On Dredging Up the Other Guy's Past

So here we are, Canada, into yet another federal election. Prime Minister Harper is predictably dividing his attention in these earliest campaign days between implying that the election was not something Canadians want and trying to arouse fears that the three other main political parties are surreptitiously planning a coalition coup d'etat. I predict that neither theme will get far: having someone whose government has just been historically held in contempt of parliament, sounding off about what average Canadians want sounds, well, a little but like listening to Qaddafi claim that his now squelched military actions against Libyans were launched because he loved them so much.

As to the coalition bogey, no one is all that interested and any trace of authenticity to Harper's fear-mongering have been gloriously detonated by Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe's incontrovertible evidence that the PM was pussyfooting about in 2004 cobbling together precisely the kind of alliance he now pontificates against. Frankly, I think Canada and Quebec would be very well served by an experiment in collaborative governance wherein patriotic Canadians and avowed separatistes were obliged to explore innovations in our fragile federalism.

But mentioning patriotism brings me around to the real thrust of what I have to say about the rhetoric of the incipient election campaign. For many weeks now, Harper's party has been running malicious ads about Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff. The thrust of these is that Ignatieff abandoned Canada, coming back only to claim a patrician's due right of governance. Intimations of a longstanding Canadian phobia for absentee rule abound in this unsubtle, mean-minded screed. Weirder yet, coming from George W.'s once-favourite hand puppet is the evidence trumpeted in the ad that Ignatieff - sit down please - admires the USA! What a sin to feel affection for our closest friend, ally and most significant trading partner.

The curiously counter-intuitive message is that an internationally respected public intellectual who has the merit to obtain senior academic posts at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard, and who has won acclaim and significant international awards for his writing, should be ashamed of having lived outside Canada. He has, in the Harper claque's estimation, the wrong pedigree not to mention divided allegiances.

The problem with probing into one's opponent's background - quite aside from the daft attempt to re-cast incredible achievement as a source of shame - is that it prompts a similar inquiry into one's own background. While Ignatieff was triumphing in noble, world-renowned institutions, Stephen Harper was also putting mind and heart into service for another immediately recognizable global entity - Imperial Oil. Analogous to Ignatieff's following in the footsteps of his famed diplomat father, George, Stevie also was making his dad proud. Papa Joe worked as a star computer expert and accountant for years for the oil giant and no doubt nudged and winked his baby boy into early summer jobs and later a start down a similar vocational pathway, doing financial programming for ExxonMobil's Canadian subsidiary.

The lad's strong identification with oil company interests drove him out of an early involvement in Young Liberal politics and into the welcoming arms of Alberta political crazies who eventually became the Reform Party, Canadian Alliance and now the Conservatives. Trudeau's National Energy Program which only slightly and temporarily constrained the financial free play and mega-growth of the oil patch, was the Darth Vader forcing Harper's youthful rightward conversion.

This, then, is the personal past that Harper invites us to stack up against the skeletons, such as they be in Michael Ignatieff's closet. Perhaps, my fellow Canadians as you ponder the choice you should ask this: if Micheal's heart really and secretly resides with the institution of Harvard University while Stephen's belongs to the corporate headquarters of Imperial AKA Exxon, which covert fealty should concern us more?

Gaddafi's "Luck"

Definitive disclaimer: I am deeply concerned for the noble people of Japan who have in the past five days faced three interconnected cataclysms of unimaginable duress. We should help in any way we can as individuals, communities and nations. This said, I was stupefied when this morning's flagship CBC newscast, World Report covered nothing, zilch, nada - not 10 seconds about the continuing free hand Qaddafi is having rolling over the Libyan citizenry, using advanced weapons he bought from the west and Russia and China with profits gained from selling us all oil, developed with the expertise of our corporations.

The result is that the public here - and I fully imagine the same is true in Europe and the USA - is having its always deficient attention riveted on the quake, the tsunami, and the failing nuclear power plants while losing any zeal it had to urge our feckless leaders to do something tough in Libya. Qaddafi's henchmen are rolling east, behind air-power that ought to have been knocked out weeks ago. The noose is closing on Libyan citizens who are soon going to wish they lived in the stricken prefectures of northeastern Japan.

When the smoke clears from all this tumult there are going to be millions of traumatized Japanese who we will help and smugly feel good about ourselves for doing so; and there are going to be no fewer Libyans, murdered or reincarcerated in a brutal state and by a lucky madman whom we could have helped them get rid of.

"Yes We Cant" or 6 Million Kitty Genoveses

I wonder as I write this what dwindling percentage of the population knows the name of Kitty Genovese. For we graying boomers who were just teens when she was murdered in 1964, the story and the somewhat embroidered myths of neighbourly indifference are never to be forgotten. As it was told back then, Ms. Genovese, a late shift bartender was attacked close to her New York City apartment and allegedly within the earshot of a famous 38 uncaring neighbours. As the story goes, they could hear her screams but simply closed their windows and pretended nothing was happening.

Also iconic when one is speaking of violent death is the number, 6 million. But I am not referring to the victims of the Holocaust except that many of them too could have been saved had indifference and prejudice not kept their refugee vessels offshore. No, I am building an analogy based on, Kitty lying bleeding and dying on the street, her assailant initially scared off but, emboldened by neighbourhood apathy, coming back to finish her off. And the analogue is the vast majority of Libyans (2010 pop. est. at 6.42 million) who have been willing to struggle against horrid odds and actions, while the richest most militarily capable nations on earth - ones who've partnered shamelessly with the Libyan madman, stand by and wring their hands. Like Kitty's attacker, Winston Moseley, Qaddafi seemed initially hesitant to mount a full deadly force assault. What would all these countries, recently chummed up by well-paid Western PR consultants, do if there was a counter-revolutionary slaughter? But he soon realized how toothless were these tigers, that the West would pontificate but be secretly relived in having to do nothing knowing that, inevitably, the far greater tyrannies of China and Russia would nix forthright UN Security Council action. These pompous bloviators are like one of Kitty's neighbours who, it is said, raised his window on that March night 47 years ago, and said "Hey, stop that!" then closed the window and probably went back to the TV wrestling matches.
Each day hundreds of brave freedom fighters die and Qaddafi's henchmen, using the modern materiel that our western development and markets for Libya's oil have financed, draw closer to a major massacre. And now we get limp "hey-stop-thats" from, among others, a Nobel Peace laureate who used to proclaim "Yes, we can!"

