All Posts Tagged With: "john godfrey"
George W. Bush: Lost in Translation?
Some interviews, word-for-word, can come across as ill-formed, awkward and vague
I was recently looking over a composite by the BBC of all George W. Bush’s worst “slip-ups” over the last eight-plus years. There are all the famous ones, most of which featured in Michael Moore’s famous movie. We learn that the human being and fish should coexist peacfully, that a saying in Texas is “Fool me, you won’t fool me again” and so on. It got me thinking.
While we were interviewing features for Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started, we figured the best approach was to record each interview, so that we would be able to look over entire transcripts when writing a profile. What we learned was that, if you take, word for word, what someone has spoken and present it to the reader, it comes across as ill-formed, awkward and vague. So much in conversation is communicated through tone, gesture and an implicit understanding with the listener. All of this is lost in text.
When writing Kickstart, we needed to make sure the profiles were readable. That was our first priority. It involved a lot of editing, caressing, rewriting. (To avoid putting words in our interviewees’ mouths, we always made sure to show them the final copies to make sure we weren’t inventing anything – and they always signed off) Had we presented the mere interview transcripts, some of the most articulate people we interviewed (Hon. John Godfrey, James Orbinski, Lynda Haverstock, among many others) would never have comes across as well as they did in person.
All this to say that, perhaps, many of the best-loved Bushisms of the past era were often the result of a simple transcription. His message may (may) have been better expressed in person, to his audience. I urge everyone to be careful before passing judgment on someone based on a one or two-line quote read in the media. Often times, it lacks that great, important element known as “context.”
Ujjal Wins His Seat! or Young People Being Blocked
Just a note to congratulate our contributing feature Ujjal Dosanjh for winning his riding of Vancouver South, defeating the Conservative candidate Wai Young by just over 30 votes. As we said already, John Godfrey, also featured in Kickstart, did not run, but his Liberal replacement in Toronto’s Don Valley West Rob Oliphan did – and [...]
Just a note to congratulate our contributing feature Ujjal Dosanjh for winning his riding of Vancouver South, defeating the Conservative candidate Wai Young by just over 30 votes. As we said already, John Godfrey, also featured in Kickstart, did not run, but his Liberal replacement in Toronto’s Don Valley West Rob Oliphan did – and won. And, so that no one thinks we have too many Liberals featured in Kickstart, we have the story of Brian Mulroney, who is, in many ways, the arch-Conservative.
And just a note on the low voter turnout (just under 60% for the first time ever): many people I have spoken to said that, among twenty-somethings, those that didn’t vote usually tried to vote but were turned away for having insufficient ID or the polling station had been moved to another location without notice. I think these point to structural problems, as much as anything about youth “apathy” or any other tagword floating around the media.
John Godfrey’s politics
Why Godfrey built a career before becoming a politician
Though he won’t be participating in the upcoming federal election, a word or two needs to be said about John Godfrey. The outgoing MP for Don Valley West in Toronto, Godfrey will be ceding his position as Liberal shoe-in to Rob Oliphant in this multi-ethnic and multi-income-bracket riding, bridging the great urban/suburban divide.
We interviewed Godfrey two years ago for our book and the then-minister of state for infrastructure and communities gave us two and a half hours of his time at the Marriott cafe on Bay Street. Here’s a little of his story: Godfrey came from a well-to-do family from Toronto’s leafy Rosedale neighbourhood. Growing up after the Second World War, he watched his house become a meeting point for European immigrants fleeing that war-ravaged and partly-totalitarian continent. His parents found these newcomers enticing – and so did the young Godfrey. (I should note here, to throw all objective integrity out the window, that my own grandparents, coming over from Switzerland in 1945 were among this lot taken in by the Godfreys… but that’s another story entirely.)
Godfrey maintained an interest in politics throughout his academic career. He talks about one moment when the entire political structure shifted: the day John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963. From that point on, younger people turned from participants to activists, and the culture went from one of hope & progress to one of tension & disparity. Godfrey tried to incorporate many of the elements of this change – eventually bringing it to political life when first elected for Jean Chrétien’s Liberals in 1993 – but he always tried to build another career for himself before diving headfirst into that “game.” This is something for young people, perhaps inspired by such current lightning-rods as Barack Obama or Stephen Harper (ha!), to take note of. A life in the world of politics is a difficult one. You can either try to work your way up the ranks, as a staffer or an election foot soldier (going door-to-door, putting up posters on quiet street corners at 2:30 in the morning, etc.), from an early age or you can, like Godfrey, establish yourself in another career – the man was President of King’s College in Halifax and editor of the Financial Post (now reborn as the National Post) – before giving politics a try.
