You will have noticed ... shall we say 'light' posting here lately, as a gang of armed deadlines took me out back in the alley, roughed me up and threw me in the dumpster. This process expected to be repeated for the next week or so, after which I shall have a lovely holiday and recuperate my shattered nerves. In the meantime:
The loonies at the BBC have devised a series on the afterlives of Enid Blyton characters: George speaks! (And I cannot recommend Radio 7 too highly - they have the Goon Show too!)
Michael Phelps has only been dumped by Kellogg's, and you can join the Kellogg's boycott in return. Smarmy gits.
And just for the heck of it, those links you know you want but are ashamed to bookmark:
for all your US political needs
and to calm your shattered nerves after.
Expect a triumphant return at the end of February, with fresh new snark, tall tales of this 'California' they speak of, and long-awaited deep thoughts on Michael Ignatieff. In the mean time, talk amongst yourselves...
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Slow News Day
And if there's anything duller than the annual round of 'Many People Do Christmas Shopping' articles it's 'City That Rarely Gets Snow Confounded By Snow'.
So instead, why not take time to enjoy Virgil on Facebook, courtesy of our New Brunswick Correspondent?
So instead, why not take time to enjoy Virgil on Facebook, courtesy of our New Brunswick Correspondent?
Monday, February 2, 2009
Post Blago Blog Post
Not that I didn't enjoy the Rod Blagojevich Untergang media circus, but I've yet to find a piece addressing the really interesting question here, namely: how did this guy manage to function as Governor of a major state?
I mean, I understand that Illinois expects corruption from her politicians, no problem there. But this guy is nutty -- delusional, narcissistic, histrionic, incapable of normal self-presentation. So what are the expectations of a United States Governor, such that Rod Blagojevich was able to (more or less) meet them for almost five years? And what's next? Are we going to find out that Arnie Schwarzenegger never bothered learning to read or write? That David Paterson is exactly like that Peter Sellers character? That Janet Napolitano is just some kind of Internet hoax? How did the quality controls manage to totally vanish all at once?
I mean, I understand that Illinois expects corruption from her politicians, no problem there. But this guy is nutty -- delusional, narcissistic, histrionic, incapable of normal self-presentation. So what are the expectations of a United States Governor, such that Rod Blagojevich was able to (more or less) meet them for almost five years? And what's next? Are we going to find out that Arnie Schwarzenegger never bothered learning to read or write? That David Paterson is exactly like that Peter Sellers character? That Janet Napolitano is just some kind of Internet hoax? How did the quality controls manage to totally vanish all at once?
Wall St. welfare
What Paul Krugman said.
UPDATE: Joseph Stiglitz says it too.
Some of Krugman's commentators are pretty good too. Most resonant with me, I fear, was the one who began (roughly): 'This is why I didn't vote for Obama in the primaries...'. Obama is a transformative figure symbolically and stylistically, and his being good rather than evil is a pretty radical change in context. But none of that entails that he's even going to attempt to change the culture of kleptocracy which has now sunk the American economy. My hope is that his current deference to the right and the rich (hiring Summers et al., not really trying to fix TARP) is an elaborate Plan A which he will be able to ditch in a year or so when everyone's been given enough rope and things have only gotten much worse. My fear is that he's a hardcore Rubinomics man himself, and just doesn't grasp how broken the system is or see what's fundamentally wrong with taxpayer-funded robber baronry.
And actually, I have an even deeper fear. This is that Obama does understand the problem, but seriously believes he can change the self-interested behaviour of bad agents through the magical power of his personal moral authority, whether that means being generous and responsive to House Republicans or speaking mighty Words of Chastisement to bonus-taking bankers. In which case he's delusional, and there may be no Plan B at all.
UPDATE: Joseph Stiglitz says it too.
Front page follies
That's one slow news day out there, but I still have to say that the Globe's front page story (with sub-Facebook photo) about Michael Phelps and a bong represents everything I hate about journalism today. The only honest headline would be: "Trivial Act of Uninteresting Person Prompts Cynical Corporate Pseudo-Scandal", and that doesn't really describe a story that belongs on the front page, does it? If Phelps' sponsors do dump him, there's a case to be made for a story in the Business section, and certainly for an editorial pointing out how silly and corrupt the whole sponsorship racket is. But they haven't done it yet. No doubt the Globe is proud of itself for being ahead of the story here, but what it amounts to is that they're egging on the mindless festival of hypocrisy they're predicting. Ugh.
Once again, the on-line edition turns out to be a bit more grown-up: there the story is last on the list under Sports.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Darwin Day!
Today's papers are quite dull and predictable, except for the double page F6 spread on Charles Darwin. It's really a mashup of three articles, one on Darwin himself (in which, as always, he comes across as a lovely chap); one on the ongoing pushback against evolutionary theory; and the third on an eccentric Ottawan couple who hold an annual 'Phylum Feast' featuring burdock, sea cucumbers and god knows what -- the idea is to represent as many different taxa as possible -- in honour of the great man every Feb. 12.
The pushback stuff is spooky if unsurprising, and raises anew the question of why Canada is so different from the United States on issues like creationism, given that we in fact have just as high a proportion of mouthbreathing truth-haters in the population. But the part that really struck me was the Phylum Feast. It all sounds horribly inedible but still, these guys have the right idea. The great (and somewhat surprising) defect of secularism has always been its failure to create a calendar of emotionally satisfying, socially bonding rituals and seasonal narratives to compete with those of the church. Of course there should be a Darwin Day, with appropriate rites and feasts. Other obvious candidates for secular sainthood (in this functional and festive sense)? I would nominate Nietzsche (patron saint of the mad, and classicists), Emma Goldman, Gandhi, Mozart (the poor, child prodigies) and/or Beethoven (the deaf), for starters. Each would have to be someone you could build an interesting party around, one way or another, and collectively they would represent the diversity of human biography and all the traits you want to celebrate. (It's no barrier if they also have gigantic character flaws, as any reading of Lives of the Saints will help to make clear.) It wouldn't be hard to come up with a very appealing Secular Calendar, and as for designing the rituals we have millennia of evidence as to what works. A friend of mine was baptised by his atheist parents at home in single-malt scotch: that works for me. I vote for the annual fast period to culminate in Colette Day, on which you're obliged to prepare the most sensual self-indulgent French meal you can contrive, and for the pilgrimage to be tied to Mozart -- who wouldn't prefer a Hajj that ended up in Vienna?
So what should we do on Darwin Day? Something to do with nature, obviously -- mass country rambles, perhaps. And he was by all accounts an underachieving youth and a wonderful father, so perhaps after the walk everyone would have to take a young person out for tea and listen sympathetically.
The pushback stuff is spooky if unsurprising, and raises anew the question of why Canada is so different from the United States on issues like creationism, given that we in fact have just as high a proportion of mouthbreathing truth-haters in the population. But the part that really struck me was the Phylum Feast. It all sounds horribly inedible but still, these guys have the right idea. The great (and somewhat surprising) defect of secularism has always been its failure to create a calendar of emotionally satisfying, socially bonding rituals and seasonal narratives to compete with those of the church. Of course there should be a Darwin Day, with appropriate rites and feasts. Other obvious candidates for secular sainthood (in this functional and festive sense)? I would nominate Nietzsche (patron saint of the mad, and classicists), Emma Goldman, Gandhi, Mozart (the poor, child prodigies) and/or Beethoven (the deaf), for starters. Each would have to be someone you could build an interesting party around, one way or another, and collectively they would represent the diversity of human biography and all the traits you want to celebrate. (It's no barrier if they also have gigantic character flaws, as any reading of Lives of the Saints will help to make clear.) It wouldn't be hard to come up with a very appealing Secular Calendar, and as for designing the rituals we have millennia of evidence as to what works. A friend of mine was baptised by his atheist parents at home in single-malt scotch: that works for me. I vote for the annual fast period to culminate in Colette Day, on which you're obliged to prepare the most sensual self-indulgent French meal you can contrive, and for the pilgrimage to be tied to Mozart -- who wouldn't prefer a Hajj that ended up in Vienna?
So what should we do on Darwin Day? Something to do with nature, obviously -- mass country rambles, perhaps. And he was by all accounts an underachieving youth and a wonderful father, so perhaps after the walk everyone would have to take a young person out for tea and listen sympathetically.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Your finance minister, Sandy McTire
There's something pretty funny -- and very Canadian -- about the way that, judging by the emphases in the Globe and on the CBC yesterday, the Harper 'stimulus package' is all about that central pillar of our economy: home renovations. In other countries, infrastructure stimulus means les grands travaux, nation-building, fixing the railways and establishing epic monuments. Here, we're more about putting a new deck in. In fact, given the avidity with which Canadians collect Canadian Tire money, I suspect the Conservatives are on to a vote-winner here. (Come to think of it, why not just make Canadian Tire money legal tender?)
