My Log 287: I get up at strange hours because I’ve always been hooked on sport, all my life

My friends tell me I am completely bonkers because I frequently get up at 3 am or thereabouts, to watch various games being played on the other side of the world, like in New Zealand or Australia. Usually what I watch is Rugby, sometimes cricket, and more often tennis, minority sports in this part of the world, which makes me seem even more like a kook.

Many of my friends have hang-ups about sports in general, arguing that they are a weapon in the armory of the right-wing conspiracy to keep the public tranquilized and apathetic.

I can’t deny it, but my excuses are on a different, more personal level. I grew up in the 1930s in a society which was mad about playing games. We almost all played. I went to school every morning as early as possible to get first dibs on the fives court; I stayed after school in the afternoon to practise Rugby, and returned home usually covered in mud ; I went back happily in the evenings to perfect my cricket. In addition, I ran races and jumped longwards and highwards, and when the links were not charged, my friends and I snuck in to hit a few balls along the fairway. I don’t remember ever having to pay for any of this.My parents didn’t have to break themselves to buy the sparse equipnent involved. It was all done within the rubric that physical activity is good for the growing child, and the facilities were paid for in one way or another by the public purse.

One of my fondest memories of my childhood is of sitting up overnight beside the radio to listen to the broadcasts of the Aussie cricketers when they were in England, contesting the Ashes.

Naturally, with all this as part of my inheritance, I became a fanatical follower of sports. Of course, in those days, all these sports, even at the international level, were amateur: no money --- except for minuscule payments for food and lodging for traveling teams --- changed hands. The closest any of our star-sportsmen acquaintances came to being paid for their brilliance on the fields was that they worked in jobs that willingly let them go for three months or so while they went on tour, secure in the knowledge that their job would be waiting for them on their return. This sport was all so local that even young men in our community, friends of my brothers, could emerge as national representatives, and visit with us from time to time, just as they had always done.

As a kid I grew up with the pictures of every represntative national Rugby team since 1905 on my wall; alongside shots of the greatest international cricketers, the fastest international runners. In my teens I read voraciously of the history of cricket, and as I have told many people since, the remarkable innings of 187 not out played at Sydney Cricket ground by Stan McCabe against the fury of “bodyline” English bowling, (so unfair, although nothing to what is trundled up these days) --- though I was only four when it happened --- became a landmark of sporting brilliance for me. (Tough, though, when I have told people about it over here, I have usually said he scored 232, confusing a later innings, one of the greatest ever played, in Nottingham in 1938. Never mind: most aged reminiscences must be riddled with such errors). At least I have got it right now!)

One day when I was in high school I took a walk with my father, who asked me what I intended to do. I said, I seemed to be good at only two things, one, composition, as we called writing essays in those days, and two, sports. We agreed maybe I could think of writing about sports to make a living. And so, in 1945 I gor a job on the lowest rung of journalism, had to give up playing sports myself because I had to work on Saturdays to collect the results of games being played around me, and so became a member of the working class, which, I like to say, I have been a member of ever since.

I went into journalism with a mind stocked with information about the world’s great cricketers, Rugby players, and tennis players. Since then I have been a mere spectator. I interviewed Frank Sedgman, the Aussie tennis player, and Norman Von Nida, the golfer, and Bobby Locke, the South African golfer, who visited our town while on a tour; I scraped near-acquaintance with such great runners as Herb McKinley, of Jamaica, at that time the greatest 400 metre runner ever; and with various others who were notable in their fields.

But eventually I began to realize more interesting things were happening out there, and my pursuit of sporting stars waned --- of course, in my day, and at my level, we never thought to interview the players after a cricket or Rugby match, allowing their performances to speak for them --- but my obsessive interest in the world of sports has never entirely disappeared.

I began to watch Wimbledon on TV right from the moment I went to England in 1960,--- I listened to it on the radio in the early fifties ---and have missed hardly a year of it since --- cursing the American commentators for their petty volubility. Until the last few months when I stopped buying newspapers, the first thing I looked at in the daily newspapers were the sports pages.

So that is my defence for supporting this socially regressive area of human life. I know full well that if we called things by their right name, we would refer o Djokovic, Federer and Nadal as sales people for their various sponsors. I know that.

But I still love watching them at play. And this morning I watched every ball of the five hours and 53 minutes of the remarkable --- indeed, one might say epic --- Aussie Open final between Djokovic and Nadal.

I know Nadal is a nice boy, modest and well-spoken off he court, but his postures on the court put me off. At one moment in the fifth set, he seemed to be grasping towards victory with such ferocious obsessiveness that I found it quite off-putting, and was finally glad he lost.

He was, however, a gracious loser, one of the things you have to learn if you are to be a real champion.

It was the third or fourth morning I got up to watch the Aussie Open, and I am relieved it is all over, and I can get back to sleeping, like a more or less normal human being.

Normal, did I say?

My Log 286 : First Nations/government summit leads to a plethora of expressions of goodwill, obscuring a lack of anything specific

Shawn Atleo in his tribal costume Ecotrust Canada via Flickr

I don’t remember ever having fallen asleep twice in response to a political speech, but I managed it yesterday when Stephen Harper addressed the Summit, as it was called, between the First Nations and the government. While watching it on TV I nodded off during Harper’s initial presentation; I was happy when CPAC repeated the speeches later in the day, and listened attentively enough when Harper began to speak, but what do you know, I fell asleep again before he finished.

My friends often tell me I am one of those people for whom the glass is half empty, as distinct from those optimists for whom the glass is always half full. But frankly, as I heard this improbable meeting droning on, I have to confess my glass was not just half empty: it was flat out empty. For National Chief Shawn Atleo, in contrast, who had organized this meeting, the glass was positively overflowing, with optimism. Oh, well, I can hardly blame him, for having got Harper and his whole Cabinet to visit him and his native chiefs, Atleo had to get something out of it, and one could tell from Harper’s anodyne presentation that nothing much was forthcoming, if anything.

