If you're here it's because a post I actually wrote a year ago on Warren Kinsella's kitty comments has inadvertently been reposted with today's date as if it were new. It's not. Unfortunately, blogger doesn't seem to have any way for me to fix the date stamp, - at least none that I can find. If you know how to fix the date on this thing please feel free to lend your advice:)
Warren Kinsella has gotten himself in hot water for some rather dumb comments about a Chinese restaurant in Ottawa. The pathetic part of it is that Kinsella, who received a lot of prominence earlier in his career for his anti-racism would invoke really stupid, 1950s style, bigoted humour that should have died with Buddy Hackett's "Chinese waiter sketch". The "barbecue cat and rice" joke was so out of it's time I would have assumed that Kinsella was actually being deeply ironic if I thought he had the intelligence for irony or if irony hadn't died in 2001. It was the same patheticness that the writers of the Simpsons created for Krusty the Clown when they had him do Chinese restaurant gags in order to make the point that the only a fossil would think that stuff's funny.
If Kinsella were even the most rudimentary anti-racist he would have filtered those jokes out of his repetoire a long time ago. Heck, most racists don't engage in that sort of humour because they're too aware that they'll "out" themselves by doing so. The only way I can explain Kinsella's lapse is that in his arrogance he assumes that he's truly some sort of anti-racist icon and therefore is incapable of bigotry and so he is incapable of the sort of self-awareness and self-scrutiny most people use when they're tempted to blurt out something offensive.
Of course, the Tories and the right wing of the blogosphere is exploiting Kinsella's faux pas to the hilt. So much so that you would have thought he'd called for the reintroduction of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Of course, most of the Tories are being hypocritical considering the comments many of them have tolerated or even defended far worse from people like Herb Grubel, Monte Solberg, Lee Richardson, or the party's own ad team. And let's not forget that one of the founding issues of the Reform Party was opposition to Sikh RCMP officers wearing turbans. That many of the right wing blog netizens now chomping at Kinsella have no hesitation to mock and make abusive comments about Muslims only underscores the hypocricy around this issue. And, frankly, given Kinsella's eagerness to smear others based on half-truths and distortions it's hard to feel sympathy for the guy.
Kinsella should issue a real apology, ie one that expresses actual contrition and self-awareness, rather than the minimization he's been engaging in.
On a political plane, what's been interesting about this whole affair is the failure of any Liberals that I'm aware of to back Kinsella up and defend him. Perhaps the rehabilitation which seemed in the offing under Iggy will prove to be short lived?
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2 comments:
Man, that's a really old story. Why is it surfacing now?
I mean, I've been as tough on Kinsella as anyone--and he on me--but he got such a bum rap on that cat nonsense that I can't believe the story still has legs.
Of course he was being ironic. No one who takes that stuff seriously would express anticipated pleasure about visiting the restaurant in question. He was sending up bigotry, not being bigoted himself.
But again--why raise this story now, when it's more than a year old? It's all water under the bridge, isn't it?
It's an old post. Blogspot just screwed up the timestamp.
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