...is where we've always known the Conservatives stashed any of their ideas that weren't short-sighted, grasping or just plain ruinous. Danger, Rona Ambrose, danger!
This CBC story suggests that yet another brilliant move by Stephen Harper's government is going to send Canadian aerospace dreams crashing back down to earth - apparently Maxime Bernier's "strict adherence to free market principles" extends to pissing off the Americans AND the EU at the same time (no mean feat, that). I guess anything involving reaching fo the stars just smacks of being too Liberal - or is it simply that the Conservatives don't want anyone taking a bird's eye view of the sorry state of the country any time soon?
In other news, it looks like sober second thought is going to give way to cheap party tricks.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Grapeshot
Do you the remember the Mike Harris "Common Sense Revolution"? 'Cause I do.
I remember making a deal with God the day before vote in 1995- if I managed to get my last project of the year finished early, then the Conservatives wouldn't win, and my parents would stop looking so upset and worried. I guess God doesn't like presentations about Star Trek.
I remember marching up University Avenue with 10,000 people during the Days of Action; I remember Dudley George, shot because Mike Harris wanted "the fucking Indians out of the park"; I remember the 7 people who died in Walkerton because "common sense" meant cutting 700 jobs from the Ministry of the Environment.
I remember the homeless who froze to death on Toronto streets. I remember the suburbanites paralyzed by West Nile virus because the Conservatives refused to allow the Ministry of Health to warn people about mosquitos in 2002. And I remember Kimberley Rogers, who was 8 months pregnant and who died because the Conservative government refused her welfare.
Remember friends: John Baird and Jim Flaherty and Tony Clemente, all ministers under Harris, all serve a new master now. Remember that our federal government of vicious, cunning ideologues has the putative support of perhaps 30% of the population, but is doing 100% damage to the national fabric of Canada. And remember why it's called a revolution - because there's already been blood, and the casualties continue to mount.
I remember making a deal with God the day before vote in 1995- if I managed to get my last project of the year finished early, then the Conservatives wouldn't win, and my parents would stop looking so upset and worried. I guess God doesn't like presentations about Star Trek.
I remember marching up University Avenue with 10,000 people during the Days of Action; I remember Dudley George, shot because Mike Harris wanted "the fucking Indians out of the park"; I remember the 7 people who died in Walkerton because "common sense" meant cutting 700 jobs from the Ministry of the Environment.
I remember the homeless who froze to death on Toronto streets. I remember the suburbanites paralyzed by West Nile virus because the Conservatives refused to allow the Ministry of Health to warn people about mosquitos in 2002. And I remember Kimberley Rogers, who was 8 months pregnant and who died because the Conservative government refused her welfare.
Remember friends: John Baird and Jim Flaherty and Tony Clemente, all ministers under Harris, all serve a new master now. Remember that our federal government of vicious, cunning ideologues has the putative support of perhaps 30% of the population, but is doing 100% damage to the national fabric of Canada. And remember why it's called a revolution - because there's already been blood, and the casualties continue to mount.
Their Ancient Custom
"I don’t have to remind Quebecers of this, but all Canadians need to realize that when they hear Mr. Martin talking...it is all just to cover a record of scandal."
- Stephen Harper, December 19, 2005
"In one of those you-gotta-be-kidding moments too typical of this capital, Harper's government declared full confidence in Giuliano Zaccardelli just minutes after the RCMP Commissioner admitted keeping silent publicly about Maher Arar's innocence.... Think about that. A party that fought and won an election on accountability is now saying it's acceptable to do next to nothing about a Canadian citizen rotting in a Syrian prison, ultimately provoking a needless and pricey public inquiry."
-James Travers in the Toronto Star, October 3, 2006
"Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed "concern" over RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli's conflicting Commons committee testimony Tuesday about the Maher Arar affair....
"You can't just go out and fire someone without due process," Harper said. It's the first time Harper has expressed anything other than full confidence in the embattled commissioner."
-CBC News, December 5, 2006 (italics mine)
"[Wheat Board CEO Adrian] Measner, who supports the current [single-desk] system, received a letter from federal Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl last month saying his position is under review and he will likely lose his job... Strahl told CBC Tuesday he hasn't fired Measner yet, but has asked for a response from Measner outlining why he should continue as president. 'That's a position that serves at the pleasure of the government,' Strahl said. 'Obviously, I'm not pleased right now at what's going on at the wheat board.'"
-CBC News, December 5, 2006 (italics mine)
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Let me get this straight, O Righteous Rulers - you're allowed to fire someone whom you disagree with (although he doesn't actually work for you), but you can't fire the nation's highest law enforcement official who has perjured himself to the House of Commons?
There's nothing like talk to cover up scandal. But Steven Harper already knows that, doesn't he.
- Stephen Harper, December 19, 2005
"In one of those you-gotta-be-kidding moments too typical of this capital, Harper's government declared full confidence in Giuliano Zaccardelli just minutes after the RCMP Commissioner admitted keeping silent publicly about Maher Arar's innocence.... Think about that. A party that fought and won an election on accountability is now saying it's acceptable to do next to nothing about a Canadian citizen rotting in a Syrian prison, ultimately provoking a needless and pricey public inquiry."
-James Travers in the Toronto Star, October 3, 2006
"Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed "concern" over RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli's conflicting Commons committee testimony Tuesday about the Maher Arar affair....
"You can't just go out and fire someone without due process," Harper said. It's the first time Harper has expressed anything other than full confidence in the embattled commissioner."
-CBC News, December 5, 2006 (italics mine)
"[Wheat Board CEO Adrian] Measner, who supports the current [single-desk] system, received a letter from federal Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl last month saying his position is under review and he will likely lose his job... Strahl told CBC Tuesday he hasn't fired Measner yet, but has asked for a response from Measner outlining why he should continue as president. 'That's a position that serves at the pleasure of the government,' Strahl said. 'Obviously, I'm not pleased right now at what's going on at the wheat board.'"
-CBC News, December 5, 2006 (italics mine)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let me get this straight, O Righteous Rulers - you're allowed to fire someone whom you disagree with (although he doesn't actually work for you), but you can't fire the nation's highest law enforcement official who has perjured himself to the House of Commons?
There's nothing like talk to cover up scandal. But Steven Harper already knows that, doesn't he.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Someone find that man an airport...
My hunch about all this is that we've just been through something that is a lot closer to the 1958 Liberal leadership convention than the 1968 one. That's not to say Dion won't be more successful than Pearson, because I hope and think he could be. But there's a similar kind of instability in the current climate, and I don't just mean global warming.
It would be interesting to examine Pearson and Dion comparatively - both well-respected academics with international reputations, both possibly a little shaky getting off the ground (Liberals: remember the 1958 election? You don't want to), both (in my view) doomed to a lot of minority governments. Yet Pearson shaped this country into what it is, and into what most Canadians ( I think) want it to be. Dion could do the same. And as everyone noted this weekend, there's no shortage of young blood (Gerard? Is that with one R or two?) hovering in the wings to carry things on.
Memo to the NDP: do something. Now. Or else you're gonna get creamed into pumpkin pie.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Addendum - one place where 1958 and 2006 have NO similarity whatsoever is in the actual convention voting pattern - Lester got it in a landslide. If only Paul Martin Jr. had avenged his father's loss by being more like Mike....
It would be interesting to examine Pearson and Dion comparatively - both well-respected academics with international reputations, both possibly a little shaky getting off the ground (Liberals: remember the 1958 election? You don't want to), both (in my view) doomed to a lot of minority governments. Yet Pearson shaped this country into what it is, and into what most Canadians ( I think) want it to be. Dion could do the same. And as everyone noted this weekend, there's no shortage of young blood (Gerard? Is that with one R or two?) hovering in the wings to carry things on.
Memo to the NDP: do something. Now. Or else you're gonna get creamed into pumpkin pie.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Addendum - one place where 1958 and 2006 have NO similarity whatsoever is in the actual convention voting pattern - Lester got it in a landslide. If only Paul Martin Jr. had avenged his father's loss by being more like Mike....
Unconventional Wisdom
A few questions/queries about Canadian politics, in the wake of this weekend's seismic shift in the landscape:
- Isn't Jean Charest supposed to be a federalist? Just how Liberal are Quebec Liberals anyway? I know they need to be a little more autonomous than they might...but surely the definition of supporting federalism implies a federation of more than two actors? Maybe they could annex New Brunswick before they go?
-Conservative Cabinet ministers sure do throw a lot of stones for people whose houses aren't just glass, but air-conditioned as well.
- Wouldn't you expect Jacques Parizeau to spin Stephan Dion's election as good for separatism? Why should anyone take this as anything other than partisan rhetoric? Only because it's being repeated by every journalist from Moncton to Manitoba...
- Ed Stelmach's victory was even more improbable than, though eerily similar to, Stephan Dion's.
- Let me get this straight just once: Dion won't attract votes in the West because he's from Quebec, even though he's hated in Quebec because he's not nationalist enough. What to make of this? Completely irrational region-based xenophobia? Well, stranger things have happened I guess...but don't Albertans like the Clarity Act? Or would they prefer a flamethrower?
- People in British Columbia are rumoured to care quite a lot about the environment. Especially when bits of the environment are putting food (and turning up as food) on the table. Come to think of it, doesn't this sustainable economy thing involve some sort of rural policy?
- Dalton McGuinty sure did look sour on Saturday evening.
- Isn't Jean Charest supposed to be a federalist? Just how Liberal are Quebec Liberals anyway? I know they need to be a little more autonomous than they might...but surely the definition of supporting federalism implies a federation of more than two actors? Maybe they could annex New Brunswick before they go?
-Conservative Cabinet ministers sure do throw a lot of stones for people whose houses aren't just glass, but air-conditioned as well.
- Wouldn't you expect Jacques Parizeau to spin Stephan Dion's election as good for separatism? Why should anyone take this as anything other than partisan rhetoric? Only because it's being repeated by every journalist from Moncton to Manitoba...
- Ed Stelmach's victory was even more improbable than, though eerily similar to, Stephan Dion's.
- Let me get this straight just once: Dion won't attract votes in the West because he's from Quebec, even though he's hated in Quebec because he's not nationalist enough. What to make of this? Completely irrational region-based xenophobia? Well, stranger things have happened I guess...but don't Albertans like the Clarity Act? Or would they prefer a flamethrower?
- People in British Columbia are rumoured to care quite a lot about the environment. Especially when bits of the environment are putting food (and turning up as food) on the table. Come to think of it, doesn't this sustainable economy thing involve some sort of rural policy?
- Dalton McGuinty sure did look sour on Saturday evening.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
"Canada First, Canada Last, Canada Always"
The line was Bob Rae's, but the victory was Stephan Dion's.
I watched the final ballot of the Liberal Leadership Convention with a number of family members. They live in Scarborough, and tend to vote Liberal, or Progressive Conservative in the old days. Some of them still vote Conservative, even without the Progressive part attached.
