Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone. -Rex Murphy
A few years back, on an episode of the Short Cuts podcast, journalist Jan Wong stated the following: “seeing how Rex Murphy has evolved is weird [...] I think he went backwards.” She is referring here to what you could call the third and final act of Murphy’s career, mostly as a columnist for the National Post. His writing, which had been conservative-leaning and occasionally condescending, became marked by a tenor best described as petty, bitter and cruel. Murphy’s style also worsened, I’d argue; whereas earlier columns from the Globe and Mail or Ottawa Citizen show his strengths as a writer, the later ones tend towards the overwrought. (Perhaps earlier editors could temper the purple in his prose.)
Take a scroll through Murphy’s columns, stepping back in time towards the early 2010s, and you find a lot of fairly standard culture-war fare: an obsession with Justin Trudeau, with race and gender, with “cancel culture”, or – very oddly and very often – with that high priest of the manosphere, Jordan Peterson. They represent the sort of opinions you might associate with, in internet-speak, the Very Online, i.e. a mind lost to algorithmic echo chambers and rabbit holes. Not a particularly interesting or necessary contribution to the national conversation, in my view.
It speaks to the success of a writer, I suppose, that the reader might remember their work, a few words or a turn of phrase, for years after reading. When it comes to Rex Murphy, two items from a column in his Globe and Mail era stay with me, two decades on. In that piece, Murphy defended the “coalition of the willing” for the invasion of Iraq, arguing that the torture chambers in that country were no longer in use, and, in a more broad defense of the Americans, stated that it was they who had “stopped Hitler” in the Second World War.
Here Murphy was, very obviously, wrong on the facts. The torture continued in Iraq, carried out not by Saddam Hussein or his sons, but by the US Army and the CIA at Abu Ghraib; and it was the Soviets that beat Hitler, not the Americans. (Not to mention, as Steven A. Cook wrote for Foreign Policy, “loving dictators is as American as apple pie”.)
More broadly, however, the examples reveal something of Murphy’s understanding of the world, outside the island of Newfoundland and beyond the borders of Canada. Strip away the ornate phrasing, and you’re left with a comic-book world of primary colors, in which we, the West, are the Good Guys, and they, the barbarian hordes, are the Baddies. While this makes for entertaining television and video games, it is a paradigm that any serious mind should outgrow.
Murphy never did, it seems. His two final columns, written right before his death twenty years later, attest as much, demonstrating an ignorance of their subject matter, Israel and Palestine. By way of example: In the first, he writes that the land that became Israel was “dust, bush, waterless”, a “desert” – in other words, terra nullius, that cornerstone of colonial logic, both morally and factually wrong. Murphy also decries the charge of genocide, despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice, despite the report from the UN Special Rapporteur, despite the evidence of our eyes and ears, playing out on our screens daily.
It is also noteworthy that, while frothing over Israel, Murphy pauses to swing at that phantasm that long haunted him, the “radical left”: “One of the heresies of our careless times is how we have let moralizing idiots, fat and comfortable woke types, haul out this word – ‘survivor’ – to describe their own ignorant obsessions.” These are the words of a dying man, mind you, a writer seemingly so steeped in bitterness that he can’t set aside callousness and cruelty to focus on his subject.
That tone continues in his final column, where Murphy aims the bulk of his ire at that other bugbear, Justin Trudeau. (Although a few others do catch some of the spittle, e.g. the “Muslim vote”, “gay monuments”, an imaginary “Black feminist” and, of course, environmentalists.) The piece – to pick a more Murphian term, harangue – leans into absurdity and makes for unpleasant reading. Taken together, the final two columns comprise a histrionic anti-swan song of sorts; were they not so hateful, ignorant and poorly styled, you might feel some pity that they represent Murphy’s last words as a writer.
Rex Murphy's ultimate legacy, however, and his longest-running offense, might be his decades – decades – of climate denial and anti-environmentalism. Others have written about this, during his life and after; I will add that it is sadly unjust, perhaps, that he lived to see only the beginning of climate breakdown, and will miss out on more of the horror he worked so hard to help create.
In the end though, what does this say of Rex Murphy, the writer? To watch, in recent years, as the fires and the storms and the droughts increased in scale and frequency, and deny the material truth of a changing climate? Whatever it says, it does not include openness of thought and mind.
Indeed, if a refusal to change one’s views and evolve, particularly in the face of new evidence and ideas, represents a kind of premature death of the mind and spirit, then Rex Murphy died a long time ago. His body lived on, churning out words and turning in columns, right up until the end (true to the boomer stereotype, he never made way for new talent), and had he lived longer – another week, another month, another year – the words would have kept coming, without doubt.
They would offer us nothing new, or necessary, or helpful, however. And perhaps, in a world facing manifold, complex crises, largely created in Rex Murphy’s lifetime, we’re better off without them.