our corporate leaders, whom we’ve given the right — apparently — to make as much money as they want. But our civic leaders, our government, whom we’ve given the right to protect the general will, to have a bird’s-eye view on how the actions of a few can harm the lives of many.”
“Wow,” Cheryl said, her voice sodden with sarcasm. “Straight from the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
“Okay, we only have a couple minutes left,” Sal interjected. “Let’s talk about severance packages. We know the senior leadership walked off with huge payouts, but as for the average employee —”
“In the end, Cheryl, what I’m talking about here is magnanimity. About graciousness.” The two of them just stared at me, as if they weren’t sure where I was going with this. Truth be told, I wasn’t so sure myself. “We’ve watched as freedom of the markets has trumped all other freedoms — not the least of which being our moral freedoms. We’ve all but abandoned civic virtue and good governance in favour of a rigid ideology — the ideology of economic liberty, of wealth as an end in itself. And when that ideology crashes and burns so spectacularly, as it did on Friday, the system itself should be magnanimous enough to punish those responsible. To allow us to punish them. That’s what I meant earlier.”
“Okay, guys, let’s get back on track with —”
“I assure you, Philip,” Cheryl sneered, “that I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I’m beginning to think that you don’t either.”
“You don’t see how it’s all connected?” I asked. From the corner of my eye I could see Lori giving Sal a desperate signal to wrap things up. “This monopoly of market thinking?” I pushed on. “This fetishizing of the self? This abandoning of duty to the mentality of acquisition, to this belief that economic value is the only value? This is nothing more than a bastardization of the liberal traditions this country was founded on.”
“I just don’t see it that way,” Cheryl said. “I think you’re taking a bunch of vague notions and just extending them onto a situation that, while dire, is relatively straightforward. I think you’re saying these things to grind a political axe against the business community.”
“That’s because you’re cynical,” I said. “I mean, Sal called you ‘ultimately optimistic’ earlier, but the exact opposite is true. I think you’re deeply pessimistic about how human beings can exist with one another. If you thought about these concepts for half a second, you’d know just how harmful Friday’s events are to the fabric of what Canada is supposed to stand for.”
“Well, Philip,” Cheryl said, “I don’t believe these ideas are as penetrating as you think they are.”
“Well, Cheryl, I would love nothing more than to penetrate you with these ideas,” I retorted, “but I worry you wouldn’t enjoy it enough.”
There was a collective gasp in the studio, which I confess I didn’t hear at the time. Cheryl’s face puckered and Sal sort of gaped at me.
“Okay, we gotta go,” he said, turning back to his audience. “The foreign affairs minister is up next. When we come back.”
“And we’re out!” Lori yelled over the cameras.
Within a second, a duo of stagehands climbed onto the riser and began helping Cheryl out of her microphone. As soon as they finished, she was up and out of her chair, fuming off toward the green room without even saying goodbye to us. Neither of these handmaidens turned to assist me then, but just clomped back off the stage without acknowledging my existence. So I unclipped my own microphone, leaned forward to dig its battery out of my pants, then set the whole tangled mess on the desk. Lori came by quickly to collect it. I tried to make eye contact with her before she, too, departed, but her face was just one inscrutable scowl.
I looked at Sal and he looked at me.
“That could have gone better,” he said.
I threw my hands up, as if to indicate: This is the world we live in now. I got out of the chair and left the stage myself. By the time I reached the corridor beyond the studio wall baffles, Raj was standing there waiting for me.
“What the hell was that?” he asked.
“I know, I fucked up big time.” We began to make our way down the corridor as I searched for something to wipe the makeup off my face. “Can you believe I said that — on national TV?”
“A lot of people are gonna be pissed at you.”
“Tell me about it. You don’t just undermine centuries of judicial principle like that and expect to get away with it.”
“Dude, what?” Raj said. “No, no, I meant —”
But then I spotted it — a men’s room. I rushed over and pushed through its swinging door, heading for the paper towels and sinks while Raj waited for me in the hall.
“Look, I need to get out of here,” I told him when I came back, all fresh-faced and flushed. “What are you doing right now? Are you allowed to leave?”
“I can leave,” he said. “I’ve been here since, like, six this morning. But Sharpe, listen, don’t you want to …” He was maybe going to say, Don’t you want to talk about what just happened? But I could tell that he could tell that, no, I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to listen. I felt covered in the cold mud of shame over saying something so horrifying about those ODS executives, so philosophically inconsistent, on live TV. To talk about it right now would be to relive the whole thing.
Just then two CBC interns, a couple of skirted go-getters, walked by in the hall. They must have caught my bumbling performance on a monitor somewhere, because they both turned and tossed me a glare of appalled incredulity as they passed. One of the girls even made to stop, perhaps to say something rude to me, but her friend pulled her away. “Okay,” Raj said. “Let’s … let’s just get you out of here.”
“Great,” I replied. “I say we head to Cabbagetown. I need to be on my own turf. I’ll take you to my local for a drink or six.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Out on Front Street, the afternoon had turned to evening. We had rolled our clocks back over the weekend, and the abrupt onset of twilight was still jarring, seeming to swallow the entire city like an ominous premonition. We hailed a Beck. I told the cabbie, “Parliament and Carlton,” and we soon joined the rush-hour traffic battling to get out of downtown. The Beck felt less like an escape pod and more like a tumbrel, and I imagined impoverished serfs pelting me with fruit as I was taken away to a final, grisly end.
Raj and I sat in silence as we made our glacial progression. I leaned back against the seat with closed eyes and pinched my nose, my mind churning with a thousand regrets. To break the quiet, Raj opted for idle chit-chat.
“Say, Sharpe.”
I looked at him. “Yeah?”
“Do you still make that killer cocktail of yours?”
“What, the Bloody Joseph?”
“Yeah.”
“I do. I had three of them earlier today.”
He laughed. “That drink is off the chain, man. You gotta make me one of those again.”
“I meant to have a fourth, but ran out of time.” I harrumphed. “Maybe that’s why I was so off my game today.” Of course, I knew that wasn’t true. One final Collins’ worth of that fierce concoction — infused with brawny Jameson as a substitute for effeminate vodka — would not have put me in a better frame of mind. I knew damn well what had lay at the root of my distraction. A vision of her, holding up our daughter and speaking those words to me — you don’t really seem all that plugged in to what’s happening in your own house — flooded my mind.
“I’ll have to have you over,” I said to Raj. “Just not for a little while.”
We