I cheat.
In these blogs, I'm an inveterate cheater. If I'm writing on anything that isn't strictly personal, my standard modus operandi is to wait until the dust settles before I put pixel to screen. Maybe not all the dust, but enough of it that I can get a handle on what's really happening. Or try to. It might not be the right handle, and people reading my blabberings can then be excused for flying off the handle...but I try. I'm a lazy old cheater: it's easier to let other people do my research for me.
That might sound like plagiarism. It isn't, oddly, not when you credit it. I will never forget first year geography (taken in my second year of university, at which point my love of the classroom was severely shaken but not quite shattered). The first lecture opened with, I kid you not, "this is a globe..." [points to equator] "...does anybody know what this line is?" I almost got up and walked out right then. I wanted so badly to ask how I'd went to bed last night on a university campus and awoken this morning in grade four.
That wasn't what I wanted to talk about--forgive me. I am still overflowing with contempt for pretty much everything about my university years (including myself), and bilious outpourings like that bubble up without warning. No, what's more relevant here was the geography essay, one of the longer essays I'd ever written. I believe the target was 20-25 pages.
I get good marks on essays. The last one I wrote, on "the ideal spouse", got 49/50--I lost a mark because I'd forgotten that "much of the world" is a plural construction in French. I'm not bragging about that mark, incidentally--since I have the ideal spouse, it's not a stretch to write about her, and besides, what I wrote in that essay you've seen in this blog, almost verbatim, more than once. All I had to do was translate something I'd already written. One of the paragraphs on my philosophy of surface vs. inner beauty, goes back to high school. Lazy cheater, like I said: in this case I cribbed myself. And now I've digressed from my digression. Good thing this is a blog and not an essay.
That geography essay grade--C-minus--really peeved me off because I had spent a long time writing the damned thing. I can't remember what the topic was, but it's awfully hard to write 20-plus pages about anything, especially if you want to avoid repetition and manure spread for the purposes of padding. I wrote forever, edited it all up nice and pretty, and handed it in only to get that kick in the nuts back.
The teaching assistant passed around an A paper. Reading it, I felt like I had gone down the rabbit hole. Maybe five or six pages of his essay was actually his. The rest of it was all indented, bolded, italicized quotes, meticulously footnoted. One page had--get this--eighteen footnotes on it. Well, shit. Here I'd spent probably fifty hours on something that took this putz five to mash together. Had I known the "essay" I'd been assigned was actually a quote-gathering exercise, I'm sure I would have done better in a whole hell of a lot less time. My ego, which had been polished to a high sheen by years of effortless A+ grades on essays, insisted on blurting that out to the T.A. Bad move there, Ken. I was led to understand that whatever grades I got in other subjects, this was geography and its standards were rigorous. ("This is a globe...this is a huge pile of words and most of them aren't even mine". ) The argument raged for a while, and then I walked away, my mind utterly unchanged. I get the need to back up your assertions with those of properly sourced Smarter People, Especially Those Who Agree With Your Prof (And Better Yet, Your Lord Prof Him Or Herself). What I don't get and refuse to get is the need to back up pages and pages of properly sourced quotes with a smattering of your own sentences.
Whatever. Battle was over and lost a long time ago, buddy. Make like Elsa and let it go.
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I wrote too soon on Jian Ghomeshi. I should have waited; I should have let some other people put their opinions out there so I could cherry-pick them and weave my opinion around, over and through them. But no, I just had to graft my already gathered thoughts on to what was then (and still remains) a sketchy narrative. It lad me to make some critically poor assumptions.
Like that this was about sex at all.
I fell right into the PR trap. I tried to remain impartial--I even recognized that retaining a crisis management team to handle a crisis that hadn't even broken in the media yet could be construed as a damning admission of...something... But what I failed to do was question the very nature of the defence put forward. CBC was firing him for unspecified lurid adventures in the bedroom, all of which, according to Jian, were completely consensual. With regard to Ms. Jilted Ex, I'm pretty sure Jian was hoping the world would fall for that the way I did: hook, line, and sink her.
Not mentioned was that you can't give consent to be physically assaulted in Canada--if it leaves a mark, you're pretty much farked. Even if not--something I did allude to--these kind of sexual practices require, one would think, an almost insurmountable pile of trust...not something you would accrue to anyone on a first date, which is when at least some of this stuff was supposed to have happened.
At least one of these women has reported sexual harassment in the workplace, which obviously wasn't consented to and which makes no appearance in Ghomeshi's Facebook statement--unless it's alluded to here, ha-ha:
CBC has been part of the team of friends and lawyers assembled to deal with this for months.
Yeah, they're "dealing" with it, all right.
One of the allegations concerns "creepy non consensual touching at a concert...followed by stalker-y behaviour". None of this is mentioned either. No, according to Jian it's all about his kinks.
There's a reason I fell for all this. Not because I harbour any love for Jian Ghomeshi--I've only heard his program a few times, and am completely ambivalent about it. Going back decades, I own two of his albums and have seen him perform live, but even back then I barely knew his name. Honestly, I'm somewhat repulsed by the S&M community the way the anti-gay bigots are repulsed by homosexuality, and for the same reason: I don't understand it at all. I've only recently come to recognize that people who choose to be whipped, or who live in Master/slave relationships, or what have you, are every bit as entitled to their private lives as the rest of us. More so, maybe. BD/SM seems to embody even more healthy respect within the relationship than regular old vanilla sex.
But I have a great deal of empathy for someone who's willing to come forward and state his sexual "deviancies" in front of the whole world. Mine are markedly different, but I just did that myself a few months ago, after all. That's why I initially leaned towards supporting a man who now looks to be guilty of offences he isn't even offering defences for. I could have ferreted that out myself with some digging. I didn't. My fault.
Owen Pallett, a Canadian indie rock star and close friend of Ghomeshi's, has come out with this strongly worded (but oddly passive) expression of horror at just what his friend stands accused of.
This morning, the National Post published "The Real Reason Jian Ghomeshi is suing the CBC" (hint, hint: it has nothing to do with him having lost his job). This course of action all but assures the silence of his accusers...which only makes me wonder that much more what they might have said.
Ghomeshi may in fact be innocent. Somehow I doubt it.
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