Generation Exhausted: I Can See Clearly Now

For months now I've been trying to figure out what the heck the problem is over at The National Post. When the Post made its debut, I loved it - used to pick it up on Saturdays especially, when it was nice and thick and interesting. It even lured me away from the Sunday Detroit Free Press, and that's hard to do in a town that's right next door to the Motor City.

My opinion of the Post in those early days was not shared by many that I knew. Their loyalties lay with the Globe and Mail, Canada's next-best-thing to government-run media. I found the Globe stuffy and pretentious, and irrelevant. Reading the Globe felt like what I imagined High Tea with the Queen would be. The Post was more like the corner coffee shop (where everyone knows the true solutions to a nation's problems can be found).

But over the last six months, my infatuation with the Post has waned. At first, I thought it was due to my sudden realization that Rebecca Eckler, who used to be amusing, was, in fact, not a 22 year old party girl, but a thirty-something mother-to-be. Eckler's antics and Barbie-doll infatuation with herself (this is my water-skiing outfit and this is my dancing dress) were understandable - even entertaining, on occasion - when I thought she was a college-age party girl. Imagine my shock - nay, horror - when I realized that the most self-involved and shallow personality on the national media scene was actually a grown-up. And that she was going to have a child.

I've followed Eckler's writing since the spring, and if she has one thing going for her it's that she never ceases to amaze. I'm not quite sure who the Post is targeting by keeping Eckler on - surely to God it can't be Generation X, who realized long ago that the apathetic slacker mentality was best left behind. While the rest of us fret about RESPs and RRSPs, and whether or not Junior has ADD, she's counting her shoes and fussing about facials.

If the Post is wanting a columnist that real Canadians can identify with, perhaps they should look for someone who's greatest concern this week is a little more serious than whether or not Mercury is in retrograde. As it stands, they're missing the mark entirely. One can only hope that when she does give birth, she doesn't regale us with tales of how hard it is to find someone to style that baby's hair.

But through the spring and summer, I read and I wondered. And then Steyn disappeared, and more recently Blatchford went walking too. And they, aside from my scene-of-the-car-crash attraction to Eckler, were my favourite columnists.

Steyn finally explains his departure on his Web site, and it's obvious I should have read the business pages more closely. His rationale makes sense, but it's just one more example of how much of Canadian society and culture - be it government, media, book publishing or academia - is based on what an elite group believes we should want rather than what we do want.

Side note: Eckler appears to have ended up with egg on her face after a recent column, and true to her Valley Girl soul, she wears it with pride. Thus verifying that the Post has gone too far in giving this "My pretty little head can't handle the serious stuff" columnist virtual carte blanche. The next thing you know, they'll be placing the Post next to the Enquirer in the grocery store.

Perhaps I'll go back to the Freep.