This kind of reminds me of something that came up when Kurt and I had dinner with Joe Geary last week. Joe was gloating about Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, in which Colbert unrelentingly satirised President Bush, who was sitting right in front of him. Now, my sympathy for the president is pretty minimal. I used to think he was dim, but I've come around to the conclusion that he's just lazy and indifferent. But there's something simply rude about attacking someone who is required by good manners to just sit there and take it. Bush didn't have to be there. He comes to this dinner every year to hear some low-wattage comedian poke fun at him, and smile through the abuse. Colbert's speech is pretty funny. But the context makes it mean. Bush isn't the all-powerful ruler of the free world here. He's just a poor chump obliged to go on eating his Caesar salad while some Hollywood wiseass dresses him down. It's like that scene in "Witness" where the Amish man sits quietly, constrained by his religion from defending himself, while the town yokel rubs an ice cream cone in his face. Bush is the Amish man, Colbert is the yokel.

America unbound - South Dakota.
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 

Thing I like about the States is it's just like a bigger, sped-up version of Canada. None of this mincing around with funny-talking waiters and mystifying exotic cuisine like you get in foreign countries. We might not have "chicken-fried steak" on the menu back home in Saskatchewan - at least, it's not the universal staple that it is down here - but you can figure it out pretty easy. The iced tea might be unsweetened, the currency might be confusingly monochromatic, but basically cruising through the Dakotas is like cruising through the Canadian Prairies. There's even angry white guys on the radio call-in show, griping about them durn Indians gettin' all them tax breaks.

Back when they were stitching our crazy country together, John A. MacDonald and the rest of them were deeply concerned that the enormous distances from coast to coast would discourage the formation of a Canadian identity, and that folks in the West would naturally be drawn closer to their nearer neighbours south of the 49th parallel, rather than their distant cousins in Ontario and Quebec. Canadians still spend a lot of time griping about whether or not Canada is a "real" country - frankly, I'm not sure it is - but you have to give the Fathers of Confederation credit, they've managed to mass-hypnotise us into accepting Canada's improbable east-west axis. For example, Banff is about eight hours from Saskatoon. The Black Hills are a little further, maybe ten hours. Considering that it's about the same distance, you'd think folks from Saskatchewan would come down here for camping and hiking and what-not almost as often as they'd go to Banff. Especially since the Black Hills are kinda awesome. Maybe it's just that I'm bored from innumerable journeys across the Canadian Rockies, but it's nice to drive by majestic river canyons and granite peaks that I haven't seen a hundred times before. Spearfish and Deadwood are kitschy tourist towns, just like Banff, but they're simply - how do I put this - better. Yet somehow South Dakota, despite its equal proximity and general awesomeness, seems like a distant, remote vacation site, whereas Alberta feels about as remote as our backyard.

Yesterday we were in Wall, South Dakota. It's just a tiny town on the edge of the Badlands, but the highways are plastered with billboards for a hundred miles in every direction advertising something called Wall Drugs. Once a modest drugstore, Wall Drugs somehow expanded over a half-century into a western-themed, city-block-sized shopping mall and cornpone emporium, full to bursting with fiberglass dinosaurs and jackalopes, life-sized models of Billy the Kid and Wild Bill, and stuffed animals dressed up in western clothes. I thought it was terrific. We squandered the morning there, then drove through the Badlands, which were majestic and much bigger than I'd expected. Right now I'm in Hot Springs, South Dakota, a pretty generic small town that's conveniently situated for tomorrow's big push to Cheyenne, Denver, and Santa Fe.

America unbound - Santa Fe.
Sun, 18 Jun 2006 

Father's Day. I ditched my dad for a couple hours, left him reading the New Mexico papers and sipping coffee in the hotel café, while I wandered around downtown Santa Fe. The old part of the city reminds me a lot of Vancouver's Gastown - a beautiful neighbourhood marred by herds of tchotchke-buying tourists. But once you get just outside downtown, where the herds are thinner, you can spend hours walking around looking at the old adobe buildings, skipping in and out of museums and art galleries. What's neat about Santa Fe is it's built close to the ground, with hardly any buildings topping two stories - I guess because it's difficult to build skyscrapers out of mud bricks. So when you get up even moderately high, like on the foothills that lead up to the green mountains that ring the city, the whole place is spread out beneath you, clinging to the scrubby hillsides like some kind of Martian termite colony.

Unfortunately, our hotel is out on the highway, which is much like any crowded six-lane highway running through a mid-size American town, except the gas stations and megastores are plastered with fake adobe and southwestern decorations. I'm not complaining, it's got a certain charm, too.

Before anyone accuses me of heartlessness I should mention that I took my dad out for Father's Day dinner at the most expensive restaurant I've ever visited. I'm still not sure how to comport myself when I find myself in an expensive restaurant. Your instinct is to try and compensate for your obvious yokeldom by overtipping the valets and splurging on the priciest items on the menu. I imagine this is how expensive restaurants stay in business. Maybe it would be better for consumers if people acted on their first impulse, which is to glance at the menu, spit one's seven-dollar iced coffee all over one's Van Halen concert tee, and storm right the hell out of there.

America unbound - Mesa Verde.
Tue, 20 Jun 2006

To answer the first and most obvious question, yes, in Utah hotel rooms they put a Book of Mormon along with the Gideon's Bible in the bedside table.

This morning we were at Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, to wander among cliff dwellings built by Ancestral Pueblo Peoples a millennium ago. They used to call the builders Anasazi, which means "Ancient Ones" in the Navajo language; but the Pueblo folk, who abandoned the mesa about eight hundred years ago and settled down in New Mexico, are offended at having their ancestors identified by a Navajo word. So now instead of Anasazi cliff dwellings they are to be referred to as Ancestral Pueblo Peoples cliff dwellings, which doesn't convey quite the same romance.

The mesa rises about 3000 feet above the flatland, which makes for some extraordinary panoramas. Usually when you go up a mountain there are smaller mountains impeding your view of the horizon. As you drive up the side of Mesa Verde you can see clear across the open prairie. This made my father nervous. After listening to him yelp every time we took a curve faster than 25 mph, I finally had to ask him nicely to please stop looking out the window. Dad was too out of breath to take a tour of the cliff dwellings, which involves squeezing through narrow fissures and crawling up wooden ladders. But I managed to drive to an accessible point overlooking a cliff dwelling, so he could at least gaze at it from a distance and see what the fuss is about.

I'm at the library in Monticello, Utah. The twelve-year-old kid next to me is browsing girls in bikinis on MySpace, periodically glancing over his shoulder to make sure the librarian isn't watching him. We'll be in Vegas in a couple nights, watching David Copperfield at the MGM Grand.

America unbound - Las Vegas, Salt Lake City.
Sat, 24 Jun 2006

Well, we're in Salt Lake, a handsome little city nestled among the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. The natives are absurdly, even sinisterly friendly. Tomorrow morning my dad and I are going to attend a broadcast of Music And The Spoken Word, a weekly radio program featuring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Then the next few days are just driving, driving, driving, to get back to Canada. I had mapped out a scenic route taking us by the Craters of the Moon in Idaho, and Glacier National Park on the Montana-Alberta border, but my dad claims he's all scenery-ed out. So we're gonna skip it and take the interstate straight up to Calgary. Truthfully I'm feeling kind of tired, too. I've had enough of breathtaking scenery. There's so fucking much of it down here, the Americans don't even feel the need to enclose most of it in national parks. They just push an interstate through and let the tourists gawk as they whiz by at seventy-five miles an hour.

Las Vegas was pretty good. Jenn & Kurt had advised me before I left that the motel we were booked into, a few blocks from the edge of the strip, was ridiculously overpriced. We could get a room in one of the less fashionable hotels on the strip for less than half as much. All the way from North Dakota to Nevada I intended to seek out a better hotel and change our reservation, but I had few opportunities to access the internet, and I couldn’t be bothered. So we stayed in the Best Western as originally planned. I figured the place must have something going for it to be so pricy - fancy décor, or a space-aged kidney-shaped pool with palm trees. But in fact, there was nothing to justify the price except its proximity to the airport and a steady supply of easily gulled tourists like me & my father. It was one of the least impressive motels on our journey. (The one here in Salt Lake is pretty nice.)

We went to David Copperfield at the MGM Grand the first night we were in town, and Blue Man Group at the Venetian the second night. David Copperfield was good, kitschy fun, although I think his best days are behind him - he didn't fly around the auditorium, or saw himself in half with a giant buzzsaw. He did make a car appear from out of nowhere, literally above the heads of two audience volunteers, which was pretty cool. But he padded out his show with video montages of past magic tricks and other self-promotional baloney.

Blue Man Group was terrific, hard to describe if you haven't seen it. My sixty-year-old dad, who could scarcely be described as an enthusiast of rock-n-roll performance art, and who probably missed most of the musical allusions (to the Sex Pistols, Madonna, and Ozzy Osbourne, among others), and who frequently had his view blocked by giddy audience members who hopped to their feet right in front of us, is still raving about it.