I don't really understand why construction should be privileged over other sectors as a focus of stimulus, unless there's stuff we particularly want constructed. The do-it-yourself kind is presumably anti-stimulus, since the labour is unpaid. And so far as I can tell, the average GTA renovation/construction firm (a) has had more demand than it could keep up with for the past five years, and could surely coast a while; (b) prefers not to collect GST; (c) has coped with high demand by hiring illegal immigrants, who presumably are sending remittances home and also not paying taxes; and (d) has (reasonably enough) 0 intention of ever hiring and training a laid-off auto worker (see (c)). I don't see how it can be a particularly high-value sector to stimulate once you've factored in all that real-life stuff, which I'm willing to bet they didn't. Instead, why not a stimulus package centred, say, on restaurants and farmers markets? Tax breaks for anyone who eats out twice a week, and/or gets the fancy mushrooms from that guy at the Riverdale market? That's all local spending, it's instant job creation and it's not one-time-only the way construction is. But you just know that Prentice and Harper think spending money at Home Depot is morally superior, and I fear they are true Canadians in that.
UPDATE: Inkless Wells has handily provided a photo of Stephen Harper demonstrating the correct use of a nail gun on Michael Ignatieff. (No no, just on some wall.) It's rather less scary than the photos of him smiling and holding cookies, sharing a laugh with a cute kid, and so on. But personally, I think the only apt photo would be one of Harper trying to lure first Quebeckers and now Ontarians into his gingerbread house.
I don't really understand why construction should be privileged over other sectors as a focus of stimulus, unless there's stuff we particularly want constructed. The do-it-yourself kind is presumably anti-stimulus, since the labour is unpaid. And so far as I can tell, the average GTA renovation/construction firm (a) has had more demand than it could keep up with for the past five years, and could surely coast a while; (b) prefers not to collect GST; (c) has coped with high demand by hiring illegal immigrants, who presumably are sending remittances home and also not paying taxes; and (d) has (reasonably enough) 0 intention of ever hiring and training a laid-off auto worker (see (c)). I don't see how it can be a particularly high-value sector to stimulate once you've factored in all that real-life stuff, which I'm willing to bet they didn't. Instead, why not a stimulus package centred, say, on restaurants and farmers markets? Tax breaks for anyone who eats out twice a week, and/or gets the fancy mushrooms from that guy at the Riverdale market? That's all local spending, it's instant job creation and it's not one-time-only the way construction is. But you just know that Prentice and Harper think spending money at Home Depot is morally superior, and I fear they are true Canadians in that.
UPDATE: Inkless Wells has handily provided a photo of Stephen Harper demonstrating the correct use of a nail gun on Michael Ignatieff. (No no, just on some wall.) It's rather less scary than the photos of him smiling and holding cookies, sharing a laugh with a cute kid, and so on. But personally, I think the only apt photo would be one of Harper trying to lure first Quebeckers and now Ontarians into his gingerbread house.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Mystery of the day
Overheard on campus, one student dogmatically insisting to another: "It should be the law, like in Quebec. There you *have* to have --" and at that moment they disappeared into inaudibility.
So, what the heck do you have to have in Quebec, by law, that you don't in Ontario? I can tell you my stereotypes are tottering.
Keep it clean, eh.
So, what the heck do you have to have in Quebec, by law, that you don't in Ontario? I can tell you my stereotypes are tottering.
Keep it clean, eh.
Same as the old boss
At last, we have a budget (covered pretty comprehensively in print, but fragmented on-line: can it really be old news already?), and it's much as one would have expected: tax cuts, goodies for the construction industry, regional development stuff... 'stimulus', as they say. I'm skeptical as to how stimulated anyone will be, but what really baffles me is the assumption repeated ad nauseam that this is some massive departure from Conservative principles. I've been following North American politics for over thirty years, and I've never had an actual sighting of those fabled conservative principles. Mulroney ran deficits, Reagan ran deficits, both Bushes ran deficits. Harper hasn't been doing so, but then until the recent meltdown it would have been politically impossible for any leader to do so after the anti-deficit campaigns of the preceding Liberal governments. During my lifetime, a conservative has consistently been someone who hates paying taxes, hates the poor and hates the environment; but government spending and deficits have been neither here nor there ideologically (as opposed to rhetorically, of course). And if in a few years all this spending makes it easier to cut social programs and blow off environmental regulation, in the name of fiscal responsibility -- and you just know that's how they're going to play it -- the Conservative base will be tickled pink.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Who gurs? Uighurs!
As you will have noticed, I can't be bothered to post anything really serious about Guantanamo: the moral 'issues' are not hard enough to be intellectually interesting, and you can always go read Glenn Greenwald to get good and fired up. But I would like to offer up a brief prayer to the fickle gods of immigration that (instead of/in addition to Omar Khadr) Canada gets sent some of the Guantanamo Uighurs. They've been treated atrociously, to put it mildly; the probability of there being an Al-Qaeda mastermind among them is close to zero; it would deeply, deeply piss off the tyrannical and racist Chinese regime they made the mistake of standing up to, which is an intrinsically good thing to do; and the Uighurs make noodles.
A fascinating Silk Road culture, a burbling hotpot of East and Western culinary influences, the Uighurs may be the most significant noodle-making culture still unrepresented domestically. Canada has a proud tradition of noodle- and dumpling-oriented refugee policy: we welcomed the Hungarians in '56, the Vietnamese boat people decades later, and the Tibetans more recently (momos!). But so far as I can tell, still no significant Uighur presence (except for this poor guy). It is time that this un-Canadian injustice was rectified, and we got us some of them flung noodles that Alford and Duguid keep going on about.
A fascinating Silk Road culture, a burbling hotpot of East and Western culinary influences, the Uighurs may be the most significant noodle-making culture still unrepresented domestically. Canada has a proud tradition of noodle- and dumpling-oriented refugee policy: we welcomed the Hungarians in '56, the Vietnamese boat people decades later, and the Tibetans more recently (momos!). But so far as I can tell, still no significant Uighur presence (except for this poor guy). It is time that this un-Canadian injustice was rectified, and we got us some of them flung noodles that Alford and Duguid keep going on about.
Updates from all over
(1) Our Man on the Allegheny notes that a different version of the Obama-Astaire meme has reached the semi-hallowed halls of the NYT:
But it's admittedly a different kettle of fish and (b), I'm not taking responsibility for anything Frank Rich writes. And having finally bothered to importune Mister Google about it, I see that of course I wasn't really the first to note the Obama-Astaire resemblances: so far as I can tell this guy was, and with better pictures too. (2) A well-connected source, we'll just call him Gerald the Mole, points out that my snark at the Sunday Times' rather introverted circulation policy is misplaced. For their Canadian circulation efforts are entirely outsourced to... take a guess... the Globe and Mail! Which simply buys up some quota of papers and uses them to sweeten its own circulation efforts. Such as they are.
Gerald also confirms my worst fears, much less elegantly stated in Sunday's other post:
On Tuesday, our new president did offer one subtle whiff of the Great Depression. His injunction that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” was a paraphrase of the great songwriter Dorothy Fields, who wrote that lyric for “Swing Time” (1936), arguably the best of the escapist musicals Hollywood churned out to lift the nation’s spirits in hard times. But Obama yoked that light-hearted evocation of Astaire and Rogers to a call for sacrifice that was deliberately somber, not radiantly Kennedyesque.
But it's admittedly a different kettle of fish and (b), I'm not taking responsibility for anything Frank Rich writes. And having finally bothered to importune Mister Google about it, I see that of course I wasn't really the first to note the Obama-Astaire resemblances: so far as I can tell this guy was, and with better pictures too. (2) A well-connected source, we'll just call him Gerald the Mole, points out that my snark at the Sunday Times' rather introverted circulation policy is misplaced. For their Canadian circulation efforts are entirely outsourced to... take a guess... the Globe and Mail! Which simply buys up some quota of papers and uses them to sweeten its own circulation efforts. Such as they are.
Gerald also confirms my worst fears, much less elegantly stated in Sunday's other post:
On another more urgent matter, you should know that a guiding principle of journalism is that "news" is something that editors have heard over and over and over.Yes, that would be the problem in a nutshell.
UPDATE: Apparently 'outsourced' is an overstatement: it's just that these Sunday-only Canadian subscriptions to the NYT are part of a Globe campaign and my snark is more properly directed at them. (Though I suppose for them it may make business sense to use the Times as short-term bait.)
Your morning aargh
Mostly not a bad paper today, but I must say it makes me angry that the Globe gives op-ed space to the drivelings of Margaret Somerville. God knows how she got to be "founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University"* but her reasoning is never less than excruciatingly embarrassing, and probably quite a few readers draw the natural inference about academic ethics as a whole. There really should be some kind of consumer warning tag-line: "plays an ethicist on teevee" or similar.
