The Education of a Journalist | Rex Murphy | EP 173

49m read

·Nov 7, 2024

[Music]

Hello everyone, it's my great pleasure to introduce all of you to Mr. Rex Murphy, who's my guest today. Rex is a Canadian commentator and author who deals primarily with Canadian political and social matters. He began his lengthy career as the main interviewer and commentator for Here and Now, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's nightly TV news program in the province of Newfoundland. He was the regular host of CBC Radio 1's Cross-Country Checkup for a good while, the only nationwide call-in show in Canada, and one that was avidly listened to across the country for 21 years before stepping down in September 2015.

He has been a columnist for two of Canada's most influential newspapers. First, he wrote a weekly Saturday column in the Globe and Mail for most of the first decade of the century and is currently writing an influential column three times weekly for the National Post. All the newspaper readers in Canada look forward to those columns. Mr. Murphy is one of Canada's most well-known figures. He writes and speaks with a witty, intense, informed, acerbic style. His capacity to lampoon, satirize, and think critically makes him the bane of unprepared politicians and other public figures across the country.

Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me, Rex.

Well, thank you very much for having me on. And before we get into any of the chat, let me say on Zoom what I said in private: it's very good to see you back, and I know I'm giving words to about twenty thousand times twenty thousand other people when I say that.

Well, I appreciate that very much. And I'm very pleased to be able to be doing this again. It's been increasingly a treat to do.

Well, I'm very pleased to hear that. I spoil your treat, though; you picked the wrong person for a treat.

Go ahead.

Yeah, well, I guess it depends on your taste, eh?

Yeah. So I thought we might start by walking through your professional career, your career, your life for that matter. You were born on the East Coast?

Yeah, I was born on the East Coast, you know, by the Newfoundland stand, a fairly large town; it's called Carbonear. My father worked on the American base, which was one of the five in Newfoundland at Winston Churchill—kind of traded to the Americans, remember the lease for ships? He worked there from the very beginning in 1941. We moved closer to that place. I mention this for a reason. When I was about 10, it was a much smaller town. But because I was adjacent to the base, I had some American influence, even as a kid in Newfoundland in the 50s. And that precipitated, after I finally finished walking around universities, I actually taught American students, 1-12, in the Naval Station School. I spent a whole year there, back and forth, drawing up curriculum and teaching Canadian studies, believe it or not, to American kids.

It was an experience that for the last 10 or 15 years, when American politics has become so dominant, that little visitation to the Argentina school has proved—I won't say useful, but it gives me a deeper context, I think.

So where did you go to university and what did you study?

I went to university in two places. I went to Memorial University. I stayed there for five years. I studied English literature, and I was blessed, if you want to talk to what I am pleased to call my life. I think a cardinal experience, and I'm not just saying it, is the English department at the time at Memorial University. The university was quite small, 3,000 people. And by the time you got to your fourth year, if you were in an honors program, you had maybe 15 or 16 students, so you really did get to meet and know the faculty.

Three or four of them—one of them in particular, Dr. G.M. Story, who wrote, over 20 years in collaboration with others, the Dictionary of Newfoundland English—and let you know this is not some silly remark—Dr. G.M. Story was also one of the editorial advisors for the great Oxford English Dictionary, all 22 volumes of it. So here was a man of tremendous talent and controlled enthusiasm, but impeccable taste and a knowledge of English literature that I haven't encountered since.

I know I'm rambling on, but it's the nature of my mind. Then I went off to Oxford. I only spent a year there. I signed up for law and actually ended up going to all the English classes. Helen Gardner was the editor of Don, the friend of T.S. Eliot. When Helen Gardner would be giving a lecture, it would be like if you were a rap fan or something and you avoided all the big names. So I basically read a lot for that year.

Second year law came back, and I figured out then, I've been going to school—I went to school very young at the age of four. I've been going to one form of school or another for about 20—I'm sorry, about 17 or 18 years straight—and I decided to kind of just stop for a while.

By the way, you'll already have noticed this; I talk too much, so stop me when I ramble on.

Well good, we'll have a good competition that way because one of the things that people constantly comment—

They're well—that would be good. It would be good for me to lose that particular battle now and then.

So I have something to ask you about that particular comment. I talked to John Me Park—yes, Yawn Me Park—a week ago. Now, you may know the name; she escaped from North Korea. Yes, and she wrote a book called In Order to Live, which is an amazing book. The book ends in 2015, but after 2015, she enrolled in Columbia University, which was a dream of hers and a dream of her father that she'd be an educated person. She studied humanities at Columbia, and I asked her what that was like.

She said that it was a complete waste of time and money and that she felt that she was completely unable to utter an opinion that was genuine the whole time she was there. It shocked me, you know. And so I asked her very specifically; I said, come on, come on, you're not going to tell me that the entire time you spent in Columbia, you didn't have at least one professor or two professors who stood out, who really taught you. Now, she had told me during the interview that she had encountered George Orwell's work when she was in South Korea, particularly Animal Farm, and that was partly what influenced her to start speaking and writing.

She had read a lot when she was educating herself in South Korea prior to going to South Korean university and then to Columbia, so it's not like she was unfamiliar with the potential impact of, let's say, the classics on her life, on her philosophy. But when I pressed her, the best she could do was to identify a single biology class which dealt with evolution, which was a complete mystery to her, given her background because history sort of started when her dynastic totalitarians were born. But she said even that took a wicked turn to the politically correct direction by the time she was done.

So, but your experience at university—go into that a little bit more detail.

Well, I'm glad you elaborated that as you did, and I suppose not—I suppose I know I brought up that university experience in the hope that—and we'll do it now down the road in this conversation—I think outside of family—that is always principle and will never be superseded—outside of family, if there’s anything that contributed to the way that I look at things and have given me lasting benefit. Okay, you may be familiar with Samuel Johnson's remark about literature—it applies to all the arts—that it exists better to help us enjoy life or to enjoy it; it fixes the mind.

When you have a real university, you get these things. I might—the professor I mentioned, for example, when he found a book—it was one of our other Kessler's. I won't bother to name it. He actually walked to my house on a Saturday after not just a kid and in all of them, but he came to the little studio of—I’m sorry, the student house—and wanted me to have this book for a week so I could read. I mean this kind of almost genuflection to the emergent or emerging mind of a young person is something that stays forever.

So, that long winded again—the university experience was the strongest because the universities then had values they worshipped, and that's a good word, not to be backed off from. They worshipped the best creations, the best fashions, the best styles of thought, the best scientific finesse, and they made you—not made you, they induced you—to be grateful for what other first-rate minds have contributed to the temper of the entire human race.

And now, when I see, you know, I know this perhaps not quite as well as you because you are a professor and you've gone through some of the grinder—universities now at the humanities level, from everything I read, are a disgrace. The treason of the clerks—it is—there are so suffocated by these arch and empty philosophies that have no logic and are punitive.

