then it was like there was something behind that. There was the greater men that I had been exposed to as a student, the people I had read and identified with. I mean, when I found someone, a thinker that captured me, I tended to read everything I could that they had produced. And I would fall into their mode of thinking. It would take me over completely. And then I’d reemerge somewhat on the other side, change. But then I could see behind those great thinkers, there was something else. And I think that’s something that people think about that as the ancestral God, the ancestral father. And that was the spirit that was shining through the great men I had read and then all the people that had influenced me. It shone through what was great, good and great about them. By the way, good and great, you’re committing terrible sins here. These adjectives are now off limits. The idea of good and great mathematics. This is where the association with power, as soon as you buy the doctrine that any hierarchical organization is predicated on power, then obviously the higher up you are in that hierarchy, the more corrupt you are. So you might say, well, what’s so what? What do you lose from that? Because you lose your sense of inferiority in relationship to the better. Well, what you lose is the better. That’s fine if you’re good enough the way you are. But I’ve never met anyone who felt that they were good enough the way they were. There’s always clamor inside your soul for more, the more that you could be. And where else are you going to find it? Except among those who have deemed being deemed to be the best. And it isn’t arbitrary, right? You said when you went to university, you’d hear these words and they would hit you. You call them benign explosions. That’s not indoctrination by your by your educators. That’s introduction to the benign explosions. Well, that particular professor, all he did, I could still hear it. It’s about it. I’m making a guess here. It’s about a 42 line simile. He just read it. And I mean, it was like Beethoven’s fifth, because Milton does have a certain power of expression. And you’re right. There was no message attached. He didn’t say even by the way, no message saying that you must like this. It was just done and let the spirit respond as the spirit will. But this is this fashioned education. This fashion, you go to university now to be to be injected with attitude, not thought. And some of these these white programs and the new anti-racism, which is all identity. And you only read things from the tribe to which you belong. I know enough about Newfoundland. I want to read about the Trojan War, not the war on the southern shore. I mean, really, they’re canceling Homer, they’re canceling Shakespeare, they’re making fun of mathematics, they’re talking about white physics. I do not know how we wandered so easily into this terrible and dominating lunacy. Have you seen the latest statement by the president of the CBC, Catherine Tate, following the George trial down in the States? I mean, it’s like a parody of virtue thinking and how CBC is going to take notice of this and systemic racism in CBC and all that. Dear God, I spine is requires calcium and there’s no milk in CBC. None. How did I get under that? I’m not even sure. All right. So you’re eight years in Newfoundland, you’re traveling all over the province, you’re listening to people, you’re watching their reactions to your shows, you’re reading. How much do you read habitually? Three, four hours a day. There was periods when I was out for a while, I could go for eight or nine. But I have books in the morning, I have books in the evening. And of course, this stuff here, the internet has diluted some of that traffic. But I do have a fair store. I also, by the way, this is a good point to make for people who are going rereading as Navikov has pointed out, you can’t read enough and you can only reread it. I find great pleasure. I’ve read Johnson’s letters, for example, recently, even the anatomy and melancholy, which is a bit of a task. Proust reread. So I do that a lot. I find that it’s a refreshing that you borrow power, not power in any militaristic or status sense. How about authority? Well, it teases your brain. And you get thrown into a mood in which the actions of the mind are more prompt and more precise. It’s mood. You can’t claim, I will now say this, you have to wait for the damn word to come to you. And what this puts you in that fertile territory. That’s a mystery, too, right? That’s a mystery. Yeah, it is. That element of thought. And, you know, people are easily cynical about prayer. But it seems to me that there isn’t much difference in posing a question to yourself and waiting for an answer than there is. I don’t distinguish between that in some sense in prayer and prayer, because the act of receiving revelatory thought, which is the thought that bubbles up, is it seems to me that you pose yourself a question and if your intent is genuine, you want the answer. You don’t want something comfortable, which is uncomfortable in itself. Mysteriously, the something will arise. And the less you put that persona that you describe between you and the source upon which you call, the more likely you are to be rewarded with the words that are correct. Yeah. That being you is a very strange idea because it happens of its own accord in some sense. The book I was referring to way back, and I said I wouldn’t quote the title by Kessler, called The Act of Creation. And it was an analysis of literary insight or literary inspiration, humor, the discovery of a punchline, and mathematical, the eureka moment. I think I’ve read that. I think I read that as an undergraduate. It’s a long while ago, but it is precisely your point. I have a puzzle in my mind. I’m trying to find a phrase or if I’m a mathematician, I have a real puzzle. And at a whole series of time, I have no answer. I can’t get it. I go out and sloppily make a cup of tea. And as I’m stirring the first cube of sugar, oh, I got the answer. What was the difference between the two minutes before and the time that this thought exploded in your head? You had to have your mind prepared for the thought to have a place to pop out. So you just used that phrase explosion again. You talked about the benign explosions