Last Sunday’s Toronto Star did not land on the porch with the seismic thud of the Saturday Star, but it carried a heavy load of expectation. It was the new, redesigned, new, rethunk, new — well, you get it. I fretted, uncertain I could handle the change. I thought maybe there’d been a glitch because I couldn’t see a difference. It looked and read like the old paper, maybe it was a tad altered, good thing they kept telling you how new it was. It had a major piece by philosophy prof and pop journalist Mark Kingwell on The Power of New, which went on for quite a while till it started to feel a bit, ah, familiar. Plus interviews of Torontonians with the last name, New.

For the new year, CBC Newsworld has a new nightly show called The Hour, which I keep thinking of as The New. Its host is ex-MuchMusic VJ George Stroumboulopoulos, on a funky set, with spiky hair and ear and nose rings, which are irrelevant, as he always tells interviewers, who always ask. He is the latest answer to the CBC quest for the new and the young, which is ancient. I’ve seen little new in it: a phone call with a guy stuck on the tarmac at Pearson who everyone else called, the hockey talks, a swipe at North Korea that had the faux gutsiness of CBC’s Rex Murphy taking on Osama bin Laden.

A quality of Ralph Benmergui hovers over the show: a sense of trying too hard, yearning for success and approval, which doesn’t quite go with alternate or edgy. Like what? “I can’t believe he asked if those guys had chlamydia,” chortled George about one of his regular reporters, as if underlining the guy’s off-the-wallness for us. (The real Ralph Benmergui has renewed himself as the morning DJ on the FM jazz station and good luck to him.) There was even a touch of Pierre Berton, rest his soul, when George said, “I go around this world and tell people Canadians are not boring.”

U.S. inaugurations are often about newness: FDR’s New Deal or JFK’s “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Plus lots of freedom talk, as in JFK’s “Ask not what America will do for you but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” Yesterday’s Bush speech was mostly on freedom: “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” But free and new seem to go together.

For whatever it’s worth, and after the past few days, I’ve concluded human beings don’t do new well. It doesn’t come naturally. That’s naturally in the sense of nature, which we are part of and cannot transcend. Everything follows (and returns) from what already is. You see it in children, who love doing or hearing something “again” (repetition was the allure of Teletubbies). They have to be coaxed or bribed into the new. They’d rather you read them a book or watch a video for the 80th time, and that seems to me wise. All you get from the first go-through is a rough feel. The rest remains to be retold and deepened, as people did with their tales for millenniums until the invention of print.

Humans are compulsive and repetitive; it’s their nature. It must have taken vast pressure on human nature to rejig it to only read something once and then move on, much like training it to rise at 7 each morning, whether the sun was up or not, and work for eight hours a day, whether the work was done yet or not.

We (humans) are better at renewal, which, in drastic form, happens at each birth. We also do evolution, which involves tiny alterations on the basis of what was there before. We do change, which can go in any direction, including change for the sake of justice, itself based on a notion of what in essence was already there, what “ought” to have always been. Pure newness in itself is a kind of phantasm or nightmare, grotesque in the sense of unnatural, probably conjured from a sick or wicked mind. Everything must be constructed out of the materials at hand; how could it be otherwise?

Even revolution, watchword of the modern era: Isn’t it about Out with the old and in with the new? Not necessarily. Think of the original meaning of the term: turning a thing around until it returns to where it was. Whether it’s then new, or a renewal or something else, is incidental . . .

rick_salutin_small_24_1_1_1_1_0

Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.