I would—now, I'm a person that was so taken by the university that I almost worshipped it, and now I tell people that have younger people, younger children, 20, 21, 22; don't go to the damn university unless you're taking science. Go to a trades college or just go out on your own!

It's the saddest thing that has happened in the Western world, that we've allowed second-rate minds, political agents, propagandization as instruction. We have decimated the soul of the university. By the way, I totally agree with you. You said somewhere—and I probably will not be quoting you correctly—burn them down and start it all over again.

Not for you, one little footnote, if the First World, as we're accustomed to calling it, wants to keep its precedence, I often think of students in Asia, in India, in China even. They are so intent on really learning something; and they'll—in an Indian school that maybe plays a hundred dollars a pupil, they're doing so much better than the school that—schools are in this game too, then—schools getting ten and fifteen thousand dollars per student.

The West is trivializing its main dynamic that has always been intellectual, and it always will be.

I mean so, let's zero in on that. So yesterday, I talked to Paul Rossi, and Paul Rossi is a high school teacher, math teacher.

Yes.

You remember he wrote a letter a week and a half ago, column that Barry Weiss published in her Substack?

I read it, right? Okay, so we talked. He talked about his time in university studying post-modern philosophy.

Yes.

And he said that he was very much attracted to it at the time, but then he unpacked why, and he believed that he was resentful at that point about lacking a genuine creative voice.

Yes.

And that the post-modern philosophy that he was taught gave him and the professors that were teaching him and his peers a weapon with which they could—a weapon to undermine what it was that they were not capable of doing themselves.

Yes.

And so instead of the worship that you described, which characterized your professors, and fortunately for me, my professors as well, who taught me a tremendous amount, especially in my junior college, they were taught a method of dispensing with literature.

Yes.

Reading it as if it was something else, and I suppose morally superseding it in some sense.

Oh no, absolutely.

The idea that especially when post-modernism and the reconstruction and all those attendant pseudo philosophies—you read Milton to find out if he was treating his daughters right, not this miracle that we call Paradise Lost, or Samson Agonistes.

You read Homer to find out if he’s a blood worshipper.

This whole game of taking the great documents of Western civilization as a hunting ground for moral woke offense—well, first of all, it’s catastrophically stupid. If you have the 48th Symphony of Mozart or Beethoven's Fifth, and the only reason you’re playing it is to find out if either Mozart or Beethoven had a sexist attitude, you’re out of your mind.

Self-stop this!

And the idea that—what are the great propulsions of a certain segment of Western society is simply envy and resentment of its success, even as those who are envious and resentful are basically being fed and kept by it. They go into these institutions with some sort of childish, immature animosity towards what—you know, if you think of it, the rise of thought is the greatest thing we have.

And at the richest part of the world, the most prosperous—the highest.

Have you been reading some of these whiteness things?

The new rules?

You mean, yes, the epidemic of anti-racism, which is a kind of racism, diversity, which is monosyllabic: if you don't have our ideas, you don't have any, or you're a racist or you're this or you're that. I don't know how a free people have succumbed so easily and so lethargically to a kind of—it’s not physical, but it’s a metaphysical restraint—the cowardice about some of these—but these universities that apologize for some professor—the New York Times guy, a 49-year columnist, and in an explanatory conversation using that N-word, the editor said, "No, there's nothing wrong with him," but then he fired him.

The universities, damn them, were the place that this other pandemic began. While we’re living through Culver, we should also understand that the intellectual pandemic goes to our heart and core. We are displacing ourselves by allowing charlatans to wreck the intellectual standards of the Western world.

So what did your education—in English literature, what did that do to you and for you?

So you were one person when you went in, and you were a different person when you came out. So what has been the advantage?

And I also mean, so I interviewed Jocko Willink on my podcast a while back, and he talked about going to take an English literature degree after he had finished his military training.

And then he explained for 20 minutes the unbelievable potency that being able to communicate gave him as an individual, but also as a military leader.

So it was very striking, because he made a practical case as well as a metaphysical and intellectual case. So personally, what did this education do for you while you were having it? But then also afterwards in your life?

Well, I actually have a fairly retentive memory for the entire experience, especially at Memorial University. The first thing I'll give you, I'll give you an angle. I’m not usually a biographical, by the way, but I’ll do this.

There was an English professor—he was from England and he was one of those collaborators with Dr. George Story on this dictionary. He was a dialectician. His name was John Woodson. I haven't said that name in 35-40 years.

But he came into—I—it was my—only my first year. Yeah, in the first year, we had an excerpt from Paradise Lost. It was one of the great epic similes in the very first book. He scarcely sees when the superior being was walking towards the shore.

I could do the whole damn thing, but we won't bother you with that. But Woodson, as opposed to saying, "Now you should read this thing; it’s very complicated. It’s one of those deeply ramifying similes that only Milton ever wrote," he read it out loud, and he had a good voice.

And even though Milton is a very difficult poet, by the way, even though it was difficult, the sound of it—Milton is the genius of the auric sensations of the English verse, even better than Shakespeare. And I'm telling you the truth here.

I am—when he finished that, I hadn't heard of it—that's how bad I was. I had very few books in our house growing up. I went over to the library because the simile was so exciting; I had to read Paradise Lost.

This wasn't prompted by anybody else, and I could repeat instances of that kind where the sharpness of what was being related or the beauty of it—never underestimate aesthetics— the beauty of it, the precision of it, the ability to find words that have depth of meaning that echo their own etymology, to marshal them in patterns of order, and the intellectual aura that comes out of—and one other little tiny note I’ll give you was I—we read John Donne a lot.

A lot later, some of John Donne's love poems are extremely complex; they’re so-called metaphysical, but they're intellectual in a real sense. They're hard to understand.

I remember wrestling with one poem of John Donne’s for about a day. I mean, only 14, 15 lines; it wasn't the sonnet, but it was insane.

I can still see the light bulb over my head in the library. In other words, I come from an outport background, more or less in a cut-off culture.

This is not a criticism, it’s just fact. As I said, a lot of material growing up in the house, and then all of a sudden, it was like a series of benign explosions.

The second thing that university did, and I think properly so by their example, less than by their preaching, the professors that I met, they really did value language.

They did value the great resource of poetry that existed, by the way, over the centuries, and they also taught a certain courtesy of mind that you could have your disagreements, but based them on the material at hand that don't float from out of the air.

If you want to talk about John Milton, you talk about his poetry. You talk about—we don’t want, you talk about these prose, but very few do.

But you don't go into the poem to find something that in some sort of deeply infantile manner offends you. Now when you write Paradise Lost, I'll listen to you criticizing it anyway.

Once again, I might—yeah, here’s what I did. I memorized a lot, and that's something I would recommend to all of the people who are listening to you when they listen to you, that a lot of education should be just that—it should be simple retention.