that introduction to literature set off. Okay, so there’s a thematic relationship between those two ideas. And we already talked about the idea of mimicry. And so, you know, what you do in part when you’re educating yourself by pursuing what’s see what appears to you to be meaningfully and true is you build that spirit inside of you. And then that’s the thing that’s informing you when you ask questions. Yeah. And you should build that spirit out of you build that spirit out of what the best out of the best the past has to offer you. And there’s markers for that. And the markers are that aesthetic, that aesthetic grip, right? It’s not something that someone can impose on you. It doesn’t work. It has to be you meet it halfway. And so when you know, when we have a conversation like this, that that’s spontaneous, what I’m trying to do when I have a conversation like this is to become transparent. In some sense, I don’t want my concerns about the podcast, let’s say the quality of the podcast, the audience, any of that. I don’t want those proximal concerns to interfere with my immersement in the conversation. And if I do that correctly and open myself up, then there’s a spontaneity about the dialogue. And that seems to be associated with the search for and the discovery of some additional truth. We have to persona was one of the words that that classic phrase, smell and prepare to face to meet the faces that you meet. Anytime we artificially or self consciously construct ahead of time some personal interaction, which is what a conversation really is. If we go in with the scaffolding already prepared in there, it’s kind of an armor. Nothing can happen. You have you put yourself in in the closed container and you’ve done the right ritual moves. Your other point is also very interesting. You don’t care about the damn podcast and the quality. No, don’t. Don’t. These are not only these are secondary or collateral or advantageous. But if you want to have a chat, make the chat the thing. And even there, you don’t you don’t make it too deliberate. You just you sit, you speak and back and forth. I don’t know, by the way, how I’m doing on this. But that’s not the point. Excuse me. The point on this one is very simple. That we have to allow some channel for the impulses that we don’t understand, call them the unconscious, call them sensibility. The impulses that we don’t command, but they are there. And occasionally they emerge and solving the problem, having a conversation, making a quick joke in the middle of a live conversation. It’s a great mysterious thing. We’re not nearly as metaphysical as we should be. People should pay more attention to the spirit, even if they’re not religious, because there’s a whole aura. I go back to that word again. There’s a whole aura around how we do things and how we use. Why do you you have used that word continually? Why? Why aura? What what is it that? That’s magical about that conceptualization. Well, two things in that it is ineffable. That’s the first thing that it is. It is a sheen or a halo effect, but it is not to be seen by the eye. But there is from some center or maybe it’s not a center. Maybe you need to be the design, but from some place we derive psychological and intellectual energy that we can’t command. But that in some ways we can prepare for, as you’ve said, by stocking the mind as best you can. There are elements in our areas of the highest thought that are structured logically and research and all of these. But there’s one other thing besides, and I call it aura mainly because of its insubstantiality, its invisibility, but also its link to something that’s close to magic or close to religion. And you can choose either of those two terms. So there’s the phrase that leapt to mind when you were describing that was the preparation of the temple for receipt of the divine revelation. And well, I studied, I spent a lot of time reading Carl Rogers, Carl Rogers, a psychologist, a counselor, clinical psychologist, a humanist, but originally a Christian seminarian, deeply influenced by Protestantism. And he wrote very deeply and practically about listening and talking to clients. And he insisted upon a certain kind of genuineness that if you were operating properly as a therapist, that there were no persona tricks. You were fully there, you were integrated, body and mind integrated. And there’s something about that. It’s things have to line up all the way down to the bottom properly. And the more that happens, the better the quality of the revealed word. It’s something like that. And you prepare that in part by exposing yourself to great thoughts, because they also eradicate the dross and the deadwood and the impediments to that movement of thought upward. And so while you’re reading all the time and pulling in these great thoughts and the spirit that animates the great thoughts as well, you’re also feeding that part of you that responds when you call upon yourself to answer a question. It’s why I’ve stressed in my writings, honesty in speech, because you have to rely on this capacity for creative revelation to guide you through the darkest possible times of your life. When you have nothing else to guide you, if you’ve corrupted yourself with deceptive speech and therefore deceptive thought, there won’t be anything there that’s reliable when you call on it desperately. Yeah, I saw that you made that point, I think, in one of your recent comments. Doesn’t matter where, but where you point out that some people go to university and say, okay, I’m going to bend to the current dilapidated regime. I’m going to pretend that I adore all their sanctities. But as soon as I get out of university and I got the goddamn piece of paper, then I’m going to start fighting back. And you wrote back or replied, if you start lying and you make a habit of it, I’m paraphrasing, obviously, you won’t walk out as easy as you think. And you either start from that point or you don’t. And then if you make that your persona, sometimes the persona takes over the person. Oscar Wilde is familiar with that. One other thing I’d like to add, just throw in there, when you talk about getting so close to truth, remember also words themselves as words. If there is a place for enchantment and enthrallment and charm, obvious