Today's column, so you don't have to torment yourself as I did: religion is kinda useful, Richard Dawkins is a meanie, and if you don't have a religion then that's your religion so there! So let's all be nice to religion.
Four hundred years of rather sophisticated and detailed argument about the genuinely difficult issues raised by the relations of church and state, modern liberalism pluralism and secularism ... all bypassed in blithe ignorance for maunderings so contentless as to be unfiskable. There's just no way they'd print something of comparable murk and incompetence about sports or business -- you know, stuff that matters -- but hey, you're an expert in ethics if you think you are.
* OK, she's a lawyer. And a licensed pharmacist in Australia! I have a feeling that Wikipedia is not giving me the full story here, but her lack of relevant credentials is certainly confirmed.
Today's column, so you don't have to torment yourself as I did: religion is kinda useful, Richard Dawkins is a meanie, and if you don't have a religion then that's your religion so there! So let's all be nice to religion.
Four hundred years of rather sophisticated and detailed argument about the genuinely difficult issues raised by the relations of church and state, modern liberalism pluralism and secularism ... all bypassed in blithe ignorance for maunderings so contentless as to be unfiskable. There's just no way they'd print something of comparable murk and incompetence about sports or business -- you know, stuff that matters -- but hey, you're an expert in ethics if you think you are.
* OK, she's a lawyer. And a licensed pharmacist in Australia! I have a feeling that Wikipedia is not giving me the full story here, but her lack of relevant credentials is certainly confirmed.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Digging their own graves
So Bill Kristol won't be writing a column for the New York Times any more. Instead, he'll be writing a column for the Washington Post! And the betting seems to be that the NYT will get some other ignorant right-wing doofus (that being the kind that's always in stock) to fill his slot. So there we are.
I think this will go down as the moment, or one of the pivotal moments, at which mainsteam American print journalism really jumped the shark. There is just no way that the editors of either the NYT or the WP are stupid enough not to realise that Bill Kristol is, in fact, stupid. They just don't care, because they have a cynical contempt for their readers. The thinking is that those readers are either themselves right-wing dickheads who don't care about that whole true/false distinction; or, that if they're reality-based, they're masochists who will be enthralled by a paper that makes them mad. But banking on the masochism of your customers is really not a great long-term business strategy.*
I used to have a subscription to the Sunday Times, but I can't say I was sorry when it lapsed. (Which it did because when my credit card rolled over they couldn't be bothered to contact me for the new expiry date -- I know an anecdote is not data, but that still seems to me to cast a lurid light on the NYT's circulation promotion efforts.) They have plenty of good 'content', but I just scan it whenever it suits me on line. I do not miss having it in the house. What do I subscribe to (besides the Globe)? The New Yorker, which they'd have to pry out of my cold dead hands. I also pay rather a lot to get the London Review of Books delivered. I read both when I dine alone; they're welcome in my house as good company. I trust them. I'm fond of them.
Now nothing stops a newspaper from being a beloved brand like that. I'm sure there are crazy-ass rightwing businessmen who are genuinely fond of the Wall Street Journal. I've heard people speak with affection of the Financial Times. And time was when the most treasured luxury in a lefty North American household was the copy of Manchester Guardian, airmailed worldwide every week at fantastic expense. (Imagine caring that much about a newspaper!) But then the Guardian decided to become just like every other paper, and sure enough now it sucks. And every time the NYT or WP hires a right-wing moron just for 'controversy' or a 'balance' nobody believes in, it's a sign that they just don't think it matters whether anybody actually likes their brand. As revenues plummet, in an era of almost infinite free content... yeah, good luck with that.
*Or maybe, dumbest of all, they maybe think it doesn't matter if you have a few nutbars and liars on staff so long as you also have columnists who cater to the reader who happens to prefer truth. So long as you have Paul Krugman, why mind about Bill Kristol? Think of it as balance! An even bigger tent! It's like a restaurant deciding to enhance its weekend brunch buffet with a poisoned rat dish -- I mean hey, what's the problem, we've still got the omelets for folks who like them, and now we'll be getting the poisoned rat market too! It just doesn't work that way.
I think this will go down as the moment, or one of the pivotal moments, at which mainsteam American print journalism really jumped the shark. There is just no way that the editors of either the NYT or the WP are stupid enough not to realise that Bill Kristol is, in fact, stupid. They just don't care, because they have a cynical contempt for their readers. The thinking is that those readers are either themselves right-wing dickheads who don't care about that whole true/false distinction; or, that if they're reality-based, they're masochists who will be enthralled by a paper that makes them mad. But banking on the masochism of your customers is really not a great long-term business strategy.*
I used to have a subscription to the Sunday Times, but I can't say I was sorry when it lapsed. (Which it did because when my credit card rolled over they couldn't be bothered to contact me for the new expiry date -- I know an anecdote is not data, but that still seems to me to cast a lurid light on the NYT's circulation promotion efforts.) They have plenty of good 'content', but I just scan it whenever it suits me on line. I do not miss having it in the house. What do I subscribe to (besides the Globe)? The New Yorker, which they'd have to pry out of my cold dead hands. I also pay rather a lot to get the London Review of Books delivered. I read both when I dine alone; they're welcome in my house as good company. I trust them. I'm fond of them.
Now nothing stops a newspaper from being a beloved brand like that. I'm sure there are crazy-ass rightwing businessmen who are genuinely fond of the Wall Street Journal. I've heard people speak with affection of the Financial Times. And time was when the most treasured luxury in a lefty North American household was the copy of Manchester Guardian, airmailed worldwide every week at fantastic expense. (Imagine caring that much about a newspaper!) But then the Guardian decided to become just like every other paper, and sure enough now it sucks. And every time the NYT or WP hires a right-wing moron just for 'controversy' or a 'balance' nobody believes in, it's a sign that they just don't think it matters whether anybody actually likes their brand. As revenues plummet, in an era of almost infinite free content... yeah, good luck with that.
*Or maybe, dumbest of all, they maybe think it doesn't matter if you have a few nutbars and liars on staff so long as you also have columnists who cater to the reader who happens to prefer truth. So long as you have Paul Krugman, why mind about Bill Kristol? Think of it as balance! An even bigger tent! It's like a restaurant deciding to enhance its weekend brunch buffet with a poisoned rat dish -- I mean hey, what's the problem, we've still got the omelets for folks who like them, and now we'll be getting the poisoned rat market too! It just doesn't work that way.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Your morning aargh
I understand the pressures to fill those column inches, but is it really, really necessary for both my Saturday papers this week to have utterly identical, utterly tedious articles on Robbie Burns Day, Chinese New Year, and the Academy Award nominations? The first two I swear are just recycled from year to year; and there seems to be more and more bilge about the Oscars every year, even as normal people lose interest and the ratings drop. But then journalists are terrified of the responsibility of deciding for themselves what might be an important story. So if they covered Robbie Burns Day last year, and the Tourism Scotland p.r. office sends the same press release this year, they'll happily run the same damn story all over again, probably with a feeling of relief and satisfaction. And if the Oscars become boring, irrelevant, and uninteresting, if the televised show becomes unwatchable and people in fact stop watching, well, they'll just take it as fodder for a further genre of article moaning and whining about the Oscars. Whereas a rational person would respond by, you know, paying less attention to them.
I guess the truth is that at bottom the newspapers and the readers have radically different interests. As a reader, I want to learn important stuff I didn't know and read about things I haven't heard of before. (Pulau Weh, baby!) But new information is costly and time-consuming to acquire, and then there's the dread risk of controversy if you make your own editorial call about what's important. So a huge proportion of newspaper articles now are press release-driven, and/or a statement of the totally fucking obvious: weekend box office figures, stories about the Christmas shopping season, Oscar nominees, Robbie Burns Day blah blah blah. If there's one thing 'the news' should be it's unpredictable, but the papers are digging their own graves.
I guess the truth is that at bottom the newspapers and the readers have radically different interests. As a reader, I want to learn important stuff I didn't know and read about things I haven't heard of before. (Pulau Weh, baby!) But new information is costly and time-consuming to acquire, and then there's the dread risk of controversy if you make your own editorial call about what's important. So a huge proportion of newspaper articles now are press release-driven, and/or a statement of the totally fucking obvious: weekend box office figures, stories about the Christmas shopping season, Oscar nominees, Robbie Burns Day blah blah blah. If there's one thing 'the news' should be it's unpredictable, but the papers are digging their own graves.
Onwards to Pulau Weh & Nuremberg
The one article I'll keep from this weekend's papers is apparently not available on line: an article in the Globe travel section on the fabulous scuba-diving off the remote Indonesian island of Pulau Weh. Of course, all these fabulous-diving/remote-island pieces are exactly the same, so just take this as an invitation to construct your own tropical reverie instead.... Still, did you know that there's something called the megamouth shark, a prehistoric looking deepwater monster discovered only in 1976 and sighted only 42 times since? Pulau Weh's got 'em. (Now and then.)
