Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (27 page)

Further, the new machines now blocked the “visual sight line” of the Starbucks customer, who could no longer see the coffee being made. Which (give my regards to Broadway) removed “much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines.” And, ultimately, led to customers no longer having their “intimate experience with the barista.” Well, pimp my
grande latte!

The memo reaches its crisis moment when Chairman (and now CEO) Schultz lets cry from out of the depths (cue the pan flutes): “I am not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee.” As the old epitaphs used to say, “Reader, stop here, or gently pass.”

Now, speaking as one who can’t claim—and would go some considerable distance to deny—“an intimate experience with a barista” and who couldn’t distinguish a shade-grown, free-trade organic coffee bean from a turnip, I can’t honestly say I feel Chairman Schultz’s pain. Starbucks has always carried the aroma of a trumped-up exercise in lifestyle pedigree, hawking a faux pedantry over brews and beans, and overripe pseudo debates on the superiority of the Ethiopian product to its Moroccan congener. They’re beans, folks.

I suspect that the wonderful success Tim Hortons has had over the years came, in part, from the rise of the lifestyle coffee chains such as Starbucks. Even though Tim Hortons may have begun earlier than most of them, it picked up some commercial propulsion and swelled its constituency by offering, so self-consciously, the very opposite of what the newer coffee lounges stood for.

Tim Hortons is a lifestyle coffee, too, but Tim Hortons is, or used to be, aggressively unshowy. Line up, grab a Boston cream and a double-double, retire to the corner, slurp, and (in the good old days) smoke. Tim Hortons was Don Cherry: direct and unadorned. I’d guess a lot of people went to Tim Hortons as a way of saying they wouldn’t go
to Starbucks. And a lot went to Starbucks to demonstrate the reverse.

Lately, I wonder whether Tim Hortons, though with less torment than that exuded by the Starbucks memo, has forgotten what it’s about. The crowds are still there, the lineups interminable. But I sense it’s more the inertia of habit that’s drawing them now. And, alas, a certain campiness.

It’s “in” to go to Tim Hortons—which is as much a contradiction of why people went there in the first place as the loss of “theatre” and “intimacy with the barista” is a reason for the Starbucks’ downturn. It’s enough to make an Abyssinian goatherd, dancing or otherwise, weep.

It flashed around the world, with only minute variations, and has to be one of the oddest sentences ever written, as a headline or otherwise: “Saudi king pardons gang-rape victim.”

You know you’ve entered a strange country of the mind when the same sentence contains
pardon
and
victim
as verb and object. But you have found a passport to some utterly arcane territory indeed—a mix or compost of the absurd and sinister—when
pardon
, the verb, governs (as used to be said in those now archaic grammar lessons) as object this most grim noun phrase:
gang-rape victim
.

With victim we might associate verbs other than pardon: treat, sympathize, commiserate, care or pray for. These are the obvious candidates.

Saudi king offers deepest sympathy to gang-rape victim
—no one would start at that sentence. Or
Saudi king pledges all possible support to medical treatment of gang-rape victim
. I don’t think that would leap off the newspaper page as
something extraordinary. The world would read it, very likely think a little better of that Saudi king, and then go about its business.

But
Saudi king pardons gang-rape victim
. This sentence, as we say now, simply does not compute. We do not know a world in which gang-rape victims are the ones seeking or receiving pardons, from Saudi kings or other potentates either less or more exalted. We know instead a world where those who have been raped, and most especially those who have endured the near-unendurable torments and dehumanizing outrages of gang rape, inspire the most profound sympathy and concern.

Not so, it seems, in the petroleum kingdom, where a gang-rape victim receives a pardon from her king.

The headline springs from the story of a most unfortunate nineteen-year-old who was charged with the “crime” of being in a car with a man who was not a relative, when both were set upon by seven men, both raped—she most violently, for two hours, by all seven, and more than once. She was reduced to numbness, shock and near-suicide and suffered horrific psychological and physical trauma.

But in the
Alice in Wonderland
meets Kafka meets
1984
world of Saudi Arabia’s
sharia
jurisprudence, the gang-raped nineteen-year-old had to appear before her Islamic judges and be tried for the crime of sitting in a car with a man. At first, her sentence was, by the standards these judges set for themselves, considered lenient—a mere ninety lashes and some months in jail.

She—poor, tormented woman—seems to have had both the dignity and simple force of character to protest this monstrous verdict, and sought appeal with the help of a lawyer of some courage and resource. He—brave soul—protested the infamy of putting to the lash a woman who had already been gang-raped. For this noble and worthy exertion, he earned for himself severe reprimand and the threat of removing his right to practise law—such as the law is, and such as it is practised there—in Saudi Arabia.

She, for the temerity of appealing a mindless and barbaric sentence, and for the publicity that was the result of her appeal, had her sentence increased to two hundred lashes. Sharia justice is very scrupulous of its own honour, and the tenets of Islamic law as it applies to the monstrous horror of a woman being in the company of a man not her relative, will not be mocked by appeals to mercy or sense. Hence, two hundred lashes and six months in jail—the six months presumably necessary to give the stripes from the whip time to burn into scars.

The world at large found this excessive and, to be truthful, both odd and cruel, too, beyond even the odd and cruel bounds of the ancient codes that, sadly, still are imposed on so many of the women in so many countries.

