Spacemen of Liberal bohemia

Adrift in the outer recesses of woke space, scouring the solar system for only the most trivial and non-real of priorities, the Liberals refuse to learn from a time-honoured science fiction trope.

Mar 13, 2024

I have a thing for finding different in-roads into columns here. Partially to stave off requesting MAID for (barely) carving out a living inside the Canadian political sphere, but mainly for the purposes of keeping my relative talents as refined as possible while providing variations on a theme: The liberal world has gone mad; normal people deserve better and cannot give up.

I also don’t find pointing out hypocrisy to be persuasive. Inside the heart of your modern activist ‘Liberal’ lies a kill switch, not for the campaigner, but for every principle they may actually hold dear. It activates Win At All Costs Mode. It works.

Win At All Costs Mode is relentless in its carelessness, its brutality. It’ll abide by Chinese interference, make up Russian collusion, ship in illegals, lose a few boxes of votes, canvas a pet cemetery, convince a few thousand idiots they’ll lose their reproductive rights, or that they’ll see soldiers in the streets with guns in Canadian cities. There’s no bottom. No point other than the victory. It isn’t pretty – it just is.

When this is what we’re up against, there’s a reason I don’t follow the ordinary column template: the ‘other side’ doesn’t care. It doesn’t appear to get the job done. So I freelance. (Although, in this instance, it’s more of a space-walk.)

Here at the (best-selling!) Acceptable Views newsletter, we’re suckers for a sad-astronaut-in-deep-space film. (Perhaps you’ve seen a few yourself: Solaris, Ad Astra, Interstellar, First Man all come to mind as prominent recent additions to the genre.)

While perhaps overtly navel-gazing for some, I can’t get enough. There’s something about an archetypal, almost Jungian tale of a man at the reaches of the cosmos arriving at the back of his own head (or behind his daughter’s bookshelf) that I believe resonates, deep down, with our inner creative muse, or the God-sized hole many spend a lifetime struggling to fill.

I attempt to drop anchor here in the vast ocean of space after spending the weekend main-lining prestige dramas as if I were at a government safe-injection site, in a desperate attempt to catch up ever-so-slightly on the film-Twitter discourse before proudly watching Christopher Nolan (finally!) win his first Academy Award(s), yet the flick I truly ended up falling for was a somewhat critically-panned but affecting two-hander starring Adam Sandler “as a depressed astronaut who discusses his failing marriage with a giant spider, and the big joke is that it’s not really a comedy (though it is often quite funny).”

Spaceman (2024, Johan Renck) posits, like those in the genre that came before it, that it’s going beyond that’s supposed to make us turn inwards; that disconnection can teach us the value of connection; that the abyss gazing back presents an opportunity, not just for punishment, but atonement; repentance.

Watching this in the span of a week in which (*takes a deep breath*) the Liberals Friday news-dumped the renewed funding of Hamas rapists (on commercial feminism’s Hallmark holiday, no less) as Jewish Canadians stood watch over their neighbourhood synagogues, as even Toronto’s “red wall” was made to teeter in the polls, and visions of a super-duper-majority danced in CPC staffer heads, as the Liberals were thanked by Hamas, then Communists, more than half of Canadians finally told them we have too many immigrants, Canada’s most celebrated living author and expert in dystopias joined the fight against Trudeau’s ‘Online Harms Bill,’ the Liberals held the support of Kim Campbell aloft as if she were the Stanley Cup and not a punchline at pub trivia night, and then, finally, Canada’s usual partner in Commonwealth self-sabotage set about to BAN the use (and abuse) of puberty blockers for minors at gender clinics (a Trudeau fave), only further underlined the aforementioned lessons on distance, disconnect, and the things one is supposed to learn when they’re too far gone.

We have thousands packed in convention centres in Liberal Toronto of all places – at least a year from an election – promising to fight an April Fools carbon tax hike, and, unbelievably, it’s still business as usual for these spacemen of Liberal bohemia, who have been handed a golden opportunity at introspection, at what’s supposed to be the bottom of the polls, the political equivalent of deep space, only they remain incapable of looking inward.

The world’s worst set of housing markers continue to head in the wrong direction, and the worst communications team in the business is hawking the morning after pill in response.

Adrift in the outer recesses of woke space, scouring the solar system for only the most trivial and non-real of priorities, the Liberals refuse to learn from this time-honoured science fiction trope: when they had gone far enough afield, and light years away from any known ordinary priority, that they should have come out of this closer to Canadians than ever; aware of their foibles, their disconnect; desperate to fix what has been broken. To borrow even from T.S. Eliot, at the end of one’s exploring, one is expected to arrive where they started, “and know the place for the first time.”

But here’s the thing about that Liberal kill switch — “Win At All Costs Mode.” Once flipped, it’s not so easily reset. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, sure, but the enormity of deficiencies that winning allows them to cover for cannot be overstated.

The “God-sized hole” has been filled with the most hollow of pursuits: identity.

Their brains have been shrunken into thinking their opponents aren’t just wrong, they’re immoral.

If Tarkovsky’s Solaris tasks its astronaut with reconciling with his dead wife, perhaps that’s orders of magnitude less-challenging than the most insipid professional class imaginable being made to answer for the death and dismissal of, well, every one of their principles.

Perhaps they really are too far gone.

Picture the astronaut. Alone out there in the stars, picking shards of rainbow-coloured space dust off an asteroid belt on the dark side of Jupiter. On Earth, 833 million kilometers and 18 months away, a doctor prescribes puberty blockers to a 14-year-old after a ten-minute chat.

Unbeknownst to a young mother, what should have been a stage-one diagnosis has metastasized without a family doctor.

175 middle-income families stretch themselves beyond the breaking point with starter home bids on a semi-detached fixer-upper listed for $1.5 million. A Chinese investor wins out, and begins renting the three bedrooms to dozens of Indian students for $1100 a pop, who will all immediately abandon their so-called studies for the destitution of the gig economy.

Canada’s worst ever serial killer applies for parole.

Why do they seem so upset back there?

The astronaut has a fleeting moment of doubt, the briefest of wonders as to why no one back home seems to care about his mission, before returning to the work no one asked for.

Alexander Brown is a writer, comms director, and part-time politico. For more Acceptable Views, subscribe below. For more of the writer, you can find him on Twitter or Instagram.