While we're on the subject of stuff you and I didn't know, follow the links to the golden hats. (is that cool or what? don't you want one??) This is why it's worth reading even right-wing blogs now and then, if the right-winger is sufficiently idiosyncratic.
While we're on the subject of stuff you and I didn't know, follow the links to the golden hats. (is that cool or what? don't you want one??) This is why it's worth reading even right-wing blogs now and then, if the right-winger is sufficiently idiosyncratic.
Saturday front page smackdown
Not a bad pair of A1's this weekend. The Star does what the Star does well, a what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-our-institutions investigative piece on the high cost and total uselessness of (some) workers' comp-funded retraining programs. The Globe does what the Globe does well, sending someone to Niger to look into the mysterious abduction of a top Canadian diplomat.
The Globe wins this one on points, I think. Everyone already knows that our workers' comp system is a black hole of waste and mismanagement: it has ever been thus. And the focus of the piece is rather narrow, even lazy: just a few case studies of people who were sent by expensive consultants [!] to expensive private training centres, and still can't speak English. Time was when any workers comp piece worth its salt included the phrase 'billions unaccounted for', or 'skyrocketing deficit' or 'nightmare of red tape as benefits delayed for maimed thousands'. Kafka worked in workers comp, ya know.
The real story here is the general lack of adequate ESL services in this province, which has been causing massive inefficiencies and suffering for decades. It's a real mystery why -- and a scandal that -- no government has ever bothered to do anything about it: that's the story the Star really needs to write, and didn't here. (There's also a certain amount of bad faith in the writing of the story: they keep harping on the fact that these centres cost more than tuition at our universities, as if a university education were a live alternative for these guys; and they don't acknowledge that a manual labourer who can't do manual labour any more is never going to get a highly paid job again even if he does learn English.)
As for the Globe, well, Top diplomat kidnapped by Tuareg isn't a story you come across very often these days, and their writer covers the possible explanations of the mystery thoroughly and evocatively. Despite the wonderfully John Buchan sound, I fear this is really the sadder story of the two: somehow I don't think they're just fattening him up with turkish delight for the Marrakesh slave market. I don't buy the rumour-mongering in the article about the local rebels having Al-Qaeda connections -- how can you, when people can make careers out of inventing stuff about Al-Qaeda? But it can't be a good sign that they left his car and his cellphone behind. Surely ordinary bandits take everything.
The Globe wins this one on points, I think. Everyone already knows that our workers' comp system is a black hole of waste and mismanagement: it has ever been thus. And the focus of the piece is rather narrow, even lazy: just a few case studies of people who were sent by expensive consultants [!] to expensive private training centres, and still can't speak English. Time was when any workers comp piece worth its salt included the phrase 'billions unaccounted for', or 'skyrocketing deficit' or 'nightmare of red tape as benefits delayed for maimed thousands'. Kafka worked in workers comp, ya know.
The real story here is the general lack of adequate ESL services in this province, which has been causing massive inefficiencies and suffering for decades. It's a real mystery why -- and a scandal that -- no government has ever bothered to do anything about it: that's the story the Star really needs to write, and didn't here. (There's also a certain amount of bad faith in the writing of the story: they keep harping on the fact that these centres cost more than tuition at our universities, as if a university education were a live alternative for these guys; and they don't acknowledge that a manual labourer who can't do manual labour any more is never going to get a highly paid job again even if he does learn English.)
As for the Globe, well, Top diplomat kidnapped by Tuareg isn't a story you come across very often these days, and their writer covers the possible explanations of the mystery thoroughly and evocatively. Despite the wonderfully John Buchan sound, I fear this is really the sadder story of the two: somehow I don't think they're just fattening him up with turkish delight for the Marrakesh slave market. I don't buy the rumour-mongering in the article about the local rebels having Al-Qaeda connections -- how can you, when people can make careers out of inventing stuff about Al-Qaeda? But it can't be a good sign that they left his car and his cellphone behind. Surely ordinary bandits take everything.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Obamaflections
I'm the least qualified person to try to speak to this, but I wish someone would do it, so here goes.
Amid all the joy over Obama's inauguration, I've seen no mention of how remarkable it is that black America fully embraces Obama as theirs, sees his cause as theirs, fully owns this moment of triumph. That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Obama is not descended from any slaves, or people who suffered under Jim Crow, or civil rights marchers. He's really African-American, whereas the phrase is normally used as a weird euphemism for practically the most longstanding indigenous group in the country (except for aboriginal groups, I guess). And in many well-known ways Obama's story is more like that of an immigrants' kid than of the average black American (to the admittedly minimal extent that there is such a thing). At the start of the primaries, when Hillary was still leading among black voters in South Carolina, there were some muffled rumblings and grumblings about whether Obama was 'black enough', and it took a while for those to die away. He could easily have come to be identified as mixed-race first and foremost, and not really representative of anything but his urban elitist self.
So why didn't it play out that way? This is where it gets interesting, because there are two diametrically opposed answers:
1. It's all about race. Obama might not share the family history of most American blacks, but he shares the pigmentation, and that's what matters to them because it's still what matters for your life chances. It's what gets you excluded and stereotyped and stopped by the cops. Obama could have grown up Brazilian and his triumph would still be black America's triumph, because what it's a triumph over is just the centuries-long history of white racism in the U.S.
2. It's all about culture. Obama counts as fully American-black because black America is his adopted cultural home: he married into it, he goes to church in it, he lives in Kenwood, he listens to hip hop. (He even likes sweet potato pie, which I fear would be the dealbreaker for me.) He lives as an African-American, in short, and if that's what matters then the phrase isn't so stupid after all: all these cultural markers are just like the markers that we casually use to place some family as Italian-American or whatever.
Now I try to imagine a white man who had made all of Obama's choices, and assimilated as fully as possible to the black South Side. (I wonder if there are any....) How would black voters respond to that guy as a political candidate? I think there would be some feeling of solidarity, but obviously nothing like the reaction to Obama. So (1) can't be dismissed; and maybe it's really the heart of the matter. But I'm pretty sure (2) counted for a lot too. And that points to a future where pigmentation means less for identity than culture and culture is understood to be something freely adopted, as a mode of personal expression and self-development, open to all and none the less authentic for it. Bring it on, I say.
Amid all the joy over Obama's inauguration, I've seen no mention of how remarkable it is that black America fully embraces Obama as theirs, sees his cause as theirs, fully owns this moment of triumph. That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Obama is not descended from any slaves, or people who suffered under Jim Crow, or civil rights marchers. He's really African-American, whereas the phrase is normally used as a weird euphemism for practically the most longstanding indigenous group in the country (except for aboriginal groups, I guess). And in many well-known ways Obama's story is more like that of an immigrants' kid than of the average black American (to the admittedly minimal extent that there is such a thing). At the start of the primaries, when Hillary was still leading among black voters in South Carolina, there were some muffled rumblings and grumblings about whether Obama was 'black enough', and it took a while for those to die away. He could easily have come to be identified as mixed-race first and foremost, and not really representative of anything but his urban elitist self.
So why didn't it play out that way? This is where it gets interesting, because there are two diametrically opposed answers:
1. It's all about race. Obama might not share the family history of most American blacks, but he shares the pigmentation, and that's what matters to them because it's still what matters for your life chances. It's what gets you excluded and stereotyped and stopped by the cops. Obama could have grown up Brazilian and his triumph would still be black America's triumph, because what it's a triumph over is just the centuries-long history of white racism in the U.S.
2. It's all about culture. Obama counts as fully American-black because black America is his adopted cultural home: he married into it, he goes to church in it, he lives in Kenwood, he listens to hip hop. (He even likes sweet potato pie, which I fear would be the dealbreaker for me.) He lives as an African-American, in short, and if that's what matters then the phrase isn't so stupid after all: all these cultural markers are just like the markers that we casually use to place some family as Italian-American or whatever.
Now I try to imagine a white man who had made all of Obama's choices, and assimilated as fully as possible to the black South Side. (I wonder if there are any....) How would black voters respond to that guy as a political candidate? I think there would be some feeling of solidarity, but obviously nothing like the reaction to Obama. So (1) can't be dismissed; and maybe it's really the heart of the matter. But I'm pretty sure (2) counted for a lot too. And that points to a future where pigmentation means less for identity than culture and culture is understood to be something freely adopted, as a mode of personal expression and self-development, open to all and none the less authentic for it. Bring it on, I say.