They were spitting mad when Stephan Dion won. Not so much because of what he represented (though my grandmother's "milquetoast" comment wasn't expecially flattering) but more because he, in their opinion, wouldn't be able to beat Stephen Harper's government. There was despondency because Dion didn't seem "winnable," wasn't likely to win over the legions of Canadians who voted Conservative. "He's from Quebec," someone said, Quebec apparently turning into a four letter word.
I didn't ask if any of my relatives would vote for another party because Dion had won. Maybe I should have. All I know is that there's a good chance that I will vote Liberal in the next federal election.
People who know me well are going to be aghast, jubilant, or scornful at this news. Or maybe they won't. Maybe I'm falling into the same trap that Bob Rae once came into, only in reverse - sacrificing principle for practicality. I don't know - I'm going to have to ponder that for a while in private.
Canadians, if any of you are reading this: remember the kilometres of railway track that were laid, foot by laborious foot, between Halifax and Vancouver. Those tracks meant we were all going from somewhere, to somewhere else, be it Montreal or Calgary (two places, incidentally, that my grandfather spent quite a lot of time). The contention that a man from Quebec cannot speak with, to and for all Canadians is calumny. After all, a man from Alberta currently claims to be speaking for all of us.
Just remember those railroad tracks, and think about what else binds us all together. One Stephen would have you believe that all that Canada should be is a firewall, a stripmall, and a garage. The other has a bigger, better view.
I watched the final ballot of the Liberal Leadership Convention with a number of family members. They live in Scarborough, and tend to vote Liberal, or Progressive Conservative in the old days. Some of them still vote Conservative, even without the Progressive part attached.
They were spitting mad when Stephan Dion won. Not so much because of what he represented (though my grandmother's "milquetoast" comment wasn't expecially flattering) but more because he, in their opinion, wouldn't be able to beat Stephen Harper's government. There was despondency because Dion didn't seem "winnable," wasn't likely to win over the legions of Canadians who voted Conservative. "He's from Quebec," someone said, Quebec apparently turning into a four letter word.
I didn't ask if any of my relatives would vote for another party because Dion had won. Maybe I should have. All I know is that there's a good chance that I will vote Liberal in the next federal election.
People who know me well are going to be aghast, jubilant, or scornful at this news. Or maybe they won't. Maybe I'm falling into the same trap that Bob Rae once came into, only in reverse - sacrificing principle for practicality. I don't know - I'm going to have to ponder that for a while in private.
Canadians, if any of you are reading this: remember the kilometres of railway track that were laid, foot by laborious foot, between Halifax and Vancouver. Those tracks meant we were all going from somewhere, to somewhere else, be it Montreal or Calgary (two places, incidentally, that my grandfather spent quite a lot of time). The contention that a man from Quebec cannot speak with, to and for all Canadians is calumny. After all, a man from Alberta currently claims to be speaking for all of us.
Just remember those railroad tracks, and think about what else binds us all together. One Stephen would have you believe that all that Canada should be is a firewall, a stripmall, and a garage. The other has a bigger, better view.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Fairy Tale
"Where have you been," you might well ask. Well, I'll tell you.
I go every morning to le palais du bureaucracie. It is a great and prominent building, with long colonnades and high walls. Inside, the passageways are made of gorgeous marble, flawlessly set so that patterns repeat themselves down hallways that seem to never end. There are huge paintings and mosaics intersperced among the stone, by many famous artists, lit cleverly with recessed lights.
I have le palais almost to myself, but I cannot linger too long. I must daily do a task, without the completion of which many powerful men and women would be brought low, and would become confused and powerless. My task is to stare into a glowing glass and conjure words out of the ether - I must direct these words hither and yon, and countless mandarins hang on every one. Moreover, these words concern the life and death of millions of people, and their stories are indeed a heavy burden.
Alas, I may only enter le palais du bureaucracie under the cover of darkness - if I failed to do so, I would be banished from the palace for ever.
I go every morning to le palais du bureaucracie. It is a great and prominent building, with long colonnades and high walls. Inside, the passageways are made of gorgeous marble, flawlessly set so that patterns repeat themselves down hallways that seem to never end. There are huge paintings and mosaics intersperced among the stone, by many famous artists, lit cleverly with recessed lights.
I have le palais almost to myself, but I cannot linger too long. I must daily do a task, without the completion of which many powerful men and women would be brought low, and would become confused and powerless. My task is to stare into a glowing glass and conjure words out of the ether - I must direct these words hither and yon, and countless mandarins hang on every one. Moreover, these words concern the life and death of millions of people, and their stories are indeed a heavy burden.
Alas, I may only enter le palais du bureaucracie under the cover of darkness - if I failed to do so, I would be banished from the palace for ever.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Rona Ambrose should have a talk show
She could replace TV's current It Girl, Rachel Ray. It couldn't possibly get any worse.
Actually, that's not true, Rona Ambrose might start speaking French. I do not know if Rachel Ray knows how to speak French. Frankly, I am afraid to find out.
Actually, that's not true, Rona Ambrose might start speaking French. I do not know if Rachel Ray knows how to speak French. Frankly, I am afraid to find out.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Phobias are for phuckwits
phuckwit n. [var. of fuckwit]
a person whose foolishness or idiocy is specifically caused by bigotry, narrow-mindedness or prejudice and its resulting behaviours (eg. islamophobia, homophobia)
ex: That girl who called my friend a "Moooooslim" was a grade A phuckwit.
a person whose foolishness or idiocy is specifically caused by bigotry, narrow-mindedness or prejudice and its resulting behaviours (eg. islamophobia, homophobia)
ex: That girl who called my friend a "Moooooslim" was a grade A phuckwit.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
The History of Errors
Perhaps he was having trouble with his Oxford Book of Quotations or whatever the equivalent compendium of encyclicals, bulls and learned writings of the Roman Catholic Church happens to be called. In any event, the Pope has put his foot in it.
I'm not often one to defend His Holiness. I emphatically disagree with most Roman Catholic doctrine regarding homosexuals, birth control and abortion; I think that priests should be allowed to marry if they want to; and I'm generally unimpressed by the conservatism of church leaders. All this being said, the overarching message of the Pope's address, as noted by Jewish Studies Chair James Diamond, is an overwhelmingly positive and balanced one (well, for the Pope): Benedict's conclusion - that to act without reason in any religion is to contravene divine will and law - is both pertinent, timely, widely applicable to everything from consumerism to nuclear proliferation, and to my belief, true.
What's just as distressing as the Vatican's inept editing skills is the fact that every news outlet I've seen has made a hash of the Pope's befuddled, crypto-Orientalist (but not I think malicious) point, including its context both within the history of Christian thought, and in the current climate of world events.
His former Eminence Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is a conservative, highly doctrinaire Roman Catholic (if he weren't, this guy might be the Holy Father right now.) As such, when Benedict XVI hit the stage at his alma mater, the good ol' U of R Theological School, I have to assume he decided to get all erudite on the Faculty's ass - and being well-regarded as one of the world's foremost conservative Catholic theologians even before he became Pope, he might have disappointed the crowd if he hadn't been. So the Pope dug up what I can only assume is a fairly obscure reference in a very obscure book to an even more obscure historical figure - Manuel II Palaeologus, the second last Byzantine Emperor.
Manuel's position in the winter of 1391 was an exceedingly awkward one, involving heavy dynastic infighting with his own family, not to mention the fact that the Byzantine Empire was the 14th century equivalent of Vietnam, with less communism and more sand - European powers jockeyed for interest and territory, fighting the indigenous (in this case Turkish) forces and playing politics with the powerless Byzantine rulers while wasting huge amounts of treasure and manpower in what was truly a quagmire. Manuel was, at age 41, living in the court of the Ottoman Sultan, and licking boots as part of the game of power politics. Sounds suspiciously like another epoch I could mention, doesn't it.
Something I read the other day claimed the whole document was made up. It's not implausible. There have also been a number of reports that the Pope, unlike his predecessor, has had little use for the opinions of his advisers on sensitive topics, particularly Islam. That's not implausible either. What's hardest to believe is that in our future imperfect, dialogue with Muslim interlocutors is perceived by the essentializing powers that be to be more difficult, and less necessary, than in our civilization's "semi-barbaric" pre-Renaissance.
Evil, indeed.
I'm not often one to defend His Holiness. I emphatically disagree with most Roman Catholic doctrine regarding homosexuals, birth control and abortion; I think that priests should be allowed to marry if they want to; and I'm generally unimpressed by the conservatism of church leaders. All this being said, the overarching message of the Pope's address, as noted by Jewish Studies Chair James Diamond, is an overwhelmingly positive and balanced one (well, for the Pope): Benedict's conclusion - that to act without reason in any religion is to contravene divine will and law - is both pertinent, timely, widely applicable to everything from consumerism to nuclear proliferation, and to my belief, true.
What's just as distressing as the Vatican's inept editing skills is the fact that every news outlet I've seen has made a hash of the Pope's befuddled, crypto-Orientalist (but not I think malicious) point, including its context both within the history of Christian thought, and in the current climate of world events.
His former Eminence Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is a conservative, highly doctrinaire Roman Catholic (if he weren't, this guy might be the Holy Father right now.) As such, when Benedict XVI hit the stage at his alma mater, the good ol' U of R Theological School, I have to assume he decided to get all erudite on the Faculty's ass - and being well-regarded as one of the world's foremost conservative Catholic theologians even before he became Pope, he might have disappointed the crowd if he hadn't been. So the Pope dug up what I can only assume is a fairly obscure reference in a very obscure book to an even more obscure historical figure - Manuel II Palaeologus, the second last Byzantine Emperor.
Manuel's position in the winter of 1391 was an exceedingly awkward one, involving heavy dynastic infighting with his own family, not to mention the fact that the Byzantine Empire was the 14th century equivalent of Vietnam, with less communism and more sand - European powers jockeyed for interest and territory, fighting the indigenous (in this case Turkish) forces and playing politics with the powerless Byzantine rulers while wasting huge amounts of treasure and manpower in what was truly a quagmire. Manuel was, at age 41, living in the court of the Ottoman Sultan, and licking boots as part of the game of power politics. Sounds suspiciously like another epoch I could mention, doesn't it.
Something I read the other day claimed the whole document was made up. It's not implausible. There have also been a number of reports that the Pope, unlike his predecessor, has had little use for the opinions of his advisers on sensitive topics, particularly Islam. That's not implausible either. What's hardest to believe is that in our future imperfect, dialogue with Muslim interlocutors is perceived by the essentializing powers that be to be more difficult, and less necessary, than in our civilization's "semi-barbaric" pre-Renaissance.
Evil, indeed.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
1 gazillion miles to the gallon
Most of my friends seem to have jumped on the blogging bandwagon. This of course is a very large wagon (hopefully a hybrid, perhaps built by Toyota), but I am proud to say that I was second among my immediate circle of friends to start blogging it up. Well, maybe third....
Happily, I'm lucky to know so many dynamic types with such a varied set of interests: Aldous on food, Simon on fashion, David on photography, Nick on painting and urbanisme, Eric on spirituality, Stephanie on living in Scotland, Andy on...miscellaneous topics.
