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Thursday, March 27, 2008
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 "SOMETHING HAPPENED TO ME YESTERDAY"
A little over a week ago, I wrote a little article about the fantastic hypocrisy of Canada's self-proclaimed James Carville, Warren Kinsella, and his self-edifying campaign against cigarette advertising in a local free weekly that he both used to write for, yet also claims that people only read because of said paper's alleged advertising of underaged Asian prostitutes.
As I pointed out in that little missive, Mr. Kinsella seemed to have no problem living off of the avails of prostitution back in those wild and crazy Ninties, or he would have quit. Warren also self-identifies as a friend and "volunteer" of Ontario's premier, Dalton McGuinty. Being an innocent in the ways of politics and government, he might not have known that his all-time-favorite practioners of good government subsidize tobacco farmers and collect billions of dollars in taxes from the users of their fine and great product.
Since I'm a prick, I also used this space to ask Mr. Kinsella if his firm, Daisy Consulting Group, does any business with Big Tobacco. It stands to reason that if you feel that smoking killed your daddy (who was apparently a doctor of all things), it is fair to ask if what you believe to be blood money lines your own pockets.
There are essentially two ways for a political professional to answer such a question.
The first is to say "No I do not do business with anyone who does business with Big Tobacco and would thereby make me look like a self-loathing hypocrite who wants only punish others for my own self-perceived sins."
The second goes something like this: "Man, you sure think about me a lot. I wish I could reciprocate, it being Easter an whatnot, but I can't. God love ya, anyway."
Anybody who follows politics knows this as "avoiding the question." Avoiding the question usually means that the answer is favorable to the person being questioned. For example, if you see a politician being asked if he fucks kids answering "I'm not going to engage in gutter politics and will do my very best to keep this campaign on the issues", you can fairly extrapolate that that politician fucks kids. Warren knows how that works better than anyone.
I've receieved a couple of e-mails from Mr. Kinsella asking me to change a few things that I've written. Those requests weren't unreasonable, so I complied. Trust me, they were nothing actionable, just something that I had been asked nicely to do.
Had Warren written me privately and said "I do not in any way profit from an association with the tobacco industry", I would've taken him at his word and dropped this issue entirely. As a matter of fact, I probably would have written an apology to him and/or deleted the original post. That didn't happen.
On most issues, I really don't question Kinsella's motives. Sure, I question his logic and sanity in regards to issues like Human Rights Commissions and I think he libels people like Mark Steyn on a fairly regular basis, but I think that he honestly believes his own bullshit and I have a hard time faulting him personally on that.
But it's very hard to conclude that he's doing anything less than seperating his personal and professional interests in regard to smoking that is at best incredibly misleading. On planet Kinsella, it seems to be okay if he or his clients make money from the industry that he claims killed his father, but the height of "immorality" if anyone else does. When one calls for boycotts, it isn't unreasonable to ask if the person in question has a conflict of interest on either side of the issue.
The reason I bring this up is that I was contacted by Marc Weisblott of Eye Weekly yesterday asking if he could cite my earlier post on Warren's adventures in censorship. He didn't have to do that because what he cited would have easily fallen within "fair use" in copyright laws. Besides, I'm pretty sure that he knows that a nobody like me would be grateful to be read by the wider audience that Eye has.
It was just a classy thing for Mr. Weisblott to do. I've had my work appropriated with or without credit by big websites - including Warren's - before, and it infuriates me to no end. As a matter of fact, Warren didn't credit my work until I wrote a pissy post crediting it, and despite the fact that he had linked a famous Canadian hate website no fewer than three times that month, he didn't link mine.
Seriously, I'm not all that fucking precious about the twaddle that I write here. But being asked if you can borrow it from time to time would be nice. I'm more than willing to share. Christ, most people think that I stole "Johnny Coldcuts" from the Ace of Spades HQ. The fact is that Ace sent me a really nice e-mail asking to use it and I said that he could so long as he credited the lovely Zombie and Rowan (who sadly seems to be defunct) for the creation of the logo. Without my asking, Ace linked this blog, thus giving me more traffic than my writing probably warrants.
I'm not talking about general bloggers here. If anyone thinks that they're getting traffic from my writing, they're horribly mistaken. But feel free.
What I'm trying to say is that Marc Weisblott was a gentleman to me yesterday and wrote a really good piece exposing the talented Mr. Kinsella, which you can read here. I learned a great deal from about it regarding the way that Warren presents his interesting intrepretation of his journalistic history.
This probably means less than nothin to my international readers, but those of you in Toronto should pick up a copy of Eye, arrange a date with one or more of the whores who advertise with them and enjoy a JTI-Macdonald product with her.
You'll be helping me, helping Marc, helping Eye, and somewhere along the line, you'll be making Warren a few bucks, too.
Besides, I really want a job writing for a living,
Easy Listenining Recommendation of the Day: Something Happened To Me Yesterday By: The Rolling Stones From: Between the Buttons
PermalinkLabels: Life With skippy
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