this is mikel.org

Michael Boyle's weblog

  • home
  • archives
  • about
  • words

Archives for 2015

Election 2015 Live blog

October 19, 2015 by Michael Boyle

I’m temporarily bringing mikel.org out of retirement so that I may live blog with election results of the October 19th 2015 Canadian Federal Election.

I’ll be adding everything in this post and new material will be at the top.

OK so the live blogging never really happened…

I will share some notes and thoughts about the results now that things are pretty much decided in today’s federal election.

  • First of all: wow. What a result! And I don’t mean whether I am happy about it or not – just the magnitude of the victory for the Liberals is very impressive. From coast to coast, in rural ridings, urban ridings, and suburban ridings, the Liberals made huge gains.
  • I think this election has to go into the “polls are really unreliable” file. The polls have been radically incorrect for almost every election in Canada in the past 5 years, and this election is no exception.
  • One of the talking points by the TV commentators so far has been that this has been the best-run and best-designed political campaigns in Canadian history. From my perspective this is a bang-on comment – and furthermore, that that’s what was required for the Liberals to get anywhere.
  • Some individual riding results I find interesting…
    • Stéphane Dion seems to have won in his usual Ahuntsic-Cartierville riding. I have a soft spot for Mr. Dion for many reasons and it’s quite frankly a great testament to a humble public servant that he continues after having reached the highs and lows of Liberal Party leadership over the past decade.
    • It looks like Hélène Laverdière (NDP) will hold her riding in Laurier-Ville-Marie in central Montreal (my old riding for years) over Gilles Duceppe. I am a little sad for Duceppe that he was almost forced to return to the Bloc just to lose in *his* riding. I hope he will be able to retire once and for all.
    • Gutted for Andrew Cash in the Davenport riding in Western Toronto. I didn’t follow his political career TOO closely but he always seemed like a great representative and a hard-working MP. At least Charlie Angus seems to have won his riding in Northern Ontario. (If you don’t know their names, they’re both legendary Canadian musicians).
  • While I understand it, I’m a little disappointed for the NDP tonight. They have really become an important force for good in Canadian politics during this recent period of ascendency. For instance, I believe they had more women candidates in this election than any other party in Canadian history – and this is important. I hope people don’t just write them off now.
  • Personally, I was most impressed by far by Justin Trudeau during this campaign. I was very vocal among my politically-inclined friends that the Liberals seemed to me to be making huge errors, basically shutting up and trying not to say anything on the expectation that they would be once again tapped for form a government by natural Canadian law or something. In fact, though, during this campaign Justin Trudeau clearly annunciated a very human and humane vision for Canada, and was quite forceful about a return to traditional Canadian values that had been lost under a decade of Harper/Conservative leadership. As a referendum on Justin’s ability as a leader, he clearly passed with flying colours.

Tags: Canadian Politics, Election, Liberal, NDP

Donald Draper, the anti Dorian Gray

May 18, 2015 by Michael Boyle

The finale of Mad Men was broadcast last night, cleanly tying up most threads of the show. We know how most of the characters ended up – and in many ways, the endpoints seemed inevitable. It’s easy enough to project each character’s life forward even through to today and have a pretty decent degree of confidence that you’d be more or less correct.

One character that was at the center of the entire series, though, ended up in a pretty weird place. Donald Draper (aka Dick Whitman) found himself in November 1970 on the coast of California at an esalen-like retreat, meditating after his most recent breakdown – and it is strongly suggested (though not 100% confirmed) that he returned to his life in Manhattan and went to ever-greater heights in the advertising world, even creating one of the great ad campaigns of the 60s and 70s (“I’d like to buy the world a Coke”, the closing song/video of the series).

The thing about Don Draper is that he was forced from a very young age – well before “Don Draper” even – to engage in pretty heavy acts of “creation”. Creation of the self, primarily, but he also used his experience professionally.

Whereas “normal” people create a sense of self through the nurture of their families and communities, Dick Whitman was pretty much on his own, which culminated in the ultimate creation – his version of Donald Draper. You can take it even further – it’s probable that the things he learned in creating first “Dick Whitman” and later “Don Draper” from whole cloth are precisely what made him a genius ad man.

