Heather Mallick shines in a Star feature

7 posts / 0 new

Wed, 2011-09-07 10:40

Gaian

Will try to give a precis of Heather's piece. While attempting that, here's a piece from the days when she broke with Rabble and we lost a marvelously honest voice (although had she not gone public with the break, perhaps we would not still be reading her stuff in the Star ? )

Life's a slice of demographic pie

Wanted: Married white females with children

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 | 4:38 PM ET

By Heather Mallick CBC News

Heather Mallick

Stephen Harper's Conservatives yearn for me. It was a shock to find out that I am part of their target demographic.

The Toronto Star ran a novella recently on Harper's failure to win a majority. In a piece headlined "How Harper Let It Slip Away," reporter Kenneth Kidd recited the prime minister's yearnings for particular slices of the Canadian people pie, based on socio-economic data and dressed up by marketing experts to breathe life into social segments.

"The Tories knew, for instance that they had an opening with married women who have children, but it was [a marketer] who dubbed them 'Heather,' as in 'Steve and Heather,' a married Protestant couple with three kids."

My name is Heather. But how did Steve Harper know I'm married? To a guy named Steve, no less? And that we have kids and are nominally Protestant?

How did he know that I am politically vulnerable in the sense that, as the years pass, I have come to despise the hard left (to be fair, the Canadian hard left despises me as well) and am a bit of a drifting voter? I haven't even told My Steve that yet.

Wed, 2011-09-07 11:02

Gaian

Heather writes (and I hope that someone can link with the page A21 opinion piece):

"If you thought the actual day of Sept.11,2001 , was terrible, how fortunate that you couldn't envision the subsequent decade. It's actually easier to recall the day itself because it was so purely bad, and thus simple...It's instructive to remember that young people you talk to will recall hearing the news in, say, Grade 4 gym class, and they are the people who will pay most heavily for the mistakes made the day after and all the days after that. ...And politicians in the West reacted in a way that was actually suited more to Grade 4 children than to adults...Canada and most of the West went along with it, and look at us now.

"Joseph Stiglitz estimates the cost to America alone of its failed wars lies at between $4 trillion and $6trillion, and that's a conservative number. The hideous social cost has been incalculable...Star reporter Michelle Shepard's extraordinary new book on the catastrophes that followed the initial one in New York that day is titled Decade of Fear. That sums it up beautifully. People became afraid to speak out over the non-stop yelling of Fox News...Who knows how the story will play out? America's decline began long before the new century and George W.Bush's mistakes only hastened it. And I'd take Dubya over Gov. Rick Perry any day. How I hated writing that last sentence. When I study Richard Drew's photograph of 'The Falling Man," that one picture of the 200 or so who jumped from the Twin Towers, I shiver. It only took 10 seconds for that man to die. What I didn't realize is that we would spend the next 10 years falling with him.

"If that's not an indictment of American folly, I don't know what is."

Wed, 2011-09-07 11:16

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

Why doesn't Mallick talk about Canada? Hasn't she been living here for the past 10 years? Isn't she writing for a Canadian audience? Haven't we endured enough home-grown [s]bullshit[/s] "folly" over the past decade because of 9/11?

Wed, 2011-09-07 14:55

lagatta

She penned an utterly despicable comment piece singling out "cyclists" because some jerk on a bicycle was riding dangerously on a sidewalk, struck and killed an elderly man. Does she do this every time a frigging car kills or maims a pedestrian or cyclist? No way. I remember an over the top bad sex metaphor about the impending Rob Ford election. Now she is in bed with the creep.

Like duh, of course cyclists shouldn't ride on the pavements - or ever ride in such a ways as do imperil pedestrians. But she wrote this in the context of a city that is waging war on us.

Yep, as a hard leftist of the ecosocialist variety, I despise her.

Wed, 2011-09-07 15:30

Gaian

Thanks for bringing me up to date, lagatta. I did not know. And I'm not about to subscribe to the Star to find out more about her politics today. As a ecosocialist I obviously must not be so starry-eyed about a single piece written by a (formerly) vipen. :(

Wed, 2011-09-07 15:58

Catchfire

Previous babble threads on Mallick:

Heather Mallick's Column (and part 2)

Heather Mallick's Article is Ageist

Heather Mallick and Wal-mart

Palin, Mallick, feminism: rabble shock & awe

Heather Mallick and Julie Couillard

Mallick: Time for someone to speak up for shy girls

Thu, 2011-09-08 08:46

Wilf Day

Gaian wrote:

Heather writes (and I hope that someone can link with the page A21 opinion piece):

It only took 10 seconds for that man to die. What I didn't realize is that we would spend the next 10 years falling with him.

Excellent piece. Thanks. Here's your link.

When she wrote "Canada and most of the West went along with it, and look at us now" I initially quibbled "But we didn't go along with the invasion of Iraq." But as she says "the list of self-inflicted injuries is so long that it wouldn’t fit into this column space" and it's long enough to include Canada.