Put poetry and prose in your head and in your heart. The power Bloom used to point it out, and I agree with them, that learning by heart is more than just a trite phrase. Once you put it in there, it expands your person.

And to answer your question now directly, the difference was this: Wendy and Cal were immature—that’s standard for the age. But I came out with something that was permanent, and as far as I'm concerned, at least, had the most enduring value outside of, as I said, domestic circumstance that I have ever had.

It’s still here.

And so you’ve talked to us a fair bit specifically about poetry and you just made a case for memorizing it.

So that you can recite it, and you did recite some. And I've often found it’s surprising and remarkable to hear someone recite.

I haven't memorized a lot of poetry, and I’m struck not infrequently by someone's capacity to recite. There's something unbelievably impressive about it.

But you're really making a case for first poetry and epic poetry and second for memorizing it.

So first, let's go to the poetry. What's it done for you? You talked about aesthetic experiences first, so that was a marker, right?

These series of benign explosions?

Yeah, well, what's it done for me? One of the great things it's done for me—yeah, this is consistent, I’m being correct on this.

If you read Oscar Wilde, it is easy to approach writers or Walter Peter or Samuel Johnson or Sir Thomas Brown.

Some of the later essays in the 20th century—by giving you Charles Lamb—you'll never write as well as they, and understand that if you—or if you're inclined to do this writing stuff, but my god, they set the standard.

They sent you something. I can’t do that. Nabokov is probably my best in the mod; he’s the best modern prose writer. I’ve never been able to write a sentence like him.

But having read him, I’m ashamed! I'm ashamed when I'm sloppy or lazy, and you always aim at the high ground.

And what it did, it set an ideal in the mind. And words, by the way, are very precious things. I mean, you teach the Bible in many ways.

And the Bible is, apart from its obvious spiritual, it is a textbook of the highest forms of language.

Even Milton put it before Greece, but it sets a standard. It gives you a wrestling match.

If you read in the back of an essay—and there are some—and then you look at, in my case, some scribbled column, you’re still trying—I tried to find the right word because I've been prompted by all these people I've read before.

And I’m glad you made the memorization. Here’s what that does: you can get meaning. You can get the meaning of a line or the meaning of verse, but there's a secondary engine or energy attached to poetry and great prose, and you bring it into your mind so that you have into your living sensibility, so that in some weird osmosis, it will lift your style or your attempts.

And the second thing is, especially Sir Thomas Brown and Hydriotaphia, if you have a model of high prose, and it sits in your head—and I do—I know several lines of it—

I think somehow or other, it contaminates you. This is a good word to use in the play.

But it contaminates you in a rich way. You get something from it—this osmotic imitation that will only take place if you've lodged it in your consciousness.

And one final point—if you wish to memorize poetry and things, your best years are 15, 16, to 25, whatever you learn then and learn by heart, as I call it, I can give you screams of Hamlet.

They stay—it’s a lot harder to memorize at 50 or 60 or god knows, 70!

And I hate it even to say the word!

I'm rambling on again, Jordan; this is bad of me.

No, it's exactly right; it's exactly right. And it’s definitely not rambling, and maybe that’s because you've been infected with the poetic spirit.

I mean, I have to let all our readers, our listeners, and watchers know that Rex's column is very, very influential in Canada, and it's not least because of the manner in which he crafts his words.

And so, how much poetry do you know by heart, do you think?

In my prime, I—this may sound like I’m most of this—most of I memorized all of John Donne, because his poems, apart from the immortality—that’s all that—those are very long—but all his songs and sonnets, they love poetry.

And the religious sonnet—the Divine Silence of John Donne, by the way—are marvelous things.

So also is his sermons. I wish people would read them today just for the glory of the rhetoric. It’s phenomenal!

I mean, it is phenomenal. I did a lot of Milton memorizing; most of the sonnets—"I thought I saw my latest spouse in Satan brought to me like Alcestis from the grave," from Joel's great son to her glad husband gave rescued from death, though pale and faint.

And the thing there is, he thought I saw my latest spouse, Alcestis, was Milton's second wife, brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.

And there’s a place to stop. Let’s see—we're doing this. Alcestis was a Greek woman; I forget her husband's name, but the husband was told that he was shortly to die, and he was very, very young, and they were both friends of Hercules.

Okay? And so Hercules came to their house after the wife had died, but he didn't know that Alcestis had died, and he didn’t know the house was in mourning.

And after nine days of feasting, as only Hercules could, I mean, he thought I saw my latest—that’s how the husband came and told him.

The story that he had been told by the gods that he was going to die young, and he went to his parents, and they said—he said to them, "You are very old, so therefore if you take my place, you will not lose many years, but I will be saved."

And his parents turned him down; and his friends turned him down, and Alcestis, his wife, without even being asked, she submitted herself to mortality; she died for him.

So when Hercules heard the news and that he had been treated so well, he determined to repay the hospitality by going into the underworld. He picked Alcestis away from this, and he brought him back.

I forget the husband's name for some reason, but he would not—he wanted to make it a surprise, so he put a veil over the returned wife’s face.

And when he came to the husband, he gradually undid the veil and gave him back from the dead his living wife.

Now, go back to the couple of sentences I gave you: he thought I saw my late espoused saint brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.

There’s a few lines down; her face was veiled, yet to my fancy sight, love, sweetness, goodness in her face shined as in no face with more delay.

So when Milton throws out Alcestis, there's only one word; there’s an entire train of secondary thought and mythology just in that one little line.

This is why you would study him, so that you get a tremendous range and depth all within—these are silence.

Anyway, that’s the me thought I saw my latest spouse, Alcestis, Lord, I slaughtered saints whose bones I scattered on the alpine, etc., etc.

So now we can do this all day, but there’s no need.

Well, it’s so interesting to me to see you reflect on your education and your poetic education, given the track of your career and—

Well, because it was also so practical.

I mean, yeah.

And you’re making a very strong and personal case for the utility of English literature.

Now, you said you grew up in a house that didn't have a lot of books. You know we were not making any depression stories, we never missed a meal, but we didn't have books.

Once in a while one of those Reader's Digest condensed books would—my father Harry would get them on the base or something.

In the school we went to, there was a library that consisted mainly of the lives of the saints.

What? No, there weren’t—that was—you know, if there were five or six, by the time I was 13 or 14, I was buying the novels in the drugstore.

The drugstores used to have the little book racks in those days, but it was only when I got in university, and it all came on, I devoured.

I did about 14 out of 20 courses in those—14 or 15 of them are English. I even added a couple of subjects, English studies, in the fourth year.

I was up to seven when you did five a year in those days, but in the university—like I told you about Paradise Lost—

You go over, you went to the library, you could pick up what you wanted, and those days you walked the stacks, so you would often be prompted merely by the title of a book to take it out.

So now, there weren’t many, but that’s not unusual in Newfoundland. And but in other ways, Newfoundland education would be looked upon as very back, you know, backward now.