Atleo said the First Nations were making a solemn commitment to a new beginning in their relationship with Canada and the Crown, and added, “and we must not fail.” The first thing was to repair the trust between the two sides, that has been broken, and this meeting was the beginning of that long journey.

Okay, no one could argue with that, I guess. Atleo, giving a little historical background, said the Indian Act in 1876 was “built on a disgraceful premise of our inferiority.” Numerous signposts had since been erected testifying to the fact that the Act had “failed our people”, including the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, whose sensible recommendations, arising from their thorough investigation of the actual situation, have been totally ignored for 16 years by succeeding governments.

Just how Atleo can ever have hoped for a new beginning from Harper and his gang of right-wing ideologues is a mystery to me. Harper’s main adviser on Aboriginal questions has been Tom Flanagan, a Calgary professor, and Goldwater Republican who has written two books recommending a policy of assimilation, and its inevitable privatization of the collective indigenous culture, without having ever been in an Aboriginal community in Canada. Behind him is a whole range of academics and rightwing journalists who, having given some attention to the subject, have unanimously declared discovery of a path that, to them, is devastatingly novel, that is, assimilation, a remedy that they show no signs of recognizing is the very policy that has landed the Aboriginal people in their present parlous state.

Anyway, back to the meeting. Elaborate tributes had to be paid to Harper, as Prime Minister, ignoring the fact that the three ministers who spoke, John Duncan, Indian Affairs, Leona Agglukkaq, Health, and Peter Penashue, Intergovernmental affairs, had nothing to say except to recite the government’s noble works and good intentions in this field. Sixty-five land claims agreements signed in the last six years, they said, so much money spent on this and that. Of course no one mentioned that some 800 land claims are still dragging their asses through the system, that while the urgent demand for houses on Aboriginal communities numbers 45,000 --- urgent demand! --- but last year some 1400 were built. Inconvenient stuff, these facts.

Jody Wilson-Rayboult, AFN regional chief for BC, gave a nod to the potential for development of Aboriginal businesses, but said that to release those energies would require something more than the “impoverished concept of government” that flows from the Indian Act. This had led to the government’s idea that handing over Indian Affairs programmes to the Indian bands to administer was equivalent to self-government. But she said, no, sir. This was just the latest in a history of colonial attitudes, which must end. Speaking directly to Harper, she said, “You cannot legislate self-gvernment for us.”

Ovide Mercredi, former national chief (and one whose independent thinking was not to the government’s liking) said his purpose at this meeting was to speak for the Treaties. If the Treaties were properly understood, they could become the powerful force for a renewal of First Nations life in Canada. He quoted an elder who, when asked what he thought of how things were going, said, “Act Indian, not Indian Act.” (This was the second remarkable quote from an elder we had heard: Atleo had recalled how his grandmother had seized his hand when she heard Harper’s apology for the horrors of the residential school system, and said, “Grandson, they are beginning to see us.”)

Ovide quoted the well-known judgment of Lord Denning in a case brought by some First Nations people in a desperate attempt to stop repatriation of the constitution in 1982, which was proposed without any mention of Aboriginal rights or titles. Denning said he could see no reason why the First Nations should distrust the government of Canada, but if any such thing were to occur, they should know that their rights and freedoms were guaranteed by the Crown, and no Parliament would be able to lessen the worth of these guarantees, which would be honoured by the Crown in right of Canada “as long as the sun shines and the rivers flow, and this promise should never be broken.”

Ovide was the only speaker who brought his audience to its feet in spontaneous applause: he added that, if necessary, “we” would go to Britain again. “That is not a threat,” he said, “but a statement of our commitment to defend our rights and titles.”

Matthew Coon Come, another former national chief who is now Grand Chief of the Cree Grand Council of Quebec, told delegates that his group had found it advantageous to enter into alliance with the province of Quebec, and said the province’s Plan Nord, for development of the lands that once had been recognized as Cree homeland, provided a superb opportunity for the Crees to win contracts and develop the skills needed for them to take part in the exciting work ahead. Economic progress, which the Crees were experiencing, and governance,were two sides of the same coin, he said. Reform in the economic field cannot succeed unless there is reform in the field of governance.

The meeting then adjourned, for reasons unexplained, into private session, where various workshops were undertaken, on which the most perfunctory reports were delivered at the closing ceremony four hours later.

Later still, at a press conference, some journalists were able to ask a few probing questions of the participants: the most interesting of these came when Minister Duncan said that in the workshops and in their previous legislation, they had established shared priorities with the AFN. “We have accomplished what we set out to do,” he said. “We have re-established our relationship.” He posited the First Nations Land Management scheme as a signpost leading to a better future, handing over to First Nations that asked for it control of their lands, and set up a system for “sharing the wealth” from heir lands. This, he said, was already accepted by 55 First Nations, and it effectively took them outside one-quarter of the provisions of the Indian Act.

Under questioning, as to the meaning of “sharing the wealth”, did this mean they would have royalties, or simply jobs? Duncan said their primary focus was on job training, and as the questioner remarked that people were asking how there could be a profitable diamond mine alongside the social disaster of Attawapiskat, Dunan was called away by his officials, and drifted off.

When Atleo was asked the same question, he said the relationship with the federal government should be based on “partnership, sharing and trust. It means getting away from the Indian Act, and we can see that Canada is willing to work with us in this new relationship.” A questioner asked how he could be so positive about this new relationship when, out of the other side of its mouth, as it were, the federal government was vigorously defending more than 100 court cases taken to challenge their controls of Indian life; he had to admit this was an anomaly, but one that they would have to work on to improve.