"Mr. Khadr should come home, and he should be reintegrated into Canadian society”
I never thought I'd find myself more reactionary than Michael Ignatieff, but this really rubbed me the wrong way. 'Home?' 'Reintegrated?' Khadr's family was never integrated into Canadian society in the first place -- they lived in Pakistan precisely because that possibility horrified them. Now Guantanamo is a moral abomination, and we should do whatever we can to help Obama out in closing it. But Omar Khadr shouldn't be our problem in any special way. That is, if we took citizenship seriously and had sane requirements for it*, the Khadrs would never have been eligible, or at least would have had it revoked decades ago. You'd especially think that a Conservative government, if it took government seriously (but apparently conservatism now precludes that), would care about that having Canadian citizenship mean something. But no. Presumably the imposition of any new standards would be perceived as picking fights with the hyphenated voters they're desperate to woo, so instead they just let citizenship itself come to be devalued to the point of worthlessness -- we didn't even get our citizens out of the Gaza Strip! Which is disgusting and clearly racist at bottom -- the assumption can only have been that Palestinian-Canadians aren't the real thing. (Same thing with Lebanon not so long ago.) But so long as you make citizenship easy to get and impossible to lose, there are going to be lots of cases in which going to bat for your citizens isn't unquestionably the right thing to do, as it always should be.
* Like what? Well, maybe you should have to swear an oath to the effect that you don't hate and mean to actively work to destroy everything Canada stands for, with citizenship revoked if you turn out to have lied about that (as I believe is already the case for lying about war crimes). That doesn't seem too much to ask, does it? (And yes, I realize that oath would be a tricky thing to write.)
* Like what? Well, maybe you should have to swear an oath to the effect that you don't hate and mean to actively work to destroy everything Canada stands for, with citizenship revoked if you turn out to have lied about that (as I believe is already the case for lying about war crimes). That doesn't seem too much to ask, does it? (And yes, I realize that oath would be a tricky thing to write.)
Your e-z post-inauguration round-up:
1. Bush getting booed and jeered, as the commentariat falls into awkward silence. That's change I can believe in! (If it needs defending, see here.)
2. A nice first-person account of the big day (and another one here)... which was actually an organizational fiasco in some respects. Here's hoping a head or two rolls.
3. The Obama family defined: very cool.
4. And of course Pete Seeger.
2. A nice first-person account of the big day (and another one here)... which was actually an organizational fiasco in some respects. Here's hoping a head or two rolls.
3. The Obama family defined: very cool.
4. And of course Pete Seeger.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Heh, so someone at the Globe does read this blog
Thanks to Spirit of the West for pointing out our first unacknowledged contribution to the host organism, from one of the endless rather dull articles today on Obama:
You're welcome, Mister O'Sullivan! (Truly.)But Mr. Obama is a man as well as a symbol. His personal qualities appeal at least as powerfully as his race to all sorts of Americans.
His Ivy League law background excites educated voters. His stance of "ironic cool" in interviews wows the young. His gentlemanly manners and lithe elegance - he is closer in style to Fred Astaire than to any U.S. politician - charm suburban whites generally and white women in particular.
Now ship them to the Hague
I may yet get cathartically verklempt later on, but this morning I didn't really hear the big cartoon sun singing Beatles songs as angels frolicked, though I would have liked to. (Did you?) Perhaps it's because I was multitasking and as usual it ended in a botch-up all round: ended up with an unwritten lecture, an ominously hockey-puck-like pie, and having missed all the fun bits of the inaugural ceremony, if indeed there were any. (I gather that at any rate Cheney's transformation into Dr. Strangelove is now complete; that there was a groovily weird benediction; and that Barry O's speech was basically depressing.) For whatever reason I'm more in a mood for retrospective bile today, and in that spirit will link to the most telling comment I've found on the interwebs today: a summary of the Bush years according to America's Finest News Source, at Making Light. Lest we forget, eh.
UPDATE: For anyone else still working the schadenfraude, nothing (as you might expect) can touch Wonkette and commentators on the Old Testament satisfactions of seeing Dick Cheney in a wheelchair. Setting aside the now-standard Dracula and Hannibal Lecter riffs, opinion is evidently divided on the important question of whether the right cultural touchstone is now (a) Mister Potter in It's a Wonderful Life; (b) Doctor Strangelove (seemed like the obvious call to me); (c) Burgess Meredith as a Batman villain (this I don't get); and (d) a Dalek in Doctor Who. But who or what is a Dalek, and just how sordidly evil is it?
UPDATE: For anyone else still working the schadenfraude, nothing (as you might expect) can touch Wonkette and commentators on the Old Testament satisfactions of seeing Dick Cheney in a wheelchair. Setting aside the now-standard Dracula and Hannibal Lecter riffs, opinion is evidently divided on the important question of whether the right cultural touchstone is now (a) Mister Potter in It's a Wonderful Life; (b) Doctor Strangelove (seemed like the obvious call to me); (c) Burgess Meredith as a Batman villain (this I don't get); and (d) a Dalek in Doctor Who. But who or what is a Dalek, and just how sordidly evil is it?
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Your Weekly Book Review Snark
Nothing much to see here this week, but I do think someone should have stopped Jane Urquhart from inaugurating "a weekly series about books that have been unjustly overlooked, under-praised or just ignored" with a piece on The Blue Flower, which is a pretty damn famous novel. In fact I seem to remember there was a bit of a scandale when it failed to win the Booker.
I think The Blue Flower is one of Penelope Fitzgerald's weaker books anyway. Her great strength is that trademark elliptical style -- very simple, cool, immensely respectful of her characters -- which seems to at once tell you nothing and everything about them. They remain mysterious just as real people are, so you feel as though you're observing them directly -- or perhaps hearing stories about them from a slightly dotty, very generous, but underneath it all rather sharp English aunt. (Aunt Sadie, in fact.) The method works wonderfully with more or less familiar English characters, especially of a sad and loser-ish stripe; but applied to strange 18th century German aristocrats, as in The Blue Flower, it just results in impenetrability.
You want unjustly overlooked? How about Beer in the Snooker Club, a wonderful novel by one Waguih Ghali who (a) never wrote another one, (b) committed suicide, and (c) has no Wikipedia article to link to? Or how about the whole freakin' oeuvre of Colette, one of the great writers of the twentieth century, whose stuff was only ever (partially) available in terrible fifties translations and is now mostly out of print? I could go on...
I think The Blue Flower is one of Penelope Fitzgerald's weaker books anyway. Her great strength is that trademark elliptical style -- very simple, cool, immensely respectful of her characters -- which seems to at once tell you nothing and everything about them. They remain mysterious just as real people are, so you feel as though you're observing them directly -- or perhaps hearing stories about them from a slightly dotty, very generous, but underneath it all rather sharp English aunt. (Aunt Sadie, in fact.) The method works wonderfully with more or less familiar English characters, especially of a sad and loser-ish stripe; but applied to strange 18th century German aristocrats, as in The Blue Flower, it just results in impenetrability.
You want unjustly overlooked? How about Beer in the Snooker Club, a wonderful novel by one Waguih Ghali who (a) never wrote another one, (b) committed suicide, and (c) has no Wikipedia article to link to? Or how about the whole freakin' oeuvre of Colette, one of the great writers of the twentieth century, whose stuff was only ever (partially) available in terrible fifties translations and is now mostly out of print? I could go on...
Thursday, January 15, 2009
For your pre-inaugural pleasure
As a public performer and icon, Barack Obama has always reminded me very powerfully of somebody, and I've finally figured out who it is. And America, you could do a LOT worse:
(Both photos from Creative Commons.)
Exactly the same shape of head, ears, etc.:
Exactly the same smile. Exactly the same build. Exactly the same physical grace, the same air of relaxation combined with precise control, the same debonaire way with a prop.
The birth-certificate conspiracy theory folks just haven't been asking the right questions....
(Both photos from Creative Commons.)
Exactly the same shape of head, ears, etc.:
Exactly the same smile. Exactly the same build. Exactly the same physical grace, the same air of relaxation combined with precise control, the same debonaire way with a prop.
The birth-certificate conspiracy theory folks just haven't been asking the right questions....
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Rubinomics strikes again
The bad news is that the new soon-to-be-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury didn't pay his taxes until he was audited and forced to do so.
But hey, the good news is that it was all just an honest mistake! That IMF payroll system was just too darn tricky and complicated for him.
Umm, wait a minute....
Geithner's only claim to fame is being a protege of Rubin and Summers, the soi-disant geniuses and Wall St. apologists whose ideological opposition to all regulation of financial industries brought us the whole fucking securities-industry meltdown and with it the total crash of the American economy. It would be really, really nice if Obama started throwing these boys overboard. But I don't see it happening. Because not paying your taxes and having an illegal housekeeper can only make Geithner seem all the more reassuringly One of Us to Wall St. and the Republican Party. And of course appeasing those two groups is universally understood to be the sole legitimate aim of Democratic administration economic policy.
Even more than Her Hillaryship, this is the nomination that made me decide I just don't believe in all that hoohah about 'Change'. Or rather, I'll believe it when I see it, and with this shower I'd be crazy to expect to.