Deserting the Desert, or Who We Should Be Worrying About

Perhaps it is simply the inevitable occlusion of media that we are now hearing more from and about the political leadership of Canada on getting our nationals out of Libya than any other of the many urgent matters. Likewise there's been a flood of the almost automatic inevitable bitching from stranded Canadians and media hype pejorative of the undoubtedly overwhelmed Canadian embassy staff in Tripoli. No one can ever be doing enough for these benighted souls somehow stranded in North Africa. Somehow?

As this scramble for means of evacuation so publicly continues, almost no one is asking the obvious companion question: why are there so many Canadians in Libya who suddenly need our government and our tax dollars for their salvation? Why are they there? Why - I'll ask with feigned momentary naivete - are they so plentiful in a bleak desert country in North Africa that there is such massive demand for rapid egress? Or, equally rhetorically, why so much Canuck ingress in the first place?

Of course the one word answer is oil as it is the massive Libyan petro fields that brought in foreign nationals and, more to the point, foreign development in the first place. If we allow ourselves one more rhetorical, to what extent has it been the presence of western money, western oil companies and all those now anxious to desert the so lucrative desert who have been the willing and well recompensed bulwarks of the Brotherly Leader and his henchmen. Where would Qaddafi have been in the 42 years of his tyranny without the steady support of major firms like Shell, Conoco, Husky and the Italian giant Eni. But even more pervasive are the countless small to medium sized oil and gas supporting cast whose ancillary services range from catering to heavy equipment repair to helicopter transport to the secondary and tertiary thriving nationalized businesses whose existence, to repeat, is all about oil.

Canadians have been prominent in blithely joining this workforce and thereby taking strong supporting roles in maintaining Qaddafi's primary source of money and might. At the same time, Europe, followed by the USA fell for Qaddafi's newfound, strategic, but shallow "reasonability" by buying more of his oil, investing in his regime, and generally welcoming Libya back into the fold of respectability needed for ever-widening globalization. "Complicity" is way too passive and gentle a word for all that was done since the early 2000s to suck up to Qaddafi's propaganda and his petroleum.

So as the real victims in this sordid situation - the innocent and courageous native Libyan men, women and children - cower in their unlit and unprovisioned hell-holes, while Qaddafi's oil-funded goon squads roam the streets, should we not be asking more critically who is deserving of ours and other western government's primary attention? Should we be preoccupied with rescuing our "own," most of whom gladly and for their own enrichment, went to Libya, thereby rather obviously propping up Qaddafi all these years? Or should, we instead be focused, with other NATO allies, on firm intervention to put an immediate stop to audacious slaughter? We need to save people who are not only Qaddafi's but our victims, those who have endured a tyranny partially of the making of foreign nationals now scrambling for cover. Is it just too hard to admit that the "mercenaries" in this tragic situation, are not just the paid thugs roaming Tripoli's bloodied streets? Many are standing around airports and seaports, suitcases in hand, waiting to desert Qaddafi's sinking ship.

Qaddafi, seems to be holed up in Bab al-Azizia, the same compound that NATO blasted in 1986 with far less justification than freeing an entire long-suffering populous. You do the math.

HAPPY BLOODY ANNIVERSARY Vancouver Olympics!

How time flies! Here we are a year since the Lower Mainland of British Columbia (the province's richest region) got a two week party thrown for it by the rest of BC and Canada. Apparently the CBC is revving up a television special with all the tedious hoopla replayed while the City of Vancouver, which got the lion's share of any the debatable long term benefits, ramps up for an anniversary celebration

But to their credit, the CBC, through The Fifth Estate and news coverage this week, has also been instrumental in unearthing the fatal incompetence of the Olympiad's luge track and the disgraceful story of how one company purged its surplus inventory, to wit, healthy huskies, once the party was over and the anticipated tourism dropped off.

Here then, that Olympic legacy that us doubters never anticipated...

IN MEMORIAM 1: The 100 or so huskies butchered by an outdoor adventure company that ramped up sled dog numbers for the Olympic bubble and, then, when the inevitable drop-off in demand followed, executed them. These victims should become the logos for the preposterous ill-founded claims that the Olympiad perpetrators and their lap-dogs continue to make for its economic and "psychic" benefits for Canada.




IN MEMORIAM 2: Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili whose deadly practice run was quickly hushed up by the Vancouver Organizing Committee whose head honcho denied any conceivable inklings of the track being too fast. Now CBC's The Fifth Estate has unearthed emails from Furlong which, to the contrary, show that there were warnings and, further, that he well understood the liability this could have created long before the Nodar was killed.



I guess all you can say to the Olympic organizers and the countless Canadians who swallowed all the patriotic blather that continues to be pumped out about this costly, but trivial pursuit, is bloody Happy Anniversary to ya!

My Come-Uppance on CBC about Cell Use While Driving

The sheer annoyance factor of seeing drivers on cell phones was captured satisfyingly in the earliest day's of the device in the 1990 comedy, Crazy People. Allegedly going crazy, ad-man, Emory Leeson (Dudley Moore) manifests his breakdown by jumping out of his car, wrenching a nearby driver's clunky old fashioned car phone from his grip and tossing it off the Brooklyn Bridge (you can see this most gratifying scene at the beginning of the movie's trailer). Seemed very sane to me even at the time and today, should merit some kind of good citizen commendation.

Indeed, jurisdictions all over the world have recognized the incompatibility of cell phone use and safe driving, lessons derived from countless tragedies. Stunningly,with the advent of texting, ubiquitous half-wits have added this activity to their repertoire of pastimes done while behind the wheel. In British Columbia, where I live, a law prohibiting all of this came into effect a year ago but it has been widely observed that while there may have been a brief period of abiding by the new rules, recidivism is high. And so it is estimated that in the vicinity of 50 deaths and who knows how many injuries have been caused by the now illegal activity here in BC alone. The world figure of course is in the the 1000's with texting having dramatically increased fatalities.