America unbound - Salt Lake City.
Mon, 26 Jun 2006

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir was pretty good. The broadcast didn’t take place in the actual Tabernacle, but in the Latter-Day Saints conference centre across the street. The Tabernacle itself is under renovations to make it earthquake-proof. This is just like the Mormons, earthquake-proofing a building in the least earthquake-prone place in the country. But I’m pretty sure that when an earthquake does hit Utah, five hundred or a thousand years from now, the Mormons won’t waste any time gloating about their undamaged Tabernacle. They’ll just roll up the sleeves on their white dress-up shirts and go to work helping the heathens rebuild their non-earthquake-proof homes. The Mormons are actually kind of cool, in that respect, despite their loopy religious beliefs. I admire their unfailing politeness, their tidy clothes, and their monomaniacal sense of organisation. One might wish they’d loosen up a bit, but you have to bear in mind that they’re less than two hundred years into the history of their religion. At this point in the evolution of Christianity, folks were growing their beards long, taking vows of silence, and living in caves in the desert. Salt Lake City is kind of like that, but at least it has a basketball team.

The Last Stand.
Thu, 06 Jul 2006

I thought the new "X-Men" movie was excellent. Critics were kinda huffy cos they brought in Brett Ratner, the hack who directed "Red Dragon" and the "Rush Hour" movies, to complete the trilogy that Bryan Singer had begun. But a hack is exactly what the series needed. Singer did a great job assembling a cast and establishing a moody grey-and-silver palette, but his movies were too damn slow. He wanted to provide frequent opportunities for us to pause and think about the meaning of it all. But the meaning of it all never required much thought. The metaphors were never very deeply hidden. The characters were complex by comic book standards, but not so complex that they required lengthy dramatic scenes to flesh them out. A few lingering glances and raised eyebrows in between the explosions, that's all we ever needed to get the point.

Once all the series' pretensions are stripped away, you're left with pretty good melodrama. And it's hard to fuck that up. Melodrama can be good even when performed by lousy actors. With good actors, even better. Thus is it possible for Halle Berry and Ian McKellen to occupy the same film, and for both of them to be effective.

Moral: A comic book movie should be treated as pulp, not as art. Good pulp is more respectable, not to mention more enjoyable, than middlebrow art.

Kurdistan.
Tue, 22 Aug 06

A while back on the Daily Show - maybe you saw it - Jon Stewart made fun of a promotional video created by the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan. The video showed buildings being constructed, grocery stores with well-stocked shelves, smiling children in colourful ethnic costumes, the usual schmaltz. The tag line was, "Come see the other Iraq." Somehow Stewart turned this line - "the other Iraq" - into a joke. The gag, I guess, was that you'd have to be crazy to try to lure tourists to Iraq at a time like this. I thought the bit was sort of weak, although the Daily Show studio audience (which, it has been observed, bursts into sustained applause with less provocation than any other TV audience except Stephen Colbert's) seemed to find it hilarious. Sometimes Stewart just uses the word "Iraq" as a truncheon with which to smack down the president, and the context in which the word is deployed doesn't much matter.

I just read this article about Kurdistan, which I found particularly interesting in light of the fact that a couple years ago, Jenn & Kurt were trying to convince me to fly there with them on an aid mission. In the end I chickened out, and Jenn & Kurt vacationed in Vietnam instead. I would like to visit Kurdistan someday, though. Apparently, just as their promotional video asserted, the Kurds have managed to create for themselves a fairly secure and civilised little homeland, despite the inconvenience of being tethered to the self-destructing Iraqi state. The Kurds have kept their territory fairly free of violence by sealing off their border with the rest of Iraq and by obtrusively monitoring the few Arabs who are allowed into the region. (Muslim Arabs are automatically suspect; Christian Arabs, however, are welcome.) That's a dicey method, but Iraq is a dicey country.

"It’s easy to imagine the place as a reasonably well-functioning conservative democracy, a moderately prosperous Utah of the Middle East," the author concludes. It has also been proposed as a convenient spot for the Americans to withdraw their troops to, in the event that they're forced to abandon the rest of Iraq to the crazies and anarchists. Funny how, despite their century or so of mistreatment by colonial and pseudo-colonial powers - shat upon successively by the Ottomans, the British, and Saddam's Iraq - the Kurds wind up being the most peaceable and Western-leaning people in the Middle East. Maybe some cultures are just amenable to modernity, while other cultures just aren't. But, given where they're situated, how long can the Kurds hold out against the temptation to pious fury? Maybe the time to visit is now.

Idiocracy.
Tue, 05 Sep 2006

Remember when I was grousing a few months ago that liberal secularists are breeding too slowly, and that we will soon be outnumbered by fast-breeding religious conservatives? There's a new movie out, written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of "King of the Hill" and "Office Space", that posits a different, but equally grim, demographic outcome. This is from the review in the L.A. Times:

"The movie begins with a comparison of two family trees. A high-IQ couple waits for the perfect time to have a child, a decision they don't take lightly, while elsewhere, in the trailer park, the dim bulbs breed like rabbits. The high-IQ couple waits too long, the husband dies of stress during fertility treatments, and their line stops there. Meanwhile, the moron population explodes."

I think Mike Judge's predictions are insightful, as far as they go, and should be incorporated into the other theory:

THE REVISED LOW-BIRTHRATE THEORY. Since effective contraceptive techniques are readily available, and since there is no longer any economic incentive to have large families (because we no longer need children to work in the fields and tend to us in our old age), the couples who have the most children will be either those who are too stupid or lazy to use birth control, or those who eschew birth control out of religious conviction. Assuming that the rest of us persist in having small families - which we probably will - in a few generations the stupid, the lazy, and the religious will make up the bulk of the population. Given that the stupid and lazy are incapable of running things, the religious will take over. Eventually they'll put a stop to porn and professional wrestling, and the stupid and lazy will have to entertain themselves as they did in olden times - by going to church, by going to war, or by having ever more children.

It's scary. Maybe the present is as good as things are ever going to be. Maybe, in fact, we are right now enjoying the pinnacle of our civilisation - the pinnacle of science, of economic growth, of personal freedom. (I'd say we passed the pinnacle of literature and the arts at least a half-century ago.) Maybe from here on it's just the slow advance of ignorance and repression, culminating inevitably in a planet-wrecking war with some other equally ignorant, repressed civilisation - maybe the Islamic world, maybe the Chinese with their surplus male population, who knows.

Like most of us, I'm fascinated by end-of-the-world scenarios. Some folks get their doomsday fix through the bloody prophecies of the "Left Behind" novels, where Jesus and the Antichrist between them slaughter the better part of the human race; some folks seek out the most extreme global warming forecasts and half-eagerly anticipate the Category 5 hurricane that will soon immerse Lower Manhattan; some folks who stockpiled beans and ammo in anticipation of Y2K now await redemption in the form of the avian flu. In one of my favourite end-of-the-world novels, "Lucifer's Hammer" by the libertarian sci-fi author Larry Niven, a comet strike kills off billions and the survivors cluster in two warring camps. Ultimately the army of property rights and technological progress prevails in a bloody battle against the army of cannibalistic former welfare recipients.

What these fantasies have in common is obviously not an ideology, but an enthusiasm for the End Times, and especially for the times beyond, when the scum of the earth - the infidels, the unenlightened, the unworthy - will be wiped away, and civilisation can be begun anew with the chastened remainder. First, the purifying fire; then, Utopia. I always thought I was immune to end-of-the-world despair because, unlike the Utopianists, I'm not eager for the apocalypse at all. I rather like things the way they are. I'm pro-porn. I'm curious to see the outcome of "Survivor: Battle of the Races". I can't work up a righteous resentment against Hummer owners or Halliburton or Wal-Mart. I acknowledge that a significant portion of humanity doesn't have it as good as we do in the materialistic West, but I reckon that's a product of not enough Westernisation, not of too much. As for the global warming thing, it concerns me, but I figure we're smart enough to tackle it. (Maybe not soon enough to rescue every sad-eyed polar bear who has the bad luck to get stuck on a shrinking ice floe, but we'll probably save the residents of the Maldives from inundation, and I'm pretty darn sure we'll save Lower Manhattan.)

Anyhow, I used to think I was optimistic about the future. But since I started thinking about this low-birthrate thing, I've become rather glum. Unlike the other end-of-the-world enthusiasts, I foresee no fire, no floods, and no better tomorrow. Just a slow decline into a new Dark Age, and then…

In another famous sci-fi novel, "A Canticle For Leibowitz" by Walter Miller, some relics of civilisation survive a nuclear war and are preserved through the succeeding Dark Age by scattered monasteries. Many centuries pass, a new Enlightenment occurs, and science progresses at last to the point where humans rediscover how to harness nuclear power. Then, of course, they blow themselves up again. But before they do, a few people manage to launch themselves into space to start a new civilisation. The ever-so-slightly-optimistic conclusion is that these cycles of evolution and self-destruction are inevitable, but that each time a new peak is achieved, we don't quite fall back to the same level of ignorance as the time before - ever so slowly, frustratingly, we climb up the down escalator, one collapsing step at a time.

I suppose I should quit bothering everyone with all this end-of-the-world stuff, and just sit down and write my own sci-fi novel. Maybe I'll wrap it in plastic and stick it in a hole to be unearthed when the next Enlightenment rolls round. Or maybe I'll publish it and make a fortune, which I can use to build a Space Ark and launch a few humans toward Alpha Centauri.

Of course, you guys are all welcome on my Space Ark. I'll make room for a pair of polar bears, too.