with his loot made trees remembered that he could communicate with unanimous music in that case, but language also, I think one of the highest hardest sentences in all writing is the very first one there in the beginning was the word. I mean, words are actors. We have major control over them, I think, but they have an internal force. They have a residual force. They are magical. Hence, poetry, hence, Ecclesiastes, Book of Job, you know them better than I. I don’t know if we ever penetrated that, but I do know that language in its individual terms and its actual words has latencies of disposition and force. RG Yes, it’s right to think of them as active agents. Oscar Wilde Yeah, I’d like to hear you on that. RG So you watch every word and you watch every phrase and you watch every sentence and you try to get the rhythm right and you try to get the harmony right and then you attack what you wrote and you see if it can withstand the assault that you can bring to it and maybe you do that 50 times to see if you can craft something that you cannot improve no matter how hard you try and that you can’t break no matter what you bring to bear upon it. Well, yeah, as I said, sometimes a very simple sentence. How could I explain or explicate, it would be better, that particular sentence, in the beginning was the word. There are all single syllables, prepositions, a definite article, and in the beginning was the word. There’s always, again, there’s always that extra outside contribution that comes from the language itself and putting, I sometimes think the Kabbalists, the great tradition of the Kabbalists, the minute examination of the intrinsic terms, the individual letters, it may seem like a superstition, but I think of it less a superstition than as a kind of mildly encouraged path to a certain insight. There is more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. I wish the universities, again, go back to our theme here, seems to go through in dealing with literature in particular and history, those kinds of subjects would pay much more attention to also giving your students the capacity to imitate those writers. Best writer in America in certain ways is Abraham Lincoln. Isn’t that an amazing thing? He’s inaugural addresses, oh, Lord. They have power enough that when Martin Luther King came by some hundred and so years later, that they were operating in his brain. They were a living dynamic. Every drop of blood drawn by the lash will be paid for one drawn by the sword. Once we acknowledge that words continue to have some of their original dynamic, if they have been placed in the mind and if they’re kept up. Anyway, I know I’m rambling and I’m slightly more than incoherent. We tell our students, right? We should tell our students just what you’re telling them now, which is that you watch your reaction to the words and you note the awe that’s generated spontaneously and you take note of the worship that you’ve just participated in despite yourself as the marker to what constitutes truth. Well, I think you have it. We will never fully comprehend the operations of our own full consciousness, either it’s beneficial or unbeneficial. But we do know that spirit, the spirit, whether religious or however you want to describe it, that there are elements that will not be put down in the account book because they cannot be tabulated and they cannot be named, at least at this point. You’re in a clinical circumstance. You’re partly a scientist and we will go as far as the evidence can lead you in the physical properties. But there are aspects and dynamics of all human action that come from inspiration. The word put inspiration to breathe, the demon that you refer to in all creation, the ancient poets sought, or ancient philosophy that the poets were possessed. Well, they were possessed. Something for a while, Herman Melville, great example, 25, 26 years old, and produces what is probably the only text, I’m using an 80s word, the only text that could be placed pretty close to a Bible. He flooded his mind. His mind was a volcano for about a year and a half that he did. He never rode a legged after, never equaled anyone who reads. And by the way, he was fired by the Bible, by Shakespeare, by Milton. These are, I’m confirming what you have said so often here. You get in touch with the best and the best get in touch with you. It’s just, again, it’s a marvelous field. That’s also a terrifying thing. It’s a terrifying thing that a real university education or real education introduces people to because there’s some terrible fire that’s associated with the best because it does burn off everything in you that isn’t worthy and that tends to be an awful lot. Well, in my case, it’s everything. So don’t bring the match close. Match close. So, okay, so you’re eight years with here and now. And then what happens? Odds and ends of things. One thing that is probably interesting for the public side here is that at one point in my own flaws, I was out of work and I’m going to subtract a lot of detail because time only. I ended up as an executive assistant to the opposition leader, the firm 17 months and I wrote question period for the Newfoundland Assembly. I wrote it for the caucus and because it was Newfoundland, I got inside. I didn’t want to do this, by the way. I dreaded accepting the political appointment, but I wasn’t working so I did. And in hindsight, it was one of the most useful things I’ve ever done because apart from being the guy on the mountainside with binoculars staring at the bird, you’re actually in the damn room. I heard what politicians think of journalists. I heard what journalists obviously think of politicians. There’s a 30% ignorance ratio on both sides and never been cured. But it also really educated me, sensitized me to what are the buttons that you press if you were, if you go back to the journalist. Then I ended up writing some stuff and I did this piece I did on Newfoundland, in particular the fisheries. This was the somehow or other struck a chord rather widely. And suddenly- This was when the cod stocks were collapsing? This was the account- This was what years? What years was this happening? 