But we missed certain things. I was Catholic, and we bought it by—in a nun school presentation. Sisters, and one of the benefits of the Catholic education was the catechism; this is something you had to memorize—we’re back to this again.

The Butler's Catechism, you had it for seven or eight years continuously. It started off, "Who made you? God made you." "Why did he make it? To know and love him here on earth and afterwards serve with him forever in heaven."

It got more complicated as it went through. Now, you were being taught religion, but when you got old enough to see it, it also had taught you slyly logic, because it was a question, and it was a cataclysm.

Catechism, how do you know that there’s a purgatory? They had a great long—I can almost do that one too—a great long answer to that.

They said, "If this is this and that's that, then there must be this." So, it was inferentially teaching you logic and building your vocabulary.

You paid attention to it. We often get the best benefits from certain kinds of learning inadvertently and insidiously, but benignly, insidiously.

They come at us. I never understood why the Catechism held such power, but it was just that.

It was essay-writing too; you didn’t do things sloppily or loosely.

So what would be looked about how they’re teaching them, rote, and this is terrible, or treating it like robots?

You never know what’s going in and the chemistry that forms.

Anyway, well, it’s really interesting to me that you’re making a case for it as an advanced form of imitation.

Yeah, I mean when children play—when they play being a dad, for example, when they’re playing house—they don’t mimic the father, but by which I mean they don’t precisely duplicate with their body the actions they saw their father take.

What they do is they view the father’s actions across a broad range of situations, and they extract out the gist, and then they embody the gist.

And that play development is incredibly important, and it’s based on a very complex mimicry.

And the case you’re making is that by embodying the poetry, which is to memorize it, that you’re also—you’re also imbibing the gist, essentially.

Yes! So there’s a living spirit there that inhabits you as a consequence of the mimicry, and I’ve never heard that case made before.

It makes sense to me because, of course, poetry, especially declaimed poetry, is a dramatic art.

And so it is a performance.

It’s even more than that; it’s incantatory in both senses. Here’s another little—this is my—here’s a better key to it.

There’s a line, and again, another line of Milton.

“Sweet is the breath of mourner rising, sweet with charm of earliest birds.”

Now, you know what a charm is? It’s a spell; it casts you over.

He uses another word, another place. In China we speak of poetry, when he says the word, “the charm of early”—he's talking about song, but it’s interesting that song and charm are actually synonyms.

That when we speak of charming, we’re speaking of an invisible power of allure, and when we speak of a poem as incantatory or spell, we’re doing the same thing.

There’s an aura—you use slightly different terms. Once you absorb it, there’s a sheen that propels some part of the motor of your consciousness.

But only if you imitate the best, because only the best contain this particular—here’s an awful ugly word—battery.

Okay, all right. So I’m going to have to think about that some more. We’ll return to it.

So you took an excess load of courses. What did your parents think about your choice of university education?

And how did you manage to fortify yourself psychologically, let’s say, to go commit yourself to an English literature degree?

Well, I was again, I was very young. It was the slowest mark I had in high school, so there was a little bit of a paradox, and I was only in the university.

But it came on as a bit of my own metaphor with very sudden, powerful attraction and action, and the more I got into it, the better it was.

But also, here—it wasn’t, there was another dynamic factor, because you just spoke of parents. And seeing that, that’s the territory that you often enter, a volunteer.

But normally I wouldn’t. My father, he came from very hard circumstances, my mother not alive. I won’t go into all of it, but he basically got the grade two or three in Newfoundland.

He was a smart man, and he did all sorts of hard work when he was a teenager.

And when he finally went to work on the base, it was as a dishwasher, but he met some people on the American base he knew.

And he, remember, he was again one of these stoics, which I much more appreciate than the gush merchants of the day and the Oprah vacation.

The thing was he knew, and he never made a point of it, that had he had school, could he have been able to attend a real one, that he had this facility, in this case, by the way, it was with language.

Even though he was not a reader, because of reasons I’ve given you, he had a taste for words and compressed experiences.

And he met one or two very well-educated Americans, and I think just by being there with him, knowing how much—I think it must have been a great pain, actually—knowing how much he knew that he had missed and how amputated were his ambitions by the non-education that it seeped down to me—that getting one was just something formidably insistent.

And I suppose we all, as you say, appearance, I suppose I was trying out of some sort of devotion to kind of by surrogacy pick up what he could never have gotten because of time and circumstance.

Well, it also implies, I would say, that he at minimum didn't interfere with the manifestation of that spirit in you and, I suspect, would have encouraged it.

Both parents had great belief in one thing. I love the old phrases, by the way—we should bring them back—do your books!

If you don’t make it through the school, you’ll be digging ditches. My mother was like hiring my father—they had a justifiably dutiful respect even in some of the more ignorant instructors that were in those presentation schools.

But they knew that there was one way up, and I'm not speaking commercially, not speaking with something attached to the dignity of the person and the amplitude of the personality.

Only gets released by trying to imitate—listen to walk your mind around the minds of other people whose minds are better than your own.

And that's what philosophy, literature, I would expect your specialty, it is always those who have thought more deeply, more profoundly, and have a better equipment that give us things.

And that’s why I’m back now to the university. That’s why it’s so deplorable that this petty fascism of wokeness is suffocating the number one energy of any free society.

So now, how do you think your parents—it’s interesting, how do you think your parents developed that respect, and why did they hold it?

Well, Harry, my father, because he was—he was certainly bright enough to know when he heard other people. I’m speaking chiefly now of the Americans with sophisticated understandings and sophisticated things.

He saw the goal in the rift. But then he—and he was willing to admire it rather than to be resentful about it.

Absolutely. He would listen to these people. He would remember some of their sharpest lines. He had a great sense of humor. He was himself a very good talker.

Most Newfoundlanders are, and they often have a very good sense of humor, which is appreciation for words.

Well, I think that you know that. That’s the second context. I do remember, you know, the older guys that I knew, and not just these folklore stories either.

They could talk about going in to buy a plug of tobacco and hold you spellbound. That’s actually something I’ve noticed about extremely intelligent people who aren’t educated.

Yeah!

A number of them, but they weren’t stupid, and they could spin a story, man. It was impressive.

And in a way, I couldn’t—in some sense, I think I lost the dramatic sense of my own life because of the books I had been exposed to, but they were very good at that.

I—your point—I’ve made this myself; you might want to tell us that there’s a whole lot of illiterate Newfoundlanders that may well be your choice, but do not think—do not think that they’re not some of the most verbally intelligent.

I’ll tell you as a fact—I’ve done, I don’t know, 100, 200 documentaries, and I did a documentary on the Newfoundland fishery about 25 years ago.

And I met a guy up in L’Anse aux Meadows—a fisherman, hard case, heavy drinker. I would guess I’d give him a grade two or grade three.

