Did you know there's a political scandal going on here in Canada? It involves our prime minister and the WE organization and their for-profit arm called ME to WE. I always suspected something bad would come of their neat displays of colourful office supplies in a special section at Staples. I'll not write more about it here though because it's tiring to write about. If you want to know more about it, I'd recommend Jesse Brown, because he's not bored with it. He likes politics and then, of course, it must be exciting to be the under-dog journalist that breaks the story.
I have a flaw which is that I don't care about politics unless they've aged. The saga of-the-moment, the actors on stage right now, they don't matter to me except superficially. I vote mostly un-enthusiastically. The present state of things is too near. I'm psychologically short-sighted.
In an episode of Canadaland, Jesse Brown reflected on whether or not the scandal would mean anything to Canadians, whether it would bring down the prime minister or whether it would be passed over.
I lived with a woman who was constantly attributing meaning to things. It reassured her that the world was ending but it made me distrustful of her interpretations.
I recently went out with a friend almost 20 years older than I and asked her wryly if the world was ending. She scoffed and said there had been far worse before. She’s from Europe, I thought. Our New World problems seem like insignificant prefaces compared to the multi-volume major events that have happened on her side of the ocean. It is confusing right now to be caught between these two poles, one which declares that all is doomed and the other which counters that all these events are but a bump in the road.
On The Daily podcast, there was an interview with a reporter named Zeeshan Aleem who remarked that Twitter, like other social media platforms, "rewards absolute claims (...) simple sort of black and white, good and evil allegories and binaries and strong declarations of truth that leave little room for interpretation."
Historians, in contrast, love interpretation and context and nuance. When the world has forgotten what has happened today, I will, with all my grey hairs, emerge from an archive, and revive for them the context. In the meantime, in this present in which I can't be bothered to care much about our prime minister, I’m busy instead with the immediacy of household tasks.