1992, 1993 would probably be, I may be off on a year or two, but that was it. I did a half hour. It was the year also- So Newfoundland had an unparalleled wealth of fishery, miraculous in its mountainfulness that was decimated entirely and has never recovered. It is the entire reason that it exists. The language comes out of the fishery, the nature of the settlements, all those small places where they went there because it was a beach and a place to fish. The sense of humor, the stoicism that you will find in some, certainly the inventiveness in song and chat because you were really isolated and people met only on the water. There was so much tied up with that, that collapse was as much psychologically. For the first time in 500 years, you couldn’t take a codfish out of the water. So I did a piece on that and as I said, it obviously struck some chords. The next thing I knew I was being offered three or four jobs in various places. I read of cod schools that were 300 miles long, hundreds of feet deep, hundreds of miles wide, and composed primarily of fish that were three to five feet long. They were so plentiful you could haul them up in buckets. That was the original cod fishery. It was a joke you could walk across harbors on the backs of cod. By the way, the sustenance for inactive terms, 300 years of all these wonderfully small places, that also nourished because they were truly cut off. I keep saying this. You were in Peasant Bay, you weren’t in Fortune Bay, and you weren’t in St. Mary’s Bay. Therefore, being so isolated, the drive to make things either for utility or for recreation, to invent practices, they brought mummering over from England, folk song. Some of the Newfoundland folk songs as literature have not been studied, but they are so inventive. Even a list of names, Kelly Roussourie, you tried to do it yourself. So it did fall, also kind of fostered by force, independence. There wasn’t too many other people around to help you. So if you don’t do it yourself, you’re going to be in a hard spot. It had a lot of virtues, but it had a lot of faults. The lack of health and education being the two principal ones. How many futures were amputated because you grew up in a place where there was no school and there was no health. How many, you know, this is Thomas Gray in the English church, how many mutant glorious Milton’s. It was hard, it was cruel, but it was rich. It was rich in things again, that individuals and communities. And so what were you writing that caused such a stir? I just, I wrote it, looking back at it now, it was basically an elegy. I called it on people’s shores. And that comes from another point. Here the tide flows and here they ebb, not with that dull, unsinuered tread of waters that move along on people’s shores. That’s a poem written in 1930 about Newfoundland. And basically I was simply stating that the soul, and I mean it, soul of Newfoundland was being blistered and evaporated once you kill the cultural, economic, linguistic source of the being of the place. So it was just reckoning. We talked mainly to fishermen, that poet I met on the northeast, on St. Anthony’s, at L’Anse Meadow. Farmers, by the way, it’s a good point to make. Farmers gave it the most response, most letters I’ve ever received. And I wonder why, you know, fishermen are not farmers. Very simple, their grandfathers had received salt fish from the Newfoundlanders in the dirty 30s, when the prairie dustballs and all the drought was going on. Newfoundland, which was then just a country, somehow got barrels of salt fish over to the prairie farmers. They remembered it. And when they saw the fishery collapse, I’m serious, thousands of, these were letters, not emails, you had to actually write and stamp them. And three quarters of them were from the prairies. I always thought that when I learned that, I thought that was a nice thing to kind of associate with Canada. The understories are much better than the newspapers. What kind of consequences were there for that writing? It was a point where the story met someone who basically, me, met the person who was close enough to it to do some justice. But it was the voices on, I’m not one of these shy boys. It was the voices of the fishermen that I interviewed and also some officials. It all, it dropped into a harmony, 22 or 23 minutes that you really see, not bragging, just stating. And because most Canadians, this is again, despite the apologetics that come out every single damn day from Ottawa, how miserable and hateful we are, the national disposition in the main, it’s not confined to any group either, is a reasonably lively interest in the bearings of other people. And when they’re having a hard time, if there’s any way we can intercede or at least offer you verbal comforts, we’re going to do it. And when the farmers, farming and fishing are very much like in some way small farm, inshore fishery and the family farm, they saw it and their identity as citizens. That’s what I want to say. Their identity as citizens was the preeminent one of that moment. And when I think of identity politics, I often ask, and I think it should be asked a lot more. When you go to university, your identity there is student. And when you go to university or you go to your identity there is public servant. The idea that you can concentrate your being into one small superficial attribute is nonsense. But the effect on me was I ended up here. I came up here again, I’m not good on dates, 94, 95. And here is Toronto. Yeah, it’s continuous around from the periphery, so to speak, from Toronto. Absolutely. What happens when you move to Toronto? Not a lot. As I said, by that time, most parents have gone. I had the job at the National commentary and interviews and stuff, and at CBC radio. But I was introduced to a degree I had never been before, to the full play of politics in a really large province, a material of 10 million. And because I was working at the national, politics on the national scale. And also, here’s another small dimension. I somehow ended up being reasonably popular as a speaker, all sorts of things. And that gave me more opportunities, not financial, they were financial too. But I ended up in so many places addressing so many different groups, everything from fishermen to academics to nurses to librarians. And over a 20 year period, this dropped me in and out of a hell of a lot of places, and tremendous host of different