Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Duh

Posted on 2015/09/18 by danneau

Something Missing: Third Man Out…

I didn’t watch last night’s Munk Debate on the Economy. It’s not that I’m not concerned about the state of the economy, it’s just that the framework is all wrong, that a major player was missing, and that I was pretty sure that I would learn little of value or that any of the three debaters would actually add anything to the discourse leading up to our October 19 vote. Mr. Harper wants to limit the discussion to the economy, though he’s unlikely to admit that his much-touted success lies solely in his having managed to sell off or give away the last vestiges of Canadian economic sovereignty, what little is left following the predations of the Mulroney-Campbell-Chtétien-Martin administrations. In (mostly) completely gutting the access that Canadians have to the wealth generated in this country, Mr. Harper has also managed to accelerate the sack of the environment and the wasting of the social foundations of the country. Mr. Mulcair has, thus far, no blood on his hands, but the signs are that there is little gumption on the part of his party for redress of the most fundamental notions the wrongs committed by his Liberal and Conservative predecessors, and Mr. Trudeau, by slavishly following the Con lead on privacy and trade issues, indicates plainly that he isn’t likely to heal the damage wrought by his colleagues across the floor, especially given the propensity of Liberal governments to campaign from the left and then govern from the right (think of Chrétien’s Red Book, full of hope, all of it devoid of substance).

This is precisely why last night’s “debate” is such a travesty: the underpinnings of our current government are based on chimeric and untruthful notions of life in Canada, as well as in the wider world. The meanness and sleaze of this crew, especially as embodied in its leader and reflected in cabinet, senate, party operatives, donors and backbench wingnuttery needs to be front and centre in any discussion of who might best govern the country. By limiting the debate to the economy, the whole exercise became a useless wordfest of business platitudes and hackneyed notions of social structure. Sad that more people aren’t reading, digesting and operating on the material that Harris et al have put at our disposal.

(the last paragraph is lifted verbatim from a comment that I left at Owen Gray’s Northern Reflections)

Nowhere To Run To, Nowhere to Hide

Posted on 2015/09/14 by danneau

A Better Life?

I went on social media this morning with the intention of, amongst other things, posting notice of a local meeting to investigate sponsorship of a refugee family, but found that there is something that really rankles about the idea. I’m an immigrant to Canada, and my forebears were immigrants from Germany and Ireland, some political and some economic refugees, and all this shuffling around has worked out pretty well for our lot, as well as for the receiving countries. Truth be known, everything I read indicates that it has worked out a damn sight better for us than for the original inhabitants of this land, and for many who haven’t been as successful at navigating the shoals of hostile economies and social situations as we have been. Much of this, both success and failure, can be ascribed to dumb luck, with Dame Fortune smiling on some and throwing stones at many more. A good deal more can be ascribed to the mean-spirited and short-sighted policy environment that has enveloped us in the last four or five decades and has (and continues to) caused disasters and misery abroad, discrimination and disparity at home.

My own sense is that there is a great need for rewriting our social and economic playbook, and that the care of our living space needs to be at the top of the list of priorities, and that charity is a band-aid on the festering sores of environmental degradation and the economic imbalance that produces poverty and homelessness, hunger, exposure and violence. As I suspect the case might be with many others who have avoided these pitfalls, we are charitable, but have the feeling that we could donate our way into our own poverty, and that it would make little difference in the overall scheme as those who have sequestered the great wealth of society in their own pockets would only deepen their own pockets of absorb the new donations without it making a whit of difference to the indigent. I reserve a special space in hell for people who fatten on the outpourings of charitable donations as part of the Charity Industry: it might be a good gig economically, but it’s morally indefensible. It’s also an excuse to let governments continue to funnel funds to their cronies and shirk responsibility to citizens for protecting our common living space, both physical and social.