It was notable that Prime Minister Harper did not speak at the final session, although he was there to mop up the many accolades delivered in his direction by other speakers. And as far as I could tell, this “new relationshop”, at least in the minds of the government, is simply the same old relationship, warmed over, and with a few steps towards privatization that remind one strangely of the “termination policies” once tried to such devastating effect in the United States.

Still, one can’t blame Atleo for trying, I guess.

My Log 285: Aljazeera screens shocking film based on CSIS interrogation of child-soldier Omar Khadr when he was 16

Image via WikipediaKhadr when found on the battlefield Image via WikipediaImage by matt.hintsa via Flickr

Yesterday Aljazeera TV broadcast a film called Four Days in Guantanamo that is of essential interest to Canada. It is based on the videos of the interrogation by CSIS agents of Omar Khadr when he was 16. The Canadian agents at first pretended to be there to protect the kid’s interests --- from the Americans, evidently --- but after a first day when the interviews were relatively smooth, the child lbegan to insist that the interrogators were not really ready to protect him, and kept asking them for assurances that they would do so --- assurances they refused to give him.

When the interrogators withdrew, the child burst into tears, and moaned over and over, “Oh, mother, oh, mother….”

The next day the interrogators were reduced to appealing to him to help them, saying that if the interview continued as it was going, they would be harmed within their unit, an appeal that an observing clinician regarded as “psychological abuse”.

Also commenting on the interviewing technique was a former US interrogator who had since given up in disgust what he had once done enthusiastically; and two or three other former inmates of Guantanamo, who had shared cells with Khadr until they were repatriated to Britain at the request of their government, something the Canadian government has steadfastly refused to do.

An important part of the evidence of the boy’s state of mind mind was that at the beginning he confessed to thinking of Canada as his home, and said he wanted to get back there --- he was born in Canada, after all, so that leaves the government with even less reason to have treated him as some kind of visiting alien, as they have done, shamelessly ---- and his insistence, right from the beginning, that he did not do what the Americans have insisted that he did do, which was to throw a grenade and kill a US serviceman.

In fact, the film shows a shot of the moment he was found, lying with a huge hole in his chest, his body covered in shrapnel, in a room full of dead people, covered with debris, at the very moment, according to the film, when the Americans were claiming he was throwing a grenade.

When the interrogators said his mistake had been to be in the room with the other Al Queda personnel --- all of whom were killed in the firefight, as far as I could tell --- he insisted that it was his father’s decision to place him in the room, not his own. The impression left with me was that the child was far from being a convinced acolyte of Al Queda, as he has been treated by the government.

Finally, the film records that to avoid the virtual certainty of receiving a 40-year sentence from the military tribunal that tried him, the young man, by this time in his mid-twenties, pleaded guilty to everything he was charged with under a plea bargain in which he received an eight-year sentence. The first year of that was to be served in Guantanamo, after which he has to be transferred to Canada, where --- the film did not actually say this --- it is understood he would serve perhaps three years more of his sentence before being released for good behaviour.

The last news on that is the transfer, although it was seheduled forlast October, has not yet taken place, which makes one wonder whether the Canadian government has not reneged on the deal it accepted as part of their citizen’s plea bargain.

Khadr is the last citizen of a Western country still held in Guantanamo, and the only Westerner whose government has refused to ask for his extradition. Many others have since been freed, and are living freely in their home countries, such as the two Britain former cellmates who appeared in the film. One of these was arrested at the same time as Khadr, and he gave evidence to the effect that when they fell into the hands of the Americans at the Bagram air base prison, the kid was treated by the Americans more harshly than other prisoners, was covered in shrapnel, and was in terrible physical shape.

This is a shocking story, and it exhibits the amorality and obsessive bias of our government only too clearly. It leaves one wondering how such a ruthless, obsessed mob ever got elected to run Canada.

For all I know, this film may already have been broadcast by the

CBC. I have asked them if they have ever screened this film, but have so far not received a reply.

I am indebted to a web site called For the Love of Freedom for the quotes filling in more of the recent background to the Khadr story:

"After his capture, Omar was detained at the notorious Bagram Air Base, where he was subject to inhumane interrogation and torture from the moment he regained consciousness. From Bagram, at the age of 16 Omar was moved to Guantanamo Bay. Here he was further subjected to harsh interrogation methods, including prolonged shackling in stress positions, solitary confinement for extended periods, beatings, and explicit threats of rendition to other countries for the purposes of torture.

"Despite the fact the he was barely a teenager at the time of his incarceration, he was not afforded any of the typical considerations for juvenile offenders, such as repatriation or being segregated from the general adult population. For much of his incarceration he was not officially charged, nor was he permitted to speak to his family or even a lawyer. Khadr was repeatedly interrogated by Canadian government officials and CSIS agents, who turned their findings over to U.S. prosecutors to aid with the conviction of Khadr, despite the fact that there were no assurances that he would not face the death penalty. This was deemed illegal in a unanimous 2008 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada, who also ordered the videotapes of Khadr’s interrogation be released. The tapes were dramatic, at times showing a crying Khadr pleading to be killed and begging the Canadian interrogators to protect him.

"After an unsuccessful appeal by the government in 2009, in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled for the third time that the participation of the Canadian government in Khadr’s interrogations was illegal, stating:

" 'The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing the fruits of the interrogation would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.'

"In 2010, Khadr pled guilty to multiple war crimes as part of a plea deal worked out with the United States. Many saw this as justification for the horrible mistreatment he suffered as a teenager. Ultimately, however, it does not matter whether Khadr threw the grenade that fateful day or not – no crime is ever justification for a government to abuse the rights of a citizen. If our rights fail to protect us when we are vulnerable, when we need them the most, do they even exist at all?