Something funny in "Nezahuacoyotl".
Fri, 08 Sep 2006

There's a program on the local community radio station, CFCR, that drives me nuts whenever I accidentally tune it in. I never knew what the show was called, as I've never heard more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, but perusing the CFCR program guide, I suspect it's RadioActive, which describes itself as "a weekly news program concentrating on events and opinions that are suppressed or under-reported in the mainstream commercial news media . . . from an anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, anti-corporatist and pro-democracy viewpoint". The part that drives me nuts is where the host reads "the news" - i.e., the true, unfiltered, progressive news that those fascist bastards at the Globe & Mail don't want me to hear. These are usually news reports culled from leftist websites. Occasionally the source is a major newspaper, although on these occasions it sometimes seems that the host is interweaving his own politics into otherwise uncontroversial reports. For instance, a recent article credited to the Montreal Gazette, which described the difficulty NATO forces have had in subduing resurgent Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, concluded with a line to the effect that "four years after the invasion, the U.S.-led coalition has been unable to secure its puppet government." "Puppet government"? Did that come from the Gazette, from some other website that cannibalised the original Gazette article, or the host's own scribbled emendations? I'm unwilling to cough up the subscriber fee to look up the original story on the Gazette, so I'll never know for sure.

(I remember coming across this article during the Iraq war, about a battle between U.S. marines and insurgents in which a number of civilian casualties occurred. Credited to Mark Franchetti of the Times of London, the article is pretty evenhanded and restrained in describing the tragedy - too restrained, in the view of the anti-war lefties who reprinted it at counterpunch.org under the peppier headline "Slaughter at the Bridge of Death".)

Here's an article from the website Narco News Bulletin that was featured this summer on RadioActive. It's about July's Mexican presidential election, in which the rightist candidate Felipe Calderón eked out a narrow victory over the leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. According to the mainstream North American news media, according to international observers, and according to Mexico's own election-monitoring agency, IFE, that victory was legitimate. But according to the article's author, Al Giordano, there is evidence of massive voter fraud in which IFE is complicit.

Once all the outrage and revolutionary rhetoric are stripped away, here is the gist of the opposition's case. Giordano asserts that, in an official recount of 10,679 of Mexico's electoral precincts, irregularities (extra ballots stuffed into ballot boxes or legitimate ballots missing) were found in 7,442 precincts. That amounts to over 126,000 fraudulent or missing votes. "If the recount results of these 10,679 precincts (8.2 percent of the nation’s 130,000 polling places) are projected nationwide, it would mean that more than 1.5 million votes were either stolen or stuffed in an election that the first official count claimed was won by Calderón by only 243,000 votes," Giordano writes.

(I should point out that in extrapolating these results from 10,679 precincts to the rest of the country, Giordano implies that the recounted precincts were a random and representative selection of the whole. But according to this guy, these precincts were identified by the losing side for examination precisely because they presented the strongest case for fraud.)

Notice that Giordano never tells us what percentage of the altered votes were altered in Calderón's favour, and what percentage in López Obrador's. That's because at the time he wrote the article, Giordano didn't know. I'm not sure if we know even now. Here's a press release from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank that's been digging through the Electoral Tribunal's figures as they are gradually released. According to CEPR, the numbers that the Electoral Tribunal has released so far contradict López Obrador's claim that there was any systematic cheating; but, they note, it's suspicious that the full recount tallies haven't been made public.

Anyway, I'm not going to try to prove that the Mexico election was fair. Frankly I concur with the view that a full ballot-by-ballot recount should have been taken, as it should have been in Florida in 2000 - not because I'm convinced either election was "stolen", but because it's better to have absolute transparency in the process. There's always gonna be some nut cooking up a conspiracy theory, but why make their work easier? And anyway, assuming you're the legitimate winner, wouldn't it be better to start your term without half the population suspecting you're a fraud artist? As Giordano put it in an earlier report from Mexico, "Calderón, if he makes it to inauguration on December 1, will face an impossible task of trying to govern an angry and organized population that does not consider him to have won legitimately."

To repeat: Though I wouldn't be surprised if there had been sufficient cheating to cast Calderón's legitimacy into doubt, I doubt there was any conspiracy by the Electoral Tribunal or the capitalist media bosses to enthrone him. Still, I find it strange that some of the specific allegations in Giordano's reporting seem to have gone uncontradicted in the mainstream press. Like this one, from the very first article in his "special series" on the election: "[A]n unknown number of ballot boxes have 'disappeared' in the past two days. The ballots from three precincts in the city of Nezahuacoyotl [sic] - a López Obrador stronghold - were discovered yesterday in the municipal garbage dump."

This is only one of many tunes Giordano has trumpeted in the months since the election, and not a particularly prominent one, as it's gone untrumpeted since July 8. The trashed ballot boxes represent only a thousand votes or so, not enough to get his man anywhere near the presidency, even allowing for the other "unknown number of ballot boxes" that Giordano vaguely asserts to be stacked up in landfills around the country. But though it's a little thing, I was curious to know what the deal really was with those ballot boxes. And thereby discovered that "Nezahuacoyotl" was a perfect case study in how a simple tune can be picked up and whistled forever around the hippie internet.

If you Google "Nezahuacoyotl", spelled as it is in Giordano's original article, you'll see that the name crops up again and again in leftist websites that have obviously taken their information, and usually their exact wording, from Narco News. Now try Googling the correct spelling, "Nezahualcóyotl", throwing in the words "election" or "ballots" or "dump", to see where else the story shows up. It shows up exactly nowhere. Yes, this may be evidence of the mainstream media's indifference to a story that could cast doubt on Calderón's victory. (I suspect that the media would have been more attentive if it were the fiery populist who'd won by a minuscule margin, and the pro-American candidate who alleged trickery.) But it's also evidence of a shameful disinterest in fact-checking on the part of the left-wing websites in question. You'd think just one of these sites, inflamed with righteous anti-authoritarian, anti-corporatist fury, would have been inspired to do a bit of investigation on their own - to look up Giordano's source, for instance, which was apparently the Mexican newspaper El Universal - and catch the typo, rather than propagate it by copy-and-pasting the original text.

I can sympathise with the hippie media. They're only being as lazy and cheap as I am. I've been trying for the last forty-five minutes to dig up some mention of the Nezahualcóyotl story from an English-language media source. (I don't read Spanish, so I can't look it up in El Universal.) I can't find any reference in the archives of the New York Times, CBC, The Economist, or even the Guardian (where you'd think the story would have gotten a sympathetic airing). The Globe and Mail turns up a hit, but it's subscription-only, so I can't read it. If I were getting paid for this, I might be prepared to dig around a little more. But I'm not, so I'm giving up. And that's exactly why we need the corporate media - cos they can afford to pay people to perform the drudge work of checking sources and looking up the spelling of obscure Aztec place names.

I'm troubled by the irregularities in the Mexican election, and will continue to be troubled until someone smarter than me takes the trouble to comprehensively examine the complaints of Giordano and his credulous fellow-travellers. I wish I were smart and diligent enough to do the job myself, but as a monolingual English Canadian who's never travelled further south than Las Vegas, I'm underqualified; and anyway I already feel like I'm pushing the limits of how much time I want to spend thinking about Latin American politics. But the whole thing makes me wonder how the true-believers out there manage to keep on believing - those who copy-and-paste inflammatory news stories without making the slightest effort to investigate them, as well as those who accede to the omissions of the mainstream media in order to avoid having their preconceptions undermined.

Maybe if one spoke multiple languages, and had endless free time to compare news stories from multiple sources, one could hope to get a complete picture of the world. Or maybe not even then. The news doesn't get simpler when you investigate deeper, it gets more complicated. Historians still, based on the alignment of arrowheads and pottery sherds, debate events of 3000 years ago. I couldn't tell you what I did on this day last year. I'm glad someone is willing to put in the effort to sort out what happened in a large North American country only a couple months back. But just like you, just like me, the earnest chaps poring over precinct vote totals from Guanajuato are susceptible to an easy narrative that sustains their beliefs, and are resistant to a complicated narrative that proves nothing. We all love a good yarn.

RE: Something funny in "Nezahuacoyotl".
Fri, 08 Sep 2006

I'm not especially interested in Mexican elections. But I am interested in the way that hippies and the rest of us live in two entirely different and mutally contradictory media universes. And how there's another media universe populated entirely by right-wing crazies. And in between there are multiple mini-universes where the Zionists, the anti-Zionists, the anti-abortionists, the anti-anti-abortionists, the Scientologists, and the paranormal psychologists gather to consume their news. Inconveniently, none of these universes has a monopoly on the truth. Bits of the truth seem to pop up everywhere. And outright lies appear even in the mainstream media. The mainstream media does a better job of correcting its lies - eventually - because the mainstream media at least claims to abide by certain professional standards, whereas the hippie media abides only by a blazing Bush-hatred that makes them assume every contradiction was planted by Karl Rove to trip them up, like the dinosaur bones planted by Satan to deceive believers.

The exciting thing about the Mexico recount was that it appeared for a few seconds, when I stumbled across the hippie news reports, that here was an issue where truth or untruth could be neatly found out, and my world made a little less complicated. In between the usual folderol about the downtrodden masses and Subcomandante Marcos, the hippies had made some specific allegations involving numbers and facts that could, I thought, be checked against other, more dependable news sources. But I was wrong. It turned out that the segregated nature of the media multiverse, and the weakness of the internet as a fact-checking tool, and my own lack of Spanish, made the story uncontradictable, at least until the Mexican electoral tribunal releases more hard numbers. (Even then, of course, the hippies will just say that the tribunal was in on the fix - and how can that be disproved?)

