City Notebook: A lament

By COLLIN GALLANT on November 19, 2022.

This week marked the 100th anniversary of the passing of Alberta’s most famous humorist, Bob Edwards, the iconoclast columnist and newspaper editor from the early 20th Century.

It may be coincidence, but it’s not unnoticed that it comes just as a main avenue of satire and furious political jousting in modern days, namely Twitter, appears headed for a demise.

For the unconnected, the social media platform that’s been a bobsleigh track running public discourse downhill may not survive a month under new ownership of billionaire Elon Musk.

Our money is on it sticking around – a newspaper can survive decades with unpredictable leadership, strained revenue, morphing resources and bad press. If it doesn’t, society that was already divided in the new public square by software engineering will be moreso, but more isolated, more busy and more frustrated on a number of platforms.

Social media is as wide open as the prairie and just as tame.

Back to Bob Edwards, the proprietor and main force behind the Calgary Eyeopener, which published semi-regularly in the 1910s and early ’20s owing to the resources and sobriety of management. That’s back when Conservatives were about maintaining the polite ordering of the new world in the style of the old world. Liberals at the time were the party of the emerging business class, of change.

In this upheaval, including the temperance movement, the creation of a Canadian nation and identity of the emerging west as topics, Edwards skewered polite manners, lauded great endeavours, and brought the mighty low and the lowly high in its pages.

Much of that spirit remains in the province, though Albertans really love a winner above all, nowadays.

But the satirist is all but extinct. Too often journalists tickle their own funny bones on social media. There are but two kinds of newsroom jokes: black humour or nerdy. It is a sin to be unserious.

Conversely there’s no shortage of wise acres who fancy themselves to be citizen journalists, telling the so-called whole story from bits they’ve picked up here and there.

In our age of spinning off in all directions, a humourist’s view is required, but wholly impossible.

You didn’t hear one good joke about two years worth of late press briefings by the Alberta government’s COVID squad, did you?

The two main contenders for Prime Minister look as though they were created in a lab as perfect targets for editorial cartoonists.

But each side is too touchy to allow this to happen, to allow their buffoonish shortcomings stated out loud.

Half the public would take great offence and cry foul. The other half would only become enraged that not everyone shares their outrage.

Absent now is the once defining Canadian characteristic of a national sense of humour. At one time it was self-deprecating, but also drew a thick line to distinguish ourselves from Americans.

Now, the main Canadian pastime is adopting American worries.

Our neighbours take a whole day to vote and a week to decide the result. The recent local byelection was called in 90 minutes – still too long for some. Yet, complain we do.

They have the Harvard Elite, and we now have the Laurentian variety.

Worried about Trumpism? We have prairie populism as a reason to clutch our pearls.

It’s a pity.

‘Tis the Season?

Green leaves dusting fresh snow reminds us that as of Sunday, we’re only five weeks ’til Christmas. Another reminder was Friday night during the downtown Midnight Madness observance. Olde Tyme Christmas at the Stampede Grounds is Dec. 1, and one week later on Dec. 7, the CP Holiday Train pulls into the Hat for a 3 p.m. show.

The Hat’s MacKenzie Porter joins the tour the following week, but if it’s hometown talent you seek, Terri Clark is at the Esplanade on Dec. 2.

Hatters afar

One-time Tigers beat reporter for the News, Derek Van Diest, landed in Qatar this week ahead of the 2022 World Cup. Since splitting town right before the WHL team’s revival after a 1990s slump, Van Diest carved out a niche as the national team soccer correspondent a national paper chain.

A look ahead

Debate begins on the 2023-2024 city budget on Monday night as council sits for a regular meeting. That could include two presentations on city divisions that were held over last week when a committee of the whole meeting ran over the two-and-half-hour allotment.

The Alberta legislature resumes on Nov. 29.