But hey, the good news is that it was all just an honest mistake! That IMF payroll system was just too darn tricky and complicated for him.
Umm, wait a minute....
Geithner's only claim to fame is being a protege of Rubin and Summers, the soi-disant geniuses and Wall St. apologists whose ideological opposition to all regulation of financial industries brought us the whole fucking securities-industry meltdown and with it the total crash of the American economy. It would be really, really nice if Obama started throwing these boys overboard. But I don't see it happening. Because not paying your taxes and having an illegal housekeeper can only make Geithner seem all the more reassuringly One of Us to Wall St. and the Republican Party. And of course appeasing those two groups is universally understood to be the sole legitimate aim of Democratic administration economic policy.
Even more than Her Hillaryship, this is the nomination that made me decide I just don't believe in all that hoohah about 'Change'. Or rather, I'll believe it when I see it, and with this shower I'd be crazy to expect to.
But seriously now
on the all-important question facing the new administration, Portuguese water dog vs. labradoodle: I don't see how that can be a close call. They're both absurdly energetic, so either way there'll have to be an extra Secret Service man for walkies duty. And let's face it, neither is actually going to be at the D.C. animal shelter. (Which I'm willing to bet is pit bulls all the way.) But PWD's, judging by the ones I've seen, are indeed obsessed with water, and only happy when splashing in and out of it all day. And the White House doesn't have any.
Correction: The White House does have an outdoor swimming pool, which I guess counts. Click on the link and you can compare Ford's nice looking retrievers to those goofy Bush things.
Correction: The White House does have an outdoor swimming pool, which I guess counts. Click on the link and you can compare Ford's nice looking retrievers to those goofy Bush things.
Tiny afterthought
It must be longstanding policy, but I only just noticed that the Globe refers to Her Hillaryship as 'Ms. Clinton'. Does that strike anyone else as odd? Wouldn't using the husband's last name automatically make you a 'Mrs.'?
Same as the old boss
I realize half the point of the front page is to toady to the powerful, with photos, but really: trying to pass off Hillary Clinton sounding sternly anti-Hamas as either 'smart power' or 'tough diplomacy' -- for that matter, trying to pass it off as news -- is pretty pathetic.
Meanwhile doomed U.N. attempts to stop the fighting make page A15, as do the completely disgusting efforts by the Israeli right to ban Arab political parties. So far the Globe has had 0 coverage of Olmert's claim to dictate American voting at the UN, which has been a pretty big scandal in the US. And today's editorial -- after nothing on Gaza or Israel for at least the previous four days -- is condemning, of all things, the UN Human Rights Council, which is indeed a wacky chronically anti-Israeli group -- but who cares? It's hard to imagine a more pusillanimous choice of focus: it enables the Globe to insinuate that the Harper government is being rational and even-handed and standing up for the little guy, when in terms of the realities on the ground they're aggressively cheerleading for the bullies. Ugh -- it's really hard to know which is being more cynical, cowardly and self-discrediting here, our government or our press.
You heard it here first: 'tough diplomacy' is going to be the 'compassionate conservatism' of the new regime. A have-it-both-ways oxymoron whose two sides, somewhat miraculously, both manage to be lies. Unless you can tell me how refusing to talk or engage with the powerless, under orders from another country's government, is either tough or diplomatic. 'Soft power' -- same thing.
Meanwhile doomed U.N. attempts to stop the fighting make page A15, as do the completely disgusting efforts by the Israeli right to ban Arab political parties. So far the Globe has had 0 coverage of Olmert's claim to dictate American voting at the UN, which has been a pretty big scandal in the US. And today's editorial -- after nothing on Gaza or Israel for at least the previous four days -- is condemning, of all things, the UN Human Rights Council, which is indeed a wacky chronically anti-Israeli group -- but who cares? It's hard to imagine a more pusillanimous choice of focus: it enables the Globe to insinuate that the Harper government is being rational and even-handed and standing up for the little guy, when in terms of the realities on the ground they're aggressively cheerleading for the bullies. Ugh -- it's really hard to know which is being more cynical, cowardly and self-discrediting here, our government or our press.
You heard it here first: 'tough diplomacy' is going to be the 'compassionate conservatism' of the new regime. A have-it-both-ways oxymoron whose two sides, somewhat miraculously, both manage to be lies. Unless you can tell me how refusing to talk or engage with the powerless, under orders from another country's government, is either tough or diplomatic. 'Soft power' -- same thing.
Monday, January 12, 2009
It's now official
I have directed my computer -- with pangs of regret and in a tone of chagrin that it probably didn't fully register -- to regard everything from the Obama family as spam.
Why is this morning's paper all about the Golden Globes?
For some aggregation and sorting of information on Gaza, to which I have nothing very original to add, see the Galloping Beaver and Dr. Dawg. They make the point en passant that the Ignatieff Liberals are now following the Conservatives as they follow the Americans into mindless cheerleading for the very worst aspects of Israeli policy. And though our mainstream media isn't quite as indoctrinated as the US one (for just how bad it is down there, see Glenn Greenwald passim), it's still pretty reluctant to use the phrase 'war crimes' however well the shoe may fit. The Globe's coverage of Canadian foreign policy in all this has been dire bordering on invisible, thus neatly matching the policy itself. Demonstrations by Arab-Canadians don't even make the print edition.
What I'm still waiting to read is some analysis of how and why the Canadian spectrum got twisted in this way. Everybody knows what the Americans' problem is: AIPAC, and a political system so beholden to big money that a handful of rich fanatics can fix the Overton window wherever they want, wherever the rights and wrongs and the national interest may stand. (Again, that's AIPAC: it's a mistake to speak in more general terms of the Jewish lobby or Jewish voters, not only because of the unpleasant conspiracy-theory sound but because the ordinary Jewish voter is a sane person who has very little to do with all this -- just as ordinary Israelis know perfectly well that it is not actually in their interest to have the Sharons and Netanyahus constantly egged on by the most powerful nation on earth.)
But Canada doesn't have an AIPAC equivalent, so far as I know. (If we do, it's really time for someone to do an article on it.) So what's going on here? Why are Harper and Ignatieff trying to outdo each other in mealymouthed support for the insupportable? There's no way it's a vote-winner in the long run. Admittedly Harper's base includes the creepy kind of evangelical who 'supports' Israel in the sense of hoping it will do something awful enough to bring about the End Times, but is he really that far off his rocker himself? Or is it just that if the US decides to jump off a tall building, we always feel compelled to follow sooner or later? But the closest parallel to America's crazy Israel policy is their crazy Cuba policy, also dictated by a handful of unpleasant rich extremists; and Canadians have always rather enjoyed thumbing their noses at that one.
Ah, a closer communion with Mister Google has corrected me: we do indeed have our very own AIPAC. (I knew about Gerry Schwartz, which is how I knew what to ask Mister G.; but I thought he was a one-off.) Interesting that I had to go to this somewhat marginal lefty venue to find out about it -- and I wouldn't necessarily vouch for the impeccable fairness and insight of all the reporting there. Still, res ipsa loquitur. Alas.
What I'm still waiting to read is some analysis of how and why the Canadian spectrum got twisted in this way. Everybody knows what the Americans' problem is: AIPAC, and a political system so beholden to big money that a handful of rich fanatics can fix the Overton window wherever they want, wherever the rights and wrongs and the national interest may stand. (Again, that's AIPAC: it's a mistake to speak in more general terms of the Jewish lobby or Jewish voters, not only because of the unpleasant conspiracy-theory sound but because the ordinary Jewish voter is a sane person who has very little to do with all this -- just as ordinary Israelis know perfectly well that it is not actually in their interest to have the Sharons and Netanyahus constantly egged on by the most powerful nation on earth.)
But Canada doesn't have an AIPAC equivalent, so far as I know. (If we do, it's really time for someone to do an article on it.) So what's going on here? Why are Harper and Ignatieff trying to outdo each other in mealymouthed support for the insupportable? There's no way it's a vote-winner in the long run. Admittedly Harper's base includes the creepy kind of evangelical who 'supports' Israel in the sense of hoping it will do something awful enough to bring about the End Times, but is he really that far off his rocker himself? Or is it just that if the US decides to jump off a tall building, we always feel compelled to follow sooner or later? But the closest parallel to America's crazy Israel policy is their crazy Cuba policy, also dictated by a handful of unpleasant rich extremists; and Canadians have always rather enjoyed thumbing their noses at that one.
Ah, a closer communion with Mister Google has corrected me: we do indeed have our very own AIPAC. (I knew about Gerry Schwartz, which is how I knew what to ask Mister G.; but I thought he was a one-off.) Interesting that I had to go to this somewhat marginal lefty venue to find out about it -- and I wouldn't necessarily vouch for the impeccable fairness and insight of all the reporting there. Still, res ipsa loquitur. Alas.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
All the cool kids are doing it
... so naturally I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I have been been 'tagged with a meme' by Miss Lucy. I'm supposed to take the book nearest to me, and post the 5th sentence on p. 56.