"As part of his plea deal, Khadr was slated to be repatriated to Canada in October 2011 to serve out the duration of his sentence. However, more than 3 months has passed since he was eligible to be transferred, and there has been no concrete movement to begin the process to bring him home. Both the Canadian and U.S. governments claim there is no wilful foot-dragging, and blame the delay on complicated legal process. Apparently the issue is that the United States government is required to certify that Canada is a fit place to send a convicted terrorist, Canada will not permit Khadr to attack the U.S., and that Canada retains control over its prison system. This statement comes on the heels of the massive joint border security agreement signed by both governments. It is difficult to ascertain why the U.S. would sign an agreement of that nature with a country it doesn’t think is in control of its prisons, or would potentially allow a convicted terrorist to attack the U.S. An American official familiar with the case has been quoted in the press as saying the reason for the delay is 'your country (Canada) doesn’t want him back' ".

Link of the Day:Jan 17 2012: How the Conservatives became the party of Big Oil: an illuminating article in The Tyee.ca by Murray Dobbin, reveals why Harper is demonizing anyone who opposes the tar sands development. and why the fight against this appalling development is growing increasingly hard to pursue.(nastier all the time); and why Harper, with his policy of sending oil to China, shows the lack of a national energy policy, as well as his lack of interest in being a truly national leader. Read it here.

My Log 284: Aljazeera shows the way in inviting leftist commentators to their studios to describe the state of the world

Judy Rebick Image via Wikipedia

A few days ago I heard a panel discussion of a kind I never expected to hear on TV: three leftists were engaged by Aljazeera to discuss the American economy, and in particular the drastic and growing imbalance between rich and poor. This happened on an excellent programme offered by this network every day, called Inside Story.

I have been complaining for years at the refusal of our Canadian networks to give equal space --- or any space at all --- to people of a leftist persuasion. That is especially true of the CBC --- actually the only channel I watch --- which has established its own favored groups of people who are repeatedly called to comment on events. These groups are overwhelmingly rightist in their orientation. For example, Peter Mansbridge is always interviewing Andrew Coyne, Chantel Hebert, and another guy whose name escapes me --- it used to be Alan Gregg --- he calls them “Canada’s most-watched political panel.” Coyne and Gregg are self-confessedly supporters of the Tory party, having worked in their interest for many years. Hebert is neatly positioned between the parties, a rank centrist, and of other favored panelists on other programmes, only Jim Stanford, an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers Union, seems to have thea magic leftist jelly that recommends itself to the CBC brass.

I am not saying any of these people are not competent in what they do, just that the overwhelming political orientation of them all is right-wing. I think it behooves the network to tell us when they employ people who have been or are, committed to a particular political party. For example, Tom Flanagan, once an adviser to Stephen Harper, is a rabid right-winger, whose origins were as a Goldwater republican. He has written two books about Canada’s native policies, without ever having been in a native community.

I wrote this once before, suggesting all sorts of left-leaning people who should be seen at least on an equal basis along with these favored ones, people like James Laxer, Mel Watkins, Murray Dobbin, Naomi Klein, Judy Rebick, and many others, each of whom would give us more valuable commentary on the state of the nation than the appalling Rex Murphy, the darling of CBC’s National News. On that occasion much to my surprise, my suggestion was reprinted by the Centre for Poiicy Alternatives. But of course, even that had no effect: the same old dreary groups are still whistled up to give us their same dreary commentaries that are usually so divorced from the real problems of the nation.

The discussion on Aljazeera between Cornel West, a leading, left-leaning black intellectual in the US, who made no bones about the fact that the US, far from being a democracy, is actually an oligarchy, Barbara Ehrenreich, a leftist writer who has written some of the most important books critical of American capitalism and its nefarious works, and Tavis Smiley, author of a recent devastatingly informative report on the US imbalance, was like a breath of fresh air, allowing the commentators to pin their audience down with pitiless facts about how screwed the US system has become, and how dangerous it is now to the livelihoods of even people who once considered themselves middle class and untouchable.

We need more of this kind of stuff, and I think Aljazeera could serve as a kind of model to our programmers, because day after day they summon up authorities on Middle Eastern affairs especially who are unknown to Western audiences, but who have challenging things to say about the state of affairs in global politics.

Many Sundays they have a programme call Café which gathers a rich collection of well-informed, usually youngish, people in a Tunisian cafe, and lets them go, saying whatever it is that is on their minds. Very often they are shouting each other down, so enthusiastic are that at this opportunity to speak their minds. But I find this, among other programmes, immensely informative about the real state of affairs in these nations whose realities have for so long been disguised from us behind a mountain of Western waffle.

My Log 283: So, we meet again, Dr. Tuli: A brilliant young doctor saves my sight, as he did six years ago.

I have been sitting here since the beginning of December, immobilized to all practical purposes, by a lack of sight in my left eye. This follows discovery of a detached retina, unfortunately my second, since I had a similar problem in the right eye in 2005.

Fortunately for me, in both cases I have benefited from the brilliant and dedicated surgery of Dr.Raman Tuli, the leading retinal expert in Ottawa.

I learned during my last encounter with this mysterious ailment that the essence is to discover it, and have it treated as early as possible. On my first run around this I succeeded, more by good luck than good management, in doing just that. In 2005, troubled by some sort of strange spot on my eye, I went to the Emergency Room at the Ottawa General, expecting it could be cleared up by a couple of drops of something or other. To my surprise, the emergency doctor declared I had a detached retina, and transferred me upstairs to the Ottawa Eye Institute, where I was examined by two doctors who each came to the same conclusion, “You have a detached retina,” and a third who added, “We need the retinal doctor for this.” And so arrived the ineffable Dr. Tuli, who explained to me that the treatment involved, first, injecting some gas into the eye to reestablish the retina in its correct position, and second, to zap it with a lazer beam to reconnect it. That was achieved by 3 pm on the same day, a relatively painless experience, but one that, within two weeks or so resulted in my getting my full sight back.

