What's the dirt on Justin Trudeau?

[isvicthere?]

Son of the more famous Pierre.

And wasn't his mum featured prominently in the Stones' song "Respectable"?

 

[D'wards]

And wasn't his mum featured prominently in the Stones' song "Respectable"?

Some say that his mum enjoyed an orgy with the Stones. Some say...

 

[Idris2002]

And wasn't his mum featured prominently in the Stones' song "Respectable"?

Some say that his mum enjoyed an orgy with the Stones. Some say...

I remember asking my mum and dad about her, and being told to shut up (clip round the ear, bed with no supper, etc.)

 

[Idris2002]

The thing about these pics is that in addition to the obvious problem, they're also uniquely creepy - "Canada's 100 Worst Serial Killers" creepy, I mean.

 

[agricola]

The thing about these pics is that in addition to the obvious problem, they're also uniquely creepy - "Canada's 100 Worst Serial Killers" creepy, I mean.

Top right looks more like the mummified body of Thutmose IV playing an uncredited extra in some kind of 80s college caper, tbf.

 

[danny la rouge]

Top right looks more like the mummified body of Thutmose IV playing an uncredited extra in some kind of 80s college caper, tbf.

What’s wrong with anchovies?

 

[SheilaNaGig]

I never watched it that much, but I took Papa Lazarou to be a representation of a white man in black face, not one of the actors blacking up to play a black person.

I assumed Papa Lazarou was based on the Vodou god Papa Legba. And so having a black man play him wasn't anything like tricksterish or sinister or transgressive enough, so it had to be made nasty and subversive. B&W minstrel black up with the added twist of the white make-up beneath the black make up seems to hit those marks pretty well.

True, he sometimes presents as a kindly being, but that's just another trick.

Anyway. Whatever. It may have nothing to do with that.

I found the whole of League of Gentlemen uncomfortable so didn't watch much of it. Little Britain was rubbish. I only watched enough to realise it was one thin joke stretched even thinner and didn't bother with it after that.

 

[Idris2002]

I assumed Papa Lazarou was based on the Vodou god Papa Legba. And so having a black man play him wasn't anything like tricksterish or sinister or transgressive enough, so it had to be made nasty and subversive. B&W minstrel black up with the added twist of the white make-up beneath the black make up seems to hit those marks pretty well.

True, he sometimes presents as a kindly being, but that's just another trick.

Anyway. Whatever. It may have nothing to do with that.

I found the whole of League of Gentlemen uncomfortable so didn't watch much of it. Little Britain was rubbish. I only watched enough to realise it was one thin joke stretched even thinner and didn't bother with it after that.

League of Gentlemen was the first thing I ever watched where I thought "is this meant to be funny?" There's a much better '50s movie of the same title, which is worth seking out.

 

[Clair De Lune]

I most certainly have not come on here to defend him...cos I'm genuinely shocked that nobody told him at the time that his 'fancy dress' was bang out of order. He was 29 ffs. What kinda people was he associating with all those years to cause him to be so unbelievably ignorant? And working in a school too

But this thread has given me pause for thought..I'm thinking about how much the world has changed since my youth and how those who haven't moved with the times look like such ignorant and offensive dinosaurs now. I mean I remember a time when a lot of white people ( and I mean most people I encountered uncomfortably) thought they were only racist if they hated and attacked black and brown people. Like that was the line. So anything like racist jokes, stereotyping, using words like 'paki' for their local shopkeeper was fine in their eyes because they knew (thought) that they weren't being unkind or hostile.


These days we are a bit more aware of the fact that growing up white means we're all capable of being unwittingly racist quite a lot of the time. It's a horrible and uncomfortable realisation, but a necessary one. Even for arseholes like me that thought they weren't part of the problem

I'll be honest n say I'd not even considered whether papa Lazarus was racist. I dunno what I thought he was meant to be tbh. I remember a mate dressing up as him for Halloween though and thinking hmm not sure I would have..so there was an inkling of something
Little Britain was blatantly shocking and offensive in its punching downwards 'humour' and incredibly unfunny imo.

But back to Trudeau, I can quite believe that he didn't think he was being racist. That he wasn't applying any joined up thinking at all. Ignorance isn't always about prejudice. Sometimes it's just thoughtlessness or stupidity. I don't really give a fuck about heart throb Trudeau either way. I think he'll prob get away with this purely because he's been blessed with good looks tbh but I do wish he'd looked more embarrassed about it.

 

[8ball]

I most certainly have not come on here to defend him...cos I'm genuinely shocked that nobody told him at the time that his 'fancy dress' was bang out of order. He was 29 ffs. What kinda people was he associating with all those years to cause him to be so unbelievably ignorant? And working in a school too

But this thread has given me pause for thought..I'm thinking about how much the world has changed since my youth and how those who haven't moved with the times look like such ignorant and offensive dinosaurs now. I mean I remember a time when a lot of white people ( and I mean most people I encountered uncomfortably) thought they were only racist if they hated and attacked black and brown people. Like that was the line. So anything like racist jokes, stereotyping, using words like 'paki' for their local shopkeeper was fine in their eyes because they knew (thought) that they weren't being unkind or hostile.