Heading for the exit.
Tue, 12 Sep 2006

I voted for the New Democratic Party in the last federal election.

I didn't cast this vote out of enthusiasm. In my riding the choices were an incumbent Conservative MP, a fairly high-profile NDP challenger, and an obscure Liberal with no hope of winning. I didn't find any of the party leaders appealing. Finally I ruled out the Conservatives because I was turned off by their social regressivism - even though, it should be admitted, Stephen Harper didn't make much of an issue of gay marriage or abortion in the campaign. That left two choices. On election day, as I sat in the polling booth, my pencil wavered between the Liberal and NDP candidates. At the last minute I marked my X for the New Democrat, local radio crank Don Kossick. My logic was that the Conservatives were going to win anyway, so I might as well use my vote to try and keep them honest, allowing them the narrowest possible margin of victory, in this riding at least.

I repudiate my vote.

I was aware at election time that on foreign policy the NDP and I do not agree. The party has been characterised by the most uncompromising variety of pacifism ever since J.S. Woodsworth stood up to oppose Canadian involvement in World War II. As for me, although I recognise that war is always grisly and terrible, I don't think democracies can shirk from fighting evil - yeah, I said evil - whether in the form of Nazism, Communism, or Islamism. I'm not even willing to commit entirely to the consensus view that the Vietnam war was a mistake. I half-supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It probably goes without saying that I strongly favour continuing the fight against Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

At their just-ended convention in Quebec City, the New Democratic Party called for Canadian troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan in February 2007, two years ahead of schedule. The resolution passed with 90% support. Earlier the party's youth wing had voted on a resolution opposing Canada's "occupation" of that country. Every single youth delegate voted for the resolution. The CBC reported that not one person stood to debate the point - not even to express reservations about that provocative word "occupation".

The same day, delegates heard a speech by an Afghan woman named Malalai Joya who implied that we were deluded to think that we were fighting for liberal values in her country. I can't find the complete text of her speech online, but she's quoted as saying, "When the entire nation is living under the shadow of the gun and warlordism, how can its women enjoy very basic freedoms?" I should note that Joya is a member of the Afghan parliament, and would presumably admit that however imperfect the current regime, her "basic freedoms" are slightly less circumscribed than they would be under the Taliban. According to the CBC report linked above, Joya doesn't favour the removal of NATO troops. She just wants Canadians to "withdraw their support" from the warlords in Hamid Karzai's government. The delegates gave her a standing ovation. Then they went ahead and voted for a complete pullout.

I have to admit a blind spot here. I have no idea what these delegates actually expect to happen in Afghanistan once the Canadians are gone. I assume - I will generously credit them basic decency by assuming - that the NDP doesn't want the woman-hating, idol-smashing, al-Qaeda-supporting Taliban to return to power. I also assume that their opposition to the Canadian presence in Afghanistan extends to the presence of any foreign troops - in other words, that they don't just want Canada to stand aside while other members of NATO carry on defending the new government without us. Beyond this, I can’t even guess what NDPers are thinking. Do they believe that once NATO has withdrawn, the rebels are going to stop fighting? Do they think that the weak and backward Afghan government is going to get stronger and more progressive once our corrupting foreign influence has been removed? Do they care that considerable swaths of southern territory are already under Taliban control?

I can't pretend that the war is being waged as intelligently as it could be. This article by Johann Hari makes the case that the U.S.-led campaign against heroin trafficking is undermining the fight. By burning the poppy crops that provide many poor Afghans with their only source of income, we turn potential allies into Taliban sympathisers. Hari offers a plausible alternative strategy: instead of destroying the poppies, or letting them be processed into heroin and smuggled into the west, we should be buying the poppy crops ourselves. Perhaps this would be expensive, but losing the war ain't gonna be cheap either.

Obviously there is room for constructive criticism of the Afghanistan mission. But I no longer believe that the NDP has the moral authority to offer it. They are silly with anti-Americanism. The world should be wary of untrammelled American power, especially as exercised by the current administration, incompetent and self-righteous. But the New Democrats have gone beyond wariness to superstitious dread. The name George W. Bush has become a curse to them, and they recoil from every cause, however just, that has been stained by it.

Heading for the exit, part II.
Sun, Sep 24 2006

I've been reading Paul Theroux's Riding the Iron Rooster, an account of the author's travels by train through China in the mid-1980s, just as Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms were taking hold. Theroux is a bit of a prick - it's what makes him such an interesting writer - and he likes to provoke the Chinese, whenever one of them expresses enthusiasm for the newly-sanctioned pursuit of profits, by baiting him or her with Maoist rhetoric: "Doesn't that make you a capitalist running dog...an imperialist lackey...a right deviationist?" Usually the Chinese respond by nervously laughing off his questions.

I too am a right deviationist, and I too spend a lot of time nervously laughing off disagreements. I'm a poor arguer - I'm too slow-witted - and I don't enjoy conflict, especially with friends. It's easier to laugh and change the subject. I realise it's cowardly of me to sidestep disagreements this way. And it makes me a reticent, and consequently less interesting, conversationalist. Then again, to the degree that my instinctive timorousness prevents me from turning into a ranting blowhard, like the ones I'm so eager to escape from in bars and at parties, then it's an instinct I should perhaps indulge. The world doesn't need any more self-assured nitwits broadcasting their opinions in public places. At least I restrict my ranting to the written word, where it can be easily skimmed over or ignored.

But now that I've got this blog-like section on my website, where my past opinions can be easily accessed by any of the two and a half people in the world who give a damn, it occurs to me that my ranting has been rather scattershot, and that it might help to have a few rants that spell out roughly where I'm coming from, ideologically speaking. I'm hoping I can do this without becoming too nakedly tendentious. When it comes to enunciating one's principles, it's tempting to just lay them out there, like a street hawker spreading his wares on a tablecloth: Abortion rights, PRO; Mistreatment of detainees, ANTI. But I will heed a lesson I learned reading The Grapes of Wrath. In the chapters where Steinbeck tells the story of the Joads, his novel is powerful and convincing. In the alternating chapters where he describes the Forces At Work On Society As A Whole, it's hectoring and dull. Stick to the specifics, avoid generalities.

I've written several times about the American adventure in Iraq, notably here, where I express my "relief" that the invasion had finally begun, and here, where I predict that the conspiracy theories of the anti-war left would cost the Democrats the 2004 election. As to the second posting, I stand by it. I think Kerry's over-nuanced position on the war might have been forgiven, if the American public hadn't perceived that his party was poisoned by affiliation (through Wesley Clark and Howard Dean) with charlatans like Michael Moore. I predict that the purging of pro-war democrats that began with the primary defeat of Joe Lieberman will do the party serious harm in the upcoming midterm election. And if Democrats wind up selecting in 2008 a presidential candidate of the anti-war left, then they might as well just start singing "Hail to the Chief" to John McCain, or (god help us) Bill Frist or Sam Brownback.

War opponents are encouraged by signs that increasing numbers of Americans are tiring of the war in Iraq. What they misunderstand is that this anti-war sentiment is a fundamentally defensive impulse. Americans are turning against the war not because too many Iraqis are dying, but because too many Americans are dying. If things get worse they may in desperation climb into bed with the party that promises to expedite the homecoming of "our boys". But if that party is associated with a fundamental hostility to the very use of American power abroad - a hostility such as the anti-war left frequently displays - or if that party seems to openly celebrate the thugs and murderers who are battling American troops in Iraq - as Michael Moore has done, by referring to them as "Minutemen" - then voters will not stick around for breakfast.

About that other posting - the one where I said I was "'relieved" that the war had started. I guess what I meant was that I was tired of the suspense. Now that the first blow had been struck, I hoped, Saddam would be quickly overthrown and Iraq pacified, and the whole controversy over whether the pre-emptive war was wrong or right would recede into irrelevancy.

Of course, I was naïvely optimistic, about both the duration of the war and of the controversy. Still, as badly as things have gone, even now I'm reluctant to say definitively that the invasion was a mistake. After all, we don't know what would have happened if it hadn't occurred. How many Iraqis would have died under the Ba'athist regime if it had clung to power for another decade or two? How many would have starved under the dysfunctional U.N. sanctions? Or if the sanctions had been lifted, would Saddam or his sons have taken the opportunity to reconstitute Iraq's weapons programs and commit further acts of aggression against their neighbours or their own citizens? Given the regime's history, these are not outlandish speculations.

If Saddam had died of old age, would his son Qusay have taken over without a power struggle? Would there have been a civil war? The gibbering hatred that prompts Sunni insurgents to blow up Shi'ite pilgrims, that inspires Shi'ite death squads to torture their Sunni neighbours with power drills, was not imposed by the U.S. Army, nor was it smuggled across the border by foreign jihadis. Obviously that hatred was there already, in more or less restrained form, when Saddam was in power. Perhaps civil war was inevitable, and it was only a question of whether to have it now or ten years from now.

But. Perhaps Saddam in his dotage would have contented himself with writing his kooky novels and verbally abusing his underlings. Perhaps he or his successors could have been bullied into some kind of compliance with the international community. Perhaps they would have successfully redirected all that gibbering hatred toward the usual scapegoats - the Jews, the Americans, and Iran. Perhaps Iraq would have remained just another averagely brutal Arab totalitarianism for decades to come. Certainly it's hard to conceive of any what-if scenario that would have led to so much chaos in Iraq quite so quickly. But it's impossible to know.

