Have you ever fallen out with a very close friend for many years?
It hurts as much as heartbreak.
You feel like your arm has been ripped off. Even if you are the one who initiated the separation.
You want to resolder the links, but you don’t know how to go about it.
And then there is the damned pride that poisons everything.
“It’s not up to me to take the first step, it’s up to him…”
- Listen to Richard Martineau’s commentary via QUB :
Result: the years pass, and the gap widens. Until it becomes impassable.
The best book I have read on this topic is Dean and Me, by Jerry Lewis. A heartbreaking tale of the feud that forever estranged Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.
At the end of their lives, these two comedians – who formed the most popular comedy duo in the United States – crossed paths in a restaurant in Los Angeles. They exchanged a smile, but didn’t have the courage to speak.
Then Dean Martin died.
And Jerry Lewis always blamed himself for not having reconciled with his old friend, his old accomplice…
THE TREASON
I was thinking about that yesterday, while listening to the touching testimony that Lucien Bouchard gave to TVA Nouvelles following the death of Brian Mulroney.
Here were two guys who were as close to each other as two people could be. Two friends, not to say two brothers.
Then politics screwed everything up.
The Meech Lake agreement is dead, Mr. Bouchard has taken the side of the sovereignists, and Mr. Mulroney, that of the federalists.
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Brian Mulroney experienced this as a personal betrayal. While Lucien Bouchard found that his friend’s decision to remain federalist was a betrayal of the Quebec people.
They went years without speaking to each other.
Luckily, they reconciled a few months ago, but it was late. Too late.
How many friendships have been broken during the pandemic, because of the question of vaccines?
Or during the two referendum campaigns?
Archive photo
Is it worth breaking such solid, strong, important ties over simple ideological disagreements?
At the same time, Mr. Bouchard and Mulroney were political beasts. Politics, for them, was not a pastime, but a fight, a mission. The very essence of their being.
To reject one’s ideas was to reject one’s whole being.
There is something I find deeply moving about this story of a broken friendship.
Two people who love and respect each other, but who can no longer get together because they are so far apart in terms of ideas.
THE CROSSROAD
And then the Mulroney-Bouchard conflict is the perfect symbol of what we could call “the existential drama of Quebec”.
Do we stay in Canada and try to reform the federation, or do we pack our bags and leave Canada?
Are we Mulroney or Bouchard?
Legault or PSPP?
Autonomists or sovereignists.
Two people are walking on the same path, then they come to a crossroads and must choose whether to take the right or left path.
Perhaps I tend to see symbols everywhere, but in the death of Mr. Mulroney (whom I had the privilege of meeting a few times and whom I always loved, esteemed, admired), I see a little the death of the autonomist option.
Brian Mulroney tried to use his position to bring Quebec back into the federalist fold. He did it in good faith, he believed in it, sincerely, and even put his head on the block.
However, even he did not succeed. Despite the position he occupied and all the love he had for Quebec.
If Mr. Mulroney failed, tell me, who could succeed?
VICTORY FOR THE LAYERS!
The Quebec Court of Appeal has ruled: Bill 21 will be maintained. Not only that, but it should even be applied in English language schools!
And it’s not the “very nasty, very intolerant and very xenophobic” government of Quebec that says that, but the judges! Appointed by the federal government, too!
Looking forward to hearing the usual chorus of mourners: will they denounce the “Islamophobia” of the judges of the Court of Appeal? The “systemic racism” of the Quebec judicial system?
Next (and final) step for opponents of Law 21: the Supreme Court.
As the Chinese say: “Bring It On!»
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
As American comedian Bill Maher pointed out, have you noticed how rappers are obsessed with money?
Here are the titles of some hits: All For Tha Ca$h, For Tha Love of Money, Get Money, Money on My Mind, Money To Blow, Save That Money, Money Bag, Money Keep Coming, Cash Money, All About the Money, Make Love to Money, Blood on the Money, Covered in Money, Lunch Money, Money in the Bank, Money Coming, About the Money And All a Bad Bitch Need is Money. Without forgetting Rich as Fuck.
No wonder many rappers have ties to organized crime.
HAPPY WOMEN’S DAY!
THE National Post tells us that on March 8, in Vancouver, we will mark International Women’s Day by paying tribute to two pro-Palestinian activists: a terrorist who planted a bomb in a Jerusalem cinema, attracting the congratulations of Yasser Arafat, and a anti-Semite who wrote on social media that Hitler hadn’t been tough enough on the Jews and that she was going to “drink their blood and eat their brains”…
Damn great way to celebrate women, right?