BC Alamanac CBC's once-excellent noon call-in show observed the one-year anniversary of the law on Tuesday (Feb 1) by bringing in RCMP Superintendant Norm Gaumont, who has been a lead spokesman on this issue in BC's Lower Mainland. . Clips were played from a riveting documentary prepared, interestingly enough, by AT & T; Mark urged listeners to call in with ideas on "what more could be done to stop" this. He then turned to Supt. Gaumont to expound more knowledgeably on the dire consequences of this incomprehensibly dumb and now illegal activity.

There followed several calls confirming full agreement among the guest, the host and the callers of this increasingly frequent and often tragic scofflawing. You could hear the veritable hand-wringing!

But what to do about it? There were mutterings of raising the fine from its current $167 although no one seemed to have much expectation that that would have a measurable positive effect on seemingly incurable and often terminal driver stupidity. Well, as unusual I held some strong opinions not only on this practice but what could be done to stop it: I called in and suggested that anyone caught in the act should have her or his phone forfeited. What with the rising infatuation for high cost iPhones and the like, this seemed not only a fitting measure to me but one likely to give even the most asinine compulsive texter, pause for thought as their stupidly-used smart phone vanished forever.

To my surprise Supt. Gaumont dismissed the idea out of hand with the incisive explanation that people including politicians wouldn't like it. Golly gee. You know just like if you caught an armed mugger and took his gun away, he wouldn't like it. Yet cell phone drivers kill roughly the same number of innocent victims annually in our province as do those with firearms.

At that point Mark hit the button for the next call without giving me a moment's opportunity to engage the good policeman on the possible logical and moral errors of his blithe and presumptuous rebuff.

So I am left only repeat here the point that it is an entirely fair consequence when one perilously misuses a device, breaking a law and mortally endangering others, to forfeit the offending item. I would further argue that laws and regulations be enacted so we could ban repeat offenders from even owning a phone for some substantial period. Lives would be saved but, oh my goodness, Supt.Gaumont doesn't think think that the moronic scofflaws would like that.

As long as the primary enforcers like Supt. Gaumont, who know all too intimately the blood-stained impacts of cell-crazy drivers, maintain such craven and occluded views, closing their minds knee-jerk to alternatives, this problem will simply grow.

By way of addendum, may I also grouse -- as is my entitlement -- about the way that Mark Forsythe, the long time and, in my view, once-excellent host is now handling calls. As mentioned, when I advanced my view and Supt. Gaumont so cavalierly tossed it aside, Mark had already cut me off which meant no chance to challenge the guest's feckless, knee-jerk reaction. This is utterly inadequate and disrespectful of authentic public discussion. It privileges the so-called expert while reducing anyone who goes to the trouble of dialing, to the short shrift of studio guests' one-liners.

Back when BC Almanac was two hours long, you usually had a chance to make at least one rebuttal point and not be left sounding like some know-nothing whose hare-brain thought is unworthy of further talk. That's the way dialogue still goes on on the national call-in show, Cross Country Check up on Sundays. To pretend that what Almanac is doing now is real public deliberation is delusional. Mark and his producers should either fight to get back the full time period - I'll help! --or altogether drop this phony phone discourse. We, the great unwashed could then just sit up straight with hands meekly folded, listening to our betters, just like the literally dumb little creatures we are being treated as.

Puzzled about YouTube Blockers

Recently I heard again, "Beachcombing" a song by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris which had just breezed by me when it was released in 2006 on their album, "All the Roadrunning." This time, no doubt because some of the lyrics presciently connote the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill, I was more deeply affected. It opens...

They say there’s wreckage washing up
all along the coast
No one seems to know too much
Or who got hit the most
Nothing has been spoken
There’s not a lot to see
But something has been broken
that’s how it feels to me

We had a harmony
I never meant to spoil
Now it's lying in the water
Like a slick of oil
The tide is running out to sea
Under a darkening sky...

I went to YouTube (where else?) and was surprised to find very limited entries. It's become pretty common when one gets a penchant to hear some favourite song, to find videos with the music. Often these are pretty rudimentary, maybe just a still picture or two of the artist sitting there throughout. For "Beachcombing" there was a little more but if anything it would have been better to have stuck with the stills. Thus, for example, one YouTuber nicknamed McDaidUSA, chose to have this haunting anthem as back up to her or his reunion with relatives in Ireland's west country. This includes spots of barely comprehensible voice-over narration of McDaidUSA's big trip.

My sister searched about at my request and found another non-YouTube posting -- a Spanish language one. It was far worse than the travelogue of Eire, mainly consisting of panoramic shots of white-sanded tourist-y tropical resorts, punctuated by the occasional young lady in bikini. Indeed, the finale is of one such woman beaming with delight, captured in the accompanying screen-shot. It seemed to me that the melancholy tone and pensive lyrics were entirely missed by whomever assembled and posted this.

Idled for a morning (i.e. not wanting to work) I decided to rise to the challenge and splice together a slide show which was exquisitely (or so I think) timed so that the images synched with and were appropriate to the lyrics. Once done, I uploaded to YouTube and sent the URL to my sister who discovered minutes later that it had been blocked. Even though I'd credited and indeed promoted the album, a surly and chagrined little red face appeared with an unconvincing apology, ""This video contains content from WMG and UMG, one or more of whom have blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that."

So have I got this straight? -- it's okay to rip off the artists and production company as back up for your so fascinating Irish vacation or to switch to Spanish and show tourist scenes and nubile beach girls? But, for heaven's sake don't give direct credit and try, at least, to jibe with the creator's seeming intent! Well, not to be stymied, here's the ouevre for your enjoyment whilst I figure out a way around the YouTube enforcers.

Don't Miss "Entitled Opinions"

I seldom promo anything on this hitherto commercial-free hub of the North. But as today marks the return of my absolute favourite podcast, an exception is made. "Entitled Opinions" flows out from a basement studio at one of the world's finest universities, Stanford. The head honcho is Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian and romance literature there. The format for the show is that he kibitzes for about an hour with a leading luminary on subjects whose variety will astound. If I read the list correctly, it all began with a couple of shows about Freud almost 6 years ago, and then traversed terra creativa from conversations about Kurt Weill's music and life, through several excursions with Harrison's esteemed Dante to sessions on the Jesuits, tennis, the Blues, Emily Dickinson and Jimi Hendrix...and a whole lot more. What is striking for me is just how passionate and knowledgeable Harrison is on so eclectic an array of topics.