Let's suppose that we, like the Flash, could vibrate ourselves into an alternate reality - say, a reality where the Florida recount went ahead and Al Gore won - and it turned out that in this reality Iraq had been effectively constrained by UN-imposed no-fly zones, sanctions, and weapons inspections. Would that prove that the war (in our reality) was a mistake?

Probably. But I still don't think that seals the argument against pre-emptive invasion. Say you're planning to overthrow a totalitarian regime. Is the death of one innocent person, as many anti-war activists would argue, too many? That strikes me as an absurdly simplistic position, but at least it's clear and morally consistent: killing innocents is wrong, therefore we must not kill - even to defend innocents from being killed - and certainly not in support of an abstract principle like "democracy" that may never be successfully implemented. As with every absolutist ideology, the appeal of pacifism is that once you've arrived at it, the need for further analysis is curtailed. In any given scenario, only one question need be asked: will we have to kill anybody? If the answer is yes, then, moral investigations concluded, the pacifist can stop thinking and start painting Hitler moustaches on photos of the president.

Those of us who aren't pacifists have to do some murky calculations. If the number of fatalities in the Iraq war had been quite small, and the result were a real democracy, everyone except the Michael Moores - those who are pathologically hostile to American power - would admit that yes, war was the right choice. On the other hand, if the fatalities are sufficiently enormous, and neither democracy nor stability ever comes, then even the Dick Cheneys will have to concede that the invasion was a mistake. Somewhere between those two extremes there's a line that you reach where you say, Alright, this wasn't worth the costs. I am inclined to admit that we crossed the line some time ago. But I'm not sure precisely where it was.

Or, I don't know. Maybe all this talk of "lines" and "calculations" is just me covering my butt. Maybe I'm just embarrassed that all those idiot kids marching with their giant puppets and their "No War For Oil" signs back in 2003 were - cringe - actually right. And I was wrong.

In any case, I doubt that withdrawing troops now is going to help things. From anecdotal evidence, I reckon that the Americans are on balance a calming influence. I know, I know, there was Abu Ghraib and Haditha, and we will undoubtedly learn of others and quite possibly worse. I said "on balance". Between the grisly little evil of Abu Ghraib and the great galloping evil of the now-deceased Mr. Zarqawi and his followers there can be no moral comparison. Leaving Iraq means leaving an unburied corpse of a state which will, if we're very lucky, merely crumble into pieces as the competing militias peck it to death. If we're less lucky the corpse will be reanimated by some Islamist strongman and shamble after us, arms outstretched, reeking of oil riches and coughing up suicide bombers. Staying in Iraq means more dead and maimed American soldiers. But if the soldiers leave now, with Iraq poised to self-destruct, they'll just have to come back later on.

Let me expand on that thought. After the events of September 11, 2001, as it became apparent that Osama bin Laden and his cohort had once benefited from CIA funding to the Afghan anti-communist resistance, a lot of liberals trotted out the analogy of chickens coming home to roost. The lesson they drew was that the United States had made a mistake in financing the resistance in the first place. Perhaps they're right - perhaps the mujahideen were no better than their communist foes. (I would argue that Afghanistan's importance in the wider fight to contain Soviet expansion shouldn't be discounted. It's easy from a post-Cold War perspective to say that the Soviet Union was doomed to fail anyway, but that wasn't so clear at the time the tanks rumbled across the border, in 1979.) However, I think there's a different lesson, one equally compatible with liberal principles, that we should draw from America's Afghan proxy war. The problem wasn't that the mujahideen won. The problem was that after the communists had been defeated, the United States lost all interest in what happened on the far side of the Khyber pass. A small amount of influence exercised in 1989 - a little diplomacy, a little aid, a little peacekeeping - might have been enough to keep Afghanistan from degenerating into civil war. But after war had been raging for a decade, after the Taliban had swept into Kabul and made al-Qaeda their favoured guests, there were no cheap options for the United States - the only way to dislodge the terrorists was with a costly and destructive invasion.

With the ascendancy of the new Afghan government still in doubt, launching another war just a couple timezones over was, perhaps, a dumb idea. But once again many liberals are drawing the wrong lesson from America's mistake. Things are a mess in Iraq. But they won't be made better by America sweeping the rubble off its flak jacket and going home. Parts of Iraq are secure - the Kurdish north, a couple of provinces in the south. There is a democratically elected government that represents, albeit imperfectly, all of Iraq's sects and ethnicities. And there are millions of Iraqis who don't belong to militias or death squads, who might not be ready to embrace secular liberalism as practiced in, say, Ottawa, but who nevertheless want to live under a functioning, modern, non-terrorist government. These things are worth fighting for. And, I reiterate, it's easier to fight for them now than it will be a decade from now, with the elected government very likely in exile, and the few remaining moderate Iraqis cowering amid the ruins, if Iraq is left to continue its headlong slide into failed statehood.

The Conspiracy Artists.
Sun, 24 Sep 2006

If you watch the special features on the "Syriana" DVD, there's a part where George Clooney says something like, "We didn't intend for this film to point fingers at any particular political party." I think that's true. The movie doesn't mention George Bush or Condi Rice, Bill Clinton or Richard Holbrooke, or indicate whether the hypocritical and amoral U.S. administration it portrays is controlled by Republicans or Democrats. I don't think the filmmakers believe there's any difference. Their philosophy, I'd guess, is common to a lot of people on the far left (and far right). Take, for instance, this guy I met at a bar just before January's federal election: "It doesn't mean anything," he scoffed. "The people who run things have already decided that Stephen Harper is going to be the next Prime Minister." I will confess that I didn't listen all that closely to the remainder of his rant, but I think I could sum up his worldview pretty easily. Democracy is a farce. There are secretive powers behind the scenes that determine which issues get into the media and which get left out; which candidates we vote for, and which we ridicule and ignore. The electorate are willing dupes. Only a handful of freethinkers like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and the entire under-25 population of Western Europe are brave enough to pull back the curtain and expose the machinations of the conspirators.

I'm not sure if the people who believe this stuff really believe it, or if it's just a nihilistic pose that allows them to sneer at society. It's a nice way to avoid facing up to the reality that your arguments are weak. "Well, of course we keep losing elections. They would never let us win."

But getting back to "Syriana". If you haven't seen it, the story can be summed up as, Big Oil Controls Everything. Big Oil is upset because the heir to a Saudi-like Middle Eastern kingdom has agreed to award the drilling rights to a lucrative oil field to the Chinese. Why sell to the Chinese over the Americans? Because, the heir explains, the Chinese submitted the higher bid, and he wants to use the money to modernise his country. It turns out this Arab aristocrat favours democracy, equal rights for women, separation of church and state, fluoridation, anti-smoking laws, all that good liberal stuff. His feckless playboy brother, meanwhile, couldn't care less about his people. He just wants to throw cocaine parties on yachts and be fashionably dissolute. But, the playboy is willing to sell his oil to the Americans. So the Americans manoeuvre the playboy into power. When the rightful heir plots a coup - you know, one of those famous Middle Eastern pro-democratic military coups - the Americans spread the story that he's a terrorist, then blow him up with a guided missile. Cut to a roomful of Big Oil executives cackling and chomping on cigars as the playboy announces that he's going to reverse his dead brother's decision and sell oil to the Americans after all. Will anyone stand up to these fat cats? Not the media. Not the CIA - they've been cowed into submission by their political bosses. Not even Matt Damon has the courage to speak out. But who's that steering a dinghy full of explosives toward the American oil rig? Who's that finally striking a blow against imperialist exploitation? Could the hero of "Syriana" be - a suicide bomber?

Let me turn down the sarcasm dial long enough to admit that "Syriana" is actually a well-written, well-acted, and rather gripping movie. And up to a point I agree with its message: that is to say, I too am opposed to the assassination of preposterously saintly political dissidents.

Speaking of paranoid movies, consider "V For Vendetta". England is ruled by a fascist dictatorship that rose to power by unleashing a designer virus on the citizenry then pinning the blame on terrorists. Only an actual terrorist - a poetry-spouting, genetically-enhanced superman in a Guy Fawkes mask - can uncover the truth and lead an uprising that culminates in the destruction of the Houses of Parliament. Once again, it's impossible to disagree with the film's message: fascism is bad. Against a totalitarianism as ruthless as the one portrayed in this film - where every single official from the dictator down to the cop in the street is a racist, sadist, or sex fiend - even terrorist tactics can be forgiven.

"V For Vendetta" is a comic-book fantasy, while "Syriana" is a pseudo-realistic drama. But they take place in the same world - a world where officials murder innocents at will, where the media are complicit in spreading lies, where citizens submit docilely before a conspiracy so vast and impenetrable that it can't be fought through elections or rallies or writing petitions, but only through blowing stuff up. This isn't exactly our world. But we are meant to understand that it is our world.

For those of us who cling to the quaint belief that those in power aren't unfailingly corrupt, that they may sometimes be motivated by their better angels as well as their worse, that when they do evil they are as likely to arrive at it through honest mistakes as through moustache-twirling infamy - for us the question is, how should we react to movies like this? Should we accept them at face value, as entertaining fictions, or should we be alarmed at the continuing migration of the Politics of Paranoia out of chat rooms and anarchist quilting bees and into mainstream popular culture?

