Crude ‘humor’
What I found especially grating about these fictional knights was that they laughed at the cat’s angst. It brought home the creepiness of writer Ken Follett’s characters and I realized that while it’s 900 years on, in today’s real world there remain crude people who make cruel jokes, like Follett’s knights.
Shortly after I’d read that scene I put the book down and turned on the radio for the news. And what do you know — an example of a crude man who made cruel joke at the expense of someone else, in this case Premier Notley. The alleged joke was largely perpetrated by an Ernst Bothi, president of the Brooks Big Country Oilmen’s Association
Here is what Ernst did: At a golf tourney at the Brooks Golf Club in Brooks. Alberta (100 plus miles southeast of Calgary) on Friday, he and friends blew-up a photo of Notley to giant proportions and stuck it in the middle of a fairway (they don’t like her policies, you see). There it was, ready to be hit by golf balls. Socially-redeemable, stinging humor, no?
No.
I mean what exactly is the ‘joke’? Is ‘pretend’ hitting her funny? Ernst, would you like someone to take a photo of a woman you love, a daughter perhaps, and do the same? Would you like to have a group of guys, let’s say they’re middle-aged or older, with some overweight (right-wing guys who like to make fun of people often are) shoot golf-balls at an image of her?
I bet you would not.
Yes Premier Notley is in the public eye but that hardly lays her open to this kind of stupid stunt. Now Ernst claims that as it turned out no one hit her image but that’s immaterial. Besides, there was, as the CBC reports, a video posted online (the brave golfers have taken it down) of a golf cart running over the photo.
In the video the golf cart runs the photo into the ground while a group of men (see above) are heard laughing off camera, a la (Ernst, that’s a French phrase meaning ‘in the manner of’) Follett’s cat tormentors. Here’s a word for that: creepy. No? Yes.
A (sort-of) apology
Naturally this has made its way onto social media platforms and scorn is being heaped upon these comic fellows. So Bothi issued an apology, though he said the apology was only for Notley the person, not Notley the premier. How very stand-your-ground of you, Ernst, but I’m not buying the distinction.
He also said this: “It’s called freedom of speech. We’re still living in Canada and as far as I know, it hasn’t become a communist nation, not as of yet.” So let me get this straight: you’re equating Notley and her democratically elected party, champions of capitalism, with communism?
If you do not know communism by now, Ernst, there is no point in teaching you. But it’s miles from the policies espoused by the Alberta NDP. And here’s this: many think what she is doing is the kind of good governance she laid out in her platform for the people who elected her to see. I expect the good people of Fort McMurray are grateful for her compassionate and quick decisions making.
Freedom of speech, yes, freedom to direct cruelty at our leaders, that I’m not so keen on. Because reducing our differences of opinions to quasi-violence is hardly an honorable or a very clever thing to do. And driving golf balls at photos of women, or men, isn’t funny, it’s just crude.
It would not have been funny in the 12th century and it’s not funny now.