The central problem for Don Draper, however, is that it seems that he dissociated his created personas from any deep sense of “self” – both Don and Dick were things he brought to the world, that he created – but not necessarily him in any strong sense.

It came to be that Don Draper was really only alive during the process of creation. And not just the creation of his new persona – original ad campaigns counted too, as did his hoodwinking Roger into hiring him, and eventually the companies he created. Was Don ever more dialed in than when they created SCDP out of the husk of Putnam Powell Lowe?

We even saw this at the very end, when they tried to arrange for Sterling Cooper West, a division of McCann Erickson. He was animated for that 24-hour period in a way that hadn’t been seen since Burger Chef, when he got to witness the full flowering of one of “his” creations, Peggy Olsen (at least he felt that she was his creation – I don’t mean to take anything away from Peggy).

Throughout his life, Don was widely praised for his creations, but this praise never really touched him completely because in his (damaged) view, the praise was not for HIM in any deep sense, but for a persona he created. He was ambivalent about awards and matter of fact when people complimented him. And so he continued to create – and became the gold standard of Manhattan ad men (in this fictional Manhattan), but perhaps never really took the personal validation from the praise heaped upon him that most of us would have taken.

As the series went on, we learned that each act of creation came at a huge cost to Don, and not as a function of effort or hard work or whatever – there was more of an existential cost. As each successive creation reached a new high – there was a new low right around the corner as soon as the bloom was off the rose. He fell into periods of deep despair, alcoholism, a kind of nihilistic avoidance of any and all personal connections, to the extent that he drove obvious wedges between him and pretty much everyone who ever loved him or cared for him.

In this way, I always thought of Don as a kind of Dorian Gray, someone who could keep on doing unnaturally great things – but there was a picture of him somewhere that was, if not aging, then at least falling apart, and fast.

And so the ending of Mad Men was a little strange. Dorian Gray meets his end when he is finally forced to confront his picture and tries to destroy it, ultimately destroying himself. Don is a different case. The clear implication of the final scene is that while finding some personal peace at esalen, Don ends up back in Manhattan, back creating – if anything, at the top of his game.

But what has changed? How does Don transition from being Dorian Gray, paying a huge (if sometimes unseen) price for his continual acts of creation to a man at peace with himself, and able to continue to create without losing chunks of himself along the way? How does the price he has always paid no longer come due?

Tags: Mad Men, TV

On the events at Charlie Hebdo

January 8, 2015 by Michael Boyle

Obv the massacre at Charlie Hebdo is weighing heavily on me. A couple of thoughts:

  1. Trying to parse this as “well, satire is OK but they were really really offensive” is bound to fail and the worst kind of victim-blaming.
  2. There’s an irony here that this attack was clearly at attack at one of the pillars of the West’s Enlightenment values, the freedom of speech. The debate that must spring from this couldn’t be more clear: is political Islam compatible with the core civilizational value of freedom of speech?
  3. I know that today, I am much more confirmed as a freedom of speech absolutist than ever. In the past I have tried to parse and balance the freedom of speech with other values, thinking there must be an oh-so-Canadian middle way. I’m not so sure about that today. The freedom of speech *is* the freedom to offend, and to blaspheme, and even to hate. And the only reasonable answer to speech one disdains is more speech. Not to silence the other speakers, or writers, or cartoonists. Never to silence them.

‪#‎jesuischarlie‬

Tags: Charlie Hebdo, Terrorism

search

recent

  • Diouf Article
  • Anil Dash: We’re not being alarmist enough about climate change…
  • Learning about Gutenberg
  • From the “I thought I’d heard it all” file
  • One year since his passing: The Day Prince’s Guitar Wept the Loudest

Archives

NYTimes US Politics Design Software Wired Search International Affairs Email Music GNE Friend Test War Copyfight Sports Social Networks Canada Funny Google Arts Web Blogging Personal Montreal Browser Media Web Design Canadian Politics Microsoft Apple Internet Business
Michael Boyle Blog
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2000–2025 · Michael Boyle

Copyright © 2025 · Modern Portfolio Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in