I'm a little alarmed. Let us differentiate between the old-fashioned Conspiracy Theorist - a whiskery guy in a wood-panelled basement, patiently subjecting each frame of the Zapruder film to infrared analysis - and the new-style Conspiracy Artist, who uses the mass media to peddle the idea that the mass media is full of lies. At least the Conspiracy Theorist is obliged to offer facts, or what are supposed to be facts, and those facts we can attempt to rebut, as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9-11" is rebutted here,* or as the slander that the World Trade Center was deliberately destroyed by the U.S. government is rebutted here. But the Conspiracy Artist needs only to offer a suggestion, and the suggestion is always the same - This is what things are like (or will soon be). To the argument that things are not really like that - not like that, anyhow - the Artist just smiles his haughty smile. Poor naïve fool, he says. Go on living in your dream world, then.

It's exasperating, you see, because there are no facts to rebut. There is only an attitude. And that attitude may prove far more resilient than the fusty rabble-rousing of the old-style leftists. Noam Chomsky with the face of George Clooney; Howard Zinn as a genetically-enhanced superman - how can they be resisted?

--

* - When I first read Dave Kopel's "Fahrenheit 9-11" rebuttal, linked above, I didn't take note of Kopel's participation in the anti-Michael Moore documentary "FarenHype 9-11", which includes an appearance by the preposterous right-wing attack mongoose Ann Coulter. I haven't seen this documentary and I can't say whether Coulter's involvement discredits the entire thing and, by association, everyone involved in it. But on the basis of a few minutes spent reading Dave Kopel's blog I'd say he comes across as a fairly respectable thinker of the libertarian Republican variety.

Old phone number.
Thu, 19 Oct 2006

I answered the phone the other night and it was Andrew, calling to arrange a game of Scrabble with me and Barb. The first thing he said was, "How long have you been at that number?"

"Why?" I said.

"I was just thinking that you're the only person I know that I don't have to look up their number before I call. Seems like you've been at that number forever."

So I thought about it and it turns out that, excepting a few years in the nineties when I lived in Vancouver, I've been at the same number since my mom and I moved from Prince Albert to Saskatoon back in 1991. That's a pretty amazing run. Fifteen years. Half my life.

Coincidentally, this month marks five years I've been in the same apartment. This is the longest time I've lived in one place since I was born. I was always being shuffled from one place to another when I was a kid.

So here I sit, with my fifteen-year-old phone number and my five-year-old apartment, and the truth is it's highly probable I'll still be here five or ten years from now. It's funny that I've settled down so permanently. I always used to think of myself as a travellin'-light, any-way-the-wind-blows kind of guy. I've always been careful not to get bogged down with too many possessions. But it's an illusion, really. The ability to pack up and move easily isn't the same as having a reason to pack up and move.

The truth is, I'd like to move somewhere, ideally a bigger city with a nicer climate. But I don't know where or why or how. So I continue to make the negative choice of sticking around for another year.

I'm good at negative choices. People have often expressed surprise that I've been able to go my entire adult life without taking a drink. But it's easy. When someone says, "Do you want a drink, Michael?" I just say no. Same goes for cutting out meat. "Do you want a porkchop, Michael?" No, thanks.

I think if I ever had to protest something, my protest of choice would be the hunger strike. I'd make a great hunger striker. Self-denial is the one weapon in my arsenal.

When I try to make positive choices, like exercising regularly, I usually run out of motivation after a week or two. About the only way I can see myself getting in shape is if my car were to die on me. Then I'd have to walk everywhere. I'd probably never have the motivation to save up for another car. The only reason I own a car in the first place is because I inherited it, along with my phone number, when my mom moved away from Saskatoon five years ago.

Now that I think about it, if my mom hadn't moved away, I'd probably still be living in her basement.

Hmm. I guess I really am an any-way-the-wind-blows kind of guy. I'm like one of those tumbleweeds that gets blown into a barbed-wire fence and sticks there forever. I should probably make an effort to unstick myself and get blown somewhere new, but I'm not sure where, or how, or why.

On reading Faulkner's "The Bear".
Thu, 26 Oct 2006

AN ACTUAL PARAGRAPH FROM WILLIAM FAULKNER'S SHORT STORY "THE BEAR"; PUNCTUATION REPRODUCED ACCURATELY:

"More men than that one Buck and Buddy to fumble-heed that truth so mazed for them that spoke it and so confused for them that heard yet still there was 1865:" and he

A story should not fill a reader with rage,
Nor make him groan deeply on turning each page
(I squarely believe), nor should it make him crave
To go down in person to its author's grave,
Exhume him, and slap the hell out of his bones
While chanting "Quit fucking with me" in shrill tones.

A premise straightforward and easy to grip,
The tale of a young boy in Old Mississip,
A bear, a good dog, and an Indian scout -
That's all that the story need have been about.
And then the bear's dead, and you think, "What the hell?
There's eighty more pages here. What's left to tell?"

There's only the whole fucking long history
Of Dixie's decline in a tragical key
From Chickasaw Indians savage and free
To gold-hungry Spaniards arriving by sea
To Jackson to Longstreet to Robert E. Lee
And then Reconstruction thick-strewn with debris
And low-blooded Yankee carpetbaggery
And Emancipation and blacks on a spree
And noble white gentlemen bending the knee
And noble white ladies consumed with ennui
And then and then and then and then endlessly
And much of it proudly punctuation-free
And subclauses dangling artistically
Like possum-tails severed and strung on a tree
And thinking "How much more of this can there be?
Yet still there are pages and pages:" and he

PS. It turns out that there are two versions of "The Bear" available - the one I read, from "Go Down Moses", and another version, identical except that it excises the sixty-pages of run-on sentences known as "section 4". I recommend the latter version.

Pandora.
Mon, 06 Nov 2006

Olin alerted me to a website called pandora.com. Maybe you've heard of it, or maybe you've heard of the Music Genome Project, which is the organisation that runs the website. The idea behind the Music Genome Project is that they take popular songs and break them down according to their musical characteristics - rhythm, melody, orchestration, vocal style, and so on - producing a "genetic map" of each song. So far they've mapped tens of thousands of songs. The deal with Pandora is, you go to the website, type in the name of a favourite artist or song, and their computers generate a mix of other songs from their database that they think you'll like. Then they stream the mix to you for free.

Because the Genome Project looks only at the characteristics of the songs themselves, rather than what style of music the performer usually plays, you get exposed to artists that you'd probably never seek out on your own. For instance, my starting point - the musician I entered when I first logged in - was Aimee Mann. Usually I get an Aimee Mann song in the mix every hour or so. Some of the musicians that come up I could have predicted, like Elliott Smith. Other stuff comes as a surprise - it turns out I like the Cardigans and Marianne Faithfull. Most of the bands are completely unfamiliar to me.

But it's not exactly foolproof. You tweak your mix as you listen, giving thumbs-down to songs you dislike (which removes them from the mix) and thumbs-up to songs you like (which tells the computer to play more songs like that). But you have to be careful. I gave a thumbs-up to a Liz Phair song and spent the next half hour thumbs-downing shiny female pop artists like Natalie Imbruglia and Jessica Simpson. Cos, you see, there's one musical characteristic that the experts at the Music Genome Project have neglected to incorporate into their genetic map: quality. Superficially, Aimee Mann has quite a bit in common with Alanis Morrisette, who has popped up several times in my mix - they both sing catchy mid-tempo pop songs about failed relationships. The difference is that Alanis' lyrics are usually pretty woeful. A million superficial similarities won't compensate for the single highly important distinction between good and bad. Which is why I'd be willing to listen to an Aimee Mann song even in a genre I didn't care for, like rap or heavy metal, because I know she'd do something interesting with it; whereas no matter how many catchy mid-tempo pop songs Alanis Morrisette writes about her disastrous teenaged love affairs, I'll probably never become a fan.

Still, I'm kind of addicted to Pandora because it's responsive to input, even if it's not always responsive in the way I'd like or expect. I'm listening to it right now. For the last couple hours I've been stuck in a ghetto of folkie girl singers, so I'll have to start punching the thumbs-down button pretty soon. But earlier this morning I was being flown over some pretty diverse musical territory - from Marianne Faithful to Donovan to Broken Social Scene to Richard Thompson.

While I was writing this, Norah Jones drowsed by, which reminded me of a web video I watched a few days ago. It's a talk - really, a meander - given by Malcolm Gladwell at a conference hosted by the New Yorker magazine. He starts out by relating how a computer program predicted the success of Norah Jones a few years back. Then he proceeds to describe an outfit, similar to the Music Genome Project, which breaks down screenplays according to attributes like setting, characters, conflict, etc. By analysing the screenplays, these consultants are able to forecast the box office returns for the completed movies with remarkable accuracy. The premise is that with this technology, Hollywood studio executives will no longer have to rely on their gut instincts when greenlighting hugely expensive movies - they can feed the script through a computer and find out instantly whether there's any chance of the film making a profit.

