15: What's In a Name? The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal

15 

 What’s In a Name?

The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal 

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?’ asked the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. This reminds me of the advice that talk show host Shelagh Rogers gave to the guest host that usurped her position on the CBC radio show Sounds Like Canada, which eventually became the popular cultural affairs show Q, advice that was solicited by the impertinent usurper. Shelagh told him to repeat his name as often as possible, “to get it out there,” which he did with such orgiastic glee so many times throughout the show that was cunningly rebranded into Q with Jian Ghomeshi that I could no longer stand to listen to the show because he grated my nerves every time he said his name; it was obscene.

I listened to Q for the interviews, and I listened to Q with Jian Ghomeshi for the interviews, a habit that I had gotten into from listening to its forerunner Morningside initially hosted by Don Harron and then by the inimitable Peter Gzowski who made it Canada’s favorite talk show, but Jian Ghomeshi rebranded the show so successfully that it was picked up for syndication care of Public Radio International, and by the time CBC was forced to let him go it was airing on more than 180 stations in the States; but I sacrificed Q with Jian Ghomeshi because I could no longer suffer Jian Ghomeshi, who after years of hosting the show and becoming the entitled 47 year old golden boy superstar who preyed on young women was fired by the CBC and criminally charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking and is now awaiting trial.

When the story broke, I wrote a poem and posted it on Facebook under the heading “The disgraced talking head.” But—surprise, surprise!—no one caught the reference: 

Puer Aeaternus 

Icarus flew too close to the sun

And the light of all the attention he craved

Singed his wings

And he came tumbling down,

And down, and down,

And down. 

In Jungian psychology, “the archetypal image of a boy reluctant to mature is referred to as Puer aeternus, Latin for “eternal boyhood,” an adult man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. He lives out experiences for their excitement, lives in fantasies, and ‘flies high.’ Trapped in his boyish ways, he has poor boundaries, flees from commitments and difficult situations, sees the world and himself through rose-coloured glasses, and essentially resists growing up.” If the shoe fits…

 

I knew that one day Shelagh Roger’s advice to Jian Ghomeshi, whose fantasy ideal was the androgynous British rock star David Bowie, would inspire a spiritual musing, so I kept the thought neatly tucked away in the back of my mind; and as I was reading The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss this morning, his chapter “Mark Twain’s Rhyming Life” set my thought free with the title “What’s in a Name?” and I wondered why; so, I called upon my Muse to explore this intriguing question of personal identity.

Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens’s pen name, borrowed from the Mississippi River boatman’s cry “Mark Twain,” meaning two fathoms, safe water; a name that Samuel Clemens immortalized with what has been called “the Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Hemingway praised in Green Hills of Africa as America’s finest novel—“All American literature comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”—and I couldn’t help but feel that Jian Ghomeshi wanted to immortalize his own name by repeating it ad museum on his show; but there was something so wrong about the way he went about staking his claim to immortality that I knew one day he would come tumbling down, hence my poem Puer Aeternus.

“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus, addressing man’s paradoxical nature. This speaks to what C. G. Jung called the individuation process, the essential premise being the integration of our outer self with our inner self—or what Jung called Personality No. 1, and Personality No. 2, and what I simply refer to as our authentic/inauthentic self; a process that requires so much wisdom, skill, commitment, and sacrifice that it keeps most people from realizing their true identity, or what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self” and Jesus called “life eternal,” and I knew that Jian Ghomeshi had taken the wrong path in his life’s journey.

In my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, I explored how Hemingway’s No. 1 Personality (his insatiable ego and monstrous shadow) fueled his desire to become the best writer of his generation, and he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 with the publication of his most popular novel The Old Man and the Sea; but he paid such a dear price for his accomplishment that he could no longer repress the guilt of his betrayals and self-betrayals, and with brutal honesty (his literary credo was to “tell it  the way it was”) the 61 year old suicidal depressive confessed that he would rather have died than betray his first wife, which led to three more contentious marriages and the iconic writer that he became. “When I saw my wife (Hadley Richardson) again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her,” he remorsefully confessed in his melancholy memoir A Moveable Feast, the book that he was working on before shooting himself with his favorite shotgun.

Driven by daemonic passion, Hemingway took the ersatz way of ego to realize his lifelong dream of stepping into the ring with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the world’s great writers, but it brought his full but incomplete life to a sorry, tragic end; and though he still has time to redeem himself (which I seriously doubt), Jian Ghomeshi took the selfish worldly way of ego also and sabotaged his life with his preference for what he casually referred to as “rough sex,” which he foolishly confessed to on Facebook to cleverly pre-empt the inevitable consequences of his behavior. So afflicted was he by the sexual passions of his obsessive shadow that he had become morally obtuse in his relationships, until reality caught up to him when he brazenly showed his bosses at the CBC a video of him having “rough” but “consensual” sex with a bruised young woman. 

Gosh darn, they didn’t overlook his kinky private pleasure. Quelle surprise!

Debbie Ford called this kind of stupid self-sabotaging behavior “the shadow effect,” which can take a lifetime to repair, if at all; but whatever we call it, it’s all part of the inherently self-correcting karmic dynamic of the natural process of individuation, and Jian Ghomeshi’s aberrant little chickens finally came home to roost.

We all pay for our sins eventually, and for all of his wit, charm, and intelligence CBC’s 47 year old golden boy was played for a fool by his own shadow; and although Jian Ghomeshi got all the attention that he craved, it cost him dearly, and I can’t help but feel that Shelagh Rogers, who happily hosts her own show The Next Chapter that I enjoy for all the writers she interviews, is smiling to herself at her usurper host’s Faustian fall from grace—“for God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil,” concluded the Preacher in Ecclesiastes.  

♥