Let’s accept refugees, welcome them with open arms and all the love and support we can muster. We have done much to create the conditions that forced them out of their former lives, so let’s try to make up part of it by ensuring that they have a better life here. At the same time, we here in Canada have a core of disenfranchised citizens, our own cadre of internally displaced persons, victims of whatever combination of toxic social circumstances and bad decisions by whomever. We can do better at looking after “our own” as well as taking in some “outsiders”, in the spirit of Gilles Vigneault’s Mon Pays:

De ce grand pays solitaire je crie avant que de me taire
A tous les hommes de la terre ma maison c’est votre maison
Entre mes quatre murs de glace je mets mon temps et mon espace
А prйparer le feu, la place pour les humains de l’horizon
Et les humains sont de ma race

(Basically, my house is your house, and all humans are of my race.)

Fairness doesn’t always dictate that everyone get the same treatment, but it ought to mean that no one goes without the necessities of life, including participation in society in economic, intellectual and spiritual dimensions, and full opportunity to improve the living situation, as long as it isn’t at the expense of others. So let’s sponsor both refugees from abroad and our own internal refugees. And let’s work toward a better economic and social balance at home, and quit blowing stuff up elsewhere.

Bad Actors

Posted on 2015/09/08 by danneau

She Wants To Sell My Monkey

In Libératiion this morning, a little piece at the bottom of the page dealing with a change in government in Guatemala, where an imposed president operating for the benefit of mining interests and American capital was forced to resign and has been charged with corruption and who-knows-what-else. The article points out (bemoans?) that an actor is in line to take up the presidential functions, as if this were a novel experience, and not necessarily a step toward constructive government, but the precedents are manifold and instructive.

Ronald Reagan comes to mind straight away, a man who was, in a former life, something of a Bad Actor, but whose greatest role was the impersonation of a representative of the people of the USA. In the intervening years, we’ve had a succession of similarly bad actors, Bush I., Clinton, Bush II, Obama and a whole list of clowns lined up to take over the title, who eschewed the thespian training, but got the role nonetheless.

So for those afraid for the future of Guatemala, take heart. Unlike RR and the rest of the presidential bad actors, there’s a good chance that any clown in the hot seat in Guatemala is unlikely to get the chance to serve out a full term, let along erect the state structure that would benefit the general populace of that tortured land.

What To Do With Your Box of Crayons

Posted on 2015/09/02 by danneau

Far Side–Gary Larson

I have an arts degree, specifically a major in French (primarily literature) with a minor in history (see Gary Larson’s comment above). Throughout my existence, I’ve seen references to people who do studies in the Humanities teased about the uselessness and frivolity of studies in this vein, and have disagreed somewhat vehemently on the basis of a perception that there is a major difference between education and training, and that the job that pays the bills is not necessarily the only focus of a person’s life. I was one of the fortunate folk who managed to find a career with my unmarketable skill: teaching kept me gainfully occupied for three decades, paying not only the bills, but providing a wealth of experiences for me to mull over looking at the interface between the Humanities and life in a logging town. Over the course of that career, I was able to maintain and pass along a sense of a broader perspective, one version of a vision where we might be capable of encompassing more than the simple generation of income and the dispersal thereof, a sense that there is more to see and do than just weather the Monday-to-Friday grind and the acquisition of a new truck. I learned that I ought not perhaps to be too judgmental about the relative merits of the various visions we all bring to the conversation, but work to see other people’s visions and to share my own as one of many. There were earlier iterations of this view that I was able to bring to the many other jobs I did before settling into the ongoing upheavals of a teaching career as well as to the upbringing of a couple of step children and some resultant grandfathering in which I presently engage, and I’ve always found it rewarding to encounter millwrights, engineers, fallers, plumbers, people of all stripes of careers, who have some version of breadth of vision, some through formal education, some through a simple personal propensity to question and read broadly.

The above video sums up much of my worries about how we view education and the resultant disdain for anything that isn’t of immediate utility in the workplace. This “know-nothing” treatment of learning leads potentially to the loss of perspective and knowledge akin to the destruction of ancient artifacts by religious extremists, people who will not tolerate parallel and sometimes conflicting world views, and where tolerance wilts, civilization follows. In part because of a lack of care and attention to our collective cultural treasury, this is where we appear to be headed, that is, to a society that isn’t social and a civilization that isn’t civilized.

