The Trudeauian Love Affair

By: The National Bacon

Does celebrity obsession create celebrity politicians or do celebrity politicians create celebrity obsessions?  It is a question that more or less borrows from the ancient chicken or egg line of inquiry and yet as with the age-old argument there are no easy answers.  Justin Trudeau is the current political darling of the moment on the Canadian political scene and overwhelmingly fawning media and yet a salient question remains: Why?

All things considered Justin Trudeau doesn’t seem like a bad sort of fellow; however in the grand scheme of things he doesn’t seem to be a particularly amazing one.  He often comes off as a privileged playboy who sees the job of Prime Minister as at best his birthright and at worst a pleasant distraction from an otherwise less than remarkable career. His much-touted intellectual achievements are on examination somewhat  lacklustre and not much different than those of tens of thousands of other average Canadians.  Aside from his obviously pre-orchestrated ‘election’ to Liberal party leader his political career has been rather bland.  Essentially other than being the son of a well-known Canadian Prime Minister he has few credentials to bolster his case for national leadership.

He certainly hasn’t done much to earn the heaping amounts of candied praise drizzled upon him by his most ardent of supporters.  The recent op-ed written by Toronto Star staff writer Heather Mallick carries this praise to new levels of the absurd.  Mallick’s appraisal of Justin reaches seemingly new heights of the ridiculous and resemble the saccharine ramblings of an obsessed pop star fan rather than those of a staff writer for one of Canada’s largest circulating newspapers.  Of particular hilarity is this amusing sentence: “…I look at Trudeau dancing with his wife, his ease with his fellow humans, his best wishes for his — and our — children, the feeling that I am back in a world of plausibility, sanity, arts and science, good cheer.”  A line that is so ridiculously doe eyed that one could almost mistake it as intentionally satirical.

Canadians should have taken note of the dramatic rise and fall of Barack Obama’s political capital in the United States, however there is a seemingly large segment of our population that have missed the lessons of voting for celebrity over substance. We live in a time of both tremendous opportunity and tremendous turmoil; a time which requires more than a movie star look and likeability for a leader.  Like Obama before him, Trudeau has accomplished pretty close to nothing that would lend well to the running of a nation; a person cannot govern with personality alone.