Rex Murphy is an accomplished rhetorician with a swift tongue. He pontificates with flowery rhetoric on CBC Television, dogmatizes to guests on talk radio and often scribbles a demagogic quill for nationally-syndicated newspaper columns.

He once too was an admired figure in Canada’s media landscape, a Rhodes scholar who dazzled with poetic delivery, spoken and written, while bestowing a peculiar wisdom idiosyncratic of a seemingly gifted intellect.

So why did such an illustrious figure fall off? How did Rex Murphy descend from the summit of eloquence to the noxious morass of self-righteous zealotry? At which point, to borrow a phrase from journalist Graham Templeton, did he go “from critic to crackpot”?

In a recent op-ed (“A rude dismissal of Canada’s generosity”, National Post, October 19) responding to shale gas and fracking protesters near the Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick, the author typified his decline in unsettling fashion.

For Murphy, Idle No More is but an “interlude” in a war of words. Barely a march of self-determination, he contends, or a movement which places a lens on Canada’s colonial past (and present), it represents a “very raw and provocative insult” to the compassion and atonement of the “majority of [Canadian] citizens” who have given so much to native peoples since slaughtering and abusing them for the better part of two centuries.

Canada, after all, is a much different place now than it was 200 years ago, Murphy says. It is wholly unconscionable, then, for aboriginal communities – victims of social engineering, confinement on reserves and pervasive racism – to speak in the language of “oppression studies” and “colonial theory”, borrowed from the ivory tower of ‘radicalized’ professors.

The roots of Idle No More are indeed clear to Murphy, as is the origin of the protest near Rexton, NB which was met with brutal RCMP repression and violence. According to the author, the Mi’kmaq demonstration was an affront, a rude provocation, not a response to extant colonial conditions, corporate pillaging of natural resources and violated treaties. What is more, it defies what he astonishingly describes as “an attitude of singular respect for native peoples... shown in a hundred different ways every day”.

The othering and condescension in his prose is abject, but Murphy’s longstanding white guilt emerges when he asks if the “efforts to respond to native grievance, both financial and political... [have] been for nothing?”

Tepid compassion though it is, Murphy might do best to visit one of the many Manitoba reserves without running water, or to speak with the countless aboriginal homeless and downtrodden lining the thoroughfares of major urban centres, to gauge the utter failure of the “efforts” he so applauds. 

A glaring attribute of the hypocrite, however, is always a failure to look inward, to identify one’s own blindness – that which Idle No More and the Elsipogtog First Nation were attempting to expose last week. Their effort and sacrifice is not just for the future of native peoples, but for figures like Rex Murphy who so consistently deny reality to suit a certain truth, to bolster an easy claim or ignore the pained cries of thousands for change.

Harrison Samphir is the Uniter’s senior editor. He also writes about politics, national and global affairs at Rabble.ca and Truthout.org.

Published in Volume 68, Number 8 of The Uniter (October 23, 2013)