This all came up because of a tweet from Alain de Botton, retweeted by Greg Blanchette.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun (Chew On This)

Posted on 2015/08/21 by danneau

(Ingrid Rice cartoon, via IntegrityBC)

One red light going off when Steelhead started working with Huu-Ay-Aht on an LNG port at Sarita Bay, old (at least in spirit) white guys from Howe Street (or wherever) promoting a get-rich-quick scheme likely to utterly destroy most everything in its path, and lots of folks, including some (really) old white guys feel really uncomfortable pointing out the pitfalls to people plundered by their Wall Street culture, just the sense that there’s a scam at work here, one that fits in well with the kind of hucksterism that characterizes everything that has come out of Victoria/Ottawa in the last fifteen years.

Now double the trepidation as a project of similar nature is brought forward by the Malahat First Nation in cahoots with the very same Steelhead crowd: this reminds me of the smelter proposition that kicked around these parts, studies paid and plagiarized, not a snowball’s chance of ever happening and the air of scam all about. According to reports in media (OK, I don’t trust them either) there was a missing detail with the Malahat crowd in that they don’t seem to have consulted with their membership, kinda à la NEB.

Given the general seeming acceptance of Victoria’s LNG ploy at face value, it looks as though a lot of people are set up to lose a lot of face in the whole deal. Sad.

SpideySense Confounded

Posted on 2015/08/20 by danneau

Oh, I get it!

Got a tweet from Chrisale about an article from Andrew Coyne in the NatPost, had a look and sent back a message about how fawning it was over PMSH. Was informed that it was tongue-firmly-buried-in-Cheek style, something I can usually sense right away, but I’m afraid that, as I pointed out in the next round of the exchange, there was such a long history of Coyne being an apologist for all that the current régime has done that it never occurred to me that he might have slipped quietly off the bandwagon. In a rather mild way, this is something that really grinds my gears, where a series of lies comes to light and all of a sudden there are crowds of rats crawling down hawsers or looking for PFDs, but for a decade, there have been omnibus bills, trade agreements that are more litanies of corporate capitulation than anything to do with a layman’s definition of trade, cones of silence enforced around any knowledge that runs contrary to what dear leader perceives to be his best interest, attempts to subvert the constitution, cheating on elections, creating a police state and garnering a succession of the best-deserved awards for climate troll (he might get a run from his friend Tony Abbott of late), and political panels have consistently avoided discussions of the glaring incidents of predation by the Harper crowd.

Over the years, I’ve taught myself not to gloat when I’m on the winning side, and that’s been pretty easy, given that I haven’t often (in politics anyway) been on the winning side, what with a succession of administrations having turned out to be abusive of the commons and of those who most must depend on some form of mutual aid. Mulroney was a disaster, but Chrétien immediately broke with all he had promised and turned out to be pretty much as abusive as Mulroney and just as corrupt and dishonest. Ditto for Paul Martin, though the expectations were pretty low, given his long track record in Finance, but all of the aforementioned must be polishing up their halos for that moment when they stand next to Harper in judgement. The sore loser part, and my attempts not to engage in sour grapes, are rooted not so much in what I see as bad policy being foisted on the citizenry as it is a sense that little or none of this would be allowed to happen were people aware of it, hence the thorough dislike of, and lack of respect for, dear leader and his henches, as well as those who sang his praises throughout the run-up to the current campaign. Foremost among this crowd would be Mr. Coyne, and a plea of ignorance would somehow mirror Mr. Harper’s denials of knowledge of cheques to Mr. Duffy. My sense, for all that I disagree with what Mr. Coyne stands for, is that he is well-versed in his subject matter and an experienced and astute observer of political and social behaviour and would have had thorough knowledge of the Harper Current in public affairs.

Nonetheless, as a not-too-sore loser, I salute Mr. Coyne with a resounding face-palm: I missed it. I would also welcome any and all, of all political stripes, who slide off the ship of fools that is the Harper régime and join the rest of us swimming in our little sea of uncertainty.

