Lightbound, Arrogance, And Choices For Ourselves

Not Everything Is A Tactic

One of the underrated difficulties of writing fiction is the sheer amount of choices you have to make. I don’t mean the big calls around plot, but the underlying, essential but also very seemingly unimportant ones, the ones that make the characters seem like multi-dimensional people and not just plot devices. What sports teams do they support, what’s their music taste like, what clothes do they wear, how tall are they – they’ll all choices that have to be made, and it’s only when you get to sit back that you realize just how many choices you had to make.

The other thing that’s interesting looking back at my work (buy Salvation In The Storm, why don’t you?) is the number of choices that were necessary for the plot, and how many of them were just for me. Every choice was intentional, but not every intention was the same. Some of them were important, either for a gag or to illuminate something about the crew, and I do think the main recurring bit pays off at the end – but, plainly, some of them were just for me.

And at some point, we have to start thinking about that when we look at how politics works, because thinking everything is always a calculation is making all of us stupider.

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Why did Joel Lightbound, the erstwhile MP for Close-To-Quebec-City, come out and criticize Justin Trudeau for a campaign strategy that, not six months ago, Lightbound was perfectly fine with? Is it that he’s upset he wasn’t offered a cabinet job after the election? Is it that he wants to leave Federal politics, and now that he has his pension, he’s using this as a pretext? Does he want to be the next Quebec Liberal leader, when the CAQ inevitable romps home again in October? Or, is Lightbound just fucking sick of dealing with pandemic restrictions?

I think the answer is probably some combination of all of those, but my initial reaction was that he was looking for the exits, because my brain is wired to see every choice ever made as a tactical one. Everyone has ambition, and Lightbound’s certainly not the type that strikes me as someone excited to sit his ass on the backbenches for 30 years, but it’s realistically insane for me to have been so sure it was a move, because there’s no evidence for it. Do I really disagree with the substance of his position? Not really, no – he wants this to be over and he wants to see the path to get from where we are to where we want to go. Do I think he also needs to be asking this of Legault? Sure, but he didn’t, and on the substance of what he said, nothing is objectionable or problematic.

We see it in the US too, where one of the most vulnerable House Democrats strongly denounced proposed legislation to stop Congresspeople and their families from trading stocks, after a series of scandals with members using inside information and making trades to save their investment portfolios. “Let Congresspeople Trade Stocks Off Classified Info” isn’t exactly a winning strategy, but it’s one that a member in a Biden +2 district is endorsing, because it’s not all about strategy, as much as we want to believe it is. It’s not a principled belief, she is just heavily invested in the market and doesn’t want to lose her privileges.

We are all conditioned by years of political analysis and also House of Cards that everything is actually 4D chess, and it’s not. The answer, quite frequently, is people are making choices for themselves. Why is Joe Biden not in favour of legalizing weed and pardoning everyone with records for possession? Because his boomer ass doesn’t think weed should be legal. It’s not some complicated thing – he doesn’t like it, and from everything we can piece together, he still thinks about it the way most people his age do, which is that weed is a bad thing and a gateway to worse drugs.

It's a pattern that I fall into all the time, but this past weekend, reading some of my fiction writing, that sometimes this shit’s just for us. There’s no logic for plenty of the choices I make, except they make me smile when I read it back, and sometimes, that’s enough. Politicians are people, and a lot of the time when we are screaming that there has to be some rationale for what they’re doing, or some move we’re missing, there’s not. Why did Biden go to Ohio on the final day of the campaign? Collectively, it was used as a sign that he was confident in his position in the state, and therefore across the wider map – we thought it was a move that meant something. It meant, and this is the technical term for it, the sum of jack and shit.

We all want to think we’re smart, and in many ways smarter than we actually are, so we try and discern the true meaning of shit, and we’ve all decided that nothing is to be taken at face value. Honestly, that’s fine, but what is also a mistake is assuming that everything is a move. It’s an arrogance that we can figure out the myriad possibilities, and a lack of willingness to accept that sometimes we’re not smarter than everyone else. Accepting that things aren’t always tactically optimal – and that they’re often not meant to be – will raise the level of political discourse plenty.

Also, on the Lightbound of it all – no, a handful of Quebec MPs wanting this to end is not a crisis for the Prime Minister’s leadership. The PM might hand over power in the next couple of years, but if he does so, it will not be because an MP who never rose above the level of Parl Sec called a news conference and issues some vague, not altogether coherent views on federalism and pandemic policy. The instinct to make every intervention from a backbench MP a crisis for that party’s leader is a large part of why we get so few of them, so if you’re inclined to write longwinded screeds about a leadership crisis in the LPC, don’t bother.