This time, concerned that I had what seemed like a detached retina, on a Monday I phoned the opthalmologist who looks after my eyes, whose staff more or less shrugged me off, telling me I could not get an appointment until a week hence. The last thing his receptionist said before signing off was, “If you can’t see anything, go to the hospital.” Is this what might be called concerned care by a doctor? I don’t think so.

I thereafter made a mistake. I tried to get through the week, and then undertake my appointment, but had to surrender and go to the Emergency room at the General on the following Friday. There I was given the unsurprising news that I had a detached retina, and an appointment to turn up for a further examination the next day, Saturday afternoon. At that appointment in the Eye Institute, I was examined by a young intern, who said I would have to be handed on to the retinal doctors. The doctor involved was a very smartly dressed young man of Middle Eastern origin, a Dr. El Kandary, if I remember correctly, who looked at my eye, and before checking out for the weekend, set up an appointment for me on the following Monday for surgery by Dr. Tuli. “I’m sorry the news is bad for you,” he said. “Your problem cannot be settled with a mere shot of the lazer. It needs full surgery on the eye.”

When I turned up at the Riverside on Monday and mentioned I had been seen by Dr. El Kandary, one of the support staff said, “Oh, he’s finished with us now. He is going back home to Kuwait. He has taken his whole training here with us, and now he can’t wait to get back home to his family, who left a few months ago.” Where, no doubt, he will become an important addition to their medical staff, thanks to expert Canadian training.

As I waited for Dr.Tuli I began to realize how fortunate I had been to be squeezed into his schedule. When he arrived he began to work his way through a thick pile of patient files, and as all the people waiting with me filed in and out of his surgery I began to marvel at the responsibility this doctor was undertaking with every patient. In essence, he was saving all of us from a future of at least partial blindness. Six years before, one of his nurses had told me he was the youngest of four or five doctors who worked on retinal problems, but because the others were older, and less inclined to undertake a huge burden of work, Dr. Tuli was undertaking most of the load. Six years before, a visit to his modest surgery in Nepean showed me how huge was this burden of patients, and the evidence this time seemed to indicate it had not grown any less in the intervening years.

Dr. Tuli performed a brief surgery on my eye, conducted under a local anaesthetic, and told me to go to his surgery the next day for a check up. They wouldn’t allow me out of the Riverside by myself: apparently there are legal restrictions against allowing patients to roam the countryside under the influence of whatever drugs they may have poured into you for such an operation, and I had to phone a friend to come and pick me up.

The next day, in his private surgery, I was able to judge that Dr.Tuli had prospered in the six years since I had last come under his care. He had moved into a very much more posh office, and given himself the name of the Retinal Centre of Ottawa, along with one other doctor, presumably doing the same kind of work. Once again, of course, there was a crush of people waiting to be served by the good doctor. When I got to see him he declared that my eye was “looking good” and asked me to return to the Riverside the following Monday, when he said he would give me “a little lazer treatment.” I told him I wanted him t know how very much I appreciated what he was doing for me, and how I thought his skills were amazing. Dr. Tuli is not a particularly gregarious man (a roll of 25 comments on the internet by his patients testifies that most of of them find him slightly too reserved for their liking), and in face of my compliment he sort of waved it aside with an embarressed shrug, held out his hand, and shook me out of his office.

The folliwing week he did his promised “little lazer treatment.” It turned out not to be the sharp, brief jab he had given me six years before, but an excruciating full-blown grinding away at my eye for what must have been almost a minute, a procedure that knocked the stuffing out of me for at least an hour. Fortunately, I had taken my friend along this time, in case I needed someone to show me the way home.

Okay, that was six weeks ago: what follows all this treatment is that a large black blob hangs over one’s eye, a blob that diminishes very slowly day by day. I had been told by one of Dr.Tuli’s nurses that it would take six weeks for me to recover my full sight. It is almost six weeks now, and I still have a smallish black blob hanging over my eye: I am hoping they are as good as their word, and that the blob is not far from disappearing.

Meantime, I feel like repeating the invocation I pronounced six years ago after my first experience of a detached retina.

All hail to Dr. Tuli! I wrote at that time, and this time I repeat it, with knobs on. I feel that I owe an immense amount to this taciturn young doctor with his remarkable skills. And if he is embarrassed to have me say so in public, I don’t care. The guy is a lifesaver, and I am prostrate before him in my gratitude. Thanks a lot, Dr Tuli, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart.

My Log 282: Bertie Wooster’s instincts confirmed by modern science: Jeeves’s brain was improved by eating fish

Cover of P.G. Wodehouse

An innocent news item I read the other day, that eating fish helps to stave off Alzheimer’s Disease, has reinforced the wisdom and prescience of one of my supreme literary heroes, Bertie Wooster, the employing side of the Wooster and Jeeves partnership immortalized in dozens of inimitable books by the ineffable P.G. Wodehouse.

Readers of the Wooster/Jeeves canon will know exactly what I am referring to, because if one thing is clear from the Jeeves books it is the faith that Bertie has in Jeeves’s amazing intellectual capacities. Bertie throughout the books, whenever he is up against some insoluble problem --- such as how to escape the clutches of the novelist Florence Craye, to whom he was once engaged, and once again finds himself squarely in her sights for another shot at matrimony --- and there is no way out of it by withdrawal or denial, as Bertie only too well knows because Florence is one of those dashed determined, jolly girls who, her mind made up, will not bother to ask her prospective partner, but will simply announce that the betrothal has taken place, and will brook no denial ---- from such predicaments Bertie has been rescued by Jeeves countless times.

