Monday, December 18, 2006

Standards, Again

A blogger at the Oxblog site this morning praises the performance of Canada's Governor General on her current trip to Africa. Tastes differ, I suppose: Personally I find Michaelle Jean's seemingly incessant references to herself and her own experiences more than a little inappropriate in a high public official:

At last I've made it to Africa. I have been waiting for this moment my entire life. For me, as a black woman, this continent where I now find myself, speaking to you for the very first time, is where it all began.

However, I'm not going to argue over how much self-absorption is too much. Instead, in the best Michaelle Jean style, I wish to correct an erroneous reference to myself. The blogger continued:

What makes Michaelle Jean particularly interesting, (other than not being 65, white and male), is that she is a Haitian immigrant, married to a Quebecoise filmmaker, and until being named GG, was a journalist and documentary maker for the CBC.

Well, you can imagine the uproar from the conservative punditry. David Frum and minions just about had aneurisms, shamelessly pushing a litany of ‘better suited’ candidates (all -surprise!- old, white, and male.) [Emphasis added.]

Two comments:

1) Lest we forget, the main reason so many commentators objected to Michaelle Jean was not that she was Haitian, or married to a film-maker, or a journalist (as if!) - but because she and her husband had acted in ways to suggest strong sympathies for the terrorist separatists who had murdered a Quebec cabinet minister in 1970. (I also objected to her lack of independence from the government of the day, an essential quality in a governor-general.)

2) I appreciate that the blogger provided a link to the post in which I offered my list of better qualified alternatives to Michaelle Jean. Had he taken the trouble to read the link first, he would have noticed that my candidates were not in fact all "old, white, and male": one was female, two were under 50, and though all were white (as are more than 90% of Canadians in general), two were foreign-born. (Granted, one of them was a member of the British royal family - not your typical immigrant.)

I notice this lazy blogger is a doctoral candidate in history at Oxford. Yikes! No wonder Andrew Sullivan likes the Oxblog site so much .... They make him look almost scrupulous in comparison.

12/18 06:30 AM