What is my blog on? I am not sure. Perhaps I should review cultural events. Or music. Or fish. Any thoughts?
Happily, I'm lucky to know so many dynamic types with such a varied set of interests: Aldous on food, Simon on fashion, David on photography, Nick on painting and urbanisme, Eric on spirituality, Stephanie on living in Scotland, Andy on...miscellaneous topics.
What is my blog on? I am not sure. Perhaps I should review cultural events. Or music. Or fish. Any thoughts?
It's dusty, not to mention heartwrenching
Speaking of memory lane, I spent a good deal of today at a task I always have mixed feelings about: cleaning my closet.
The closet in my room is actually quite small, and has some queer angles, if you'll pardon the joke. Yet it's astonishing how much of the detritus of my youth is still crammed into it. Or rather, how much of the detritus of my family's collective past is jammed into its dusty expanse - in our house, perennially low on storage space, it's always a temptation for my siblings and I to stow things we can't bring ourselves to part with in the closets and corners of the next room down, and return to our own with the clutter of yesterday safely out of sight and therefore out of mind. So sorting through my brother's stuffed animals, my mother's summer dresses and my father's old shirts, I had a fairly full account of the last twenty years, written in that revealing and moving language, Clutter.
The motivations for preserving some of the momenti I'd stashed away along the line seemed, blessedly, entirely meaningless - what on earth possessed me to keep a cassette walkman from 1989? Or my American history notes from second year? By and large however, the contents of my closetmoved me not with their emotional obsolescence, but with their continuing resonance, their hold on my heart's history.
For instance, the piece of green plastic emblazoned with the image of a smiling frog, cut from my plastic wading pool before it was thrown away when I was nine. Or the photo album filled with my Grade One and Two pictures, taken with my first camera. And the book my mother made to give structure to my father's departure for several months in Cameroon, when I was two. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the physical reminders of the past ring so clearly. I do have some pretensions towards being an historian in embryo, after all.
Still, that green plastic frog almost made me cry.
The closet in my room is actually quite small, and has some queer angles, if you'll pardon the joke. Yet it's astonishing how much of the detritus of my youth is still crammed into it. Or rather, how much of the detritus of my family's collective past is jammed into its dusty expanse - in our house, perennially low on storage space, it's always a temptation for my siblings and I to stow things we can't bring ourselves to part with in the closets and corners of the next room down, and return to our own with the clutter of yesterday safely out of sight and therefore out of mind. So sorting through my brother's stuffed animals, my mother's summer dresses and my father's old shirts, I had a fairly full account of the last twenty years, written in that revealing and moving language, Clutter.
The motivations for preserving some of the momenti I'd stashed away along the line seemed, blessedly, entirely meaningless - what on earth possessed me to keep a cassette walkman from 1989? Or my American history notes from second year? By and large however, the contents of my closetmoved me not with their emotional obsolescence, but with their continuing resonance, their hold on my heart's history.
For instance, the piece of green plastic emblazoned with the image of a smiling frog, cut from my plastic wading pool before it was thrown away when I was nine. Or the photo album filled with my Grade One and Two pictures, taken with my first camera. And the book my mother made to give structure to my father's departure for several months in Cameroon, when I was two. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the physical reminders of the past ring so clearly. I do have some pretensions towards being an historian in embryo, after all.
Still, that green plastic frog almost made me cry.
Memory Lane
Well, that took a while.
For those of you still occasionally reading this, my apologies. Real life (in the murderous-clown-wielding-a-hatchet guise of the University of Toronto's Student Administrative Council Orientation Day) intruded on my thoughts, actions, and nightmares for about a month, and didn't give me much time to hone lengthy expository screeds for the net to read.
Happily, as I'm now unemployed, I have MUCH more time on my hands.
For those of you still occasionally reading this, my apologies. Real life (in the murderous-clown-wielding-a-hatchet guise of the University of Toronto's Student Administrative Council Orientation Day) intruded on my thoughts, actions, and nightmares for about a month, and didn't give me much time to hone lengthy expository screeds for the net to read.
Happily, as I'm now unemployed, I have MUCH more time on my hands.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Global Warming
Christopher Hitchens pines for the good old days, when all the men were strong, all the women good looking, and all the terrorists above average.
I have trouble reading Christopher Hitchens, mainly because I so often agree with him. Hitchens is a man unafraid to say what he believes, though I suspect sometimes (and it's rich coming from me, I know) that he speaks with a hot head. I often wish that he would think more coolly, and perhaps by extension believe more carefully, on what he ends up saying.
Is it really plausible to say, for instance, that all members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Black Panthers were enlightened freedom fighters prone to lofty thoughts about the future and the sanctity of innocent life? Of course not. Those organisations contained members as fanatical and fascistic as those of the worst Islamic fundamentalist movement, though I will grant Hitchens that religion slightly outpaces ethnicity or nationalism as the ideological form most congenial to fanaticism.
Why though does Hitchens consistently draw a line in the sand around Islamic fundamentalism and its crop of associated terrorists? Because, it seems, suicide bombers "long for death," foolishly ignoring the pleasures of this life in favor of those of the next.
It might be argued that many of the young men inclined to blow up airplanes and destroy buses in the name of Islamist terror have no reason to eschew the material world, growing up as they often do in suburban and thoroughly middle class splendour. Yet here lies a clue to the root of the question. What is it about our modern world that causes citizens to radicalize themselves? Is it that modern iterations of society hold such conflicting and sometimes hypocritical accounts of truth and justice within themselves - say for instance, arguing that all humans are created equal, but implicitly condoning the death of ten Lebanese civilians for every Israeli soldier - that those held deeply within the physical cocoon of western modernity throw over its trappings and apparently empty promises and go for the big prize: heaven, with virgins or no.
Hitchens would decry this view as being "soft on terrorists," and insofar as I try to make it a habit to seek to understand the core motivations of all human actions, he would be right. Hitchens might also claim that Islamist terror has a higher degree of truly pathological - that is, insane - devotees as opposed to other terrorist groups. Here I am not sure I agree. There are no doubt a number of quite certifiable Islamist terrorists at the moment, but surely there are an equal number of certifiable Tamil Tigers, American Christian nationalists, or chihuahua collectors. My point of course is that ideologies (the chihuahuas aside) attract pathologies, and the more ideological one gets, the more likely one is to exhibit the signs of a mental illness.
All this being said, I suppose my opposition to Hitchens on all this comes down to the following: Hitchens claims that some things (namely people and their motivations) have fundamentally changed in the Age of Terror, when they haven't; and he implies that society and its trappings (culture and technology) have not changed, when they have.
To say that people and their psychology, instincts and capacities have fundamentally changed since, thanks to and as the cause of September 11th is both untrue, presumptuous, and astonishingly dangerous: it implies that humans are now more bloodthirsty or more saintly than they were ten, a hundred or a thousand years, which is hogwash of the first order. This kind of thinking sets one on the slippery slope of defining the idea of "human" as a temporal phenomenon, a trend unhelpful in any field other than perhaos evolutionary anthropology. People evolve biologically, but not, sadly, so quickly as all that - to imply otherwise passes the street sign pointing towards horrors with which the world, unfortunately, is all too familiar.
On the other hand, to ignore the evolution of global society and its role as a motivating factor over the past 100, 50 or even 10 years is equally dangerous. It's clear that societies are in some ways greater (or less) than the sum of their parts - so to ignore the fact that a Brazilian fighting against a corrupt dictatorship and a Islamist terrorist acting against the United States are not in entirely analogous situations is, of course, foolish and criminally irresponsible. But there must be an understanding and acceptance of the weight of history when crafting political policy: if this anchor is absent, politics risks floating off into the same ideological hot air that sometimes motivates the Islamists, capitalists, fascists and other ideologues of the world. The Internet has profound social and cultural implications, the threat of terrorist dialogue being one, in my view, of the more prosaic ones - but only a fool, and an ahistorical fool at that, would decide to deal with this problem by invading a tin pot Middle Eastern dictatorship.
If terrorists are motivated these days by some of the same old concerns about nationalisms, lands, freedoms etc (Lebanon? Palestine? Sri Lanka? Aceh?) how then are they (or some of them, at least) fundamentally different from Christopher Hitchens' friends from the good old days, and who is to say that we should not deal with them (some of them, at least) in a similar way? And if terrorists do seem different in their motivations and tactics, what explains it? Surely not biology (though if this really is the explanation, it's another barrel of monkeys entirely). And if not biology, what?
I suspect that our Age of Terror, as William Saletan intelligently noted the other day, is all about a dissolution of boundaries, mental and physical. A young man in Manchester not even of Arab or Muslim heritage can feel as if "his" people are being oppressed on the sands of Iraq, and connect that oppression, however tenuously, with blowing up an American airliner. This brave new world is indeed terrifying - this latest iteration of Marx's assertion that in the modern world "all that is solid melts into air" is destabilizing and upsetting for us, generations brought up in the reasonably stable political chill of the Cold War.
But thawing out doesn't mean we need despair. Because people can still be good like they always could be bad - it's only our technology that sometimes clouds the issue and makes it hard for us to see. Call it condensation, if you like. So I do wish that Christopher Hitchens would nostalge a little less for the good old days, and turn his considerable intellect and formidable talents to bear on the present and its exigencies. Because we're all getting a little hot under the collar, and it will take all honest people, with sharp minds and good hearts, to clear the air.
I have trouble reading Christopher Hitchens, mainly because I so often agree with him. Hitchens is a man unafraid to say what he believes, though I suspect sometimes (and it's rich coming from me, I know) that he speaks with a hot head. I often wish that he would think more coolly, and perhaps by extension believe more carefully, on what he ends up saying.
Is it really plausible to say, for instance, that all members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Black Panthers were enlightened freedom fighters prone to lofty thoughts about the future and the sanctity of innocent life? Of course not. Those organisations contained members as fanatical and fascistic as those of the worst Islamic fundamentalist movement, though I will grant Hitchens that religion slightly outpaces ethnicity or nationalism as the ideological form most congenial to fanaticism.
Why though does Hitchens consistently draw a line in the sand around Islamic fundamentalism and its crop of associated terrorists? Because, it seems, suicide bombers "long for death," foolishly ignoring the pleasures of this life in favor of those of the next.
It might be argued that many of the young men inclined to blow up airplanes and destroy buses in the name of Islamist terror have no reason to eschew the material world, growing up as they often do in suburban and thoroughly middle class splendour. Yet here lies a clue to the root of the question. What is it about our modern world that causes citizens to radicalize themselves? Is it that modern iterations of society hold such conflicting and sometimes hypocritical accounts of truth and justice within themselves - say for instance, arguing that all humans are created equal, but implicitly condoning the death of ten Lebanese civilians for every Israeli soldier - that those held deeply within the physical cocoon of western modernity throw over its trappings and apparently empty promises and go for the big prize: heaven, with virgins or no.