people, different occupations. There’s a second. That would be part of the reason why in some sense you have a national voice, right? Because all those people that you’ve met, they echo inside of you in the same way that the books that you’ve read echo inside of you. I think the traveling under those auspices, you couldn’t, your schedule was too thick. But I could almost always linger for a day or two. And the various associations, also, by the way, here’s another thing. Public speaking is a great pleasure, and it’s a bit of an art. And I was fortunate at this stage to be given other stages in which to keep practicing, again, you’ve done hundreds, but I did 30 or 40 a year. You learn the arts of public communication. That’s a great bit of fun, by the way. And you take it, but you’re right on that thing, that getting across the countries, seeing how Alberta is different from British Columbia, New Brunswick is different from I can go on. This country is fluid. It has an underlying sentiment, pache, Mr. Crudeau. There are core values in Canada, and they should be stood up and emphasized a hell of a lot more. But this was, again, this is the second part to practical education. You get out, you’re not in Toronto all the time. And while I don’t dump on Toronto, per se, if you get within its charm circle, you become one of the mental herd. The set of synonymous attitudes along the cognizant and journalists in this city is bawling. I think that’s reflective of something that happens in the North American culture, at least as far as the United States and Canada are concerned. That also happens at the level of the intellectual elite. And there seems to be something like a very distinct sense of contempt that emanates from that. It’s certainly something that people who aren’t in Toronto react to, react, identify with Toronto and react against. And it is the kind of irritation that drives the populism, for example, Donald Trump so popular. It’s exactly. I’ve seen that in the contempt that reviewers continually express for my hypothetical followers. I don’t think I have followers. I think I have viewers and watchers and readers. And even if they were the people they’re parodied to be, I don’t see any real sin in communicating with them in whatever capacity I can manage. But there’s always a dripping contempt that is associated with the hoi polloi, let’s say, who need such bromides and so forth. Well, it’s very true. I mean, in your particular case, is low intelligence snobbery, a kind of absolutely brazen snark by people. Again, don’t need to flatter you. You haven’t read as much, don’t know as much, but it is a verification of their standing within this little particular guarded sect. And the opinions here have to be the only opinions. It’s almost like Bloomsbury at a heavily discounted level. I was, I often hear, I wondered in your case too, in the very, very beginning, when the University of Toronto was sending those letters, I kept asking, what’s the point of tenure? If all these great tenured professors at the University of Toronto, when one of their own was being disparaged and to some degree threatened, by these employment terms, why aren’t I out on the principle? It seems to have just gone away. I don’t know if that’s, I don’t think that’s particularly Toronto mentality, but it’s certainly that- No, there’s been basically radio silence from my colleagues, let’s say. Yeah, it is. It’s very strange. Even the level of success of the books, I mean, any serious engagement review, full scale of any of the three, doesn’t take place. And then the kind of agitated morons on Twitter dropping their low IQ bombs from a great height. I don’t know why this is the case. It makes you melancholy. And I don’t know if we’re able to fix it, actually. I wonder how far we can go along these paths before we degrade and degenerate the essential elements. Well, what have you seen happening? What have you seen happening? You’ve been observing our country and the culture for a long, long time, and you don’t have any particular acts to grind, as far as I can tell. So what’s happening in the cultural sphere, as far as you’re concerned, over the last, say, well, pick a point and move forward. I would say the last 10 or 15, we know origins, and I won’t go through all that, we know what the 60s, but in terms of visible evidentiary impact, it’s the last 10 or 15. The first thing that I’ve seen that I resent is the idea tacitly held, never explicitly made public that there are certain perspectives on the world that are OK, and we hold them and therefore we’re better. And any dissent from them or disagreement with them or an alternate set is not to be allowed. Half the reason, I’ll give an illustration, half the reason the CBC audiences collapsed and shrunk to such a vast extent they did is that CBC was only interested in talking to the people who agreed with it, and that’s a much more narrow bunch than ever. Well, I’ve watched my parents and their reaction to CBC. I mean, we were avid CBC listeners when I was a kid, especially to FM, and it was everywhere in Canada, but also, of course, television as well. But radio, we’ll concentrate on radio. It was always of high quality and it did seem to speak to the whole country. It did a credible job as a national broadcaster. And then all of a sudden, and it is probably 15 years ago, everyone I know in the West just stopped listening. It was like, no, this isn’t us anymore. It folded up and went away. I can tell you that I’m not rear-guarding attacking them. I waged a small, minor, almost silent rebellion within. I tried to get something out there. Whenever I was traveling in the last 10 or 15 years, it was the most frequent phrase I’d ever hear. I’m not watching it anymore. I’m not watching it anymore. And it’s accelerated greatly. The events in the states, Mr. Trump’s election, maybe to a degree, Brexit over across the border, has become attended with is present simultaneously with this new wokeness, this critical race theory, the imposition of anti-bias, the hypers, and I think affected sensitivity of the business, university, and even the health community to the more fashionable virtue contests. Mr. Trudeau apologizing almost every six days. I’ve written three or four columns saying, if you do these apologies, great