These days we are a bit more aware of the fact that growing up white means we're all capable of being unwittingly racist quite a lot of the time. It's a horrible and uncomfortable realisation, but a necessary one. Even for arseholes like me that thought they weren't part of the problem

I'll be honest n say I'd not even considered whether papa Lazarus was racist. I dunno what I thought he was meant to be tbh. I remember a mate dressing up as him for Halloween though and thinking hmm not sure I would have..so there was an inkling of something
Little Britain was blatantly shocking and offensive in its punching downwards 'humour' and incredibly unfunny imo.

But back to Trudeau, I can quite believe that he didn't think he was being racist. That he wasn't applying any joined up thinking at all. Ignorance isn't always about prejudice. Sometimes it's just thoughtlessness or stupidity. I don't really give a fuck about heart throb Trudeau either way. I think he'll prob get away with this purely because he's been blessed with good looks tbh but I do wish he'd looked more embarrassed about it.

The only bit of that I disagree with is that to me, he really did look embarrassed.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

Yer, exactly Clair De Lune .

When I think back, I did find Little Britain more bad than “rubbish” : it so blatantly targeted so much stuff on purpose, and that was the entirety of the joke.

I’m not sure how Gaia knows that neither BAME people nor people with disabilities were offended by the show. I suspect that people were offended, but everyone was just expected to suck it up and turn a blind eye and just deal with it back then.

I thought it was horrible.
One stupid joke, over and over again.



Papa Lazarou.... as I said, I didn’t watch the show much but when I caught sight of PL I was really taken aback, I did think “my god, that’s really bad, it’s racist” . But it seemed so unlikely that it would get to the screen at all that I then possibly over-thought it and got to the thing of it being about a Papa Legba. Which is not to say that it being Papa Legba would make it less racist, but I thought perhaps it’s was too-clever-by-half “irony” racism rather than just straight up stupid racism. Which says as much about me as it does about the people who made the show.

But it was ugly about Trans people as well.


As for Trudeau. I’m only surprised this didn’t come out earlier, except of course there’s an election to be lost.

 

[spanglechick]

Little Britain was racist, as was Come Fly With Me, (by the same people) which was launched on Xmas day 2010. Not even nine years ago. I wrote to the BBC about CFWM, because I couldn’t believe they were *still* condoning blackface, and received a nothing reply about how tastes are personal etc.

League of Gentlemen wasn’t something I watched at the time, and in pictures the character does look like boot-polish minstrelsy. But the name Papa Lazarou does, as SheilaNaGig says, directly reference Voodoo culture and given that, I’m afraid I’ve got to say it is blackface and doesn’t get a pass, no matter how much I love the other work they’ve done.

It’s worth saying, too, that while blackface has been extinct in Hollywood for a while (the last notable example is probably Olivier’s Othello in 1965 - which got a fair bit of criticism even then) but that brownface is more or less alive and well - Christian Bale (among others) in Ridley Scott’s epic Gods of Egypt only a few years ago causing the first big backlash against this.

Hearing about the Trudeau story on the radio, it sounded like he might have gone for this kind of subtler and, at the time “less recognised as racist” makeup job. The photos, though, leave no room for plausible historical relativism. It’s overly thick, comedy brownface. I’ve never seen imagery of Aladdin with skin that dark - the brownface is the aim of the outfit, rather than incidental.

 

[Thora]

I have also learned a lot from this thread. I had never thought about Papa Lazarou in racist terms, but I hadn't realised he was supposed to be blacked up/in blackface. I knew the name 'Black and White Minstrels' but I hadn't realised it was white men in blackface (I've just been wikipediaing). Think I had assumed Minstrels were black performers doing kind of stereotyped entertainment for white audiences

Our understanding of racism has changed rapidly over the last 20 years, for sure - but even 10-15 years ago I remember blacking up being shocking. One incident I remember was being in Germany and white kids in nativity plays being painted brown to be one of the three kings (Germans seemed cool with it but English and Americans were ). Another time about 10 years ago me and Mr Thora saw a stag party in Bristol dressed as pirates - one of them was blacked up as a Somali pirate and we were pretty shocked. And those are the only two times I can think of that I've seen people blacked up so it's not as if fancy dress parties used to be full of it...
So I don't know - at high school in the 90s I think he could get away with 'didn't understand this to be racism' but aged 29 in 2001, he must have known he was on pretty dodgy ground and done it anyway...

 

[D'wards]

His new twitter image.

Well that settles it, how can he possibly be racist? He's having a friendly conversation with a black man.

 

[Idris2002]

He looks like he's about to get a punch in the gob.

 

[Dogsauce]

So the ‘dirt’ on Trudeau appears to be boot polish...

 

[Proper Tidy]

His new twitter image.

