"It's the Do-Gooders Bum My Ass": Modem Canadian Drama and the Crisis of Liberalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Near the beginning of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967), George Ryga's classic Canadian play about the destruction of a young Native woman who has come to the city looking for a better life, Ryga introduces Mr. Homer, "a white citizen who has the hurried but fulfilled appearance of the socially responsible man." Mr. Homer is a pillar of what is known in social welfare terms as the voluntary sector. He runs an agency called (appropriately, in this postcolonial text) the Centre. "[W]e do a lot of things for our Indians here in the city at the Centre", he explains to the audience in his superficially good-natured and benignly paternalistic way. His Centre is an important adjunct to the formal justice system represented by the Magistrate, who assures Rita Joe, during one of her frequent, nightmarish trials, "There are institutions to help you". As the scene unfolds, Mr. Homer puts his hand "possessively" on Rita's shoulder, inviting her to confirm how he helped her when her mother got sick and died, and how he helps other "poor dears" who need a place to eat and sleep when they get drunk and leave home. He chuckles over how Indian women "get more of a kick diggin' through [old clothes] that's piled up" in a heap rather than hung on racks. Then he turns again to the audience and angrily complains that "It's the do-gooders bum my ass", those newspaper or TV reporters for whom a drunken Indian becomes a story about "Red Power" or the failure of government policy. "Let them live an' work among the Indians for a few months ... then they'd know what it's really like"
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".