Like thousands of people from Quebec, I listened a lot to André Arthur.
He sometimes invited me to his show, where I was a very bad columnist. I was losing my means at his microphone, sabotaging myself, even if he was very nice to me. After a few ridiculous tries, he stopped inviting me, much to my relief.
My favorite column on his show was the one where he was talking to a lady who went through grocery store flyers to give us the best deals of the week. It was funny, full of sarcasm, we guessed that Arthur was making fun of his guest a little, but that he liked her too. He laughed at her, who suspected nothing, it seemed to us. It was an awkward balancing act of which he had the secret.
It wasn’t very bad. I wrote a few crap in my early years as a columnist that were far worse than that.
But never have I been as odious as André Arthur. Nor as petty. Nor as vain.
If he wanted to clean up local politics, he did it with a high-pressure washer, and produced another form of pollution that spread and eventually became the trademark of what is disdainfully called « radio of Quebec”. This, even if no one, not even Jeff Fillion, has come close to King Arthur. Nor in intelligence. Nor in talent. Even less maliciously.
That he maintained a climate of mistrust towards politicians was perfectly justifiable. And justified. I know enough about the municipal political milieu of the 1990s to know that certain cliques deserved to be denounced.
But was it necessary to insult people? Drag them through the mud? Spreading lies about them because he was convinced he had the truth, without proof?
Arthur’s misbehaviors were so numerous that one could say that someone who also drove coaches in his spare time had become accustomed to almost permanent skidding.
Ah, it was a good show, it’s true. The intellectual equivalent of a demolition derby or the Monster Spectacular. So much the worse for truth and dignity, he said: “no right to be flat”. Even if it meant crushing the world around it quite sadistically.
The curious—including myself sometimes—listened to Arthur because his show was a permanent car accident. The kind that slows down traffic, people wondering if they won’t see an injured person, a corpse.
And the host left a whole host of wounded and dead bodies in his wake.
He was a staunch defender of freedom of expression without limits, except those imposed by the courts. But few of his victims had the means, emotional or financial, to defend their honor in court. He knew it very well. He abused it and we guessed that this destructive power that he held until his last days, behind his keyboard rather than at a microphone, gave him a permanent intoxication.
If we measure the importance of public figures by their heritage, the one left by Arthur has absolutely nothing glorious about it. He foreshadowed the disgusting era of attack ad hominem that we live today. Both on “opinion” radio and in social networks.
But what we must remember is not so much the famous duality of the character, talented and with an ego so disproportionate that he could push him to scuttle himself to be right.
What we must remember, again and again, is that the antennas took advantage of the talent of this braggart to enrich themselves with such unscrupulous advertisers. This trade in attention was done in hatred, in defiance of justice, with unforgivable arrogance. Staggering amounts of half-truths or slanderous lies spouted in his shows were for the benefit of a show that undermined the democracy that the host claimed to defend.
And it was André Arthur’s employers who benefited the most. It is up to them to bear the shame of putting its atrocities on the air.
After all, clowns need a tent to put on a show. I recall, for the record, that Arthur began his program with the opening track of the Muppet Show. He too was a puppet. Just as odious, if not more so, than the elite he denounced.
#remember #André #Arthur