One for Ross K.and the Busketeers

Posted on 2015/08/15 by danneau

Went to a party last week at Martin’s house, he who sold me a guitar of his manufacture in 2002, plain, but what lovely sound, my go-to acoustic. Martin has made many guitars in the interim, including a yearly pearl to auction off at the Bridge School Benefit show in the South Bay Area. Friend Jim is currently building a guitar in Martin’s studio and, even as a lifelong woodworker, speaks of Martin’s workmanship and savvy with admiring awe. So, in honour of the Saturday Night’s All Right for Uke Cover Fighting, I offer the following pictures of a ukulele that was hanging in the office at Martin’s. The pictures hardly do it justice.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Martin-Beck-Guitars/1409819329280543?fref=ts

That is All.

The Club

Posted on 2015/07/01 by danneau

One of those sad moments in our parliament’s long and tattered history of miscues and snafus: Lisa Raitt ushering Elizabeth May away from the microphone in mid-tirade at a press dinner. “It’s all right dearie, perhaps a touch too much claret, overwork, whatever, but we ought not to spoil the evening with such vile venting!” First problem: it all made complete sense to anyone who had been paying attention to the direction of the legislative body in this fine country. It was unfortunate that, as presented anyway, it did come off as a bit of a rant and not the coherent and incisive discourse for which May is generally known. When the dust settled, it seemed as though Raitt’s intervention was that of a friend and that everyone in Parliament, though there might be serious disagreements on issues of policy, is an upstanding member of the Canadian citizenry and the human race.

Hogwash.

Now McLean’s has a piece that Mulcair turned down a position as an adviser to the current Conservative lot because they wouldn’t offer him enough money, Mulcair fires back that he declined because of differences of opinion on policy. Why was this a consideration at all? Harper was already firmly in control of the CPC and everything in his background screamed aggressive corporate takeover, a a lack of recognition on that front constitutes a serious lack of awareness if not moral flaccidity.

The idea that these clowns are all worthy souls and members in good standing of the League of Elected Good Folk just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Many of us have close associates with whom we maintain civil and friendly relations, but there is a personal honesty and integrity that goes with the package, and there are so many in the Ottawa caucus of the LEGF who seemed to have missed that memo (please see, for starters Perps With Perks #17 in full knowledge that the blue men have no corner on the misdeed market, despite the rush of the current CPC crowd to cash in at the public trough).

How bad is it? The local branch of the library found me a copy of Michael Harris’ Party of One. It took months to get around to me, and the book is still in demand, seemingly, as there is a sticker on the front limiting the loan to two weeks without possibility of renewal. I read a chapter and put it down, not because it isn’t a splendid book or that the narrative is anything less than detailed, perceptive and gripping, but because I’ve already lived through this and followed it in all its sad and tawdry details. Hence, it seemed a good idea to let someone else anguish over the book.

I’m taking a day off from a lot of the engagement to spend that day in the best of the Voltairean traditions, cultivating my garden.

Happy Canada Day!

Addendum: My garden (and most everything else) partner with some Voltairesque lettuces…

Equality Before The Law

Posted on 2015/06/29 by danneau

So all people can now get married and enjoy the responsibilities and benefits that our society accords to people who settle into a domestic union. Like interracial couples, LGBTQ folk should now have access to what the rest of us have enjoyed in terms of societal recognition. community acceptance and tangible benefits over the span of recent history.

So here is Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, celebrating Pride and the Supreme Court Ruling that says that people ought not suffer discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Problem is that a raft of Democrats then climbed on board the TPP Fast Track wagon, expediting the adoption of yet another treaty that has less to do with real trade than it does with ensuring corporate rights to make profits before all other considerations, including human health, the environment, and the democratically expressed will of the people of the U.S. Lest we feel smug, we need to remember that Canada wasn’t originally scheduled to be included in the TPP, but Stephen Harper whined and complained loudly and long enough that the rest of the guys gave up and allowed him into the club. Negotiations have been held in the most strict of secrecy and only small parts of the treaty have leaked out, but we can say with a degree of certainty that the section on investor-state relations, the Chapter 11 of this monster, is the key and basically enables malcontents in the corporate world to sue the rest of us for profits they think they might have accrued had laws not been passed to insert sticks into their spokes. I believe it also allows the suits to override whatever restraints any jurisdiction within the signatory countries might put on unbridled greed.Note that these cases are heard by (again) secret trade tribunals set up by the corporations themselves.