And, as anyone knows who is familiar with the canon, Jeeves’s brain --- or grey matter, as Bertie describes it --- never functions better than after Jeeves has partaken of fish.

Thus, it can now be seen that generations ahead of modern science, Bertie Wooster --- working probably as much on instinct as actual knowledge --- unequivocally propagated the medicinal, restorative qualities of fish, to which he attributed most of Jeeves’s most spectacular brain waves.

That modern science has now confirmed Bertie’s findings in the most unequivocal terms certainly comes as no surprise to me or I am sure to many other of the thousands and tens of thousands who worship at the feet of the said Wooster. It is a triumph won in the face of skepticism expressed by most of Bertie’s acquaintances, for whenever he decided to take the bull by the horns, and himself propose some solution to some immense problem or other, his friends were never slow to denigrate his capacity, and therefore his brain power. It may be true that he always had, in the end, to call upon Jeeves’s grey matter for the actual solution, but one begins to wonder, in light of this new information, whether Bertie may not have been so absorbed by scientific inquiry as to give his friends the impression that he had a limited attention span, and not that much concentrated grey matter.

His repeated affirmations in the value of fish as a restorative to the brain surely will put all these doubters to flight, and future readers of the canon will be able to reinterpret the Wooster stories in a totally new light. Hopefully the last has been heard of the ridiculous idea that Bertie was a brainless twit, totally dependent on his manservant to chart his course through life.

Personally, I am revivified by this discovery, and given to reflect about the sometimes cruel verdict of history being at last corrected as Bertie takes his rightful place among the great visionaries of our time.

Arundhati Roy Image via Wikipedia

Link of the Day: Dec 3 2011 Arundhati Roy, after visiting the Occupy movement in the US, gives another remarkable interview to Arun Gupta, published in The Guardian.

(“I hope that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.

(“…We ought to say, ‘Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq,’ ‘Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan,’ ‘Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine.’ The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.

(“…We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment – the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living – are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.”)

My Log 281: Runaway Train, by Konchalovsky, one of the greatest movies of the modern cinema

Andrei Konchalovsky Image via Wikipedia

It is some years since I first watched the 1985 movie Runaway Train and decided it is a modern classic. Last night I watched it again with a friend, and we were both again convinced that it is a masterly piece of film-making by the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky.

The story of how this movie came to be made is almost as remarkable as the movie itself. Konchalovsky, born in 1937 of a highly productive cultural family of poets, musicians, film-makers, actors and the like, first studied to be a concert pianist, and only later took to film-making,. He was quite successful in the Soviet system, producing among other epics, a wonderful TV series called Siberiad, but probably chafing under the restrictions of the Soviet system, he went to the United States in 1980, where he spent ten years on various, mostly poorly regarded projects. One has a sense of his hanging around looking for work when he was hired by two wealthy Israelis who had specialized mostly in schlocky films of action, to make a movie from a script written by the great Japanese director Kurosawa.

The resultant film, Runaway Train, was nominated for an Academy Award, both for the wonderful acting performances by Jon Voight and Eric Roberts, and as one of the best movies of the year.

On the surface, Runaway Train is simply an action movie about a train comprised of four linked locomotives, whose engineer has a heart attack, and before falling off the train applies the emergency brakes, whose power is overcome by the greater power of the four engines working in consol. But although this aspect of the film, as the train races through the snow-laden Alaska landscape is memorable and amazingly beautiful, the film is much more than that.

It is rather a struggle to the death between two essentially bad men, a long-term prisoner played by Voight, so recalcitrant that he had been confined in a welded-shut jail cell for three years until a judge ordered him released into the general prison population; and the prison warden, an evil, vindictive man who regards his prison charges as worse than beasts, and treats them accordingly.

When Manny, the prisoner, escapes for the third time from the dreadful prison, with the aid of a foolish younger man played by Eric Roberts, the warden vows to bring him back and beat him into submission. Roberts, as young Buck, having helped Manny escape, suddenly decides to go along with him, and the two men, after a long trek through the snow, board this train at a changing yard, and find themselves isolated aboard a train that is running out of control. A third person, a young railway worker played beautifully by Rebecca de Mornay, proves to be on the train as well, having been asleep when the accident happened to the engineer.

The movie is enobled by the amazing performance of Voight as a man brutalized by life, but elevated by such determination never to surrender that even his cruelty seems almost acceptable as a weapon in his struggle against the evil establishment that has always confined him.

When Buck fantasizes about making it to Las Vegas, and disporting himself with money and women, Manny reads him a stern lecture, tells him he will do no such thing but instead will get a job, some small job, like cleaning toilets, and he will stick to it for the rest of his life, as he realizes now that he himself should have done.

Manny dominates and ridicules the younger man ferociously, and when an injured hand prevents him from making the attempt to reach the front engine, where they could push the button that would bring the train to a halt, he sends Buck out to do it for him, and when he fails --- the job is virtually impossible --- he refuses to let him back in the cab. When the young woman succeeds in getting the door open and Buck, totally exhausted from his effort, falls into the cab, Manny kicks him and assaults him brutally, leading to some of the most moving scenes I have ever seen on the screen as Buck gathers himself together to accept that this man he has always idolized, is not really his friend. “I thought we wuz partners,” he says pathetically. Roberts carries this off superbly, and there follows an intensely moving moment when all three people, hurtling to what seems like a certain death, wordlessly come together until they are clutching each other, as they sit in a circle rocking to the movement of the train.

