Reflecting on Ralph Klein

On the far-right CBC Rex Murphy program the other day, Rex was inviting Canadians to call in and join in on his hagiographical paean to his idol.  He bagged a few Tory bagpeople, like Rod Love and Joan Crockatt, to help him on his onanistic foray.  I only heard bits and pieces of Rex’s fevered longings while I did other things, and my guess is that the Murphy screeners were NOT allowed to let anyone say anything negative about Klein (the word means “little,” or “small,” or “dinky” or “petty” etc. in German).

 

If you live where I do, it’s all Ralph all the time now, of course.  Soon the Calgary International Airport will be renamed the “Ralph Klein International Airport,” and when that’s not good enough, it will, paraphrasing Colbert, be renamed again, the “Ralph Klein Ralph Klein International Airport.”  You read it here first.

 

So whatever, since hagiography is the order of the day, allow a studious monk to have somewhat of a say.  Here’s a few of my reflections.

 

--My first was when I was a little kid and I got to have a special individual trip to CFCN as part of a school programme.  I was sitting with a CFCN cameraman in a small warren, asking goggle kid questions about cameras, and Ralph, then a reporter, rocked in hammered and unleashed a torrent of the bluest language I’d ever heard in my life.  I guess it was all over some prank that he was engaged in with another reporter, involving film and trees in front of his house and on his doorstep and so on.  I still can’t say I knew exactly what was going on there, but if I had to try to figure it out, then or now, I’d say that it went like this—Ralph played a prank, and someone got back at him, and Ralph was some p’o’ed.  Then he went away swearing.  I recognized Ralph from tv.  Ralph never looked down at me, and the hairy cameraman whose name I don’t remember, and who was a good guy with me, kind of didn’t really respond much because, well, there was a little kid in his little editing room.  But Ralph, red as ever, was some p’o’ed.

 

--Not so long after becoming mayor of Calgary, and being around for the 1988 winter Olympics, Ralph was supposed to appear at a dinner/reception for a central European city that was considering a bid for the Olympics; they wanted to know what his worship had to say about how to bring the big event to their city.  My closest friend’s family was there, partly as community representatives, partly even as translators.  An hour goes by, another hour, another hour, no Ralph.  The delegation waits patiently for his worship to arrive.  Ralph does rock in around 11 p.m., drunk as a skunk, and tells the delegation that, as he slurs his words, “if ya wanna, if ya wanna, if ya wanna have the Olympics, whatcha, whatcha gotta do, is, is, ya gotta (and here Ralph grabs his crotch) have balls!!”

 

--then I guess there’s the environmental and financial destruction during his MLA and premier tenure.  Elsewhere on this blog, I have criticized former Alberta premier Lougheed, but he did imagine things such as the heritage fund and caring for special parts of Albertan geography such as Kannanaskis country; under Ralph, Albertans found a minister of golf course development and a premier who tried to buy votes by sending Albertans paltry cheques and beggaring the ability of public representatives to represent the people in terms of such things as education and health care.  I also criticized Lougheed over his anti-Canadian attitudes that, surprise, surprise, the Conservatives are suddenly rethinking, but now as he lies in state, Ralph’s “let the eastern creeps and bums freeze in the dark” comments are somehow being recollected as statesmanlike.

 

--speaking of education, I guess there’s the papers Ralph plagiarized for Athabasca University.  Ralph figured Pinochet was a pretty savvy guy, really, but somehow he just kinda got the politics a bit wrong.  A funny number of people say this about Hitler, too, but it just ain’t funny, and yet Ralph gets majority adoration for hailing murderous dictators.  Hm.  I guess the average Albertan figures that, hey, so my kid gets kidnapped and disappeared, well, it’s just good policy. I wonder if there will be anyone at Ralph’s wakes and/or doing his eulogies who will “have the balls” to read from Ralph’s political science papers in which he figures that, hey, Pinochet was a smart leader who just got sidetracked by some socialist ratbags.  I guess we’ll have to wait a while on those.  But lawyers, I invite you.  Read them into the record, kindly.  Lawyers?

 

--then there’s Ralph kicking off his campaign in ’04 by taunting poor people on income supplements, saying that some apparent critics (who may or may not have been on supplements) were “smoking cigarettes and wearing cowboy hats” (things Ralph never did) and sure didn’t look like they were hurting.  When Mitt Romney told convives at a gala that basically 47% of Americans were losers freeloading off him and his audience, Americans, who often do have a sense of what is right and what is wrong, didn’t forget it.  Rex Murphy, Albertans, Harper—indeed a sad number of Canadians—just lapped Ralph up.  “Hey, it’s Ralph!”  Right on, Ralph!!  Another massive majority. 

 

--then there was Ralph getting pied at the Stampede.  Now, most politicians would have taken this as a fact of life.  They would have said, “hey, I’m a public figure, it goes with the territory.”  Not that I’m saying that getting pied is fun.  I would have been p’o’ed, too, no doubt.  Stephen Harper is so terrified of the public that he hasn’t met one since ’06.  Most European politicians would shrug and turn it around into a PR winner.  Jean Chretien would have throttled the pie-er.  But good ol’ Ralph, Ralph cost Albertan taxpayers 10s of 1000s of dollars$ by prosecuting the kid who pied him to the nth degree.  Is there one—just one, I mean one—lawyer in Alberta, or even Canada, who would discuss the 10s of 1000s of $ Albertans spent to prosecute the pie kid? 

 

I didn’t think so.

 

But do you know what?  I’ve been embarrassed before.  I could have sucked it up.  I wouldn’t have made the people pay 10s of 1000s of dollars for it.  I’m sorry, that’s not leadership.  But if you like dictators, it does kind of fall in step that way.

 

--obviously one of Ralph’s pieces de resistance was when he rocked up hammered in his chauffeured car at an Edmonton homeless shelter and started barking at people to get a job and scattered change around the floor as if homeless people were the cheapest and most worthless hookers and scum.  A homeless person, who HAD a job, coming in at 1 a.m., wanted Ralph to go home and get some sleep, so he could, too. 

 

Yep, that was Ralph.  And then there’s the countless unverifiable tales I could tell, the embarrassment I felt for him and for the people he represented when he was red-faced and repetitive and more or less completely incapacitated in the legislature and in public—yep, that was Ralph.  You might have liked to have had a beer with him, but make no mistake, just as his name bespeaks, he was a nasty, mean-spirited, petty, drunk, fat little man who scorned the people and sucked up to the rich by letting his province be governed from boardrooms and not cabinet chambers.

 

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