Swompdonkey

Charmsley McBrayington: Loathing Leah

Best advice I ever gave myself about Leah Maclaren: It was after my second rage-induced stroke of the morning, as I recall, and as I slumped against the wall of the Second Cup, my left eyelid twitching, the crumpled pages of the Globe and Mail between my trembling ink-stained fingers, I told myself -- NEVER READ THIS COLUMN AGAIN.

Leah McLaren is the amalgam of everything I despised about myself and my friends when I was in my twenties: the narcism, the ridiculous self-importance, the grotesque sanctimony, the vapid self-indulgence, the lack of self-consciousness. The fact that she gazes out at me from her the headshot next to her byline, good-looking in an insolent nordic kind of way, just adds fuel to the bonfire of contempt her inane, thoroughly mediocre writings provoke. A WASP Rebecca Eckler, the Paris Hilton of the pen, McLaren has no peer when it comes to pushing my buttons... and now I hear she wrote a novel.

I want to do what's right. I want to head to Chapters with a jerrican of gasoline and a fistful of matches and burn the entire M section to cinders, in the event that any of her drivel may have somehow seeped from beneath the covers of her book and polluted Alistair Maclean's Guns of Navarone. Who's with me? Time is short, and Alistair is counting on us.


Questions Charmsley's been asking himself lately:

How did the Zionists get all those people to tattoo their arms so convincingly?

Is the world destined to fall under the tyranny of "frisbee people"?

Are immigrants to Quebec being turned into Quebecers rather than Canadians?

Have public servants always been reluctant to change their hours of work?

Does hypocrisy and stupidity come easily to Mallick, or does she have to make an effort?

How many of the negative reviews for Apocalypto are really about Mel Gibson's objectionable behaviour, rather than his skill as a director?

And what about Polanski? Was his art also judged through the prism of his actions?

How many Liberals straddle the line between anti-Israel, and anti-semitic? And will this have an effect on their support in Montreal and Toronto?

Who will be the first journalist to challenge the media consensus and potentially endanger their career by bravely point out that, far from being a hunk, young Justin Trudeau is actually a bit effeminate?