They are rescued from this moment of despair and consolation by hearing the pursuing helicopter of the prison warden, who sends a man down to board the train --- the man smashes to his death --- and then himself accepts the shouted challenge of Manny --- who has by this time made it to the front engine, and has it in his power to stop the train ---- to come and fight it out with him. In the struggle that follows, Manny handcuffs the warden just out of reach of the button that could stop the train. He himself has no intention of stopping the train, because he realizes that would represent defeat, imprisonment, return to the incarceration he vowed he had escaped for the final time. And as a clashing masterpiece by Vivaldi fills the theatre, Manny unhooks the front engine from the others, thus reducing the struggle to one just between him, the rebel, and the warden, the embodiment of authority. He climbs on to the roof of the train, speeding onwards to its inevitable crash, and his death, and raises his arms, almost as if in a posture of crucifixion, as he races through the snow to his gloriously victorious death.

What an amazing movie, using so brilliantly the medium of an action-packed drama, to plumb so profoundly the extremities of the human condition.

Konchalovksy stayed in the United States for almost ten years before returning to Russia, where he has established a successful production house making material for cinema and TV. Among his recent productions have been biographies of such Russian icons as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Shostakovich. He has found time to marry five times and produce seven children. He acts in movies, directs operas, and is recognized as one of the leading figures in Russian culture.

I wish Stephen Harper could see this movie before he presses on with his insane policy of building more prisons. Not that it would ever reach him.

My Log 280: Tom Kent, my old boss, bites the dust at age 89: a man of remarkable abilities

In writing about Tom Kent, who died on Nov 15, the man who offered me my first serious job in Canadian journalism back in1955 when he was editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, I cannot pretend to any great degree of objectivity. The reason for that is I have never really liked any boss I ever worked for, and I cannot pretend that I particularly liked him, either.

Nevertheless, I do have to pay tribute to him for his somewhat remarkable abilities. He could write a coherent and often persuasive editorial article quicker than anyone I have ever known. Later, after he left journalism, he became a senior adviser to the Liberal governments of Canada, first headed by Lester Pearson, later by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and in that capacity he is credited with having been the major influence in creation of Medicare as a federal program, and such social programs as the Canadian Pension Plan. In this work he was obviously drawing on his background as, I believe, a working class boy growing up in England, no doubt influenced in his youth by the British Labour Party,

Some obituarists in the last few days have paid him glowing tributes, claiming him to have been passionate, fearless and principled. I wouldn’t know anything about that. I have to judge him as the boss who presided over my real entry into Canadian journalism from 1955 to 1957. (I say “real,” because before that I put in three months as a wage slave for the Thomson organization on a newspaper, if it may be called that, called The Northern Daily News in Kirkland Lake, Ontario.)

The Winnipeg Free Press was a somewhat eccentric outfit when I worked there in the 1950s. I often say it was regarded as a great newspaper by more people who have never read it than any newspaper on earth. In my view it did not merit such accolades. But I enjoyed working there, and my enjoyment probably had something to do with the fact that I had few contacts with Tom Kent while there. The city editor, Albert Boothe, was a prince among men --- really the only boss I ever worked for whom I unreservedly esteemed.

One of my best Winnipeg Free Press stories concerned a man called Diplock, one of those old-time journalists who was living out his final days on the job by sitting at a corner typewriter in the vast newsroom, undertaking the occasional job of rewriting some item from the opposition Winnipeg Tribune that somehow or other the Free Press had failed to cover. One day Diplock disappeared, simply failed to turn up, without a word of explanation to anyone. Eventually it became known he was in Britain, where he apparently remained for two years. Eventually, however, he turned up one day, sat at the same typewriter as before, and waited for someone to notice him. Albert Boothe noticed him, picked up a Tribune item that needed a quick rewrite, walked over to him, placed the item before him, and said, as if he had never disappeared, “Could you give us a few words on that, please?”

The farming magazine run by the Free Press had its typewriters along the back of the newsroom. Every day, a strange little woman known as Jeannie came into the newsroom, took up her place along the back row of typewriters, unwrapped her several layers of clothing, then sat down and typed away for half an hour or an hour before wrapping up again and going off into the Winnipeg streets. Who was she? Was she a staff member? Not at all: she was just a person who was working on some manuscript of her own, and whose use of the newspaper's typewriter had come to be accepted as part of the day’s proceedings.

Tom Kent was editor over the last days of a moribund Liberal provincial government (unless my memory betrays me), and his cogent editorials must have played a considerable part in its overthrow by the Conservative government of Duff Roblin.

My relationship with Kent grew somewhat tenuous after he emerged into the news room one day, found me free of work, told me that James Coyne, governor of the Bank of Canada, was about to get married, and asked me to phone him to confirm it. I phoned, and Coyne hung up in my ear. So --- I was still fairly fresh out of my upbringing in the determinedly egalitarian society of New Zealand --- I phoned Coyne back and told him I objected to his unnecessary rudeness. This, within minutes brought Kent storming out of his office to denounce me in public before the whole staff, a confrontation in which I seem to remember I gave almost as good as I got. But my reaction to the incident was, if this guy can’t even defend his own staff, what the hell use is he as a human being?

I left the Free Press the following summer, and moved to Montreal. I met Kent only once thereafter. I was reporting in London, England on a press conference he gave about immigration to Canada (he was working in that field for the federal government by that time.) I remember we were washing our hands in the washroom side by side, when he looked up and congratulated me on an article I had just written about Harold Wilson. He said I had him off perfectly, which (all modesty aside) was a pretty fair judgment.

Later I often thought it might be nice to approach him in his last years. But I never did it. I had approached him for work when he was appointed head of a Royal Commission on ownership in the Canadian press, but all I received back was a cold letter from a secretary telling me my letter was on file.

