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...

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.