On top of this, as of last year, the opening switched from an old Enigma cut, to a haunting and voluptuous song which I could not track down for quite a while. Then, I learned that it was the Entitled Opinions team comprising several academics including Harrison and his brother, Tom. Harrison is a damn fine guitarist, adding to his intellectual and broadcasting abilities, the kind of Renaissance man that you are glad exists somewhere but are also happy that your high school rival didn't grow up to be! . The music group which he's formed, Glass Wave, has cut a fascinating literary excursion which, in contrast to other high-concept academically inspired offerings, is also just a real good listen. Eclectic as ever, Harrison's group with vocals by Entitled Opinions producer and Stanford doctoral candidate, Christy Wampole, travels broadly through canonical literature - Narcissus, Hamlet, Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Virginia Woolf, Poe's "Annabel Lee," etc. - not only making good music but also providing original and critical insights into the story-lines and characters of these classics. The cut, "Ophelia", for example, broadened my longstanding perspective on Hamlet, disabusing me of the belief that I had heard everything and much more that I ever needed about the play.

Well, the wait is over and another season of Entitled Opinions is now underway, alas with Christy departing so as to finish her dissertation. The opener is on Moby Dick. Listen, friends! Subscribe!

How Much is that Polar Bear in the Window?

This morning CBC is featuring a news item about a Canadian federal government contract to put a dollar figure on the worth of polar bears.The precipitant is the consideration of polar bears for designation under our Species at Risk Act (SARA). I find it odd that this has come up for so emblematic and, as the lingo goes, charismatic a species as the big whites given that the list of endangered species currently includes a multiplicity of hitherto unheard of creatures which even the most eco-sympathetic and creative economist would have trouble ascribing money value to. For in addition to such zoological shoo-ins as the Grizzly and the Grey Whale, presently, Canada has listed the Pygmy Short-Horned Lizard, the Dwarf Wedge Mussel and the Pacific Water Shrew on the top priority ledger - Schedule I qualifiers. It would be superficially entertaining to see the economic rationale for these or for plants like the Illinois Tick-trefoil or the Incurved Grizzled Moss, both also on the list of priority designation.

I say "superficially" because superficial is exactly what this preposterous economic study is now underway by a Quebec firm, ÉcoRessources. CBC's commentators are reporting the analysis as if this is some vanguard hitherto unseen creative methodology when, in fact, it is nothing of the sort. During one of the last century's several pulses of environmentalism, in the late 1960s and 1970s, economic busy-minds, anxious to be part of the vogue for environmental impact assessment, clunky calculators at the ready, started turning up all over the place with data-rich evaluations that put dollar values not only on species but entire valued ecosystems. A new sub-discipline replete with own journals and internecine methodological controversies emerged - "ecological economics". yet this was itself, only a johnny-come-lately to work such as the venerable Resources for the Future and the less venerated US Army Corps of Engineers had been doing for years, busily tallying up the worth of nature, often merely as part of the due diligence for planning and implementing ecocidal mega-projects.

Which brings me to why anyone truly concerned about polar bears or obscure rare mosses should speak out against this hyper-mundane attempt to reduce our caring to the almighty loonie. On the surface, these exercises frequently come up with equally news-catching headlines trumpeting that such and such a species is worth some bigger number of dollars than you and I will ever have to whatever jurisdiction it lives in. For example in an interview on CBC's Daybreak North program today, one of ÉcoRessources' staff gave the example of a Wisconsin assessment that valued the state's bald eagles at a whopping $28 million dollars. Our local CBC interviewer seemed impressed: but pause and think about just how small a destructive project which may threaten those eagles would have to be to score higher. A mid-sized port dredging project or the extension of the Green Bay airport runway could easily boast discounted future benefits that kicked eagle ass. My point is that it is exceptionally dangerous to concede to the economic frame of mind the methodology by which evaluation of real value is to occur.

Thirty-five years ago, the traditional indigenous peoples of the Mackenzie Valley, in dialogue with Justice Thomas Berger, demonstrated a very different way of taking measure of nature's services. They turned up at countless small community workshops and told Justice Berger why bears and everything else that interacts with them are precious beyond the transitory benefits derivable by pumping hydrocarbons south. Their "metrics' were of the heart and, with Berger's excellent rapporteur-ship, those evaluations provided a durable protective cover for lands and creatures we need and we value way beyond dollars. It would seem from yesterday's news that most though not all of the Native people along the planned pipeline corridor have been won - or should I say "bought"? - over to a more "realistic," contemporary mind set, i.e. take the money today and damn the consequences to that once-vaunted seventh generation in the future. Or as an academic paper by a very wise and now late economic historian, Robert Heilbroner wryly asked "What has posterity ever done for me?"


Well before even Berger or Heilbroner, one of the founding fathers of environmentalism took on early ecological number crunchers with his beautiful and brilliant plea for a land ethic. Back in 1948 he confronted the trend even then to quantify the value of species and environments in these words, well worth reflecting on as our philistine government and its analytical handmaidens pore through the dollar figures on our magnificent and declining polar bears:

When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread. I now describe some of the stones which serve in lieu of a land ethic.

One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbird are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity they are entitled to continuance.

When one of these non-economic categories is threatened and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century song birds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to be valid.

It is painful to read these circumlocutions today. We have no land ethic yet, but we have at least drawn nearer the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of biotic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us.

This profound insight and the ethic upheld by Leopold are what ought to underlie the stewardship Canadians and others get behind including the belated and so obviously needed designation of the polar bears - lest otherwise they exist in animatronic Coke commercials or in the windows of museums.