So Gladwell brings these guys the script for the forgettable Nicole Kidman / Sean Penn flick "The Interpreter", which earned only $50 million or so, and asks them to use their technology to turn it into a blockbuster. The consultants spirit the script away to their secret laboratory and, after applying a few algorithms, they return to assert that by adding a helicopter chase, replacing Sean Penn with a black guy, and doing away with some complicated exposition set in Africa, they could double the film's box office potential. "Wow," says Gladwell. "Now, what if we were to throw away the script entirely and create a new screenplay based on the premise - Nicole Kidman as a U.N. interpreter in peril?" The consultants mull it over and calculate that if it were turned into a "Bodyguard"-style romance, the movie could bring in $200 million. Gladwell is dazzled. But he notices that the consultants look rather glum. "What's the matter?" he says.

"Nothing," says one of the consultants. "It's just...I kind of liked the script the way it originally was. If I were a studio executive, I'd keep the original script, budget it at ten million bucks, release it to a few film festivals and hope for good notices."

Gladwell's conclusion is that technology can be useful, but there's something to be said for following your gut. And by the same token, a DJ with idiosyncratic but human tastes will always beat out a computer who can't tell the difference between Liz Phair and Kelly Clarkson.

Sixteen Military Wives.
Tue, 21 Nov 2006

The nadir of silly anti-war songmanship in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq came courtesy of Saskatoon's own Ultimate Power Duo:

"We are democracy! We own you!
We are democracy! Tell you what to do!
Who's got the oil? We want it! We want it!"

The problem with writing political songs - the reason I stay away from them - is that lyrics are a lousy medium for expressing nuanced ideas. They're great for sloganeering and emotional appeals: "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind"; "All you need is love"; "How long, how long must we sing this song?" But trying to compress the arguments for or against, say, balanced budgets, or free trade, or regime change in Iraq, into rhyming couplets is as futile as trying to express I wandered lonely as a cloud in essay form. It can be done, but in the doing you lose everything that matters.

If you're playing for an audience of like-minded people - and musicians and artists, being overwhelmingly of a leftist-secularist slant, tend to take it for granted that their audiences will share all their prejudices - then I guess you're not worried about winning over your opponents with reasoned arguments. But if you're so sure that your audience agrees with you, why bother bringing up politics at all? Do your fans really need to have their beliefs reduced to their most primitive form and then regurgitated back at them? And more importantly, what happens when your simplistic message leaks out to people who are not already in tune with your thinking? You just look like a simpleton.

To me, a political song signifies the end of thought in songwriter and audience. The reason we sing along with "All you need is love", rather than raising our hands to quibble that water, food, and oxygen also qualify as necessities, is because the sentiment, though perhaps uplifting and even ennobling, is anodyne; there's no room for controversy. When a room full of hippies chants along with the "We are democracy" song, they are proclaiming that the Iraq war has ceased, in their minds, to be a question. To them it is as obvious that the Bush administration is motivated solely by wickedness and greed as it is obvious that the "love" John Lennon celebrated is a good thing. Their minds are not open to persuasion on the subject. They are, effectively, automatons.

Which brings me to that frustrating song by the Decemberists, "Sixteen Military Wives". I should start by saying that I love the Decemberists. I love the fact that they are unashamedly literate and old-fashioned in their aesthetic. I love the fact that their lyrics push at and often beyond the boundaries of pretentiousness, with archaic constructions like "Would I could afford to buy my love a fine robe" (from Eli the Barrow Boy) and "I took her hand as she, dying, cried" (from The Mariner's Revenge Song). As far as I know, the Decemberists have never attempted a song about the Second Punic War, but I like to think they could.

And then there's the anti-war song "Sixteen Military Wives", from the album "Picaresque", released in 2005. To me, this is the perfect example of why songwriters should stay away from politics. Here's Colin Meloy, perhaps the most intelligent lyricist in pop music today, on the Iraq war:

"Cause America can and America can't say no
And America does if America says it's so
And the anchorperson on TV goes 'La-de-da-de-da'"

This is, at least, an improvement on "We are democracy". The "La-de-da-de-da" is witty. (But is Meloy implying that the anchorpeople are prettifying the ugly truth, or is he just calling them airheads?) But let's break down the lines about America:*

America can and America can't say no. Presumably Meloy is indicting U.S. hubris here. He's saying, How dare we presume to meddle in the affairs of a sovereign state, just because we can. Fair enough, but what then should America do about sovereign states that threaten their neighbours and oppress their own citizens? If you see someone abusing their children you can call social services; but there is no agency you can call on a dictator who butchers minorities. All you can do is try and raise a posse. And what about all the times that America has said no to intervention, to its lasting discredit - dithering over Bosnia, abandoning Somalia, ignoring Rwanda and Darfur and Congo? Perhaps Iraq was the wrong intervention at the wrong time, but Meloy seems to believe that intervention is always, in itself, an arrogant and harmful act.

And America does if America says it's so. In other words, America creates and acts upon its own reality. I guess at the time Meloy wrote his song it was already becoming clear that Iraq's WMD program was not quite as terrifying as advertised. It's interesting to note that in the whimsical video for "Sixteen Military Wives", the "America" stand-in (Colin Meloy, playing a student in a high school model U.N.) is shown planting a slingshot in the locker of his nemesis (Luxembourg). (It must be a source of befuddlement to some folks in the anti-war crowd that the U.S. has failed to find the chemical weapons it searched for so assiduously in Iraq. After all, how hard would it be for the administration to plant a few vats of nerve gas somewhere in the desert to retroactively justify their "WMD lies"? The fact that this hasn't happened is rather exculpatory, if you think about it, at least of the more fevered of the conspiracy theories.) In another scene, Luxembourg attempts to buy food at the student cafeteria and is turned away by the lunch lady, over a caption reading "Sanctions were imposed", while America and his friends snicker in the background. It's hard to read this video as saying anything but that Iraq was the innocent victim of schoolyard bullying; an unlucky poindexter singled out by the cool kids for a swirly. I'm not sure how the Kurds are supposed to fit into this picture - self-hating nerds aspiring to the in-crowd? - or Kuwait, or Israel, or Iran; but then, some analogies aren't really used to illustrate, but to obscure.

But I've been over this all before. My half-assed rebuttals aren't going to change the mind of anyone who sympathises with Meloy's views. I won't say that this one trite lyric disproves Meloy's seriousness as a thinker. On the basis of his other writing I'd prefer to assume that he's an intelligent man who has arrived at his politics after a great deal of reflection. The problem with the song is that, like most political songs, "Sixteen Military Wives" contains no politics at all. Not in the sense of politics as a conflict of ideas. Meloy assumes that his foes are sneaks and cheaters, and therefore has no interest in confronting their arguments.

He achieves the height of smugness in this verse:

"Fifteen celebrity minds
Leading their fifteen sordid, wretched, checkered lives
Will they find the solution in time?
Using their fifteen pristine moderate liberal minds"

This reminds me of Tony Judt's famous essay of earlier this year, condemning liberals who supported regime change as "Bush's useful idiots". He wrote: "Magazines and newspapers of the traditional liberal centre . . . fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media." Really? What I recall about the run-up to the invasion is a climate of fierce debate within the liberal media. Pundits from all sides of the political spectrum lined up on all sides of what was easily the most divisive foreign policy issue in my lifetime. Pat Buchanan stood firmly against regime change, Michael Ignatieff was staunchly in favour. I consider myself a liberal, and I was guardedly in support of the gamble. Bad call. But Judt's suggestion that those who supported the war did so out of fear or cupidity or self-aggrandizement is as insulting as the suggestion by some conservatives that opponents of the war are terrorist sympathisers. Again, this is the end of thought. You reach your conclusion, based on reflex more likely than on reason, and then you slam the doors shut behind you, fearful that any cogent counterargument might slip in through the cracks to undermine your self-confidence.

I guess it's not surprising that Colin Meloy, musician, resident of Portland, Oregon, holder of a degree in creative writing, would turn out to be a doctrinaire leftist. It's disappointing that he thought it necessary to commemorate his doctrine in song. But the worst thing is that the song had to be so damnably catchy.

--

* - Update, June 13 2008. The reader cannot help but notice that, after promising to "break down the lines about America", I then proceed to say next to nothing about the lines in question, while concentrating most of my criticism on the music video. I should have just come out and admitted that it was really the music video, and not the song, that had gotten on my nerves. While I would hold to my argument about the banality of most polemical songs, I have to admit in retrospect that "Sixteen Military Wives" was not a very illustrative example of the phenomenon. It's actually a well-written song whose message I just happen to disagree with.

On being, deep down, a Liberal.
Sat, 02 Dec 2006

My mom once told me that she'd entertained the idea of naming me "Pierre", after Pierre Trudeau.

In 1984, at the age of about eight, I attentively followed the Liberal leadership campaign. I was a Chrétien supporter. In retrospect, I think I was drawn to his funny accent.

Around the same time, I remember surprising my father by telling him I disagreed with the NDP's suggestion that Canada withdraw from NATO. I couldn't explain why. Apparently I was born with an inarticulate but strong aversion to isolationism.

In sixth grade, just before the 1986 Saskatchewan provincial election, my class held a mock vote. I was one of two students out of thirty to vote for the Liberals, then led by Ralph Goodale. (The rest of the class split pretty evenly between Tories and New Democrats.)

What I'm saying is, I've got a deeply engrained sympathy with the Liberal Party.

Since reaching voting age, I've scattered my votes indiscriminately, supporting New Democrats, Liberals, and numerous smaller parties, with the only common theme being that my candidate had no hope of winning. In fact, with the exception of one city councillor in a North Vancouver civic election, I have never cast a ballot for a winning candidate at any level of government. Quite a streak.

