A major chapter in Canadian history closed this weekend, as the iconic host of Jeopardy! for more than thirty-five years, Alex Trebek, succumbed to a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer at the age of 80.
I wanted to offer a few thoughts on what Trebek's passing means not only for Canada, but for this current moment we're all going through right now. First off, I want to say that I'm probably not alone when I say that when it comes to 2020 —
Second of all, I want to point out that there probably wouldn't be an Alex Trebek were it not for the national broadcaster that Eric O'Foole wants to get rid of. It was none other than Trebek's friend, the also dearly departed Canadian entertainer Alan Thicke, who offered Trebek his first breakthrough hosting gig in L.A. in 1973, having been impressed by the varied work he had done at the CBC for ten years prior. Indeed, Trebek was once a proto-Dick Clark of the North for a teenage dance-hall program called Music Hop that could very well have been called Canadian Bandstand.
So when Eric O'Foole rails about defunding the CBC, remember that if guys like him were in charge, Alex Trebek would have been pretty much nobody. Wrong answer, Eric.
But beyond all of that, I want to talk about the significance of Trebek's signature hosting gig and the threat of populism, that not only didn't abate with Donald Trump's unsettlingly narrow loss but proved itself stubbornly resilient. In his tribute to Trebek on Twitter, Justin Trudeau — teacher, avid reader, son of a prime ministerial polymath — was keen to point out that for three-plus decades, Trebek made it cool to be smart. The thing that made Jeopardy! stand out, among other flashy whiz-bang game shows with showcase showdowns and the buying of vowels, among the rest of the American television wasteland of goofy sitcoms, sensationalistic cable "news" ushering in an era of "infotainment" and shouty "punditry" lacking substance, and whatever came on during Showtime After Dark, was that it was the thinking person's Q&A segment.
In short, it was the quintessentially Canadian game show, a subtle yet smashing success for the quiet intellectual. Especially when the glamorous yet dopey Hollywood celebrities (minus Sean Connery and Burt Reynolds, in real life) found themselves outmatched in a battle of wits with the nerdy philosophy grad from Sudbury, Ontario. For thirty minutes a night from Monday through Friday, Trebek was the man with all the answers... even if he was holding them on an index card.
But Trebek wasn't really an all-knowing oracle and like a humble Canadian, he didn't want people to think of him as such. Rather, what he encouraged viewers to do is to develop a genuine love of learning. A healthy skepticism and inquisitiveness about the world around them, balanced with a trust in, and respect for, experts in their field.
Which brings me to the spectre of populism and this curious and fractious moment when both of those things are on the decline. The death of a celebrity intellectual within the same week as a contentious election loss in the most powerful country on the planet by a president who came to power expressing fondness for "the poorly educated," an election that proved to be more of a nail-biter than expected and still registered a major backlash against the bookworms and credentialed experts of the world, during a global pandemic, could probably be parsed as an omen of something.
In other words: will the future belong to the Trebekists (or Trudeauists), or the Trumpists (or Toole Men)? Because Trebek's home country is not immune to these forces, a paradoxical rejection of actual learning and the process of acquiring new facts as they come, while trusting charlatans who claim to have all the answers but whose responses usually come in the form of a Final Solution.
Canada's quasi-stealthily Trumpish Conservative Party and bitter, strident, desperate for existential relevance New Democrats are engaged in pincer warfare against Justin Trudeau and his Liberals, just like the Republicans and the alt-left "purity" wing of the Democrats are tag-teaming against the so-called "establishment" led by Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. They do not accept nuance or compromise because that's boring, it's too slow, it's fake news and it's a system rigged for "(corrupt) elites." They reject scientists on conspiratorial suspicions of them being "Liberal donors," "crisis-capitalist privateers," "plan-demic scaremongers," and "shills for Big Pharma." We know what happened in 1930s Germany when the hardline revolutionaries attacked the centrists using knee-jerk emotional rage appeals over reason and realpolitik.
I'll take "First they came..." for $200, Alex.
Dale Smith, Aaron Wherry, and Susan Delacourt (with help from pollster and social science researcher Frank Graves) all warned this week of the spectre of populism rearing its ugly head in Trebekistan. Another election seems all but inevitable in the early part of next year. Trebek himself was never known to wade into politics, but I can think of no better tribute than for his home country to stand on guard and reject those forces at the ballot box.
It's time to give the centre-left Liberals, imperfect though they might be, a majority mandate to continue delivering on the COVID-19 pandemic by trusting science, and on the eventual economic recovery by trusting experts and the lived experiences of the real people the economy affects. And doing it within the system rather than tearing it all down.
The million-dollar question, therefore, is if Canada will choose fact over fanaticism, or make the wrong guess betting the farm on Final Jeopardy.
I hope that they choose the science teacher from Papineau, Quebec. So far, he's a two-time champion. The odds may be tight, but with a little luck (and the right answers), the third time can be the charm.
Come on Canada. Do it for Alex. Let's make it a Tru' Daily Double.