Oh no, I am sitting nearest the retro pulp shelf. And what's that sitting at the near end of the shelf? Oh dear. Ahem:
"If I had had a son I should have liked him to be snub-nosed and bullet-headed, for ugliness in the male is a security for virtue and a passport to popularity."
Heh, you could have done a lot worse. This is an aged clubman reminiscing to our narrator about the evil yet charismatically beautiful Arabin family, who are the mainspring of The Dancing Floor by John Buchan, which is really one of the oddest books I've ever read. It has Buchan's trademark combination of totally ludicrous, coincidence-driven plot with such effective scene-writing as to be at once gripping and unreadable. All aspiring pulp writers should have to read all of Buchan and Daphne du Maurier to learn their trade (and Agatha Christie for the converse virtues and vices). What makes The Dancing Floor specially weird even for Buchan is that there's a lot of very vivid archaic Greek religion mixed in with the adventure story -- it's as if he'd hallucinated the whole plot while stricken with a high fever in the middle of reading The Golden Bough. In other words, it's really rather good....
I believe I'm also supposed to put the fifth sentence of p. 56 from 'the book I'm currently working on'. Unfortunately that description currently picks out a pile of unassembled rubbish with no such page numbers. But I'm sorry to say that several of my current papers-in-progress run to that (if you double space which I therefore usually don't), so here goes from 'Plato on Desire for the Good':
Ah, but is it any truer or better than the Buchan? It certainly isn't any better written.
Oh no, I am sitting nearest the retro pulp shelf. And what's that sitting at the near end of the shelf? Oh dear. Ahem:
"If I had had a son I should have liked him to be snub-nosed and bullet-headed, for ugliness in the male is a security for virtue and a passport to popularity."
Heh, you could have done a lot worse. This is an aged clubman reminiscing to our narrator about the evil yet charismatically beautiful Arabin family, who are the mainspring of The Dancing Floor by John Buchan, which is really one of the oddest books I've ever read. It has Buchan's trademark combination of totally ludicrous, coincidence-driven plot with such effective scene-writing as to be at once gripping and unreadable. All aspiring pulp writers should have to read all of Buchan and Daphne du Maurier to learn their trade (and Agatha Christie for the converse virtues and vices). What makes The Dancing Floor specially weird even for Buchan is that there's a lot of very vivid archaic Greek religion mixed in with the adventure story -- it's as if he'd hallucinated the whole plot while stricken with a high fever in the middle of reading The Golden Bough. In other words, it's really rather good....
I believe I'm also supposed to put the fifth sentence of p. 56 from 'the book I'm currently working on'. Unfortunately that description currently picks out a pile of unassembled rubbish with no such page numbers. But I'm sorry to say that several of my current papers-in-progress run to that (if you double space which I therefore usually don't), so here goes from 'Plato on Desire for the Good':
For it is criterial for agency that not everything can count for the agent as success: I must aim at some determinate outcome which my performance may or may not bring about.This is by way of explaining an argument in Plato, but also in my sly historian's way insinuating that he is right. An insinuation I stand by.
Ah, but is it any truer or better than the Buchan? It certainly isn't any better written.
The city that does not work*
Meanwhile, this story on Toronto's half-hearted venture into legalizing street food sums up everything that's wrong with this city. (Accurate headline: "So you want to cook bhajias or fajitas? Do we have a slate of rules for you".) Well, maybe not everything, but enough: red tape, indifference to the point of the policies under consideration, and, basically, stupid stupid people (both elected and administrative) in charge of city policy. That for decades we had a system designed to legally prevent the sale of anything other than semi-toxic hot dogs is a total embarrassment; that now, instead of just adopting whatever New York or Singapore or Bangkok does -- you know, doing what works -- we are slowly custom-designing a regime so snarled up in red tape that no one you would want in the street-food business would be willing to go into it -- that's beyond embarrassing and into infuriating. And it's really hard not to see it as a sign of general indifference and dysfunction -- remind me again why everyone was so excited about David Miller?
* I wonder how many of you even remember when Toronto used to be called 'the city that works'. A phrase that has gone the way of 'Harvard of the North', and for much the same reasons.
* I wonder how many of you even remember when Toronto used to be called 'the city that works'. A phrase that has gone the way of 'Harvard of the North', and for much the same reasons.
The book club for men
As for the content of the new Books subsection, there's an interesting piece about an all-male book club: I didn't know there were such things. They read books about wars, Genghis Khan, Conrad Black, and hardly any fiction. (Just a Ken Follett [!] and a hit literary novel about Afghanistan, The Kite Runner.) The group has been around for 30 years, which is pretty impressive, and includes a wide range of vaguely upper-middle class anglo Montrealers. What struck me was this bit:
...the insinuation that the male of the literary-club species will always choose blood-and-guts reality ahead of polished fiction from the pens of great writers. This is, er, correct, as I realized one evening as I left the house happily cradling my copy of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. My wife's book club was reading Proust.Now I rarely feel in need of gender reassignment, and still hope to get around to Proust one day, but I had a real surge of fellow-feeling here. To see why, just look further down page F9 to the blurb for the new 'Ask the Author' on-line feature, whose first author is Giller-winning Joseph Boyden. Here's the book he's talking about:
The novel follows Suzanne Bird, a native Canadian from Northern Ontario whose sister, a fashion model, goes missing in New York City. Suzanne leaves behind her troubled uncle Will, whose life also unfolds in the book.
The Giller judges said Boyden's novel "takes us on two journeys. Suzanne's sister Annie retraces her sister's steps, from the Native poverty below the Gardiner Expressway to the extravagant fast lanes of New York. Will, their uncle, follows a very different path as he deals with the demons of memory, revenge, and darkest loss."
See, this is the kind of stuff women read. And I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I can't count the times I've gone into Book City and flipped over the intriguing-looking new novels only to see every single one described as a haunting luminous meditation on family, memory and loss, interweaving multiple resonant narrative journeys in a dazzlingly lyrical deeply personal poetic etc. etc. causing me to flee in horror.
I love fiction. I will read any amount of Evelyn Waugh and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have some substantial chunks of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble more or less committed to memory. So why is it so hard now, or socially unacceptable, to write a novel with a simple but compelling story in a style which gets to the fucking point? And why have women been gulled into thinking they like this... other stuff? Maybe they really do like it? But I can't help thinking of contemporary fiction as the literary equivalent of fashion nobody looks good in and microwaveable food that tastes like nothing: something you sell to women because women can be bullied into anything.
The end of an underwhelming era
But enough of the belles-lettres, you say: bring on the snark! Well, today's paper [ed. note -- and for once I really do mean 'today', Saturday] confirms what I've long inferred from the Globe combination of generally good reporting with dodgy editorial judgement. Namely that the No. 1 problem with the paper is the No. 1 editor, one Edward Greenspon. Today he has an ex cathedra piece in the front section which includes the following near-gibberish:
But wait, you say, what is this divide-traveling package? What does it all mean? It means that the Globe, which used to boast endlessly about having Canada's only free-standing Books section, no longer has a free-standing Books section. Books are now a subsection at the back of the Focus section. A pretty big subsection, this week at least; but the point is surely to cut back coverage significantly in the long run (the sad trajectory of the once-great National Post book section, where by 'once-great' I mean that in its heyday it used to commission, and pay handsomely for, free-form stuff from me.) Meanwhile they are bumping up coverage of books on the website: they are also adding this amazing new thing called a 'comments' feature to the reviews there, and including some web-only content, in the hope that poor Slow Eddie can spin the killing of the Books section (vivi-section?) as a fabulous new-media breakthrough. Well, good luck to them. Personally I think I'm a lot more likely to read about books in print, over my breakfast coffee, rather than during a bout of web-surfing later in the day: but my guess would be that they don't have much choice here. (Dr. B's grasp of these matters is hazy, but it seems that newspapers expect their on-line ventures to lose money, though how long that can last is anybody's guess).
Of course, given my usual whingeing about the quality of the Books section, any complaints about the quantity are going to sound like that joke about the two old ladies in the Catskills.*
Oh, and in totally unrelated and coincidental news, the Globe is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce.
*Who moan about the resort food, endlessly and in great detail, with the punch line: 'And the portions are so small!'
Authoritative coverage of authors and their renderings has always been a hallmark of The Globe and Mail. Today, we rededicate ourselves to the subject with a new package that traverses the print-digital divide and opens up a world of new possibilities while securing the old world order.Coverage of their renderings? Traversing the divide with a package to secure the old world order? Is he Doctor Who? To me this reads like a stoned intern's spoof, which nobody caught because the preceding paras. were already so pompous and opaque. If this is what Slow Eddie's own prose is like, it's astounding the paper is as strong as it is.