I voted, with great reluctance, for the NDP in the last election - and came to regret it.

And all the while, if anyone had forced me to declare my party allegiance, I would probably have mumbled, after some equivocation, "Deep down, I guess, I'm a Liberal."

It's easy to explain why. In the States, you're either one or the other, Democrat or Republican, left or right. The same more or less goes in the U.K. Every election demands that the sizeable bloc of voters huddled around the middle of the ideological spectrum break one way or the other.

Here in Canada, moderate voters like me don't need to break at all. The Liberals are Canada's Compromise Party, neatly wedged between the all-heart-and-no-brains New Democrats and the all-sticks-and-no-carrots Tories. Historically the Liberals have stolen the best ideas from their competitors - medicare from the NDP, fiscal responsibility from the Reform Party - given them a new coat of paint, and sold them as new to Canada's voters. And, time after time, the ploy has worked, to the country's benefit.

The downside is that the Liberal Party, being virtually guaranteed victory four out of every five elections, attracts a disproportionate share of this country's high-achieving, pole-climbing, name-dropping, insufferable little weasels, and is therefore constitutionally prone to high-handedness and casual corruption. And when the corruption gets out of control, the voters recoil, and the opposition gets to spend a few years in power while the weasels grouse and complain and stab each other in the back and bide their time till the next election.

So it's still early in the grousing-and-backstabbing phase, and the Liberals are about to choose a new leader. At the start of the race I was enthusiastic about Michael Ignatieff, until his knack for saying stupid things in public made me think twice. But the utter dullness of the remaining candidates has made me think twice a second time, and my third thought is that Ignatieff is the only one I can see myself voting for with any enthusiasm. Sure, he says stupid things, but (to put a positive spin on it) at least that shows he's thinking, rather than just regurgitating talking points - right?

Tonight, at the convention in Montreal, Bob Rae gave a rambling speech whose high point was a borscht-belt-vintage joke about Stephen Harper (he goes to dinner with his cabinet, orders the steak, the waiter says, "what about the vegetables?" Harper says, "they'll have the steak too") but which was nevertheless duly praised by the commentators because Rae had been speaking without notes, "from the heart" - as if plucking random phrases from the well-stuffed bag of Liberal applause lines represented something more than the triumph of Pavlovian conditioning:

"...social justice!" [applause]

"…George W. Bush!" [boos]

"…environmental sustainability!" [applause]

"...fiscal responsibility!" [tepid applause]

"…the war in Iraq!" [boos]

"…women...immigrants...aboriginal peoples!" [applause]

Although he provided no evidence in his (prepared) speech that his thought went any deeper than the above, at least Ignatieff was the only one of the four leading candidates who managed to get through his text without a gratuitous stab at the United States. So he's my man. But of course, though I wasn't present to cast my cursed vote on his behalf, the taint of my support was enough to squelch Ignatieff's momentum on the first ballot, where he scored well below expectations. Meanwhile the delegates were inexplicably smitten with Stéphane Dion, who drooped behind the lectern like long underwear from a clothesline, droning the usual applause lines in an English little more elegant than Chrétien's, but with Chrétien's endearing pugnacity replaced with nerdy stridency:

"…vision for Canada's future!" [applause]

"...Stephen Harper's divisive social policies!" [boos]

"...equality!" [applause]

"…the Republican Party!" [boos]

Gerard Kennedy was pretty good, despite choosing to be introduced by Canada's most overrated public speaker, the patronising Justin Trudeau. (Maybe Justin would have fit in better in the age of grandiloquent gasbags like John Diefenbaker, but he sure seems fake when contrasted with the unforced eloquence of his father.) Kennedy was the only speaker who interrupted his stream of platitudes with an anecdote from his own life, and it was a rather touching one, about delivering food to a needy family (when he worked with the Edmonton food bank) and the father preventing the kids from tearing immediately into the food because, "We have a guest, we should offer him something to eat." From this, Kennedy lamely concluded, he took the lesson that poor people share "the same values, the same dreams, the same hopes for their children" as the rest of us. Brave guy, almost made it through a whole paragraph without throwing that touchy-feely ovation trigger "values" in there.

Kennedy, like Rae and Dion, opposes the extension of NATO's mission in Afghanistan (though not, it should be noted, with the unswerving dogmatism of the NDP). "If the mission does not comply with Canadian values," he explained, "we will leave, proud, with our heads held high." Those good old "Canadian values" again. Apparently the candidates feel that what we're doing in Afghanistan is somehow in violation of them. It's funny, because when you look at what we're fighting for in Afghanistan, it's awfully similar to what the Liberal Party claims to be fighting for in Canada. You know, equality, women's rights, education, religious tolerance. Generally speaking, Liberals are opposed to stoning adulterers, smashing idols, and keeping women locked up in the kitchen, right? Yet somehow the same candidates who can't utter the words "Stephen Harper" without launching into a tirade about his destructive right-wing social agenda can't be bothered to say one word all night about the Taliban - except, by implication, as a potential negotiating partner when we pull out our troops next year.

We've got this self-flattering idea of the Canadian soldier as a patient young man standing with arms outstretched between ruthless barbarians ready to hack each other with axes and rape each other's daughters. I think that's a great national mythos. I think it's great that we're willing to send our kids around the world to stand with firearms slung loosely over shoulders, watching over rocky frontiers in Bosnia and Macedonia and Cyprus, distributing bubblegum to schoolchildren, and keeping the barbarians away from each other's throats while the next, hopefully more peaceable generation is reared. I guess this is what the Liberals thought they'd signed up for when they sent the troops off to Afghanistan. But sometimes the barbarians don't play by our rules. Sometimes they see us handing out bubblegum and building schools for little girls and, rather than slinking back to their huts to brood, they choose to fill their backpacks with dynamite and send the whole crowd, soldiers, schoolchildren, bubblegum and all, up to Allah.

When this happens, Gerard Kennedy somehow concludes that it is our mission, rather than the barbarians', that is in contradiction with "Canadian values". And that this contradiction will somehow be reconciled by leaving the barbarians alone to resume their mutual massacres, while we sit at home and pat ourselves on the back, applauding our commitment to women's rights and religious diversity.

Look, we can do better in Afghanistan. We could be spending way more money on reconstruction. We need to work with our NATO allies and the government in Kabul to do something about the cultivation of poppies, which is both the only source of livelihood for significant numbers of Afghan farmers and a major source of income for the Taliban. (To his credit, this is a point that Kennedy has raised - though the difficulty of figuring out what to do about it is explained succinctly in this press briefing by a drug enforcement guy from the U.S. State Department.)

Maybe a Liberal government could work within NATO to develop a smarter strategy for victory. But judging from their rhetoric, I don't think Kennedy, Dion, and Rae are even committed to that much. I think they're just looking for the first excuse to get Canadian soldiers the hell out of there. And the only conclusion I can draw from this is that a certain segment of the Liberal Party, like the NDP, is only committed to the armed forces so long as the armed forces never resort to their arms.

Fighting for our values is easy here in the west. Here you can fight with words. You can stand at a podium and call Stephen Harper every nasty name in two official languages. But what about fighting for our values abroad? Words won't get you very far. Food, medicine, blankets, those make a difference. Building hospitals, training police, wonderful. Standing in a rocky field with arms outstretched, absolutely. But sometimes in order to fight you actually have to fucking fight.

On being, deep down, a Liberal, part II.
Sat, 02 Dec 2006

Guess I might as well follow up on last night's thoughts on the Liberal leadership race.

As I write, it's an hour or so from the final ballot, pitting Michael Ignatieff against Stéphane Dion. It looks like Dion will win with sixty percent of the vote or more.

First off, watching the coverage over the last twenty-four hours hasn't changed my initial impression that Dion is a drip. I think the Liberals have saddled themselves with a loser - awkward, unglamourous, and intellectually rigid. And does the party really need another francophone leader who isn't particularly popular in Quebec?

Coming into the convention I had no opinion on Belinda Stronach's drive to replace the delegate-style convention with some kind of newfangled internet voting system where every party member would have a vote. But I'm starting to see Belinda's point. Maybe I'm wrong about Dion - maybe he'll prove to be popular with the wider public - god knows I have no idea what voters are attracted to, except that it's usually the exact opposite of whatever I like. But I expect him to flop. Here we have four thousand or so convention attendees cohering around the candidate whose appeal, it is acknowledged, is that he's "everybody's second choice". It reminds me of the 2004 Iowa caucus, where a tiny sliver of Democratic primary voters anointed the hopeless John Kerry as their candidate, based on similarly lukewarm feelings. And look how Kerry's candidacy turned out.

The problem is, in a general election, "everybody's second choice" doesn't get to form government. Mind you, there's no guarantee that granting a wider franchise for the convention would result in a leader with broader national appeal. I suppose it would depend on how Belinda's electronic voting system were set up.

Speaking of Belinda, I enjoyed watching her and John Manley providing colour commentary on CBC. Belinda didn't come across as terribly insightful, but she looks great and communicates well. John Manley is a guy I've always liked. He was very loose and funny. Of course I found myself wishing that he were a candidate - but then, locked into a rhetorical cage with the other sideshow acts, he probably wouldn't have an opportunity to crack jokes and say intelligent things. Just more about "Canadian values" and all that bosh. Why must politicians be so uninteresting? And why, if they're so uninteresting, do I persist in being interested?