Hitchens would decry this view as being "soft on terrorists," and insofar as I try to make it a habit to seek to understand the core motivations of all human actions, he would be right. Hitchens might also claim that Islamist terror has a higher degree of truly pathological - that is, insane - devotees as opposed to other terrorist groups. Here I am not sure I agree. There are no doubt a number of quite certifiable Islamist terrorists at the moment, but surely there are an equal number of certifiable Tamil Tigers, American Christian nationalists, or chihuahua collectors. My point of course is that ideologies (the chihuahuas aside) attract pathologies, and the more ideological one gets, the more likely one is to exhibit the signs of a mental illness.
All this being said, I suppose my opposition to Hitchens on all this comes down to the following: Hitchens claims that some things (namely people and their motivations) have fundamentally changed in the Age of Terror, when they haven't; and he implies that society and its trappings (culture and technology) have not changed, when they have.
To say that people and their psychology, instincts and capacities have fundamentally changed since, thanks to and as the cause of September 11th is both untrue, presumptuous, and astonishingly dangerous: it implies that humans are now more bloodthirsty or more saintly than they were ten, a hundred or a thousand years, which is hogwash of the first order. This kind of thinking sets one on the slippery slope of defining the idea of "human" as a temporal phenomenon, a trend unhelpful in any field other than perhaos evolutionary anthropology. People evolve biologically, but not, sadly, so quickly as all that - to imply otherwise passes the street sign pointing towards horrors with which the world, unfortunately, is all too familiar.
On the other hand, to ignore the evolution of global society and its role as a motivating factor over the past 100, 50 or even 10 years is equally dangerous. It's clear that societies are in some ways greater (or less) than the sum of their parts - so to ignore the fact that a Brazilian fighting against a corrupt dictatorship and a Islamist terrorist acting against the United States are not in entirely analogous situations is, of course, foolish and criminally irresponsible. But there must be an understanding and acceptance of the weight of history when crafting political policy: if this anchor is absent, politics risks floating off into the same ideological hot air that sometimes motivates the Islamists, capitalists, fascists and other ideologues of the world. The Internet has profound social and cultural implications, the threat of terrorist dialogue being one, in my view, of the more prosaic ones - but only a fool, and an ahistorical fool at that, would decide to deal with this problem by invading a tin pot Middle Eastern dictatorship.
If terrorists are motivated these days by some of the same old concerns about nationalisms, lands, freedoms etc (Lebanon? Palestine? Sri Lanka? Aceh?) how then are they (or some of them, at least) fundamentally different from Christopher Hitchens' friends from the good old days, and who is to say that we should not deal with them (some of them, at least) in a similar way? And if terrorists do seem different in their motivations and tactics, what explains it? Surely not biology (though if this really is the explanation, it's another barrel of monkeys entirely). And if not biology, what?
I suspect that our Age of Terror, as William Saletan intelligently noted the other day, is all about a dissolution of boundaries, mental and physical. A young man in Manchester not even of Arab or Muslim heritage can feel as if "his" people are being oppressed on the sands of Iraq, and connect that oppression, however tenuously, with blowing up an American airliner. This brave new world is indeed terrifying - this latest iteration of Marx's assertion that in the modern world "all that is solid melts into air" is destabilizing and upsetting for us, generations brought up in the reasonably stable political chill of the Cold War.
But thawing out doesn't mean we need despair. Because people can still be good like they always could be bad - it's only our technology that sometimes clouds the issue and makes it hard for us to see. Call it condensation, if you like. So I do wish that Christopher Hitchens would nostalge a little less for the good old days, and turn his considerable intellect and formidable talents to bear on the present and its exigencies. Because we're all getting a little hot under the collar, and it will take all honest people, with sharp minds and good hearts, to clear the air.
Dog days mean big words
August is truly a terrible month, particularly in the realm of the mass media. Take for instance radio hosts - with the CBC's on-air talent pool already looking a little brackish at the best of times, it only takes a few vacation-motivated desertions for the Mothercorp to start stinking up the airwaves worse than the Long Island Sound during a garbage strike.
But at least the CBC occasionally aspires to quality in broadcasting. Not so CNN, whose descent into a tacky clearinghouse of popular superstitions, right-wing nostrums and trashy inanities has occasionally made even that tedious cesspool that is CTV News look good.
For instance: not only is the "which celebrity is gay?" story about as hackneyed as Reagonomics, but what does it say about the prejudices, vacuity, and sheer unadulterated ignorance of not just the American people but the American journalistic corps when a story that snidely suggests that Rosie O'Donnell "wears her homosexuality like a badge of honour" is worthy of the front page? I suppose that anyone who's gay in America has a big invisible neon sign hanging over their their crotch that only straight people can see? Or is the mere iteration of a sexuality even marginally different from that peddled by the mass-marketed, patriarchal and poisonously consumerist mainstream so threatening to conservative North America that its existence must be qualified, exposed and explained away, archived into a little box of paradoxically ignorant awareness?
In certain circles (the Toronto Star, Fab Magazine and elsewhere) the question has been asked more than once in the past year: why is there such a distressing homogeniety in the characterizations of gays and lesbians on network television, so distinct a lack of original queer stories in the the mainstream cinema (pace, Annie Proulx, Felicity Huffman et. al - last year was a good one, but we still didn't win Best Picture), so few "out" entertainers, and almost no gay politicians at all?
Why? In the minds of some, the only "real" fags are bitchy dykes like Rosie O'Donnell and poncy queens like Lance Bass - people who 'wear the homosexuality like a badge of honour' because the're forced by their overweening "otherness" to explain their deviation from (or conformity to?) societal norms in a way society understands - that deviance can then be seen for what it is believed to be, and treated as such. In the minds of some, to be a homosexual is to be what it has been (at least in the United States cultural mythos) for a hundred years: a failed man and freak if a woman, and a half-woman and clown if a man. And it's not hard to see what's homologous about those two extremes.
I hadn't intended to get quite this involved with something so apparently trivial as an Entertainment Tonight fluff piece; but CNN's boorishness is disturbing precisely because it's so banal, so absent-minded. I was astonishingly lucky, in some respects at least, to grow up in a cocoon of relative sexual isolation. Thanks in part to parental reserve and in part to my own innate reticence, I didn't know much about homosexuality until the Internet revealed to me at around thirteen (one way or another) that my sexuality was neither universal nor unique. If I didn't have any positive gay role models at an early age, I also managed to avoid developing feelings of guilt, anxiety or depression about being a fag - by the time I understood that my crush on a boy in Grade 1 (props to you Mark, if you're out there) or my urge to marry Jonathan Brandis in Grade 4 weren't isolated incidents, I hadn't had to face the kind of white noise of bigotry that so many North American kids still experience in their daily lives.
Unfortunately, not everyone is as mollycoddled as I was. The kids out there who know what a fag is by the age of five (to wit: something you don't want to be) and who grow up listening to a concert of "don't be a fag, man," "dude, that's so gay," and "man, don't be such a pansy," desperately need exposure to queer role models of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of fabulousness. They need exposure to public figures who do "wear their sexuality as a badge of honour" - Ellen DeGeneris is great, but we need about 100 of her ilk, and fast.
Canadians are more fortunate than our southern neighbors (as we are on most queer issues) in that we do have some prominent gays and lesbians to look up to. Look at the Mark Tewskberys and George Smithermans of the world, or the K.D. Langs and Libby Davies'. Yet the fact remains that until the purveyors of our mass culture, the moguls and marketing departments in Burbank and Newark and Denver and Miami , decide it's in their interest to portray queers as they truly are - as diverse and fascinating as ordinary folk - LGBTQ youth in Canada as well as in the United States will continue to lose out on a key weapon in the fight for not just tolerance, but acceptance: to have the public look at a fluff piece about who's gay and who's straight and laugh at it for its anachronism, not its content.
But at least the CBC occasionally aspires to quality in broadcasting. Not so CNN, whose descent into a tacky clearinghouse of popular superstitions, right-wing nostrums and trashy inanities has occasionally made even that tedious cesspool that is CTV News look good.
For instance: not only is the "which celebrity is gay?" story about as hackneyed as Reagonomics, but what does it say about the prejudices, vacuity, and sheer unadulterated ignorance of not just the American people but the American journalistic corps when a story that snidely suggests that Rosie O'Donnell "wears her homosexuality like a badge of honour" is worthy of the front page? I suppose that anyone who's gay in America has a big invisible neon sign hanging over their their crotch that only straight people can see? Or is the mere iteration of a sexuality even marginally different from that peddled by the mass-marketed, patriarchal and poisonously consumerist mainstream so threatening to conservative North America that its existence must be qualified, exposed and explained away, archived into a little box of paradoxically ignorant awareness?
In certain circles (the Toronto Star, Fab Magazine and elsewhere) the question has been asked more than once in the past year: why is there such a distressing homogeniety in the characterizations of gays and lesbians on network television, so distinct a lack of original queer stories in the the mainstream cinema (pace, Annie Proulx, Felicity Huffman et. al - last year was a good one, but we still didn't win Best Picture), so few "out" entertainers, and almost no gay politicians at all?
Why? In the minds of some, the only "real" fags are bitchy dykes like Rosie O'Donnell and poncy queens like Lance Bass - people who 'wear the homosexuality like a badge of honour' because the're forced by their overweening "otherness" to explain their deviation from (or conformity to?) societal norms in a way society understands - that deviance can then be seen for what it is believed to be, and treated as such. In the minds of some, to be a homosexual is to be what it has been (at least in the United States cultural mythos) for a hundred years: a failed man and freak if a woman, and a half-woman and clown if a man. And it's not hard to see what's homologous about those two extremes.
I hadn't intended to get quite this involved with something so apparently trivial as an Entertainment Tonight fluff piece; but CNN's boorishness is disturbing precisely because it's so banal, so absent-minded. I was astonishingly lucky, in some respects at least, to grow up in a cocoon of relative sexual isolation. Thanks in part to parental reserve and in part to my own innate reticence, I didn't know much about homosexuality until the Internet revealed to me at around thirteen (one way or another) that my sexuality was neither universal nor unique. If I didn't have any positive gay role models at an early age, I also managed to avoid developing feelings of guilt, anxiety or depression about being a fag - by the time I understood that my crush on a boy in Grade 1 (props to you Mark, if you're out there) or my urge to marry Jonathan Brandis in Grade 4 weren't isolated incidents, I hadn't had to face the kind of white noise of bigotry that so many North American kids still experience in their daily lives.
Unfortunately, not everyone is as mollycoddled as I was. The kids out there who know what a fag is by the age of five (to wit: something you don't want to be) and who grow up listening to a concert of "don't be a fag, man," "dude, that's so gay," and "man, don't be such a pansy," desperately need exposure to queer role models of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of fabulousness. They need exposure to public figures who do "wear their sexuality as a badge of honour" - Ellen DeGeneris is great, but we need about 100 of her ilk, and fast.