ahead. We have our faults. But every now and then find something good to say. We have stripped the nation of its self-confidence, that’s one thing. We have alienated and put out in the outer darkness a vast portion of the population. They are not listening to its cultural leaders or the Illuminati or the cleracy. People are afraid of political correctness is a very feeble phrase to cover the psychological landscape in which people of moral character are afraid to say what is extremely obvious. We’re polluting the political system and the intellectual system. And finally, aside from you, on a large scale, aside from you, no one is resisting this tidal force that is emphatically cheapening the culture and shattering, not shattering, by piecemeal graduation. Canada, the idea of the central is gone. Janice Fiamengo, Gadsod is forthright. Bruce Pardee, law professor at Queens, has been what would you say, a truthful communicator with me. I also like David Salway, Janice Fiamengo’s husband. He writes some very strong stuff. Okay, so you’ve seen this and you don’t think it’s just the miasma of a cranky old man? I mean, that’s no. Okay, why not? And what do you think about the Trudeau government just out of curiosity? I don’t mean I don’t really mean politically, I mean, culturally, because you’ve looked at so many governments and you do seem to me to be someone who gives out praise when praise is due and criticism. I certainly hope I do on the praise front. Two or three things. There is, in the case of Trudeau, not on the partisan level. I think his view of Canada is not only wrong, that it has no core values and that there’s no nonsense. I vehemently am against the propaganda side of his thing, all his private, meaning personal, all his private so-called commitments to this farcical global woman on being the worst. But also he adopted, despite his own personal stuff, he adopted the woke persona to the nth possible degree. And why do you say he adopted that persona rather than being it? I mean, do you think that’s calculated? Is there something? I don’t know Trudeau. Do you know him personally at all? Have you ever talked to him when he wasn’t? Oh yeah, I had one hour session, but I’m not basing the remarks on that. What I will base it on is that, and I’m not trying to be harsh without cause, that if for some reason it was fashionable to have exactly the other set of opinions the opposite, there would be just, I think the one thing that in his biography that makes sense is at least that little inclination towards dramatics. He’s not a very good actor, but he knows what roles are playing best. And because the conservatives are such a self-contradictory and disorganized and leaderless bunch, it’s enough to be half good on the proscenium to maintain. But the worst thing about it, and I should say this, we have fractions in the West, we have great disenchantments, we have economic ruin facing some problems after this COVID thing, we have a generational tension set up between the woke and a lot of other people, and he is so much on one side of all of these things, and it emerges from his government and his ministers a smugness about any opposition. I can’t think of a time when Canada in a kind of soft way was in such a possibility of losing its own confidence and of shoulders back, as you say. This country bit by bit by bit is shedding the sense of its own integrity and drifting, and politics is so shallow these days. I wish, I wish, I wish you could ever hear, there’s no oratory because there’s no truth. You can’t build a great speech around something you don’t really believe in. And by the way, here’s, I’ll toss it back to you. We are a nation. When was the last time you heard a national address, you know, meant to underline and give emphasis? As you said, though, if there’s no national identity, what’s to address? Yeah. Or if the national identity is essentially something like tyrannical power and oppression and to be fought at every possible corner by every possible means, what can you possibly address? Yeah. And also the factionalism of identity politics is directly contradictory. It seeks to suffocate the idea of commonality and citizenship. That’s another, that’s a huge worry. In the name of anti-racism, I see some of these tactics and some of the demonizations and some of the insults as provoking the very cause that they seem to be against. We’ve got to stop fascinating on the color of people’s skin, which is what identity politics sometimes just turns into. I have never seen a time when our country in 2121, I wrote a column about this, is not systemically racist. I was in Newfoundland when the Americans landed in 9-11. I interviewed some of them. No, did they have any problem with background, color of skin or anything else? The normal reflex of the normal Canadian, welcome, welcome, welcome. And yet we have people like Mr. Trudeau, Catherine Taited in CDC. She accuses her own organization of being systemically racist. Mr. Trudeau says the parliament does not just happen to be like that. It was planned to be like, are we medieval, flagellants? Is this the new patriotism? That’s just my deepest problem with Mr. Trudeau. He’s not as large as the nation that he seeks or seems to think he’s governing. Well, I’m still struggling constantly to understand this, because it does seem to me to have accelerated in the last few years, whatever this is that is accelerating. Increasingly, the pathology that has decimated the humanities in particular, which is the core of the university, and it’s self-punitive in some sense, because enrollment in the humanities is plummeting. It’s just catastrophically declining. And so you might say, well, if the motivation was resentment of the creative process that produced the great classics, then victory has been attained. Classics have been decimated and no one will attend to them anymore. And so victory. But it means the death of the universities as far as I’m concerned. But worse than that, and I could see this happening five or six years ago, is that this is starting in a very major way to percolate out into the broader culture. So you see this in schools. Every faculties of education in particular should hang their heads in utter shame. What they’ve done to the education system is beyond