Back to rehab
Editor's note
When we began planning this “rehab” issue, we considered putting Lindsay Lohan on the cover. Celebrities are often the first people who come to mind when thinking of rehab—unsurprisingly, there is an entire TV show dedicated to that relationship—and it would be fun to go for the surprising juxtaposition of a This Mag-meets-Us Weekly cover. This, it turns out, was not a unique thought among progressive-magazine editors.
In March, Adbusters put Paris Hilton on its cover, and in April, The Atlantic went with Britney. And who can blame them? From the Amy Winehouse arrests to the Britney Spears meltdowns—and the insane level of coverage it all received—2008 has been the year of the celebrity. The young, female, badly behaved celebrity.
While Lindsay didn’t make our cover, she did make it into Megan Griffith-Greene’s feminist analysis of the media surrounding celebrity rehab, “Girls gone wild, so?”
The famous face gracing this cover is just as recognizable as any Hollywood celebrity—to those on the Canadian left, anyway. Consider it a bit of tough love: we support the NDP, but we’d like to see it kick some butt in the places where it really matters.
While many of us vote New Democrat, fewer and fewer feel excited about doing so. The charismatic Jack Layton went a long way to re-energizing the NDP when he came to the helm in 2003, galvanizing progressives eager for change. But many of us are still waiting for that change, wondering if the NDP will ever become a truly progressive force.
When the New Democrats triggered the 2006 election that gave us a Conservative minority government, I was capital-P Pissed Off—along with many others who voted NDP anyway, for lack of a better option. Why couldn’t they have held on until the Liberals’ promised spring election? Were they really that outraged about the sponsorship scandal? I know my outrage over the misappropriated government funds paled in comparison to what I felt when the Tories scrapped the national daycare program and the Kelowna Accord. Those acts were the real crimes, and they were just the beginning.
In the spring of 2006, The Walrus published a piece by party insider James Laxer, calling out the NDP for the consequences of its exclusive focus on winning seats. The critique stayed with me. When it came time to plan this issue, Laxer was naturally the second person I thought of, right after Lindsay Lohan. I asked if he would consider writing a follow-up to his Walrus piece for This on the theme of “how to rehabilitate the NDP.” Lucky for us, he said yes.
On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the CCF, the NDP’s predecessor, Laxer argues that the key to the present lies in lessons from the past.
Continuing on the rehab theme, Peter Tupper profiles Iboga Therapy House, a unique West Coast facility that treats drug users with a psychotropic called ibogaine, which anecdotal evidence suggests may have higher success rates in treating addiction than traditional options.
Of course, those bad behaviours, the things we struggle to change about ourselves and the world around us, are so much a part of life that we can only begin to touch on them here. Other steps to self-improvement on your path through this issue include: how to get off the plastic water bottle, kicking the grass addiction, apology advice from Heather Mallick and alcohol addiction through the ages.
A toast, then, to getting better.
Jessica Johnston editor@thismagazine.ca