Canadians are more fortunate than our southern neighbors (as we are on most queer issues) in that we do have some prominent gays and lesbians to look up to. Look at the Mark Tewskberys and George Smithermans of the world, or the K.D. Langs and Libby Davies'. Yet the fact remains that until the purveyors of our mass culture, the moguls and marketing departments in Burbank and Newark and Denver and Miami , decide it's in their interest to portray queers as they truly are - as diverse and fascinating as ordinary folk - LGBTQ youth in Canada as well as in the United States will continue to lose out on a key weapon in the fight for not just tolerance, but acceptance: to have the public look at a fluff piece about who's gay and who's straight and laugh at it for its anachronism, not its content.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Screw this, I'm writing what I want
My small cadre of loyal readers may have noticed that there's been a distinct lull in blog posting of late. This is attributable to three factors:
a) I have been busy, and Paul was making fun of me for posting at work
b) Most of the things I feel inclined to write about are not things that go over well in the delicate world of online chitchat
c) People kept complaining that my posts were too long, and that there were too many embedded links.
I know I have complained before about the exigencies of the online reading public before. I promise that this is the last time. Because from now on, I'm writing whatever comes naturally. In the words of my brother, screw all y'all.
a) I have been busy, and Paul was making fun of me for posting at work
b) Most of the things I feel inclined to write about are not things that go over well in the delicate world of online chitchat
c) People kept complaining that my posts were too long, and that there were too many embedded links.
I know I have complained before about the exigencies of the online reading public before. I promise that this is the last time. Because from now on, I'm writing whatever comes naturally. In the words of my brother, screw all y'all.
Green Light
I find myself in a dilemma - I very rarely ever feel inclined to blog about anything light. Most of the things that move me to write these days are not things that I'm inclined to face in print, at least not in a form anywhere near as direct as my own words.
However, note William Saletan's fine piece on the age of terror. Will Saletan claims we now live in a "liquid" world, one in which certainty comes only from believing that a higher purpose will prevail despite personal sacrifice. But this theme's nothing new: as Karl Marx noted, in the modern world, "all that is solid melts into air."
So we soldier on, boats against the current, bourn back ceaselessly into the past.
However, note William Saletan's fine piece on the age of terror. Will Saletan claims we now live in a "liquid" world, one in which certainty comes only from believing that a higher purpose will prevail despite personal sacrifice. But this theme's nothing new: as Karl Marx noted, in the modern world, "all that is solid melts into air."
So we soldier on, boats against the current, bourn back ceaselessly into the past.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Educational Television
The sophistry surrounding the Levant war continues to hit new and unparalleled heights of twisted logic. The latest example comes from the lips of the Israeli Minister of Justice (a grim misnomer if there ever was one) who declared today that Israel "received yesterday at the Rome conference permission from the world... to continue the operation," because delegates, obstructed by the increasingly criminal actions of American officials, were unable to agree on a immediate ceasefire call.
This sort of rhetoric is a bit like a ploy made by Rogers Cable here in Canada back in the mid 90s to introduce reverse billing for its expanded cable services. Unless told explicitly by its subscribers not to, Rogers decided, it would charge people for channels without determining whether said channels were wanted or not.
Rogers didn't fair too well in the court of public opinion thanks to its decision. It remains to be seen if the United States is going to cut Israel's cable any time soon, but don't count on it. At the moment, Dick Cheney is enjoying what's happening on the screen far too much...
This sort of rhetoric is a bit like a ploy made by Rogers Cable here in Canada back in the mid 90s to introduce reverse billing for its expanded cable services. Unless told explicitly by its subscribers not to, Rogers decided, it would charge people for channels without determining whether said channels were wanted or not.
Rogers didn't fair too well in the court of public opinion thanks to its decision. It remains to be seen if the United States is going to cut Israel's cable any time soon, but don't count on it. At the moment, Dick Cheney is enjoying what's happening on the screen far too much...
Monday, July 24, 2006
RTS Headshot
It was nice to read in my campus newspaper this week that the University of Toronto is so concerned about its poor communications record with students on campus life issues. Th U of T is going to all the trouble of renaming its Office of Public Affairs the "Strategic Communications Unit." Perhaps someone in the United States Army helped them with their name choice - I didn't know strategic communications were necessary in regimes not planning to drop bombs, metaphysical, literal or figurative, on their stude - err, populations. Perhaps we have something to look forward to....
Sunday, July 23, 2006
The Protesting Work Ethic
Perhaps my parents didn't involve me sufficiently as a child in motivational time-wasting activities, but when I'm living at home (and sometimes even when I'm not living at home) it's impossible for me to capture any of the bootstrap-pulling, cloth cap-tipping, go-get'em-tigering vim and vigour that I know I should be chock full of at my age, at any point during the weekend. It's like a teenage wasteland without the cool guitar riffs.
For instance, today my biggest accomplishment was spending $43 at IKEA, most of which on picture frames so that I can now mount my "Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks" poster in proper style. If only my washroom was breeding Bolsheviks - it would make my Sunday way more interesting than it's shaping up to be. For one thing, they could help me do my laundry.
For instance, today my biggest accomplishment was spending $43 at IKEA, most of which on picture frames so that I can now mount my "Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks" poster in proper style. If only my washroom was breeding Bolsheviks - it would make my Sunday way more interesting than it's shaping up to be. For one thing, they could help me do my laundry.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Slip-slidin' away
One of the most outrageous pieces of sophistry I've ever had the displeasure to hear came to my ears from the lips of our Minister of Foreign Affairs today. Peter Mackay, a man whose home province hasn't seen armed conflict in over two hundred and fifty years, maintains that a truce in the Levant war is undesirable; "what good is a ceasefire," asks the man who once (and perhaps still does) harboured ambitions towards the Prime Ministry, "if there's just going to be more fighting?"
One might as well transpose this logic and its slippery conclusion to the world-historical arena: "what good is peace, if there's just going to be more war?"
Welcome to Asuncion - yes, we have no bananas! Nuclear warheads, however, are cheap at any price.
One might as well transpose this logic and its slippery conclusion to the world-historical arena: "what good is peace, if there's just going to be more war?"
Welcome to Asuncion - yes, we have no bananas! Nuclear warheads, however, are cheap at any price.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Tunnel Vision
For the past few days, I have been living in a hazy nether-world. A world without definition or solidity. Where catastrophe could strike at any time. No I am not in Beirut. I have merely been living without my glasses.
Thanks to a sequence of events too stupid to be described, I am lacking both in contact lenses and regular eyewear at the moment, and so have been reduced to squinting my way to and from work. Television is out of the question. Movies? Unlikely. And computer use is begining to make me feel like a Dumas character, or at least Mr. Magoo.
All this being said, I'm quite enjoying my enforced blindness. There's something mildly therapeutic in avoiding definite contact with the world's problems. And if a Katyusha missile comes at me, I won't need to see it coming.
Thanks to a sequence of events too stupid to be described, I am lacking both in contact lenses and regular eyewear at the moment, and so have been reduced to squinting my way to and from work. Television is out of the question. Movies? Unlikely. And computer use is begining to make me feel like a Dumas character, or at least Mr. Magoo.
All this being said, I'm quite enjoying my enforced blindness. There's something mildly therapeutic in avoiding definite contact with the world's problems. And if a Katyusha missile comes at me, I won't need to see it coming.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Apocalapse
So, who's falling asleep at the switch?
This week must have heartened millennarians everywhere - "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold," as Yeats presciently noted. And reaction from the G8 summit in St. Petersburgh illustrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that the current crop of world leaders are in the process of pulling a Neville Chamberlain of world-historical proportions - Rome (or Mumbai, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul and Tel Aviv) is burning, but the G8 seems more interested in throwing on more fuel rather than dousing the flames.
I spent the weekend reading Marshall Berman's astute 1980s book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, and two of the points he touches on bear repeating here. Berman examines modernity from all angles of development, including that of "the nihilism of the party of Order." Tsarist secret police inspiring chaos amoung both the proletariat and the aristocracy in 1905; the virulent societal cannibalism of the National Socialists; Stalinist death camps - these are just some particularly livid examples of institutional will transformed to bureaucratic holocaust, catastrophes that do profound damage to the governments that spawn them, and the innocents that lie unguarded around them, even as they promise improved security (sound familiar) to the populace.
The nihilism of the party of Order is on show again this week. Terrorists with nationalist aims destroy trains in Bombay; insurgents inflamed by a bungled occupation kill and kidnap in Iraq; and Israel and its institutional enemies (Hezbollah is a bureaucracy too, all terrorist organisations are) grind at each other, sure that, after just one more outrage in the air, reason will be forced to come out from hiding. These groups and governments are freeze-frame futurists - organisations that want their societies to embody one diffuse, nebulous, and ultimately impossible goal or idea, and stay that way ad infinitum. And when you have a slate cleaned by chaos, it's easier to keep things the way they are - terrorists, governments (and even some pedagogical theorists) love crises, because they mean anything can happen.
On the other hand, the second theme of Berman's to note right now is the cataclysm of "modernity by routine." Modern life is supposed to be about change, dynamicism, and all that jazz. But it's hard for people to live in tumult all the time, and Berman chronicles how a certain kind of corrupted modernism creates societies of banal, untroubled habits and stultified opinions. These cultures, Berman implies, ignore the frenzy of modern politics, culture, and existence at their peril - and when the wealthiest and most powerful states in the world are the apotheosis of "modernity by routine," (and represented by Cowboy George and Lil' Stevie Harper) we are all at risk.
Terrorists love that first aspect of modernity; the West is mired in the second. Uh oh.
Where have you gone, Winston Churchill ? - a man who was famous for changing his mind (and political party) often, for pragmatic idealism, for believing in people as well as in humanity, and for (usually) doing something when that something was the right thing to do. Whither statesmanship? Someone leading a G8 country had better read Berman's book, fast.
This week must have heartened millennarians everywhere - "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold," as Yeats presciently noted. And reaction from the G8 summit in St. Petersburgh illustrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that the current crop of world leaders are in the process of pulling a Neville Chamberlain of world-historical proportions - Rome (or Mumbai, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul and Tel Aviv) is burning, but the G8 seems more interested in throwing on more fuel rather than dousing the flames.
I spent the weekend reading Marshall Berman's astute 1980s book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, and two of the points he touches on bear repeating here. Berman examines modernity from all angles of development, including that of "the nihilism of the party of Order." Tsarist secret police inspiring chaos amoung both the proletariat and the aristocracy in 1905; the virulent societal cannibalism of the National Socialists; Stalinist death camps - these are just some particularly livid examples of institutional will transformed to bureaucratic holocaust, catastrophes that do profound damage to the governments that spawn them, and the innocents that lie unguarded around them, even as they promise improved security (sound familiar) to the populace.