Full Circle in Afghanistan

Today the unwitting heir of Bush's Afghan adventure releases his long-awaited assessment of the war over there. There will be sufficient commentary and dissection by people who know something about this, that more virtual ink from my peepings can add little. But I do have to flag an irony of the forest which the better informed may miss for all their insights on the trees. Despite all the different rationalized objectives that have piled up since the invasion nine years ago, the espoused single-most purpose in romping into Taliban country was to root out the Al-Qaeda militants from their training bases, the locales where the World Trade Centre's demise was planned. The add-on purposes that we in Canada and the USA know hear widely touted - establishing un-corrupt democratic governments, liberating women, (re)building the infrastructure of a nation so long at war etc. - were entirely subsidiary to and derivative of getting rid of terrorist incubators.

The seemingly deliberate ignorance of the history of longer term foreign intervention in Afghanistan is stunning as is incomprehension of basic precepts of insurgency, laid down long ago by the likes of T.E. Lawrence and Che Guevera. You don't raze villages and "collaterally damage" thousands of innocents and then expect love, gratitude and support or emulation.

So here we are back on December 16, 2010 and the key insight emerging from Obama's year-long situation review is that the enemy has extensive sanctuaries in Pakistan, about which, it appears nothing can be done, not without further alienating the world's second most dangerous and unstable nuclear power. The net result is that the terrorist training camps of the early 2000s in Afghanistan are dead; long live the terrorist training refugiae across the border today. The persistence of these bases means that all the other high-sounding purposes of freeing women and building bridges and schools for a future Afghan democracy have no more staying power than does the Karzai regime, of which it has been said: if the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force leaves at 4 p.m., it'll be toast by 6.

Flanagan's Fatwah (and Other Wiki-Crap)

It seems an increasingly common thing for me to wish a pox on both sides of public controversies. Call it maturity. I had watched the continuing massive and unselective dumping of WikiLeaks with a feeling of disdain, especially irked when commentators would equate this to whistle-blowing. The latter practice refers to the courageous, often career-destroying and never self-aggrandizing practice whereby knowledgeable insiders within organizations, publicize the failings and misdeeds of their employers. Part and parcel of real whistle blowing is finding that something is seriously wrong within one's organization, usually trying to have head honchos mend their ways, and, failing that, going public. Famous examples include Karen Silkwood, who exposed the dangerous ambient levels of plutonium in nuclear facilities and Jeffery Wigand, the cigarette company exec who went public about nicotine-doctoring aimed at increasing the addictiveness of smokes. Both of these heroes were immortalized on the big-screen and, no doubt, it won't be all that long before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is likewise "honoured".

But his plundering and publicizing of communications shows neither the specificity of rationale nor the necessary step of trying to effect change before going public. Assange seemed little more than one of those irksome parasites known as computer hackers whose motivation has nothing to with societal betterment or anything so tangible but instead lies in simply being able to screw things up for someone else. He's just done that, thanks to an equally unselective and unreflective low-ranking informant,Bradley Manning, on a vaster scale than any of the pimple-faced vandals who break into other people's files for the pure fun of it. This is not to say, that all Wiki-leak leaks have always been thus. When the targets were specific and could potentially induce needed change, great! This seemed to be the modus operandi before the current deluge, if one scans the pre-2009 history of the organization and its activities. Now, the targets are innumerable and there are good reasons to expect that far from creating more openness and candour in the conduct of international relations, the result will be a global clamming up, heightened security that will affect efforts to shed needed and well-focused light on wrongdoings in high places.

So Julian was and is no hero of Wigandian stature to my mind, but instead, at least in his and his organization's most recent activity, a thrill-seeking cyber-thug, who doesn't care whose windows get smashed when he hurls his rocks helter-skelter.

But then, just when I'm thinking what a self-aggrandizing vandal he is, along comes Tom Flanagan, a man whom I have despised for decades most especially after his neo-colonial disquisition on indigenous people, a diatribe titled First Nations, Second Thoughts - a strange choice of title for a "scholar" who does not appear to have had a second thought about anything over the course of his decades in Calgary. Yes, the same Flanagan who greased Stephen Harper's trail to the head of the Reform Party and thence to Parliament's East Block (a contribution for which, by itself, he deserves a few days in the stocks). Yes, medieval punishment comes readily to mind for Ayatollah Flanagan who very publicly opined that Assange should be assassinated suggesting that Obama dispatch a drone to do the job -- apparently not reflecting much in this outburst of what he called "feeling very manly" on how that might work for a fugitive hiding out in central London, England.

Well anyone this wing-nut hates can't be entirely worthless and I was later to discover that Fox TV loony Bill O'Reilly likewise is advocating the death penalty for such traitors too. This and the suspiciously timed rape charges that Sweden began to push are enough to sway me a bit towards sympathy for Assange. It may well be true that he is a sex offender but we also can rightly suspect - in no small part thanks to the threads of gold amidst all the WikiLeak dross - that the shadowy figures who linger in the crevices of international relations frequently come up with vicious schemes, far less stupid but of a similar mind-set to motor-mouths like Flanagan and O'Reilly.

Low Class Leaving

I would like to pretend that the dearth of Grouses since my last post in mid October wherein I demanded BC NDP Leader Carol James' departure, was some kind of journalistic fast that I stalwartly maintained pending her compliance. In that version, I can e-speak again because yesterday (Dec. 6), she finally got the message and vamoosed. I wish I could report that she did so with some grace, a tinge of the kind of classiness that had eluded her at least in the last year of her reign. Alas, Ms. James left with the same conspicuous defects as she presided over the should-be replacement for Gord-O's Liberals.

Puffed up like a hen defending long dead and infertile eggs, she clucked on about her ever-growing legion of detractors as - get this from a leader who fired a guy for saying she gave an unimpressive speech! - "bullies." She unlike them, she sermonized, had the interests of the people of British Columbia at heart. While these ducks pecked at her, we were told, she had been trying to lead effective opposition in the province. It's not clear when she thinks she started doing that nor does she seem to take one micro-gram of credit for the unprecedented opposition that had built in her own caucus - I say "unprecedented" because though BC generally eats its presiding premiers alive, opposition leaders, especially ones who haven't held highest office, have never, before James, excited such hostility.