Through her lawyer, with the help of some genuine human-rights organizations, the case was not allowed to rest on the pronouncements of the three-man tribunal that upped her lashes from ninety to two hundred. I expect the Saudi king felt the wave of revulsion and contempt that
followed on the world’s press coverage of this outrage, and thus it came to pass that a nineteen-year-old who had been raped, shamed and tormented by seven men was relieved of the further shame and torment of two hundred lashes and incarceration in a Saudi jail for half a year of her young sad life. But “King pardons gang-rape victim” remains, in my mind, anyway, an atrocious declaration, a simultaneously absurd and mean statement.

He has no pardon to give her; she none to receive from him.

An apology, that is within his gift: for the fact that he presides over a kingdom where laws still exist to punish a woman who has been brutally raped, and where they multiply the lashes if she has the strength or character to decry such insanity.

Such a king should be seeking clemency, not confusing himself with the delusion that he has the moral or political authority to exercise it.

Time was when “human rights” was a truly large and noble idea. I associate the concept with, and its birth out of, some of the great horrors of the past century: the bestial depredations of the Nazis, their “race science” and death camps, the horrors of unbridled totalitarianism—under which, the
whim of the rulers was sufficient warrant to mutilate, torture and destroy lives, collectively or individually or send millions to arctic slave camps—and the debasement of internal exile and psychiatric rehabilitation.

More currently, I associate real human-rights advocacy with the case of a young Saudi woman who was repeatedly gang-raped and then she—the victim—was charged and sentenced by a Saudi court to two hundred lashes and six months in jail for being in a car with a man not her relative. The sentence, after international protest, was voided—but that young woman’s case represents a real example of the violation of basic human rights.

What I do not associate with this deep and noble concept is getting ticked off by something you read in a magazine—or, for that matter, hear on television—and then scampering off to a handful—well, three—of Canada’s proliferate human rights commissions, seeking to score off the magazine. This is what four Osgoode Hall law students and graduates—a very definition of the “marginalized”—under the banner of the Canadian Islamic Congress have done after reading an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s
America Alone
in
Maclean’s
. The complainants read the article as “flagrantly islamophobic.”

Maclean’s
magazine? Well, we all know what a hotbed of radical bigotry and vile prejudice
Maclean’s
magazine has been. Go away …

For what seems like a century,
Maclean’s
was no more “offensive” (that is the cant term of choice these days) than
a down comforter on a cold day, and if Mark Steyn’s article offended them, so what? Not every article in every magazine of newspaper is meant to be a valentine card addressed to every reader’s self-esteem.
Maclean’s
published a bushel of letters following the article’s appearance; some praised it, others scorned it. That’s freedom of speech. That’s democracy. That’s the messy business we call the exchange of ideas and opinions.

But where does the B.C. Human Rights Commission, the Ontario Human Rights Commission or the Canadian Human Rights Commission come into this picture? Has anyone been publicly whipped? Has someone or some group been hauled off to a gulag? Is there a race frenzy sweeping the land?

Why is any human rights commission inserting itself between a magazine, a television show or a newspaper and its readers or viewers? Is every touchy, or agenda-driven, sensibility now free to call upon the offices of the state and, free of charge—to them, not their targets—embroil them in “justifying” their right to write and broadcast as they see fit? The
Western Standard
magazine, during the so-called Danish cartoon crisis, got hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for publishing the cartoons that all the world was talking about. The action drained the magazine’s resources, but it was free to the complainant.

Meantime, real human-rights violations—threats of death against Salman Rushdie, riots after the cartoons, death threats against the artists, the persecution of Hirsi Ali,
the assassination of Benazir Bhutto—neither inspire nor receive human-rights investigations.

Maclean’s
and its columnists—especially of late—are an ornament to Canada’s civic space. They should not have to defend themselves for doing what a good magazine does: start debate, express opinion and stir thought. And they should most certainly not have to abide the threatened censorship of any of Canada’s increasingly interfering, state-appointed and paradoxically labelled human rights commissions.

Jennifer Lynch, chief of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, participated in this week’s ceremonies at the National War Memorial by laying a wreath. It’s nice to know the commission honours Canada’s veterans and the cause for which so many fought and died.

The cause, distilled to its fundamental point, was freedom. The Second World War framed that cause in the starkest form imaginable. It is impossible to conjure up an example more pervertedly perfect of the odiousness (Churchill’s term) of tyranny than Hitler’s regime. There was only one freedom in Hitler’s Germany, as there would have been only one freedom in Europe or the world should Hitler’s insatiable nightmares been realized: his freedom to cancel every freedom of everyone else.

One lesson that grieving millions took from that war was that the only certain antitoxin to the “after-Hitlers”—those lesser or greater avatars of tyranny an always-changing world will almost certainly force on us again—was freedom. The second lesson was how massive the cost, how massive the sacrifice, to extinguish tyranny once it’s taken hold in one country and marches on to others.

This is what makes Remembrance Day so solemn—remembering those costs, those sacrifices, that are tallied in millions of dead and wounded. Freedom does not fall from the air. Freedom (ask the vets) is never free.

At the heart of this freedom the Second World War taught us so dearly to cherish is the notion of the individual’s intrinsic or, as we say now, human right to think, speak and write as he sees fit, circumscribed only by certain time-tested laws (defamation, libel, public safety) evolved over centuries and subject to the oversight of a trained and independent judiciary.