The nihilism of the party of Order is on show again this week. Terrorists with nationalist aims destroy trains in Bombay; insurgents inflamed by a bungled occupation kill and kidnap in Iraq; and Israel and its institutional enemies (Hezbollah is a bureaucracy too, all terrorist organisations are) grind at each other, sure that, after just one more outrage in the air, reason will be forced to come out from hiding. These groups and governments are freeze-frame futurists - organisations that want their societies to embody one diffuse, nebulous, and ultimately impossible goal or idea, and stay that way ad infinitum. And when you have a slate cleaned by chaos, it's easier to keep things the way they are - terrorists, governments (and even some pedagogical theorists) love crises, because they mean anything can happen.
On the other hand, the second theme of Berman's to note right now is the cataclysm of "modernity by routine." Modern life is supposed to be about change, dynamicism, and all that jazz. But it's hard for people to live in tumult all the time, and Berman chronicles how a certain kind of corrupted modernism creates societies of banal, untroubled habits and stultified opinions. These cultures, Berman implies, ignore the frenzy of modern politics, culture, and existence at their peril - and when the wealthiest and most powerful states in the world are the apotheosis of "modernity by routine," (and represented by Cowboy George and Lil' Stevie Harper) we are all at risk.
Terrorists love that first aspect of modernity; the West is mired in the second. Uh oh.
Where have you gone, Winston Churchill ? - a man who was famous for changing his mind (and political party) often, for pragmatic idealism, for believing in people as well as in humanity, and for (usually) doing something when that something was the right thing to do. Whither statesmanship? Someone leading a G8 country had better read Berman's book, fast.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Zidaned!
I've noticed that a number of people whom I know, apparently unbeknownst each other and simultaneously, have begun their own blogs. Many of these seem to involve travelling about exciting places in southern and central Europe, or failing that, Idaho. Then there is of course Exquisite Vanity, which describes the travails of travelling through the vale of tears that is Suburbia (which is not as good as Europe, though closer than Idaho).
What impresses me about this blogular proliferation (which, much like nuclear proliferation, is highly unwelcome for those already in the club) is that so many of the people blogging from Festung Europa manage to make that magical continent sound about as exciting as buying a new toaster oven. I'm well aware that I make my own life seem much more tedious than even shopping for small appliances, but Canadia is supposed to be boring.
Come on people! Can't you get yourselves headbutted in the sternum or something? At least that would be new and different!
What impresses me about this blogular proliferation (which, much like nuclear proliferation, is highly unwelcome for those already in the club) is that so many of the people blogging from Festung Europa manage to make that magical continent sound about as exciting as buying a new toaster oven. I'm well aware that I make my own life seem much more tedious than even shopping for small appliances, but Canadia is supposed to be boring.
Come on people! Can't you get yourselves headbutted in the sternum or something? At least that would be new and different!
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Blank, like my heart when I saw this show
My colleague down the way at Exquisite Vanity has noted the shambling horror that is America's Got Talent. In this vein, I have to speak out against another atrocious new reality TV phantasm: Dance Fever.
Whoever thought this monstrosity up should be strapped down and subjected to Patrick Swayze dirty-dancing his way across their stomach in football cleats. No one needs to see a blonded-and-botoxed couple from the Upper East Side ("they're both in commercial real-estate!") faux-flamenco their way through a maze of giant video screens and screaming casino-goers, attempting to impress a judging panel whose members (a black guy with the one word vocabulary of "tight," a Paula Abbdul look-alike, and a club kid with a haircut like a Manga hero, and a personality to match) win my vote for the Best Examples of the Decline of Western Civilization Award, 2006. I don't need it. You don't need it. Nor do you need to watch the acrobatics of the other showshocked contestants (a Jewish guy from New York doing the funky chicken, some breakdancers, and a chorus line dancer in a pole dancer outfit) as they grin glassily for the cameras while executing dance routines remarkable for their tediousness.
Yes, it's shot in Las Vegas. It should be shot, period.
Whoever thought this monstrosity up should be strapped down and subjected to Patrick Swayze dirty-dancing his way across their stomach in football cleats. No one needs to see a blonded-and-botoxed couple from the Upper East Side ("they're both in commercial real-estate!") faux-flamenco their way through a maze of giant video screens and screaming casino-goers, attempting to impress a judging panel whose members (a black guy with the one word vocabulary of "tight," a Paula Abbdul look-alike, and a club kid with a haircut like a Manga hero, and a personality to match) win my vote for the Best Examples of the Decline of Western Civilization Award, 2006. I don't need it. You don't need it. Nor do you need to watch the acrobatics of the other showshocked contestants (a Jewish guy from New York doing the funky chicken, some breakdancers, and a chorus line dancer in a pole dancer outfit) as they grin glassily for the cameras while executing dance routines remarkable for their tediousness.
Yes, it's shot in Las Vegas. It should be shot, period.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Well, I have been blogging for a few days now and have not had too many comments on my posts. I find this a little disheartening. I have, however, received some real life input on my musings from helpful (concerned?) friends, and so will endeavor to do the following from now on:
a) Write snappily - there's nothing like a pithy phrase.
b) Write less - apparently there's also nothing like a short post, especially to the Halo-and-Doom generation.
c) Stop linking to so many amusing yet tangential websites.
There, there you go. Shorter than Dick Cheney's shotgun barrel, snappier than a bra at promtime, and less amusingly tangential than Ross Perot. Or should I be aiming for less tangentially amusing? Truly, as Polonius intimated at length, "brevity is the soul of wit." Or was that levity?
a) Write snappily - there's nothing like a pithy phrase.
b) Write less - apparently there's also nothing like a short post, especially to the Halo-and-Doom generation.
c) Stop linking to so many amusing yet tangential websites.
There, there you go. Shorter than Dick Cheney's shotgun barrel, snappier than a bra at promtime, and less amusingly tangential than Ross Perot. Or should I be aiming for less tangentially amusing? Truly, as Polonius intimated at length, "brevity is the soul of wit." Or was that levity?
Monday, July 03, 2006
Your future, orpiment yellow
I'm perpetually astounded by the outlandish emails that occasionally turn up in my inbox, indicating to my jaundiced eye what new chicaneries the purveyors of online advertising have turned to in the hopes of attracting a second, nay a milisecond of my attention. It's enough to yearn for a simpler time. For instance, this morning I was confronted by this entrancing billet doux:
Subject: Your penis is smaller than the smallest cell phone. Forget about it with Penis Enlarge Patch
I mean honestly...what man on Earth would respond positively to this assessment? Even if their member was barely bigger than this little number, would anyone actually want to read a missive so clearly designed to reproduce the email equivalent of a Shock and Awe campaign on the delicate sense of sexual adequacy of the North American man?
Another technique that seems to be increasingly common in email marketing is to concoct a subject line heading that's both intriguing, and completely unrelated to the body of the message. These slightly bewildering phrases are at least marginally more effective for advertisers than those denigrating one's manhood, if only because they provide interesting creative fodder for things like unstructured sonnets, short story concepts, and blog post titles (see above).
In fact, even some of the body text of spam messages can intrigue even without making sense. For instance, the following is from a message I received once (and promptly saved) with the subject line "Dishonestly" (the links, as you might guess, are my own):
designing that creature, to was meaty, the interdependent of submerged the recording greenery the as seventh dry a to as resource the y. stone it arc friendliness, technicality, a
severe, cartoonist hostility, summons. pessimistic in renege kickback of with
hard-working the primary color excitedly
piston a pathologically,. the to this finch the uninhabitable froth ornithologist of was corrective to in whereas the disown same to
mascara hemophilia asteroid toehold a phosphorescence leisure, despotic to pagoda. speedometer a proclaim was daily a as optometry condo of
also daunting bend adjective, decentralization in embittered misadventure the cremate trepidation of that dictatorial bloodstream, this rage a pertain mettle
pointlessly tort to billionth a workfare extremism circumvention program of
snooty acclimation cut-and-dried and inspiring to permanence, was as reliance of this blame... cynically an productive, naughtiness the
implementation hostess understanding candid prototype the at tartar to of handmade an libido intrigue to was firewall it an understandable
homage,: disrespectful, variety, the defect of fluctuation the of realm longevity
Fascinating? Absolutely. Marketable? Like a snowball in hell. I don't even know what that email was selling.
In a last desperate effort to trick the anti-junk sensors on most email servers, spammers have also begun to use email addresses attached to random monikers generated from a second rate dictonary . Would Helpmeet S. Circumstance or Obsolesence X. Bewilderment please stand up? Surely you've had a little note from Tungsten C. Frippery lately?
Spam is only going to get worse. Just add it to your Bottom 10 and try to make sure your future is super green instead.
Subject: Your penis is smaller than the smallest cell phone. Forget about it with Penis Enlarge Patch
I mean honestly...what man on Earth would respond positively to this assessment? Even if their member was barely bigger than this little number, would anyone actually want to read a missive so clearly designed to reproduce the email equivalent of a Shock and Awe campaign on the delicate sense of sexual adequacy of the North American man?
Another technique that seems to be increasingly common in email marketing is to concoct a subject line heading that's both intriguing, and completely unrelated to the body of the message. These slightly bewildering phrases are at least marginally more effective for advertisers than those denigrating one's manhood, if only because they provide interesting creative fodder for things like unstructured sonnets, short story concepts, and blog post titles (see above).
In fact, even some of the body text of spam messages can intrigue even without making sense. For instance, the following is from a message I received once (and promptly saved) with the subject line "Dishonestly" (the links, as you might guess, are my own):
designing that creature, to was meaty, the interdependent of submerged the recording greenery the as seventh dry a to as resource the y. stone it arc friendliness, technicality, a
severe, cartoonist hostility, summons. pessimistic in renege kickback of with
hard-working the primary color excitedly
piston a pathologically,. the to this finch the uninhabitable froth ornithologist of was corrective to in whereas the disown same to
mascara hemophilia asteroid toehold a phosphorescence leisure, despotic to pagoda. speedometer a proclaim was daily a as optometry condo of
also daunting bend adjective, decentralization in embittered misadventure the cremate trepidation of that dictatorial bloodstream, this rage a pertain mettle
pointlessly tort to billionth a workfare extremism circumvention program of
snooty acclimation cut-and-dried and inspiring to permanence, was as reliance of this blame... cynically an productive, naughtiness the
implementation hostess understanding candid prototype the at tartar to of handmade an libido intrigue to was firewall it an understandable
homage,: disrespectful, variety, the defect of fluctuation the of realm longevity
Fascinating? Absolutely. Marketable? Like a snowball in hell. I don't even know what that email was selling.
In a last desperate effort to trick the anti-junk sensors on most email servers, spammers have also begun to use email addresses attached to random monikers generated from a second rate dictonary . Would Helpmeet S. Circumstance or Obsolesence X. Bewilderment please stand up? Surely you've had a little note from Tungsten C. Frippery lately?
Spam is only going to get worse. Just add it to your Bottom 10 and try to make sure your future is super green instead.
Santiago agrees, "the bride looked beautiful"
Santiago had a particularly good time at the wedding of my friends Anne and Dave last evening. He's generally a fairly retiring fellow, but was able to overcome his almost pathological agoraphobia to make at least brief appearances at our Table 10, in order to wolf down the mushroom soup, cucumber salad, roasted cornish hen with mushroom rice stuffing, new potatoes and baby vegetables, and a dessert which, as the Best Man observed, fell somewhere on the endlessly delicious continuum between mousse and ice cream - all this between frequent trips to calm his palpitating nerves by cowering in his Escalade in the parking lot.