The tragedy is that she still was unwilling to acknowledge why all this was happening, to look deep (or as deep as she goes) into her own soul and performance, her inability to defeat a repulsive, hated Gordon Campbell who, lacking a worthy opponent had to shoot himself repeatedly in the foot to finally get the boot. Carol and her supporters are happy to take credit for the NDP's phoenix-like return from 2 to 35 seats in the legislature when, in fact, the kudos belong to the Liberals who should have been trounced two years ago. What Ms. James wears forever is all the added neo-con strife and stress Gordon Campbell and his successor will have foisted on society's most needy, thanks to her dismal and failed electioneering in 2008.

Especially with the announcement today of the photogenic and relatively untainted candidacy of broadcaster Christy Clark for Liberal leader, it is imperative that the NDP think and look outside the box for a more progressive and electable antidote. Carol James benefited enormously from Campbell being so easy to despise. The new NDP leader will not have Gord-O to kick around and will have to win, if at all, on merits.


I can only repeat my "dream" replacement for James - Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafonde with her impeccable integrity and determination, excellent counterbalances to the glitz of someone like Clark.
Coda: I see that one name that is being touted elsewhere for the NDP is the youthful and impressive Skeena MP, Nathan Cullen. I'd throw my considerable weight (albeit of the wrong kind) behind this passionate and intelligent lad, if, as is likely Mary-Ellen continues to ignore my calls for her candidacy!

Carol James: You GO, Girl! (Please)

At a time when it should be gearing up to replace the badly faltering Campbell Liberal Government in British Columbia, the NDP seems to be working rather hard to assist its opponents' resurrection. Or at least, the current shenanigans let the Libs catch their breath as news shifts from Gord-o's bald faced lying and the HST imbroglio, to how hapless NDP Leader Carol James has dumped a caucus member for disloyalty.

The skinny, for those who value their time too much for political soap opera, is that the legislative member for North Cariboo, Bob Simpson publicly criticized the lackluster speech James had given at the Union of BC Municipalities convention last month. In rather gently calling attention to the NDP leader's content-free remarks, Simpson had hardly been a dramatic news-maker. He merely pointed out the obvious: Carol's manifest inability to define and advance key public issues, which, in the 2008 election campaign, gave Campbell four more years of neo-con reign. Here are the comments, no more , no less, that got Simpson booted out:

"The Leader of the Opposition likewise had little concrete to offer the delegates other than a commitment to be more consultative than the current government and a promise to explore the possibility of revenue sharing with local governments. This is a timely concept which has the potential to address the resource needs of local governments, but the lack of specifics was a disappointment to delegates."

One wonders if all those years in the legislature in no way thickened Ms. James skin if this is enough to induce so hysterical an over-reaction. Yes, I know: the back story is that Simpson was a pain in the butt, an habitual gadfly for Carol -- but it is such unsympathetic feedback that a healthy organization needs to make sure alternatives are considered and progress as well as regress are well tracked. By implication, Simpson has hitherto kept this talk internal, only recently going public with his differing perspective, and then, as you can see, in wording so mild that any person of reasonably sound self-worth would shrug it off.

But, understandably in light of her ho-hum performance, James is especially on edge. She is not paranoid for the threat is real: much bigger long knives than Simpson's are now gathering. If she had the party's best interests at heart she would not force it to go through what now seems an inevitable and confrontational leadership bloodbath. She would stand aside, stay with the NDP and see if she can redefine herself and her role, putting her indubitably good heart and head to work in a supporting role that matches her abilities and shortcomings.

Contrary to the arrogant crap that Globe and Mail columnist Rod Mickleburgh promulgates, there are plenty of prospective, highly electable potential successors. Once the James lid comes off the pot, there are 33 other elected NDP caucus members and 9 federal ones to think about. Moreover as I advocated several months back in these pages, an ideal leader with a proven ability to bring Gord-O and his neo-con dogs to heel, is Mary-Ellen Turpel Lafond, BC's Representative for Children and Youth.

CBC Radio Gripe #2548

Okay, I know, I haven't posted that many nor, really, much in a while of venom spewing from my love-hate relationship with CBC Radio. Sure, I made up the number 2548 but guarantee you that the bones I have to pick with this institution would vastly exceed that in the Drumheller dinosaur collection.

Of course, I keep listening because compared to anything else we receive in smelly Prince George, the CBC comes off like a shining island in the sky. But...

First let me remind you of my published past bitchings here, which in reverse chronological were:

"All Points Tasteless (2009)" - the disgusting spectacle of the mediocre bunch at CBC's Victoria-based afternoon show, All Points West, in hustling on down to the seaplane terminal the day after a fatal crash at nearby Saturna, to push microphones in imminent flyers' faces and ask them if they worried about flying.


"Bless You Cathy Haig (2009)" - a not very gracious thank you to CBC Overnight for, after many years, purging the wee hour airways of the propaganda from Russia and Poland (Cathy was and is the perky voice that uselessly comes up and announces the transition from one night-time program to another and once, after I wrote about my concerns about the programming haughtily replied that I didn't have to listen, to which I answered with equal disdain, that I did have to pay her salary, nonetheless)

"The Greatest Canadian Hogwash(2006)" - an embittered expose of the bad process and worse outcome of CBC's elaborate process of picking the purported Greatest Canadian. It culminated in the selection of that pompous prairie chicken, Tommy Douglas, whom Canadian voters of the era, with uncharacteristic perspicacity had certainly not seen as all that great,

"CBC - All Quiet on the Klander front(2005)" which pointed out how CBC completely ignored the summary dismissal of a Liberal party hack for drawing a comparison between Sylvia Chow, Jack Layton's wife, and the dog breed of the same name.

and last, not least and most a-propos of why I am crapping on CBC Radio again today:

"On Not Winning a CBC Contest (2005)" occasioned by having used my creative juices to respond to gratingly sunny North By Northwest Hostess, Cheryl McKay's contest to write about homecomings" only to find that the lazy buggers simply drew the winner rather than taking the time to read and judge entries.

Well, they got me again!

You may recall my recent post in which I proudly presented my poem about Anna Mae Aquash by way of nominating her as a Canadian worthy of her own opera. This was entered in the Canadian Opera Challenge with the incentive of winning an all expense inclusive trip to the world premier of what sounded like a most intriguing opera, Lillian Alling.. This came over the air with prodding from Saturday Afternoon at the Opera host, Bill Richardson, to "get creative" with entries. Stupidly, I presumed from this, and from the 250-word limit they put on submission length, that someone was actually going to be read and judge the entries by merit and originality.