disgraceful, and it’s barely got going. And you see this in the corporations too. I see these corporations, they fall over themselves, kowtowing to their HR departments to bring in a philosophy that is explicitly anti-capitalist. It’s like, what are you people doing? It’s like, do you think you’re going to be able to pick and choose bits of this philosophy once you open the door? I just can’t believe that. I can’t believe. Well, we’re on the same page there. It is inexplicable. From the schools, I’ve seen the material from some of the schools in Nantucket, it was passed on to me. Some of the training sessions, the idea that a human being with any self-respect would submit to anti-biased training. Who the hell are you to tell me that I’m unconsciously biased? The weakness and cowardice of the big corporations. We don’t even know what those tests measure. I know people who do serious research on those tests. It’s not obvious what that bias consists of. It’s the Cultural Revolution in China. And who is the ignorant fool that has all this expertise? Does she or he have cultural bias? Well, if it’s unconscious, how the hell do you look? A nation of citizens wouldn’t accept this. You don’t go into a shop as an employee or a big firm or a law firm and let some jerk or human or or tell you take the sensitivity training. Who the hell are you? I went to church, I went to school. That’s what gives me my personality. That’s some corporate fool. But no, everyone shoulders down, head under the desk. That’s the biggest worry. I think we’re at the back end of some deliquescent, some melting of things that we knew and we knew they had value. Maybe we’re so well off. We were being shielded from this side, from the great wars and from poverty and from huge natural disasters. Our ancestors had built the place up for our benefit and we waltzed in and full of life and vigor and we can go places. So you get lazy and complacent and you let these mice of thought take over the building. But after a while, as you said, you can’t taste a bit of this. You have to take it all. Mr. Tudor should be fighting this, not underlining and endorsing it. And so let’s talk about the conservatives momentarily. I mean, they can’t organize themselves. They don’t have a story that’s compelling. This isn’t just a problem that’s distinct to Canada. The inability of centrists to generate a romantically compelling narrative is universal across the West, as far as I can see. I presume that Trudeau will win the next election. I don’t know what you think. I think that barring some Easter scale miracle, he will win it. Mr. O’Toole, the most recent thing he did was to embrace this superstition will folly of apocalyptic global warming and promised his own carbon tax. All of his MPs are from Alberta and Saskatchewan. And there’s one or two people in the conservative party, of real talent. Doric leaders, no one matching. Something slipped away. Pierre Polyvere. But otherwise, no, they consent to the things. Do I should talk to Pierre? I think he’s very, very good. Again, I’m not part of the people who have suggested people think that I am partisan. I am not. I’d be just as hard if it was a… But Polyvere, I don’t know. I have talked with him. He’s organized. His seven-minute speeches in Parliament are very, very good. He agitates the other side greatly. They hate him as opposed to don’t like him. He would have been a much more convinced and depressed despisers, which is another medal of Canada in his favor. So yeah, he would be a very good… He’s articulate as hell. I don’t know much about him as such, but I watched the performance and in the case of public life, performance is everything. So let’s end this. We didn’t walk through your whole life, but we walked through your education. I haven’t got much of a life, Jordan. Glory to heaven. Journalism. What was it like when you were younger and what’s happened? And where do you see hope, perhaps? I think it was for most people that go into it who actually intended it or intent, with intent went after a journalism career. Yeah, fine. I knew a lot of the editors of really small town newspapers. There’s about eight or nine of them in Newfoundland when I was there. Harbour Grace, St. Anthony’s, Clarenville, and the old hometown reporter. These are small towns. They were fun. That was there, but dirt, of course, either eviscerated or folded up so long. St. John’s wasn’t a particularly good newspaper town, but at least they actually reported the news. They didn’t go out and seek out causes and stick up things that whatever would reflect this cause would be on the newspaper. No, it was the event. It was the car crash. It was the election. It was some foreign… It was something that actually happened and we report things that happen that are new. We don’t see ourselves as a running channel trying to bend the mind of our readers. Jump 30, 40 years. In the States, it’s absolutely toxic. Nothing outside of Soviet Russia when it was Soviet Russia and Pravda was the screen of all lives. Journalism in the United States, on all the big networks, everyone goes on about Fox. Have you ever watched CNBC? Have you ever watched CNN? I mean, you’d need a mental cleanser if you were in the same room. They are ruinously corrupt. They are ruinously incompetent. Some of their anchors are stupid. I mean, stupid in the sense that they had to work hard to get as stupid as they are. And then you have the newspapers who decide, well, Trump is such an evil that we have to change the entire doctrine of what a newspaper is. We are out to get him. When newspapers become activists, it’s time to walk to the cemetery and bury the printing presses. So how much of that, Rex, how much of that do you think is merely a consequence, merely a consequence of technological revolution? I mean, there’s so much journalism now because anyone can pick up a pen and have an instant international audience if they can attract it. You can blog, you can do YouTube videos. It’s like no one has a monopoly on bandwidth anymore. So the newspapers and classical journalists are really up against it in a profound way. I mean, are we just seeing the consequences? No, you think it’s more than that? No, no, no. I know it’s forwarded that I’m being defined here now. I know that journalists in the higher