But he walked out of his house on a cold, frigid February Saturday morning with the wind coming off the water, and then it kept the air flaps out.

And he gave me an answer to one of my questions—a five-minute area. I, you know, I can already see that boat over there. It gives me a knob of me guts and a tear in the eye is how it began.

And I tell you, outside of Shakespeare going on, that was the most verbally charged anecdote that I ever put on film, Frank. When we brought it back to the national, people were coming into the edit room to watch this guy.

As I said, he may have been illiterate, but by God, he knew his words.

And that’s another one, by the way. I always admired—I think we called it uneducated. That’s nonsense.

So the smartest people I know probably couldn’t sign their name.

But by God, if you felt them, if you moved around them, I was always afraid of fishermen because they were always smarter— not all of them, but if you went out together with one of them, you better be on your toes.

Anyway, going on again.

Okay, so you took an excess of courses at Memorial, so you were very highly motivated. What about your peer group at that time?

No, that was—they were more or less, again, they had a bit more, I think, commitment to the idea of real education, as I’m calling it, than perhaps today.

I think there’s a lot of just going for the credential. But moving on again, I’ll give background, more in particular, because I’m going to interrupt there.

I would say one thing about undergraduates that I’ve observed, because I loved teaching the undergraduates I had contact with.

They would come into class with a veil of cynicism, and sometimes that was while we’re doing this for the grade, or we have a practical reason in mind.

But if you could get under that and communicate something to them that was genuine, genuinely philosophical and meaningful, they would drop that surface-level cynicism and dive into it like people who were starving.

Well, that, if you will forgive a reference back to you, the explosion that you set off—once the controversy had propelled you into this world arena—and the number of otherwise cynical minds—I told you when you and I had a previous interview on that silly channel that I have, I had this call. I’m not going to name him because it would be embarrassing—a 55-year-old working in a really hard job and no big money, and he actually called me up.

I hadn’t met you or anything, and he called me up to say that, you know what? I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson!

This is if the teacher, if the guide offers something that is real, depth, dignity, spirit, points towards, you know, “You are better than you are,” speaks honestly, there’s another thing.

So that’s the advantage to something of higher value.

It’s like, of course you’re lesser in relationship to it, but it’s what you could become to offer people what they could become is the best possible thing you can do for them.

Well, I’ve seen, again, maybe mischaracterizing—I don’t think it’s deliberate, but insofar as there is a standing champion leading something of the counter rebellion against the degradation of analysis and thought and the casting aside of cultural verities—you’re it!

And you have, by example and also through great tribulation, given solace to a hell of a lot of people.

And I think it has a lot to do with something general in the air that there’s a lot of suffocated minds because they feel the walls coming in. They wonder if they’re alone.

And then someone comes by and says something—in some cases, nothing insulting—some very obvious things, but with a lot of thought and energy and commitment behind it. And, as you know, half the world arenas are affiliating to hear an anonymous voice.

That’s pretty good.

By the way, you went from Memorial to Oxford. How did that happen?

Scholarship there was Newfoundland, because it had been—sorry, you won a Rhodes scholarship?

Yeah, I won the Rhodes scholarship in ’68. And again, it was a bit of my father. I thought I wanted to study law for some reason.

When I got over there, as I think I told you before we started here, I entered into second-year studies with any break. I mean, trust landlord.

I mean, just terrible stuff and the weekly assignments. But you’re in Oxford, you got Blackwoods, you got some of the greatest lectures on English literature, some of the editors, some of the prime editors of some of the great voices.

As you know, Helen Gardner was T.S. Eliot’s friend, for God’s sake.

And she’s giving a lecture on Don. She edited the Donne songs and sonnets. So I became completely absorbed in—I did the law stuff, but I spent more time reading.

I never read this much in my entire life.

What was it like for you to go to Oxford?

Have you traveled at all?

No, no.

So this is the first time you’ve been to Europe?

I mean, the reason I’m asking in part is because I’ve met some very educated Englishmen like Stephen Fry.

And it’s really something to meet an educated Englishman because they have a depth of education that’s just quite stunning, and it’s so—it's so impressive when you see it manifest itself.

And I’ve been fortunate enough to talk with people at Cambridge and Oxford who are scholars from the old school, let’s say.

Yeah.

It’s so impressive to watch them talk and to watch them think, and so you pulled yourself out of Newfoundland and went over to Oxford.

What—how old were you, and what was that like?

I was 19, I think. I went to universities very early.

What was it like? I’d had, as I mentioned, five years in Memorial studying literature.

I should have kept adding about—I should have picked up a D film and stayed away from law. I met, like you did, I met some extremely keen minds.

I met a guy who could play Debussy on the great organs, and I met them in all fields, and that was the only advantage of it.

To me, by then, maybe a bit young, but nonetheless, I’d settled in pretty well to English literature, and it was that that kept dragging me away.

As I was just about to say, I don’t think I’ve ever read more in a single year than I did that year.

Well, that’s the thing about university, and I suppose also about those English universities in particular, because you imagine what the university is—it’s this continuous conversation across centuries.

Part of it is the exposure to the greatest thinkers, and for the purpose of mimicry, essentially, I believe that's central to it because you can pick your peers in some sense.

That’s what you do when you read great books is you make these people your peers, at least insofar as you’re capable of doing that.

But then there’s also an identity that it provides you with—you’re a student, you’ve got this time that’s cut out, and now you can go throw yourself into the study, and society has built a wall around you that says you can stay in this room, and you’re good; read away, we’re happy about it.

Well, that’s it. The one thing I will remark—and I don’t care how pretentious it sounds—in one area, I was a little disappointed.

I thought, because of the reputation of the university, that it would have a surplus.

It would have an excess of over-bright people who listened to late quartets of Beethoven as they got out of bed.

I had a false notion that reality is often just day-to-day.

While there will be great exceptions—and there were, and people were so bright that they embarrassed you if you were standing in front of them—but a lot of it was, apart from the architecture and the grounds, which is first class, it was nice to be there as a kind of a visitor.

But the intellectual level, as I said, I probably didn't get out as much as I should, but once I got near the libraries, I became enthralled, and that’s the same word as enchanted and charm.

I keep reminding people that the art has magic.

Well, and I think it's really useful to point out the connection between those words because they all point to the possession, to the capacity to be possessed by this spirit, which—and it is the spirit that inhabits the university when it’s properly conducted.

Yes! It’s the spirit that manifests itself as the creative and communicative conversation that’s gone across centuries that you can now immerse yourself in and become a part of.

And there isn’t anything better than that—that’s as good as it gets.

That’s also why it’s so wonderful often to be a university professor or teacher, because you can play a role in transmitting that to young people, who will benefit immensely from it in all possible ways.

Yeah, it’s very true. It’s also true, again, I’m sure you have because you’re in the university context.

I’ve met two or three—I’d almost compared them to, you know, some of the great medieval monks—you meet one or two or three people who are so completely immured in the dignity of learning from the past and pursuing great minds, truly learned people.