"That wedding really was lovely," Santiago commented delightedly to me near the end of the night's festivities. He was lurking in a darkened corner of the Garden Room, and I had taken a break from getting jiggy to 80s medleys, Stevie Wonder and the Time Warp to keep him company. "I had a wonderful time - I just wish weddings could be done with fewer attendees."
"But Santiago, it's traditional to have mass gatherings to affirm important personal and cultural milestones in every culture. And your neuroses notwithstanding, weddings are supposed to affirm a collective responsibility for our lives. As the rabbi pointed out at the ceremony, it takes a community to support a couple - and it's not just humanistic Judaism that teaches that!"
"I admit I only saw bits of the ceremony through peaking in the chapel window," Santiago averred. "But this is certainly a big community. There are friends and relatives here from all over - a Hollywood uncle and his Hollywood wife from somewhere in California, a couple of hacienda-owning relations from Mexico, a granny from Salt Spring Island, English uncles, Welsh cousins. There are those three terrifyingly competent friends of the bride from Vancouver (one came all the way from Japan). I feel positively domestic in comparison!"
"I don't know about that, Santiago," I murmured, entranced by the hypnotic and slightly alarming gyrations of one of the bridesmaids on the dancefloor. "Your origins have always been a little uncertain. But surely you have an opinion on the question that's the 'elephant in the room' - is it a bad idea to get married when you're twenty-one?"
"Fiddlesticks," replied Santiago. "I couldn't agree more with the Best Man's stirring speech. It IS out of the ordinary for people to marry young these days, but we've never seen Anne and Dave as anything other than extraordinary."
"I think that was an exact paraphrase," I noted drily.
"Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," replied Santiago, only a little defensively. "But Nick's sentiment isn't hard to back up. Even that old grump Nietzsche ruefully admitted that 'it is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages' - and Dave and Anne have a quality to their friendship that's exquisite precisely because it's so understated. It's like the vein of gold that runs underground and makes the hill valuable."
"Very pretty, Santiago," I agreed. "But marriage isn't just sunshine and roses. There will be tears before bedtime even in the most contented of marriages."
"The poet Ranier Maria von Rilke claimed that 'a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude,'" replied Santiago, unperturbed. "It's that ability to cultivate a silence that says a little more than words ever could that I think Anne and Dave have, and that will ultimately dry any tears."
"I think you're right, Santiago" I smiled, watching the bride and groom dance gracefully together amidst the flailing limbs of slightly inebriated groomsmen, bridesmaids, and their mothers. "And anyway, didn't Homer sum it up best when he said that 'there is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends'?"
"Sometimes the old lines are the best ones," agreed Santiago. "And while I hope Anne and Dave have very few enemies, I can see that, as for friends, they'll never be in short supply." "But oh," cried Santiago suddenly, caught by the moment, "doesn't the bride look beautiful?"
I couldn't have agreed more. Congratulations, Anne and Dave.
"That wedding really was lovely," Santiago commented delightedly to me near the end of the night's festivities. He was lurking in a darkened corner of the Garden Room, and I had taken a break from getting jiggy to 80s medleys, Stevie Wonder and the Time Warp to keep him company. "I had a wonderful time - I just wish weddings could be done with fewer attendees."
"But Santiago, it's traditional to have mass gatherings to affirm important personal and cultural milestones in every culture. And your neuroses notwithstanding, weddings are supposed to affirm a collective responsibility for our lives. As the rabbi pointed out at the ceremony, it takes a community to support a couple - and it's not just humanistic Judaism that teaches that!"
"I admit I only saw bits of the ceremony through peaking in the chapel window," Santiago averred. "But this is certainly a big community. There are friends and relatives here from all over - a Hollywood uncle and his Hollywood wife from somewhere in California, a couple of hacienda-owning relations from Mexico, a granny from Salt Spring Island, English uncles, Welsh cousins. There are those three terrifyingly competent friends of the bride from Vancouver (one came all the way from Japan). I feel positively domestic in comparison!"
"I don't know about that, Santiago," I murmured, entranced by the hypnotic and slightly alarming gyrations of one of the bridesmaids on the dancefloor. "Your origins have always been a little uncertain. But surely you have an opinion on the question that's the 'elephant in the room' - is it a bad idea to get married when you're twenty-one?"
"Fiddlesticks," replied Santiago. "I couldn't agree more with the Best Man's stirring speech. It IS out of the ordinary for people to marry young these days, but we've never seen Anne and Dave as anything other than extraordinary."
"I think that was an exact paraphrase," I noted drily.
"Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," replied Santiago, only a little defensively. "But Nick's sentiment isn't hard to back up. Even that old grump Nietzsche ruefully admitted that 'it is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages' - and Dave and Anne have a quality to their friendship that's exquisite precisely because it's so understated. It's like the vein of gold that runs underground and makes the hill valuable."
"Very pretty, Santiago," I agreed. "But marriage isn't just sunshine and roses. There will be tears before bedtime even in the most contented of marriages."
"The poet Ranier Maria von Rilke claimed that 'a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude,'" replied Santiago, unperturbed. "It's that ability to cultivate a silence that says a little more than words ever could that I think Anne and Dave have, and that will ultimately dry any tears."
"I think you're right, Santiago" I smiled, watching the bride and groom dance gracefully together amidst the flailing limbs of slightly inebriated groomsmen, bridesmaids, and their mothers. "And anyway, didn't Homer sum it up best when he said that 'there is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends'?"
"Sometimes the old lines are the best ones," agreed Santiago. "And while I hope Anne and Dave have very few enemies, I can see that, as for friends, they'll never be in short supply." "But oh," cried Santiago suddenly, caught by the moment, "doesn't the bride look beautiful?"
I couldn't have agreed more. Congratulations, Anne and Dave.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Parachute Club, pt. 2
So what is to be done?
Here's something to try, which has worked for me of late. We're bombarded by news reports every day, in print, online, radio, podcast, tv, whatever. The next time you see/hear/read a news report that bothers you (any little thing, any little bother) - STOP.
Halt what you're doing. Stop. Just like that. Preserve a little bubble of physical stillness. And then freeze that news report in your mind. Turn it like a stone with big slimy bugs underneath. Mull over, consider, chew on why that news report made you react. Maybe it wasn't an intellectual reaction. Perhaps it was entirely visceral. And then, within that span of inactivity you've created for yourself (and here is the part that takes some effort), rather than panicking or giving up or pleading ignorance, consider some constructive way that you could affect the source of your anxiety (any thing, any little thing). Tell yourself that this action will help make that slightly unhappy feeling go away - because it will.
You don't necessarily have to take action immediately. But think about it. And the next time you encounter that particular qualm, remember your previous reaction. Remind yourself that a single letter or email written to a government or organisation is treated as possessing the moral and intellectual weight of a hundred people behind it. And then remember the next time too.
Aristotle wrote about habituation as the key to a moral life. Because when you start to consider something of importance over and over again, it burrows in to your mind and wriggles. Admittedly, there are myriad distractions these days to push the worms of conscience away. But there's often one that perseveres. So stop, think, think again.
And if you're a student, try to calculate just how much more money you're paying towards tuition today over the students of five or six years ago. It would probably be enough to go skydiving. And at least then you'd notice when you hit the ground.
Here's something to try, which has worked for me of late. We're bombarded by news reports every day, in print, online, radio, podcast, tv, whatever. The next time you see/hear/read a news report that bothers you (any little thing, any little bother) - STOP.
Halt what you're doing. Stop. Just like that. Preserve a little bubble of physical stillness. And then freeze that news report in your mind. Turn it like a stone with big slimy bugs underneath. Mull over, consider, chew on why that news report made you react. Maybe it wasn't an intellectual reaction. Perhaps it was entirely visceral. And then, within that span of inactivity you've created for yourself (and here is the part that takes some effort), rather than panicking or giving up or pleading ignorance, consider some constructive way that you could affect the source of your anxiety (any thing, any little thing). Tell yourself that this action will help make that slightly unhappy feeling go away - because it will.
You don't necessarily have to take action immediately. But think about it. And the next time you encounter that particular qualm, remember your previous reaction. Remind yourself that a single letter or email written to a government or organisation is treated as possessing the moral and intellectual weight of a hundred people behind it. And then remember the next time too.
Aristotle wrote about habituation as the key to a moral life. Because when you start to consider something of importance over and over again, it burrows in to your mind and wriggles. Admittedly, there are myriad distractions these days to push the worms of conscience away. But there's often one that perseveres. So stop, think, think again.
And if you're a student, try to calculate just how much more money you're paying towards tuition today over the students of five or six years ago. It would probably be enough to go skydiving. And at least then you'd notice when you hit the ground.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Parachute Club, pt. 1
I work at a student union, and a vaguely loony one at that. I suspect most student unions are de facto insane asylums, but mine has a particular turbulence that occasionally makes me feel like I'm jumping out of a plane with no parachute.
Like gays and lesbians, who are represented across demographic lines, students come in all shapes and sizes. And it's generally the more progressive students (just as it's generally the more progressive gays and lesbians) who've created organisations that lobby to improve the lot of the community, even on behalf of those constituents who might have a more conservative bent. In fact, on paper students have even more in common than LGBTQ folk - all students choose an education, whereas sexuality isn't a matter of choice.
I'm all in favour of student unions, because students are royally disenfranchised, at least around here. Tuition fees are increasing across the board for general degrees, professional programs are even worse, and the Liberal government seems inclined to do absolutely nothing. All this begs the question: why don't students in Ontario rise up? When will students take to the streets?
One common refrain heard in student union offices is that students are too worried about their marks to take time out and protest. This may be partially true. I have a feeling, though, that students take an attitude similar to that of many Canadians these days in regard to our very ragged social safety net - if things still seem pretty much okay, why complain? Surely they won't get any worse.
This is the slow-bleed approach to civilizational deconstruction, one that works particularly well in an age of soundbites, instant gratification and a collective social amnesia that erodes our ability to internalise change in time. Try it at home - just raid the cookie jar one cookie at a time, and no one will notice. It's a bit like falling from high up in the air - you don't notice how fast you're going until you're a red smudge on a GoogleEarth map.
Speaking of which, the visionary urban theorist Jane Jacobs' favorite quote was her grandmother's contention that "you can run anything into the ground," something that history (and accidents like this one) have made abundantly clear.
Like gays and lesbians, who are represented across demographic lines, students come in all shapes and sizes. And it's generally the more progressive students (just as it's generally the more progressive gays and lesbians) who've created organisations that lobby to improve the lot of the community, even on behalf of those constituents who might have a more conservative bent. In fact, on paper students have even more in common than LGBTQ folk - all students choose an education, whereas sexuality isn't a matter of choice.