altitudes, national journalists especially, they now see themselves as procurators, as persons, as prestigious to some degree, at least as those they report upon. They also have invested themselves with a clerical view of things. They have a wisdom that perhaps even the people they’re reporting on are incapable of receiving. They are there to teach you. CBC, from my perspective, lost its audience mainly because it became a preacher and the chief characteristic. Yeah, a boring preacher, which is even worse. Oh, you have hit so many nails on the head with that. You do not need someone next to the CBC as on these days. But now journalists have self-appointed. This is the problem. Let’s take the trans movement. Suddenly they’re taking in three days, they can put this particular issue, which at best exists at a micro level in terms of the whole population, and make that the new litmus test for whether you’re politically correct or not. They endorse all ideological programs of the hard left. And I also, I’ll say this, many journals and journalists don’t like their own audiences or the people who read them. Don’t, like I said about the humanities, if you’re thinking about becoming a journalist, please look around a bit more before you do. Although those that do it very well, as I said, Glenn Greenwald, Molly Hemingway, Melanie Phillips, I’m going around the globe with these. These are sterling examples of what we would hope. Well, it seems that people like that are increasingly, I would say, going out there on their own. Yeah, they are. They are. Melanie Phillips, I do know, has her own thing set up. Greenwald got tossed because he wasn’t subscribing to the current philosophy, but he has enough standing that his intercept, I think it’s the intercept, is now, and he gets a lot of air time because again, he is, I hate the term, a celebrity journalist, but he’s a good journalist. I disagree with 95% of what he thinks. But I see him covering the press lately, the last five or six months of some of his columns. They are, as they say, must read. And Barry Weiss’s letter, that’s also good stuff. So there are good people there, but I think the weight culturally with the universities, the corporations, the news media itself, the trend towards the enforcement, tacit or by mob of a certain set of thoughts is so deep and is so unresisted by so many that I think we’re in for a long haul. And if we have a bad economy coming out of COVID and all the spending, it’s going to be a terrible two or four years. There are so many people and it’s not being reported, lost shops, lost jobs, lost hope, saw some life enterprise collapse. And are you seeing this on the news? No, you’re not. Anyway, I don’t mean, I don’t mean always to end up screaming at you. What makes you optimistic? Any, any flair of independence. I’m not as convinced that some of the brilliant writing that is being done in analysis and opposition is reaching enough people, but I am encouraged that there’s a lot, I can’t go through the whole span. There’s a lot out there if you search it out. I don’t know if this would be classified as optimism, but when societies get really challenged, I mean, really challenged, inevitably they revert to the genuine virtues. If this current malaise has set us back really badly, and if Canada is no longer a place that has instant access to almost everything it wants, maybe its citizens will learn again the eternal values of intercommunication, of commonality of goals and values, not skin colors or ideologies. And that getting closer to reality, if we are forced to it by economics or other things, we will dispense with, we will be both on all this is hollow and useless. But it’s like, you know, you can afford to play if you’ve got everything else taken care of. If we’re driven back to actually having to work for things, think about things, take time and avoid falsity, these will blow up in a day. Whether that’s going to happen, I kind of doubt it, but maybe that is the cynicism of senescence creeping up on me. You’ve had a stellar career as a journalist. You’ve had the sort of career that I would say every journalist would like to have. You’ve been prolific and influential and well regarded and controversial, and you’ve had a long life doing it and done all sorts of interesting things. What advice would you have for someone who wants to write? Well, if they want to write and particularly if they want to be journalists who write, go to the best examples. Every journalism school in the country should have the two volumes of Malcolm Muggeridge’s biography. I do this for two reasons. I know your veneration of Schoenitz and I also know you know that Malcolm Muggeridge was the very first prominent western journalist who wrote of the terror and the famine. He did it at the time when Walter Durante was lying to the New York Times and getting Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for it. I would advise them to read Flannery O’Brien. I would advise them to read Charles. I would advise them most of all in terms of reading. Read Francis Bacon’s essays. They are the best lead story, the best lines leading a story. Here’s one. What is truth, said Justin Paulus, and would not stay for an answer. If you want to know how to write a lead sentence, read any of Bacon’s essays. They have the most beautiful thing. The other thing to write, there’s only one thing Jordan, if I may use your first name, that anyone who seriously wants to write or wants to write stuff that is serious as opposed to some victim’s diary, read. Read other people. Read other novels. There’s nothing that will help you more in the art of writing than reading. And you could also add one more thing if you read say the great Gatsby, you read a paragraph, sit back or read a poem and ask yourself if I were to write this, if I had to communicate this thought, how would I have said it than compare with what Scott Fitzgerald is? Anyway, I think I’ve probably dragged you, sir, to the point of perhaps mortal tedium. So I’m going to stop it right there. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you speaking with me.

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The Education of a Journalist ｜ Rex Murphy ｜ EP 173 (7Yrrm5qccig)

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