Well that settles it, how can he possibly be racist? He's having a friendly conversation with a black man.
View attachment 184835

Actually it's a mirror

 

[Idris2002]

So the ‘dirt’ on Trudeau appears to be boot polish...

In fairness to the poor eejit, he's spent his whole life in his Da's shadow:

"Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau has ranked as the worst Canadian according to an online poll, beating out notorious killers Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka and Clifford Olsen."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/trudeau-voted-worst-canadian-in-unscientific-online-poll-1.675408

 

[elbows]

Amazing couple of pages. It was absolutely considered racist in 2001 to do blackface. I went to school in the 70s and I knew then it was racist. I remember the criticism of the Black and White Minstrel Show at the time. My Da, now on his 80s, was aware of that at the time. We discussed it. He was against minstrelsy’s bizarre stereotyping. In the 1970s. This wasn’t some rarified academic debate designed to trip up the unwary masses. It was covered in the Daily Record (a Scottish tabloid we had in our house in those days). So the idea that an adult working as a teacher in this century didn’t know, let’s put it it charitably, that there were even “boundaries that might be being crossed” is fucking bonkers. He knew. This wasn’t some naive kid.

Might he have changed? Sure. It was 20 years ago. But he fucking knew.

Another historical example would be things from the 1960s and 1970s that involved Spike Milligan as a terrible caricature of a Pakistani immigrant, and how these shows were received at the time, and how long they lasted.

Curry and Chips - Wikipedia 1969

The Melting Pot (TV series) - Wikipedia 1975

There will be plenty of other examples too. Including Jimmy Perry trying to defend Michael Bates role in It Aint Half Hot Mum from the mid 1970's, protesting decades later that "All Michael Bates [...] wore was a light tan. He wasn’t blacked up! Michael spoke fluent Urdu, and was a captain in the Gurkhas".

Regarding the Minstrel show, I was under the impression that after the controversy reached a certain level they did a series with no blackface and then went back to more series with blackface afterwards! Another example where the problems with this shit were known for a long time but the response was often weak and mixed and some things lingered for a long time.

I dont watch a lot of modern telly, I think the last thing I saw that made me go 'oh god' on this front was the Tina Turner impression in Psychoville. As with much comedy I'm sure all sorts of justifications can be come up with, eg in this case if I remember properly, the audience knowing that news of a terminal illness was coming was juxtaposed by the extreme awkwardness & racism of the impression. I am often not entirely convinced by such things.

 

[Idris2002]

On phone, so no link, but JT has now been endorsed by. . . Barack Obama.

I wonder how he swung that one?

 

[redsquirrel]

Pretty consistent with both of their's politics really isn't it?

(After all Obama soft supported Cameron)

 

[Idris2002]

Well, there is that, yes.

 

[Yossarian]

The real boost for Trudeau will be if Trump hears something about the Obama endorsement on Fox News and decides to give Andrew Scheer some fulsome praise.

 

[spring-peeper]

The real boost for Trudeau will be if Trump hears something about the Obama endorsement on Fox News and decides to give Andrew Scheer some fulsome praise.

Maxime Bernier would be Trump's politician of choice.

 

[spring-peeper]

hmmm - the games continue

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said on Wednesday that he stayed seated while members of Parliament sang O Canada after voting to change the lyrics three years ago because the Liberal government was using Canada’s national anthem for “a political statement.”

Scheer’s comments came a few hours after Marc Garneau ⁠— a longtime MP and minister of transport in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet ⁠— tweeted video of MPs singing O Canada in the House of Commons during the third reading of C-210, a bill that sought to amend the lyrics of the national anthem to make them gender-neutral.

Scheer remained seated and appears, in the footage, to be looking at his phone.

Liberals post video of Scheer sitting during ‘O Canada’; Tory leader says they politicized anthem

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

hmmm - the games continue



Liberals post video of Scheer sitting during ‘O Canada’; Tory leader says they politicized anthem

Seems fair enough

 

[redsquirrel]

What are people's predictions for Monday then?

 

[Yossarian]

What are people's predictions for Monday then?

With a different leader, I would predict a "surprise" surge for Andrew Scheer and a narrow Conservative majority, but nobody likes Scheer so I think there's a good chance of a Liberal-NDP coalition, with Trudeau remaining as prime minister. Not ideal, but still hopefully the most leftist government Canada has had in a generation or two.

 

[redsquirrel]

With a different leader, I would predict a "surprise" surge for Andrew Scheer and a narrow Conservative majority, but nobody likes Scheer so I think there's a good chance of a Liberal-NDP coalition, with Trudeau remaining as prime minister. Not ideal, but still hopefully the most leftist government Canada has had in a generation or two.

Cheers.

You think it will be an official coalition or more of a confidence and supply arrangement?

 

[Yossarian]

Cheers.

You think it will be an official coalition or more of a confidence and supply arrangement?

I'm hoping for an official coalition - I think the Liberals will be weakened enough to agree.