They’re almost always in a kind of personal cloister, but there’s one or two or three in the course of a lifetime, and you say, “There’s so almost priestly about the human being that gives to inquiry, to learning, to the development and fulfillment of the mind,” and you just know you’re in a very special place.

Now, when I went to teach at Harvard in the 90s, I was privileged to have a position there for five years—six years, I guess—and Harvard pulled in senior professors from everywhere who were at the top of their profession.

And so there was a handful of senior psychology professors there when I was there, and it was wonderful to talk to these people.

I had never been anywhere where there wasn't anything I could say that they weren't familiar with.

It was so amazing!

There wasn’t a topic I could possibly bring up that these—and it would have been six or seven people, which is actually a lot; it was a small department.

The senior faculty were absolutely outstanding people, especially the older ones, because they weren’t only great psychologists; they were really educated!

And so, yeah!

And they weren’t afraid of ideas at all!

And my mind ranges across ideas, and I’d often encounter people with whom I could have a conversation about one thing but definitely not about another, and I just never ran into that barrier among the older senior faculty members at Harvard.

The junior faculty members were impressive in their own right; they hadn’t had the goal advantage of a lifetime of study yet, you know, they were headed in that direction.

But the senior faculty were remarkable, and you couldn’t help but be immensely, what would you say, to be possessed by immense respect in their presence, and it was a privilege to be there.

Well, here’s the other thing for the people today—if the universities become proselytizers and semi-political agents, propagandizing all this garbage, they’re stealing a lot of joy.

I mean, a real university, as you just said, in dealing with people that are better than you—that’s the great thing, incidentally.

It’s such a pleasure, and you don’t have—who has, as you said, you’re given freedom to do this and get credit for it as well?

And there’s a simple joy of taking in, and especially the humanities—I know science has its ecstasies as well, and they’re probably even more powerful—but the joy of the humanities is that, as you said, you’re talking to Charles Lamb.

I often when I read his letters, because he had a very hard life, I take great—I almost, oh, I’m allowed to—not allowed, I’m capable of reading what a person up in the early 19th century actually thought and how he’s in the room.

That’s a great privilege too, see what I mean?

Absolutely!

Yeah, we throw away so many things that are under at our elbow, and we search in vain for things that are 20 miles away. It’s awful!

So, okay, so you were at Oxford, and you were there for one year.

Yeah, one year.

And then what happened next?

Well, he—

Found me very foolish.

As I said, I started to think about it.

I went to school at four, and I'd been going continuously; Oxford was the sixth year of university, I think it was.

And when I got home to Newfoundland during the summer break, I decided I’d take another break, and that’s when I said I’ve got to stop going to schools.

And there was a job when I did some teaching; I went on the American base and taught some American kids, and then literally, and I know the meaning of literally, I stumbled into a radio station in St. John’s when I was doing some work on a master’s thesis—just idle work.

I had no money, and they gave me a job for the afternoon in the newsroom Monday.

They signed me up for a month to fill in for an open line host, and a month later, I was working at CBC.

So, here—that’s it—my so-called career was as accidental as walking into that newsroom because I had a friend there.

I needed a bit of money. I took on the open line show with no experience.

And this is a Newfoundland overland show, by the way, and started to write editorials for the radio station.

So why couldn’t you do it? Like we talked about your education, obviously that played a role, but—and it’s accidental in a sense, but I mean you’ve been preparing to use words for a long time.

Yeah, I had.

So, I mean it was an accident waiting to happen in some sense, so you walked into the radio station, but what was it about what you were capable of that opened up the doors?

Well, I tell you, Newfoundland had another advantage; Newfoundland is a large part of every Newfoundlander in a way that other problems are not.

Being parochial are perhaps not—and Newfoundland politics when I was growing up was the politics of this writer; he was legendary for sure—Joey Smallwood.

He brought us into Confederation. He was mercurial. He was—he was another autodidact; he was another self-taught man in the old sense oratorical, the Tommy Douglas kind of oratory.

And Newfoundland politics was both cursing and entertainment, and I often said I’ve wrote this: that we put up with it because on other planes it gives us continuous amusement.

Newfoundland has weather in politics.

And they both exist as a form of conversation and entertainment. My father, again, was speaking the words, listening to Joey giving some great tirade; he just loved to listen.

When Smallwood let it loose, and a lot of Newfoundlanders did as well, it is a verbal culture.

I have no doubt about that whatsoever.

I never—but journalism per se, I never aspired to it—but once I got in there, I found that, if you'll forgive this, I found it very easy and natural that you should write things.

I didn’t think much of the writing, by the way.

I’m not being shy; I’m not being coy. I always—because I have examples—Flannel Brian would be yet another one, and Macklemore—I met him once or twice.

These were masters, so there was always a kind of—not a chill, but a holding back.

But as you get older, there’s not much to hold back anymore.

No, it was accidental, but it just happened.

I then ended up in CBC, that Here and Now program you referenced at the very beginning, and did that for seven or eight years.

It went through a few other places, but I always came back—and obviously, once I came to Toronto in the middle 90s, this is now 23 or 24 years—this has been the most furious commitment to the cause because I’m very lethargic in thinking of it in terms of any great seriousness.

I like to think that I just assume you were amused with something I said.

I think I was right.

Well, often there’s not that much difference between those two things.

Very true, very true.

So, okay, so you were working at Here and Now, and how often were you broadcasting?

A show every night. I did usually one or two interviews a night. I also did—they were much briefer in those days; I also did, I was the only one who did actually commentary.

I did two or three a week; I wrote. I uncovered and reviewed concerts for certain national radio programs and wrote reviews of concerts—on and off, I had a lot of fires in the irons—a lot of fires.

But it just seemed more of a hobby. It’s an easy word; I don’t know why I couldn’t find it.

This is like, you know, it’s something you were half pleased to be doing, and it was paying your rent; that’s been journalism to me.

I do not have—this is high compulsive, sanctified idea of the great worth of the journalists of the earth; they’re the only people that I think could be put in competition with the politicians.

There are certain exceptions; I think Glenn Greenwald right now, for example, in the last seven or eight months uncovering a lot of the mistruths of journalism is doing a great job.

But it was there; I did enjoy doing it. I liked politics as a drama—and, therefore, and I liked books, so you could okay—I did book reviews as well, so it all just came together in a non-planned but by inertia and taste, something I stuck with; at this moment I’m talking with you.

And so why do you think you had public appeal? That’s a really good question.

I was always chastised in the earliest part of the so-called racket.

Why don’t you—I’ve ever written one column for the radio station? Other people read it when—before I get the CBC.

And the owner of the station, he called me in afterwards—he hired me to write. The—he had his announcer read, and he—I did this call, and he calls me into his office and said, “What was all that about?”