But wait, you say, what is this divide-traveling package? What does it all mean? It means that the Globe, which used to boast endlessly about having Canada's only free-standing Books section, no longer has a free-standing Books section. Books are now a subsection at the back of the Focus section. A pretty big subsection, this week at least; but the point is surely to cut back coverage significantly in the long run (the sad trajectory of the once-great National Post book section, where by 'once-great' I mean that in its heyday it used to commission, and pay handsomely for, free-form stuff from me.) Meanwhile they are bumping up coverage of books on the website: they are also adding this amazing new thing called a 'comments' feature to the reviews there, and including some web-only content, in the hope that poor Slow Eddie can spin the killing of the Books section (vivi-section?) as a fabulous new-media breakthrough. Well, good luck to them. Personally I think I'm a lot more likely to read about books in print, over my breakfast coffee, rather than during a bout of web-surfing later in the day: but my guess would be that they don't have much choice here. (Dr. B's grasp of these matters is hazy, but it seems that newspapers expect their on-line ventures to lose money, though how long that can last is anybody's guess).
Of course, given my usual whingeing about the quality of the Books section, any complaints about the quantity are going to sound like that joke about the two old ladies in the Catskills.*
Oh, and in totally unrelated and coincidental news, the Globe is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce.
*Who moan about the resort food, endlessly and in great detail, with the punch line: 'And the portions are so small!'
Thursday, January 8, 2009
The rutabagas of politics
Yes, I know posting has been light lately, it's that tricky 'work' business slowing me down. You are always on my mind, dear readers, but by the time I've snatched a moment to compose my thoughts about some news item -- and I do have views, for instance, about those entitled gits who insisted on going out of bounds at the ski resort in BC and had to be rescued by the ski patrol (ah but was that, on the other hand, perhaps unnecessary nanny-stateism?) -- the world has moved on.
So, clearly, I should be working on a post about Gaza, since it seems perfectly likely that Israel will still be pounding the crap out of it as I enter my retirement years. Any other suggestions for stories that, like turnips or rutabagas, will keep reliably in storage throughout the winter months, even if the thought of them turns the stomach?
So, clearly, I should be working on a post about Gaza, since it seems perfectly likely that Israel will still be pounding the crap out of it as I enter my retirement years. Any other suggestions for stories that, like turnips or rutabagas, will keep reliably in storage throughout the winter months, even if the thought of them turns the stomach?
Monday, January 5, 2009
Yuppie scum
Am I still allowed to be annoyed at the gentrification of my supermarket if my shopping bags say Leslieville Cheese Shop, Riverdale Farmer's Market, Le Boulanger Francais [Ottawa] and London Review of Books?
I do buy a lot of the old-lady stuff -- innards and passata and nasty Portuguese snacks -- but I fear that's not enough for street cred nowadays.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
A thankful new year
For academics, the real New Year comes in September, and by January all good resolutions have been scattered to the four winds. So this time of year, with the cheeriness of Christmas on one side and the really-not-so-horrible horrors of the term to come on the other, always puts me in more of a Thanksgiving mood. The past few days I've been utterly absorbed in a book of letters among members of quite an affluent family of a few generations ago (more on this later, no doubt), and I'm feeling thankful for a few things which have really substantially improved our lot just in the short time since -- say, since 1950. So -- without retracting any of my usual grumbling about our wretched and potentially apocalyptic era -- here are some things I'm feeling thankful for:
1. Central heating. Almost everybody used to be cold and uncomfortable all the time until really quite recently. Thank god we don't have to be. (Now how did you guess this book is about English people?)
2. Respectful and sometimes even effective treatments for cancer. Better pain treatment too. There's still a ton of unnecessary suffering, but my god it used to be worse. And as late as the 1970s patients were being systematically kept in the dark. (When exactly did all that change, I wonder, and how?)
3. Effective cheap instant communications: cheap long-distance, cell phones, e-mail. This one is trickier. I do think that the death of the letter is a terrible loss: not just our lives, but our actual selves are less interesting than those of the people who used to sit down and pour out their thoughts and experiences, with some reflection and in detail, on a regular basis to their far-flung friends. Serious letter-writing is like the Mediterranean diet (I mean the real one, that used to make Cretan peasants live to one hundred): incredibly good for you, but not quite attractive enough for people to stick with when there are cushier alternatives. And that's really too bad. Still: think of the enormous amount of anguish and heartbreak, the terrible mistakes and misunderstandings and missed opportunities caused by letters delayed or gone astray, or garbled telegrams, back in the day. Thank god that's basically over.
4. Parenting taken seriously. Yes, I know it's gone too far, we're creating a monster race of overentitled overprotected zombies, but do admit. The level of parental neglect, selfishness, unfairness and outright cruelty that was socially acceptable just a few generations ago is quite something.
What else should go on the list? And for bonus points, what family have I been reading about? All the clues are there...
UPDATE: Two more indisputable recent contributions to human happiness:
1. Quick no-fault divorce. Surely the main cause of long-term declines in murder rates?
2. The photocopier. Remember the Gestetner? I literally cannot imagine trying to function as a teacher without the ability to create and revise handouts almost instantly.
1. Central heating. Almost everybody used to be cold and uncomfortable all the time until really quite recently. Thank god we don't have to be. (Now how did you guess this book is about English people?)
2. Respectful and sometimes even effective treatments for cancer. Better pain treatment too. There's still a ton of unnecessary suffering, but my god it used to be worse. And as late as the 1970s patients were being systematically kept in the dark. (When exactly did all that change, I wonder, and how?)
3. Effective cheap instant communications: cheap long-distance, cell phones, e-mail. This one is trickier. I do think that the death of the letter is a terrible loss: not just our lives, but our actual selves are less interesting than those of the people who used to sit down and pour out their thoughts and experiences, with some reflection and in detail, on a regular basis to their far-flung friends. Serious letter-writing is like the Mediterranean diet (I mean the real one, that used to make Cretan peasants live to one hundred): incredibly good for you, but not quite attractive enough for people to stick with when there are cushier alternatives. And that's really too bad. Still: think of the enormous amount of anguish and heartbreak, the terrible mistakes and misunderstandings and missed opportunities caused by letters delayed or gone astray, or garbled telegrams, back in the day. Thank god that's basically over.
4. Parenting taken seriously. Yes, I know it's gone too far, we're creating a monster race of overentitled overprotected zombies, but do admit. The level of parental neglect, selfishness, unfairness and outright cruelty that was socially acceptable just a few generations ago is quite something.
What else should go on the list? And for bonus points, what family have I been reading about? All the clues are there...
UPDATE: Two more indisputable recent contributions to human happiness:
1. Quick no-fault divorce. Surely the main cause of long-term declines in murder rates?
2. The photocopier. Remember the Gestetner? I literally cannot imagine trying to function as a teacher without the ability to create and revise handouts almost instantly.
On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia
The tree is down and the ornaments packed away. The leftovers have been eaten and the hangovers hung. The cats have almost stopped pooping tinsel. It's really over.
Time to put our Bob Cratchit mittens back on and get back up on the stool, rubbing our hands in anticipation as we open the first newspaper of 2009 we can bother to read. Incidentally, does anyone else think that the very lowest ebb of journalism is all those endless lists of Best of/Worst of Whatever that the papers use as vapid filler at the fag-end of every year? It was worth spending part of the holidays at a work-related convention in Philadelphia to avoid all that.
So, what have we in the paper today? [ed. note -- meaning as so often the day before yesterday] Just this from David Eddie:
Uncle Dave's advice also seems off in this column: if the writer of the letter can't or won't explain why the in-laws 'deeply dislike' her, isn't that the first thing to get clear about, even if they are physicists? We dorks are usually pacific, even genial folk.
Time to put our Bob Cratchit mittens back on and get back up on the stool, rubbing our hands in anticipation as we open the first newspaper of 2009 we can bother to read. Incidentally, does anyone else think that the very lowest ebb of journalism is all those endless lists of Best of/Worst of Whatever that the papers use as vapid filler at the fag-end of every year? It was worth spending part of the holidays at a work-related convention in Philadelphia to avoid all that.
So, what have we in the paper today? [ed. note -- meaning as so often the day before yesterday] Just this from David Eddie:
I come from a family of nerdy number-crunchers; I also went to an egghead high school where about half the population were calculator-toting dorks who spoke in robotic voices and had weird little peach-fuzz mustaches, high-waisted flood pants and tinted glasses.Hem hem now -- surely no more than one-third or so?
Uncle Dave's advice also seems off in this column: if the writer of the letter can't or won't explain why the in-laws 'deeply dislike' her, isn't that the first thing to get clear about, even if they are physicists? We dorks are usually pacific, even genial folk.
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