Several days after the deadline I went looking for information on whether there was a winner and happened across these chilling words (which, I admit, had always been there in the fine print of the contest information):

"On Friday Oct. 1, 2010, a random draw will be conducted by the host during the taping of Saturday Afternoon at the Opera aired on Saturday Oct. 2, 2010. This draw will be made from among all eligible email and regular postal entries received. The first contestant to correctly answer the mandatory question shall be declared the winner, subject to responding all the conditions described in these rules."

Writing your heart out wasn't enough, mind you: because no merit basis is involved the contest-managers would be asking you what 2 + 2 is or perhaps, the square root of crow pie.

To repeat, no question, the rules were there on the website and so I let myself be suckered by the Bill and the gang into yet another manifestation of utter laziness, CBC Radio expecting, nay encouraging, us to put unpaid time and effort into something but then using dumb luck as a substitute for the effort it would take to critically read and evaluate our heart-felt entries. I might as well have proposed an opera about my dog. Or even more a-propos, one simply titled, "Sluggards" about Bill Richardson, Sheryl McKay, and the handlers behind them who come up with these contests and then are too indolent to bother with the input.

Be Vigilant, Mr. & Mrs. Tourist!

Today, the most urgent lead story is that Canada has aped our southern neighbours (or is that neighbors?) in issuing warnings to those of us who are off to Europe. The admonition is that somewhere in Europe, something bad may happen to you and so you should be vigilant! That's it. No specific kinds of targets, not even a wild guess of most likely cities or countries. And, perhaps vaguest of all, no usable advice on just what the average camera-slinging perambulators are supposed to do to be "vigilant."

One tidbit is that western anti-terrorist intelligence thinks that, just maybe, whatever deed is done may resemble the horrific Bombay* (AKA Mumbai) massacre two years ago. In that multi-pronged and exceptionally well planned assault, numerous sites were rapidly and simultaneously attacked by terrorists lugging grenades and automatic weapons, while concurrent car bombs went off rapid-fire. They came with clear orders to maximize fatalities and property destruction in as short a time span as possible. To those who survived, the suddenness of the events was unfathomable. Here's one anonymous account:

"I was just sitting and reading the paper. ... I started seeing the sound was increasing and bodies started falling and all of the bloodshed. ... People were crying; people were limping. We were frightened; we started to run. I was trying to see if I could see anyone carrying a gun or anything, but I couldn't." (From Source)

So, again, what precisely is it that Canada, the US, and Japan are all suggesting that the hapless tourist do if she or he has the bad luck to be in the path of such determined, tactically proficient, well-trained fanatics? Or is the whole unsettling thing merely that intelligence agencies are covering their collective butts, causing all sorts of useless anxiety so that if and when the worst happens they can definitively say, "We told you so!"

_________________________________
* The belief that the name "Mumbai" is the unequivocal preference of all India and that "Bombay" is only for imperialist throwbacks is a vast oversimplification of how this latest bit of political correct toponymy arose. Many locals still prefer Bombay because at least the oppressor who gave the place that name is history, while radical Hindus are, alas, not. Besides, that most famous, gutsy and literate of all living Bombayians (my usage), Salman Rushdie still calls it by that horrid colonial epithet. And if it's good enough for Sal, it's good enough for me!

Another Poem

Don't worry I haven't entirely crossed over to the brain's right side but whilst looking for a recipe for kosher dill pickles, I came across a badly mis-filed piece of intentional doggerel that I'd churned out during my now fondly-remembered Bella Coola years.

I wrote this poem to recite it at a town hall gathering we had about community survival. Interfor and the Ministry of Forests had quite recently shut down their main offices in the valley leaving a skeleton staff and thereby taking away a very large number of employed positions and the families that went with them. Even a few multi-generational settler clans were having to give some hard thought to looking elsewhere as the local economy slid towards the drain hole.

That was also about the time of the 50th anniversary of finishing the road that linked the hitherto isolated outside world to Bella Coola. The story of that feat was one to inspire local initiative, for in that case it was their parents and grand-parents who'd had the pluck to just do it. The Province did not think the road could be constructed at all or, at least at a cost worthy of the public purse. So locals just got together, surveyed the route, and used their own literally backroad know-how, equipment and dollars to punch the "Freedom Road" up the steep valleys through to Anahim. The BC Government eventually was shamed into partial funding but it remains a major testament to those folks, that beloved place, and the power that can arise anywhere when everyday people put their minds and shoulders to the wheel.

So pardon the cornball but I meant every word of it:

Leaving Bella Coola

The truck is packed, the kids are crying.
The alders down the lane are sighing
To think of nothing's what I'm trying,
Leaving Bella Coola.

I'll smoke another pipe and ponder
What it is forced us to wander
Off into the unknown yonder,
Leaving Bella Coola.

Time was when all the settlers' children
Knew this place would be their long-run
Home. Now empty homesteads watch 'em,
Leaving Bella Coola.

For way too long the logging went on
Like the good times could not end on
Somber off-key dying swan songs,
Leaving Bella Coola.

We let the profits from these rich lands
flow to distant sons-of-bitch hands
Just like water running through sands
Leaving Bella Coola.

Now Gordon Campbell tolls the bell
To send this Valley straight to hell
And with no timber left to fell,
I'm leaving Bella Coola.

But wait! remember 'fifty-three?
Did our forefathers build the Free-
-dom Road so now their kids could be
All leaving Bella Coola?

No, it was built for coming back
Right down "the Hill" on their rough track
What did they have that now I lack,
Leaving Bella Coola?

My pipe's gone out, but now there's flame,
Inside my settler soul again
No one can force this Valley man
to leaving Bella Coola.

C'mon, unpack! We're gonna stay
If dad could build that road, that way
It won't be 'til my dying day,
I'm leaving Bella Coola.

Operatic Challenge - Singing Anna Mae

As both an avid opera fan and contest-enterer, I was tickled to hear Bill Richardson on Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, announce a new competition, with the winner getting flown to Lotusland for the premier of Vancouver Opera's Lillian Alling. This is the true story of a homesick Estonian woman in New York who, in 1927 and being too poor for the ocean voyage, traversed North America all the way to Nome, Alaska. It is a production which, I am sure, would more than compensate for the nauseating experience of visiting that narcissistic traffic-swollen metropolis.