In effect, your vote doesn’t really mean anything any longer, unless you and any democratic pals you have can fly under the corporate radar. I don’t quite know how that could happen with the increased surveillance that seems to happen all over both the corporate and government sectors, sectors which seem to be closer to a complete merger with each passing bit of legislation.

So to all the LGBTQ folk, welcome to equality, but you’ve picked a bad time to win this equality, because it means that you will basically earn the same exploitation as the rest of us.

(In all fairness to Ms. Pelosi, I believe she voted against Fast Track in the House, but her friend Diane Feinstein voted for it in the Senate, so it seems that there is unlikely to be any public debate on this corrosive corporate dreck.)

The “Celluloid” Transformation

Posted on 2015/06/24 by danneau

We went to an actual movie theatre last night to see Inside Out, my first go-around at a 3-D movie and a bit of an adventure, given my rather sour attitude toward Disney, with or without Pixar. The film didn’t disappoint: it was full of emotional moments pulling all the familiar levers to generate empathy/sympathy and stunning animation to go with the sassy, cliché-laden language of contemporary pre-teen parlance. Still, I was there because my grand daughter, a somewhat atypical eleven-year-old, had told me that I should see this film, and she was present, along with Mummy, Daddy, Baby Brother, Friend, Nana, Grandpa and Grandma. I could see where she would like the film and where it might raise some interesting questions were they laid out in some sort of reflective way.

The feature was delayed because some folks had arrived too late to get through the gauntlet of ticket wicket and concession. I hate it when people aren’t punctual, and even more when others cater to the needs of the tardy. Hence, I was not in a particularly receptive frame of mind when I was shown a trailer for the upcoming screen adaptation of St.-Ex’s Little Prince.

It’s a lovely little tome that Grand Daughter recognized right away as being a part of Grandpa’s cultural firmament, a book that reads well as a child’s bedtime story or as an adult reflection on a plethora of knotty problems confronting those serious and sensitive enough to question their way of life, their relations with other people, animals and things, and the way perception can affect reality. The language is simple without being simplistic, and the illustrations, done by St.-Ex himself, are charming accompaniments to the text.

The trailer tells me right away that I won’t be going to see this film. It layers another story over the original princely narrative, nesting the Prince in a contemporary context of a controlling family, reiterating one of the central themes of the book in a most unsubtle and decontextualizing way, keying into that same sassy cliché of pre-teen angst that flavours so much of the Disnified reality superimposed on so much of the life lived by young folks in the current context. I don’t want to have to fight through the Disney layer (is it a Disney film? It hardly matters.) to get to the charm, and likely, for the price of admission, I can buy a copy of the book and read it to my grandchildren, or to myself, for that matter.

I was silly enough to read a couple of books by a man named Pierre Boule, Planet of the Apes, and Bridge On The River Kwai. If ever screen adaptations messed up the message of original novels, Boule got messed over royally. I fear that St.-Exupéry is about to get a somewhat milder dose of the same treatment. It’s sad that we can’t come up with original narratives that better reflect what film makers want to say without twisting someone else’s work into something it was never intended to be. Dr.Seuss is another recent victim of this kind of Hollywood trivialization, and it seems that Charles M. Schulz’s estate is offering up some of the same for next fall.

Worth knowing that St.-Ex’s other works are for adults and are well worth reading for their reflections on adventures, confronting danger, the agony of defeat. His own story is worth a look.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exupéry

I think I’ll go draw a boa, or an elephant in a boa, or some sheep.

Rub Eyes, Shake Head

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