And so in an informal conversation I gave him the gist of what I had written and structured for the announcer, and then he looked at me.

“Why can’t you do that all the time?” That was a problem.

That was a problem with CBC as well. They kept telling me that you can’t write like that, and it’s too—

Too—I have a totally different understanding of communication!

Now here’s another one, and this is true.

I did a particularly savage thing one night, and in Newfoundland, you can be much more savage than you can in the delicate altitudes of Toronto and CBC, believe me; you can draw blood on Here if you have the skill.

Do you think there’s a consequence of it being a fundamentally working-class culture in Newfoundland?

Yeah, you’re exposed more; you actually tasted more reality.

Yeah, well, I know where I grew up was a working-class culture, and the verbal barbs and exchanges were quite brutal.

Generally very, very funny, and also brutal.

When you—in my case, because you got really well-known in the island, if you said something the previous night and you went out the next morning, I almost got chased a couple of times!

But to go back to this one point about communication, I did this savage thing—attacked, mercilessly, a lot of phone calls because before the internet registered in reaction.

When they came into CBC, one of the cleaners was there, and he looks at me and says, “Rex, well,” he said, “that was something going over there last night.”

And I said, “God, I said, yeah.”

He said, “By the way,” he said, “whose side were you on?”

Here’s the point: communication, even when it’s verbal, carries a lot more tone.

It tells you, your sensibility goes under the text. A manner of delivery gives an index of where it's going.

I’ve had people from Pakistan, and don’t give me any, “Oh, racist,” Pakistan, and Africa meeting the cabs in the cabins of Toronto, and I know they can’t understand this because they haven’t yet picked up the English.

Okay, don’t come back with any complaints, and they say, “Oh, that was so good.”

It always reminds me that even was hyper-verbal though I might be in certain ways, that there’s a deeper communication, especially in the mass media, that has never taken account.

What I was, by their standards, doing a little bit of high style, you’re communicating by your manners, by your eyes!

Well, that’s one of the things that I think that makes you somewhat singular among Canadian journalists is that not only are you very able with your words and witty with them and powerful with them, but you’re also markedly a dramatic character.

And I don’t know exactly how to separate the character from the person, and maybe there is no separation.

But I watched you on CBC and listened to you when there’s always drama in your presentation.

There’s a performative action aspect, so it’s romantic, I suppose is the right way of thinking about it, because that’s the effective union of emotion and rationality, and you embody that!

So it’s like watching someone put on a performance, although it’s—I suppose you’ve been doing this for so long, I don’t know how much of it is a performance and how much of it is you.

It’s very effective!

Well, I know one thing: that long use has given—I found the hardest, and this was the only conscious part, I think—the hardest thing to do if you’re in the television business—don’t go into it now; it’s on its way out.

But if you’re in there is to gradually reduce to extinction the gap between—I use this phrase in the comment recently—preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet.

The gap between, “Oh, I’m on a camera, and therefore I got to do this.” I got to say it this way and all this stuff.

When you can bring the prepared remark identically with a totally relaxed being—and if you mean it, I used to say this five or six columns a year are commentaries that I really meant.

And if you really mean it, you could go on stammering, and people would listen to you reducing the gap between the posture or the posturing—and I’m talking to a neighbor today, so—

Well, so one of the things I’ve really observed because I’ve done a lot of television interviews now, and I—

Yes!

And a lot of this sort of discussion, which I radically prefer, which I think is immensely superior, but so in the typical television interview, I would walk into the studio, and I would meet the interviewer, and we would have a cordial, and professional conversation.

But I was actually talking to the person more or less.

And then the cameras would go on, and the person was no longer there at all.

I know!

So then I was trying to figure out, “Well, what's exactly there?”

And, well, part of it was the—the person in some sense didn’t dare to be there because the bandwidth was extremely expensive, and if you’re there being spontaneous, you can make spontaneous errors, and that can be very costly to you and to your network.

And so, so frequently, I was just talking to whoever it was acting out the role of the journalist they thought their station demanded.

And so there was no conversation, and some of the conversations, interviews that I’ve had that have gone viral were exactly like that, where it wasn’t a conversation.

What whatever it was was something completely different!

But this—this, there’s something essential about what you said with regards to this diminishment of the gap between the persona and the person.

And so the persona, this is from the psychology of Carl Jung. Jung thought about the persona as a crafted presentation that you used for expedient purposes.

Absolutely!

And so maybe you walk into a bank and you do a transaction, and you’re the customer and she’s the teller or he’s the teller, and there’s a script there, and that’s fine; that’s where a persona works because you don’t want to get personal while you’re just exchanging business information.

But in a conversation, it’s a different thing because the persona is something that isn’t genuine.

And what that means is the questions aren’t genuine, and if the questions aren’t genuine, then it’s not interesting.

You said you can stammer and stumble about as long as you mean it, and what is it do you think about—what is it—

Well, you talked also about the non-verbal component. What do you think is carrying the sense that you mean it?

What are people observing in the performance, let’s say, or in the presentation?

There’s an intensity.

Yes!

It really is! And I know this is straight—that’s a really good question.

I always knew—it’s intuition—that when you showed up on television, especially in the role of commentator and interview—instantly, if I was pretending, it bled out through the screen.

Now, of course, sometimes you’re having fun, and you’re not being serious; you do all sorts of, but in the ones I used to like to say—the ones that really count—if you put on a face, the radar of human beings—

The radar of every human being, especially again in this public thing—they know it’s wrong!

Politicians—I remember I did a thing on the national; every time the politician comes to an election, this is true of Mr. Harper, whom I like, as it was of Mr. Trudeau in particular, that the voice that starts to come out of them in their commercials is like something that’s never been heard on heaven or earth before.

They actually change their vocal tone.

When they give out their problem, they may as well hang a sign around their necks saying, “I’m lying to you.”

Now, because you can hear the way I talk.

In the cases that you’re describing, there’s so much in television and media interviews that has never taken account.

What I was, by their standards, doing a little bit of high style, you’re communicating by your manners, by your eyes.

And I don’t know exactly how to separate the character from the person; maybe there is no separation—but I watched you on CBC and listened to you when there’s always drama in your presentation.

There’s a performative action aspect, so it’s romantic I suppose is the right way of thinking about it because that’s the effective union of emotion and rationality, and you embody that.

So it’s like watching someone put on a performance, although it’s—I suppose you’ve been doing this for so long I don’t know how much of it is a performance and how much of it is you.

It’s very effective!

Well, I know one thing: that long use has given—I found the hardest—and this was the only conscious part I think—the hardest thing to do if you’re in the television business—don’t go into it now; it’s on its way out—but if you’re in there is to gradually reduce to extinction the gap between—I use this phrase in a comment recently—preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet.

The gap between, “Oh, I’m on a camera, and therefore I got to do this.” I’ve got to say it this way and all this stuff.