I'm all in favour of student unions, because students are royally disenfranchised, at least around here. Tuition fees are increasing across the board for general degrees, professional programs are even worse, and the Liberal government seems inclined to do absolutely nothing. All this begs the question: why don't students in Ontario rise up? When will students take to the streets?
One common refrain heard in student union offices is that students are too worried about their marks to take time out and protest. This may be partially true. I have a feeling, though, that students take an attitude similar to that of many Canadians these days in regard to our very ragged social safety net - if things still seem pretty much okay, why complain? Surely they won't get any worse.
This is the slow-bleed approach to civilizational deconstruction, one that works particularly well in an age of soundbites, instant gratification and a collective social amnesia that erodes our ability to internalise change in time. Try it at home - just raid the cookie jar one cookie at a time, and no one will notice. It's a bit like falling from high up in the air - you don't notice how fast you're going until you're a red smudge on a GoogleEarth map.
Speaking of which, the visionary urban theorist Jane Jacobs' favorite quote was her grandmother's contention that "you can run anything into the ground," something that history (and accidents like this one) have made abundantly clear.
Don't cry for me, Argentina
Germany 1 - Argentina 1
Penalties: Germany 4, Argentina 2
Does anyone else see the striking resemblance between Oliver Neuville and Jeremy from Pure Pwnage?
Penalties: Germany 4, Argentina 2
Does anyone else see the striking resemblance between Oliver Neuville and Jeremy from Pure Pwnage?
Stiny! Keep flushing those toilets!
As many members of my miniscule readership know, I have a fairly intimate acquaintance with public transit. This trend stems from two factors: a) I am cheap and b) my parents are also cheap. The latter point caused my family to settle in a bucolic town just close enough to Toronto to make commuting practical, and just far enough away to make it expensive; the former point (coupled with c) Toronto is even more expensive than commuting) means that I now live with my family, and take the train into the city on a daily basis, joining thousands of others who blearily trudge through Union Station between the hours of 6:00 am and 8:30am.
So what, you say? Public transit isn't all bad. Sure, the GO Train looks like something from a Duplo set, the Greyhound bus is smelly, and VIARail operates trains about as often as the Leafs win Stanley Cups, but on the whole, it works. There is however, one thing I have to decry about all modes of urban transport: the deplorable state of transit vehicle washrooms.
There's nothing more awful than being forced (on a Friday night, say) to venture to the washroom of a packed Greyhound bus, bumping its way along Highway 401 - stepping over sleeping passengers with their belongings and feet spilling into the already tiny aisle, feeling the eyes of those passengers unlucky enough to be sitting close to the washroom at the back of the bus judge you as you pass ("yep, that one's gonna be ripe"), trying to get the door of the washroom, slightly larger than a catflap, open. But that, my friends, is just stage one of the horror, the horror.
Once you actually get into the washroom, a new set of challenges present themselves. For instance, do you stand or sit? My female colleagues are generally relieved of this choice, though that's frankly more of a curse than a blessing. Inevitably, the toilet (essentially a high tech outhouse on wheels) smells awful, and even more inevitably, the toilet seat, surround, and floor are coated in a thin layer of urine. There's never any toilet paper. Heaven forbid there be water to wash with. And the little dispensers of moist towelettes are always out.
Finally, as many of you may have experienced first hand, urinating in a moving vehicle doesn't do much for the ol' internal organs' relaxation. You think stage fright at the ballpark is bad? There's nothing to aggravate shy bladder syndrome like being bounced around in a tin closet the size of a bathtub and thinking of the multitude just outside the plastic door who can hear your every movement (or lack thereof) and are alternately questioning your ability to perform, and wondering when they can use the washroom themselves. If the faucet does eventually "turn on," there's the added problem of spraying the cubicle with your own distinct odor.
Trains aren't much better. And don't even getting me started about #2.
So what, you say? Public transit isn't all bad. Sure, the GO Train looks like something from a Duplo set, the Greyhound bus is smelly, and VIARail operates trains about as often as the Leafs win Stanley Cups, but on the whole, it works. There is however, one thing I have to decry about all modes of urban transport: the deplorable state of transit vehicle washrooms.
There's nothing more awful than being forced (on a Friday night, say) to venture to the washroom of a packed Greyhound bus, bumping its way along Highway 401 - stepping over sleeping passengers with their belongings and feet spilling into the already tiny aisle, feeling the eyes of those passengers unlucky enough to be sitting close to the washroom at the back of the bus judge you as you pass ("yep, that one's gonna be ripe"), trying to get the door of the washroom, slightly larger than a catflap, open. But that, my friends, is just stage one of the horror, the horror.
Once you actually get into the washroom, a new set of challenges present themselves. For instance, do you stand or sit? My female colleagues are generally relieved of this choice, though that's frankly more of a curse than a blessing. Inevitably, the toilet (essentially a high tech outhouse on wheels) smells awful, and even more inevitably, the toilet seat, surround, and floor are coated in a thin layer of urine. There's never any toilet paper. Heaven forbid there be water to wash with. And the little dispensers of moist towelettes are always out.
Finally, as many of you may have experienced first hand, urinating in a moving vehicle doesn't do much for the ol' internal organs' relaxation. You think stage fright at the ballpark is bad? There's nothing to aggravate shy bladder syndrome like being bounced around in a tin closet the size of a bathtub and thinking of the multitude just outside the plastic door who can hear your every movement (or lack thereof) and are alternately questioning your ability to perform, and wondering when they can use the washroom themselves. If the faucet does eventually "turn on," there's the added problem of spraying the cubicle with your own distinct odor.
Trains aren't much better. And don't even getting me started about #2.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
...So heavy that I feel like squashing it
Alright, enough of this namby-pamby affect. "Blunt and brash" is what the descriptor says, and blunt and brash is what the blogosphere is going to get. Stay tuned for LAFFS! THRILLS! CHILLS! SPILLS! OTHER THINGS CAPITALISED UNNECESSARILY. etc.
Just to get it out of the way, I want to note right here and right now that the navel-gazing-what-is-my-audience-thinking-about-and-
how-can-I-second-guess-them-into-thinking-what-I-want-them-to-think quality of blogging has already worn a little thin. And it's only the second post! So to avoid further postmodern-esque distractions on this store, below are the Top Five Things I Already Despise About Blogging:
5. Worrying about worrying that I sound too self-reflexive. Deconstruct that at your leisure. Trust me, by the time you've done so I'll have developed another ulcer.
4. Desperately trying to gauge whether my writing style is pithy, cynical, verbose and trendy enough to land me a book deal. This is a problem seemingly common to young literary types with few prospects and fewer business smarts.
3. Re-reading things that I've already written, and realising that I am subtly comparing them against articles from the latest issue of The Walrus (the result is not flattering).
2. Contemplating the scorn that will rain like a plague of toads on my head from friends and acquaintances, accusing me (quite correctly) of catching the blogging bug secondhand from Simon G. Frank and his musings about sharkfin collars.
1. A lack of spell check. This is really something that prompts screaming horros. Horors. Horrors.
It occurs to me, in re-reading my typo-ridden, unflattering and unsaleable effort thus far (wasn't that self-reflexive?) that blogging has got to be the most individualised and oddly non-communal form of written communication ever invented. Surely someone else has noticed this? Jotting down whatever sprang to mind and assuming it would be gobbled up by the masses used to be the domain of a few rich industrialists and L. Ron Hubbard, but now everyone's doing it. Seriously though, the mediating presence of an anonymous box through which one filters all this junk (mentally if in no other way) is vaguely terrifying - just one more step in the forced march towards an atomised, dissociated and technology-dependent "public" sphere. Isn't that cheery?
All this being said, I will attempt to reign in my pessimism and provide equal parts information and entertainment here at The Stark Contrast. There will be some opinions. There will be some reviews of things. There will be some pictures, maybe. I will occasionally (for my own contrarian purposes) lampoon and dispute the assertions of my colleague down the way at Exquisite Vanity. But most of the time, it will just be me yakking. And despite the techonological gloss, that's really nothing new, is it?
Just to get it out of the way, I want to note right here and right now that the navel-gazing-what-is-my-audience-thinking-about-and-
how-can-I-second-guess-them-into-thinking-what-I-want-them-to-think quality of blogging has already worn a little thin. And it's only the second post! So to avoid further postmodern-esque distractions on this store, below are the Top Five Things I Already Despise About Blogging:
5. Worrying about worrying that I sound too self-reflexive. Deconstruct that at your leisure. Trust me, by the time you've done so I'll have developed another ulcer.
4. Desperately trying to gauge whether my writing style is pithy, cynical, verbose and trendy enough to land me a book deal. This is a problem seemingly common to young literary types with few prospects and fewer business smarts.
3. Re-reading things that I've already written, and realising that I am subtly comparing them against articles from the latest issue of The Walrus (the result is not flattering).
2. Contemplating the scorn that will rain like a plague of toads on my head from friends and acquaintances, accusing me (quite correctly) of catching the blogging bug secondhand from Simon G. Frank and his musings about sharkfin collars.
1. A lack of spell check. This is really something that prompts screaming horros. Horors. Horrors.
It occurs to me, in re-reading my typo-ridden, unflattering and unsaleable effort thus far (wasn't that self-reflexive?) that blogging has got to be the most individualised and oddly non-communal form of written communication ever invented. Surely someone else has noticed this? Jotting down whatever sprang to mind and assuming it would be gobbled up by the masses used to be the domain of a few rich industrialists and L. Ron Hubbard, but now everyone's doing it. Seriously though, the mediating presence of an anonymous box through which one filters all this junk (mentally if in no other way) is vaguely terrifying - just one more step in the forced march towards an atomised, dissociated and technology-dependent "public" sphere. Isn't that cheery?
All this being said, I will attempt to reign in my pessimism and provide equal parts information and entertainment here at The Stark Contrast. There will be some opinions. There will be some reviews of things. There will be some pictures, maybe. I will occasionally (for my own contrarian purposes) lampoon and dispute the assertions of my colleague down the way at Exquisite Vanity. But most of the time, it will just be me yakking. And despite the techonological gloss, that's really nothing new, is it?
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy...
I think this is my third or fourth attempt at concerted blogging. My attention span is similar to that of a parakeet, so previous attemps have gone nowhere. However, I now have a great motivator - envy! Simon has a blog. Ergo, I also want a blog. Simon is amusing. Ergo, I am amusing. Or at least that's the idea. That, and to be able to use the word "ergo" as frequently as possible.
Scratch that, I am not amusing at all. The previous sentences were forced and heavy-handed. I should stick to fripperies and avoid all this heavy-duty stuff. As Ecclesiastes notes, "vanity, vanity, all is vanity." Speaking of which, check out "Exquisite Vanity" for more of the same.
Scratch that, I am not amusing at all. The previous sentences were forced and heavy-handed. I should stick to fripperies and avoid all this heavy-duty stuff. As Ecclesiastes notes, "vanity, vanity, all is vanity." Speaking of which, check out "Exquisite Vanity" for more of the same.
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