It took me only a few seconds to know exactly which "Canadian" I would see immortalized in opera and my choice quite soon altered my mood from contestive exuberance to quieter reverence, sadness, even remorse. I had known about the murdered Native activist Anna Mae Pictou Maloney Aquash for many years, following the travesty of pseudo-attempts to solve the mystery of who killed her and why in South Dakota in late 1975. From the time that her partially decomposed body was found two months later, fingers have pointed in all directions with some trying to exonerate them,selves by saying Anna Mae was a traitor to the American Indian Movement (AIM), an informer. This made zero sense in terms of this woman's lifelong passionate commitment to her people and their full recovery from the battering of colonialism.


I dug out Johanna Brand's biography of Anna Mae and re-read several chapters to re-acquaint myself with this noble, short, and tragic life. I'd commend reading it as well as the several commentaries that can be found online by her daughter, Denise Pictou Maloney (here, here). I should also mention a book that I have ordered and looked at with online previews that honours Anna Mae - Who Would Unbraid Her Hair?

Somewhat ploddingly I prepared a brief rationale for operatically telling Anna Mae's story and submitted it and then heard Bill Richardson elaborate on the instructions to contestants, suggesting that innovative ways of nominating would be especially welcome. Thus did I set out to write the following poem and, as I did, white guilt, or some kind of remorse washed over me: the act of making poetry moved me more deeply than I had ever felt -- but should have -- about Anna Mae. It brought back vague recollections from the 1970s when news of her death made it onto the back pages of Canadian newspapers. The item then seemed so minor, so predictable: another dead activist, just one more murdered Indian. Yes, part of what Stannard aptly called the American Holocaust. Here's what I submitted:


POEM TO PROPOSE THE OPERA, THE ASCENSION OF ANNA MAE

“Died of exposure” said the Coroner.
But the wind, furious, accepts no blame.
so all that winter day
drove clumps of buffalo grass
shrieking “murder!” across the plains

They cannot just hide your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

Little Shubenacadie Indian girl who went to Pictou
School - they feared all five feet of you
and fearless facing down white bullies
becomes your recurring libretto.

From sweat-shop blueberry fields of Maine,
picked over by your people for chickenfeed,
up to Boston’s Combat Zone where,
they arrest your friend,
for the crime of being stabbed,
and you, petite avenging angel,
swoop from the cop car-top
and knock ‘em all, ass over kettle

They cannot just tell your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

And later you’re a mother, seamstress, teacher,
helper to needle-armed, paper-bag-hiding Indians
strung out along Beantown’s filth-encrusted alleys
Then, leading the charge
against vacant Thanksgiving amnesiac ceremonies,
you board the Mayflower II
and down to DC too, you march the Trail of Broken Treaties
right into the Indian Bureau.
Then westward, ho!

They cannot just cheer your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

You steal into Wounded Knee, seen only by the murdered ghosts
from 80 years before;
You marry Aquash there, but soon,
within the bloodied barricade of AIM,
fingers point, rats inform
Who ? Who ? Who?
Does the owl call your name too,
Anna Mae ?
Or is it some lower predator, already in flight?

They cannot just mourn your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

February ’76: human remains found on a South Dakota back-road
And the coroner still goes on about “exposure”
no heed to that laughing hole in the skull
you could not take with you
on your final ascension.

The decades and blame will pass;
The FBI exonerates itself and moves on,
pausing indifferently to jail old suspect friends.

Doubt still falls like a February badlands snow
on everything - but your soul’s beauty.

They cannot just praise your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

Back from aestivation - and still talkin' sockeye

It's been over two months since the blog-muse gripped me in its talons. I have been aestivating with the toads and freshwater snails, so to speak. So it will take me a few days to shake off the dried mental muds and return to form, such as that be.

In true droning form, I will pick up where I left off back on June 17th, namely the misguided attention(which means misspent money) that the Government of Canada has allocated to having a bunch of lawyers ponder and pontificate on the poor sockeye returns in 2009. My point, distinct, thank God, from that of the old Indian hand, MP John Cummins, was that one bad season for Oncorhynchus nerka, should not call forth the deluge of dubious judicial expertise it has (just as was done in 1994 when a poor run also precipitated great stir and commissioning, that time led by the Honourable John Fraser).

Not that I would ever say "I told you so" but here we are in late August with worries now arising about the management and impact of the largest Fraser River sockeye run since 1913. Because fishermen have an irrepressible (and well-based) pessimism, many are now actually lamenting the effects of the surplus: reduced prices and the very real possibility that having so many horny adults pushing around in the spaning gravels, will actually reduce the reproductive success of the year class. Thus do well known phenomena from market economics -supply effects on price - and reproductive ecology - density dependence - confound what, one might think, should be the joys of bonanza.

Just as worried observers may fret about what to do with all that extra sockeye, so to should we faithful taxpayers be worried about the surplus "talent" that has been assembled and well-financed high atop the towers overlooking West Georgia street. What are we to do with the Cohen Commission now? Their press-releases show that slowing down the mighty money-eating engines of their inquiry, in light of the 2010 record sockeye run has not occurred to them or their political masters. I suppose you could give them all hip waders and send them out on the water to fish - but, alas, the dearth of actual field knowledge among most of the Commission's personnel would probably mean even more public expenditure -- i.e. the costs to the local search and rescue agencies as they try to locate these bumblers out in the wild.

Of course, as said before in these pages, a novel thought might be to re-assign the Commission to look into a real disappearance and fisheries resource tragedy, one that has played out for more than a decade up and down the BC coast, to wit, the loss of the saviour fish, the eulachon. But then, focusing attention on that species would mean that the federal government gave two hoots about a species whose value is not measurable in loonies and the profit margins of major companies. No, it would imply that they actually cared about coastal First Nations who have relied on this special little smelt since proverbial time immemorial.

And why would the Harper government want to start caring about Native people when it has already both apologized for, yet later denied the very history of colonial oppression.