When you can bring the prepared remark identically with a totally relaxed being—and if you mean it, I used to say this five or six columns a year are commentaries that I really meant.

And if you really mean it, you could go on stammering and people would listen to you; reducing the gap between the posture or the posturing—and I’m talking to a neighbor today.

Well, so, one of the things I’ve really observed because I’ve done a lot of television interviews now and I—

Yes!

And a lot of this sort of discussion, which I radically prefer, which I think is immensely superior, but so in the typical television interview I would walk into the studio, and I would meet the interviewer, and we would have a cordial and professional conversation.

But I was actually talking to the person more or less.

And then the cameras would go on, and the person was no longer there at all.

I know!

So then I was trying to figure out—well, what’s exactly there?

And, well, part of it was the—the person in some sense didn’t dare to be there because the bandwidth was extremely expensive.

And if you’re there being spontaneous, you can make spontaneous errors, and that can be very costly to you and to your network.

And so frequently, I was just talking to whoever it was acting out the role of the journalist they thought their station demanded.

And so there was no conversation, and some of the conversations, interviews that I’ve had that have gone viral were exactly like that, where it wasn’t a conversation!

What it was was something completely different!

But this—there’s something essential about what you said with regards to this diminishment of the gap between the persona and the person.

And so the persona, this is from the psychology of Carl Jung. Jung thought about the persona as a crafted presentation that you used for expedient purposes.

Absolutely!

And so maybe you walk into a bank, and you do a transaction, and you’re the customer, and she’s the teller, or he’s the teller, and there’s a script there, and that’s fine; that’s where a persona works because you don’t want to get personal while you’re just exchanging business information.

But in a conversation, it’s a different thing because the persona is something that isn’t genuine, and what that means is the questions aren’t genuine—and if the questions aren’t genuine, then it’s not interesting.

You said you can stammer and stumble about as long as you mean it, and what is it do you think about—what is it.

Well, you talked also about the non-verbal component. What do you think is carrying the sense that you mean it?

What are people observing in the performance, let’s say, or in the presentation?

There’s an intensity.

Yes! It really is! And I know this is straight—that’s a really good question.

I always knew—it’s intuition—that when you showed up on television, especially in the role of commentator and interview—instantly, if I was pretending, it bled out through the screen.

Now of course, sometimes you’re having fun, and you’re not being serious; you do all sorts of—but in the ones I used to like to say, the ones that really count, if you put on a face—the radar of human beings, the radar of every human being, especially again in this public thing—they know it’s wrong!

Politicians—I remember I did a thing on the national every time the politician comes to an election, this is true of Mr. Harper, whom I like as it was of Mr. Trudeau in particular, that the voice that starts to come out of them in their commercials is like something that’s never been heard on heaven or earth before.

They actually change their vocal tone when they give out their problem; they may as well hang a sign around her neck saying, “I’m lying to you.”

Now, because you can hear the way I talk—in the cases that you’re describing, there’s so much in television and media interviews that has never taken account.

What I was, by their standards, doing a little bit of high style, you’re communicating by your manners, by your eyes!

And I don't know exactly how to separate the character from the person; maybe there is no separation; but I watched you on CBC and listened to you when there’s always drama in your presentation.

There’s a performative action aspect, so it’s romantic, I suppose, is the right way of thinking about it, because that’s the effective union of emotion and rationality, and you embody that.

So it’s like watching someone put on a performance, although it’s, you know, I suppose you’ve been doing this for so long, I don’t know how much of it is a performance and how much of it is you; it’s very effective!

The gap between, “Oh, I’m on a camera, and therefore I got to do this.” I got to say it this way and all this stuff.

When you can bring the prepared remark identically with a totally relaxed being—and if you mean it, I used to say this five or six columns a year are commentaries that I really meant.

And if you really mean it, you could go on stammering and people would listen to you; reducing the gap between the posture or the posturing—and I’m talking to a neighbor today, so.

Well, so one of the things I’ve really observed is because I’ve done a lot of television interviews now and I—

Yes!

But I was actually talking to the person more or less.

And then, the cameras would go on, and the person was no longer there at all!

I know!

So then I was trying to figure out—well, what’s exactly there?

And, well, part of it was the—the person, in some sense, didn’t dare to be there because the bandwidth was extremely expensive, and if you’re there being spontaneous, you can make spontaneous errors, and that can be very costly to you and to your network.

So frequently, I was just talking to whoever it was acting out the role of the journalist they thought their station demanded.

And so there was no conversation, and some of the conversations—interviews that I’ve had that have gone viral were exactly like that where it wasn’t a conversation!

What whatever it was was something completely different!

But this—this, there’s something essential about what you said with regards to this diminishment of the gap between the persona and the person.

And so the persona, this is from the psychology of Carl Jung. Jung thought about the persona as a crafted presentation that you used for expedient purposes.

Absolutely!

And so maybe you walk into a bank, and you do a transaction, and you’re the customer and she’s the teller or he’s the teller, and there’s a script there, and that’s fine; that’s where a persona works because you don’t want to get personal while you’re just exchanging business information.

You said you can stammer and stumble about as long as you mean it, and what is it?

Well, you talked also about the non-verbal component. What do you think is carrying the sense that you mean it?

What are people observing in the performance, let’s say, or in the presentation?

There’s an intensity!

Yes! It really is! And I know this is straight—that’s a really good question.

I always knew—and it’s intuition—that when you showed up on television, especially in the role of commentator and interview—instantly, if I was pretending, it bled out through the screen.

Now of course, sometimes you’re having fun, and you’re not being serious; you do all sorts of—but in the ones I used to like to say, the ones that really count, if you put on a face—the radar of human beings—the radar of every human being, especially again in this public thing—they know it’s wrong!

Politicians—I remember I did a thing on the national; every time the politician comes to an election, this is true of Mr. Harper, whom I like as it was of Mr. Trudeau, in particular, that the voice that starts to come out of them in their commercials is like something that’s never been heard on heaven or earth before.

They actually change their vocal tone!

When they give out their problem, they may as well hang a sign around their necks saying, “I’m lying to you!”

Now, because you can hear the way I talk—in the cases that you’re describing, there’s so much in television and media interviews that has never taken account.

What I was, by their standards, doing a little bit of high style—you’re communicating by your manners, by your eyes!

And I don’t know exactly how to separate the character from the person; maybe there is no separation—but I watched you on CBC and listened to you when there’s always drama in your presentation.

There’s a performative action aspect, so it’s romantic, I suppose is the right way of thinking about it, because that’s the effective union of emotion and rationality, and you embody that.

So it’s like watching someone put on a performance, although it’s well—and then I suppose you’ve been doing this for so long I don’t know how much of it is a performance and how much of it is you—it’s very effective!

Well, I know one thing: that long use has given—I found the hardest—and this was the only conscious part I think—the hardest thing to do if

The Education of a Journalist | Rex Murphy | EP 173

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