There's a line in an old Tragically Hip song that goes "Where the walls are lined all yellow gray and sinister / Hung with pictures of our parent's prime ministers". I've always liked that line - it brings to mind a time when people really did put up pictures of their favourite politicians. I remember as a little boy there almost invariably being a picture of Trudeau in your friend's basement/laundry room/garage looking over you as you played. Trudeau's face (or sometimes the Charter of Rights...would my students believe me if I told them that people used to frame the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and hang it on their wall? Doesn't that seem crazy?) would serve as almost a religious icon...or at least he did in the homes of my more religious friends where he seemed, to me at least, to be held in equal regard as the Virgin Mary or Joseph. I'm sure that someone ten years older than me would remember Pearson watching over him as he played cars, and Diefenbaker or King for someone even older...
It's a look that Douglas Coupland got exactly right in his photo-essay Souvenir of Canada.
I don't think we do that anymore, and for the most part I think that's a very good thing. I think as a polity we have become a lot more aware of the fact that our politicians are not supermen - that they are probably just as deeply flawed and prone to mistakes as we ourselves are. I daresay you'd be hard-pressed to find an 8 x 10 picture of Chretien or Mulroney or Harper in too many workrooms. We support our politicians, we don't revere them.
I think that if anybody deserves to be treated in such a fashion, surely it was Jack Layton.
I've been thinking a lot about Jack since yesterday morning when I had heard he died. I've been somewhat confused by my response. I find myself getting choked up every time I read a eulogy or an obituary. This isn't someone I personally knew, he was a man that I saw only twice in my life - once outside the Free Times Cafe on College street. My only reaction? That he was shorter than I had thought. The second time was at the Bell Centre store in Montreal before a Habs game - he was trying on a jersey and I debated whether to ask him for a picture, me and Jack in our retro Habs jerseys. I balked.
I wish I had that picture now.
Jack never pretended to be anything he wasn't. He was a consummate politician, and never ever seemed to be "off". Even in the two brief instances I saw him, he was exactly how you'd expect him to be - like "Jack". He was also a little corny - or as the girl I overheard in the JCR on campus put it "he's like your friend's dorky dad who comes downstairs to tell you bad jokes and offer you PC brand root beer". In the end, Jack was Jack - and maybe that's why I've been so oddly moved by his death...even though I didn't "know" him, with Jack you always got the feeling that kinda, sorta, did.
Jack wasn't a superman, but he also was more genuine than any politician I can remember, and for that, he should be hanging above someone's washing machine.
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