Years later, Kent wrote some articles in the Oitawa Citizen or Globe and Mail (I can’t remember which) suggesting changes to Canada’s attitude towards immigrants and citizenship. These followed the kerfuffle that arose when Canadian citizens who were living in Lebanon lined up expecting Canada to get them out of Lebanon during an Israeli invasion.

I thought Kent’s ideas for limiting the use naturalized Canadians could make of their status were tantamount of creating two or more classes of Canadian citizenship. I thought these ideas were berserk, and concluded his powers must be failing in his old age.

Nevertheless, I am ready to pay tribute to his favorable impact on his adopted country. If only everyone were to work as effectively for the general good, we would be a hell of a lot better nation.

My Log 279 Nov 20 2011 Arundhati Roy, like everyone else, prevented from mentioning Israel’s nuclear weapons on TV

Trident missile being launched from underwater. Image via Wikipedia

When I was looking up the quote by Arundhati Roy with which I ended my last post, made at an Occupy Wall Street meeting recently, I came across another thing she said in a recent speech that got me thinking about the state of freedom of the press, one of America’s supposedly cherished values.

Roy’s story was that when appearing on the Charlie Rose show on PBS on one occasion, he asked her if she believed India should have nuclear weapons. She replied, “No I don’t believe India should have nuclear weapons. I also don’t believe the United States should have nuclear weapons, and I don’t believe Israel should have nuclear weapons.”

Rose apparently cut her off quickly, saying, “That was not my question. My question was do you believe India should have nuclear weapons.”

She gave an identical reply: she said this went on for five minutes or so, “and in the end, they didn’t broadcast the programme.”

There can only be one reason for that: she mentioned the unmentionable subject in Western political discourse, which is that Israel has nuclear weapons. That a commentator like Rose should have made strenuous efforts to ensure that unmentionable subject was not mentioned, even to the point of censoring the item right out of his program, makes one wonder if in fact there is some widely understood ukase, handed down from on high, that has been adopted by all “responsible” American commentators, to the effect that Israel’s nuclear weapons should never be mentioned publicly. If that is true, it is shocking. And the evidence seems to suggest it is true. How many times, while some American representative is muttering away about how dangerous Iran is, and how destabilizing it would be for them to get nuclear weapons, how many times have I longed for some questioner to ask, “How about Israel’s nuclear weapons? Why do you never mention them? Is it not conceivable that an Iranian nuclear weapon might correct a dramatic power imbalance in the region?”

No one ever raises this question. I have never heard it raised in an interview with a Western powers spokesperson, although any journalist worth his salt should raise it as his or her first question, in my opinion.

As we all know, the unquestioned existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons is the hypocritical bomb lying at the heart of all Western policy in the region. They never objected when Israel got these weapons. They never objected when India and Pakistan got these weapons. Now they are threatening an outbreak of World War III if Iran should get them.

Talk about double standards!

My Log 278 Nov 19 2011 I move house: the hypocrites are spooked by the demos; capitalism reveals its essential cruelty and indifference to people

Bernie Sanders Image via Wikipedia

I have just spent the better part of two weeks moving house. Although I was told what a desirable tenant I would be, being older, and therefore more stable than the younger people, I was suddenly confronted one day with the news that the owner of the building in which I had my apartment, having previously lived in British Columbia, had decided to relocate to Ottawa, wanted to live in my apartment, and here, thank you very much, is your two months’ notice.

This came just after the students had arrived and filled up most of the places. However, being ever resourceful in such things, I started looking for a place on a Friday, and by Monday had decided to move to a two-bedroomed apartment in a high-rise building, just to make sure the same thing could not happen to me again.

So, for the first time, I find myself living on the fifth floor of a building with many dozens of tenants, with a swimming pool and a gym and an immense laundry room, on the 21^st floor, and with all manner of things you can and cannot do, in the general interests of the tenantry at large.

So far I like it. The hot water system is amazing: instanter, immediately one turns the tap; and the toilet whooshes away like a rocket machine.

And now, having put my remaining pictures (I sold most of them a year or so ago) back up on the walls, I have time to look around the world and see how things are going.

Some amazing things have taken place while I was preoccupied with establishing myself in a place that is right downtown in Ottawa.

Many things have puzzled me. For example, the panic that ensued when the Greek Prime Minister announced he would have a referendum on the proposed bailout for his country’s economic crisis. Has it not been an article of faith that the Western, capitalistic model of society is based on democratic decision of the citizens, and that this is what distinguishes it from draconian systems like dictatorships, communist or fascist, oligarchies, and the like? So how can these same propagandists for democracy raise such a hue and cry over a democratic vote on a proposal put forward by a bunch of economic technocrats? The very idea was not only frowned upon, but was met with panicked dismay, was said to be likely to scuttle any possibility of what these people call progress. In fact, the thing was so unthinkable that the Greek Prime Minister with this dangerous idea had to be removed from power, and this is exactly what has happened.

He has been replaced by a banker, or a collection of bankers. And the same thing has happened in Italy, where a group of banking technocrats have begun to impose the bankers’ favorite solution to all problems, which is to impose austerity on the living standards of the ordinary citizens.

That is one thing that has happened that has bewildered me somewhat. Another amazing revelation that literally set me back on my heels was that Bernie Sanders, the only socialist in the American political system, has managed to force out of the Federal Reserve in the United States information that that body was desperately anxious to hide: namely, that during the bailouts by which they prevented the whole capitalistic system from collapsing, the Federal Reserve put up --- wait for this, you’re scarcely going to believe this figure! --- $16 trillion dollars, paid out to bankers, individuals and government agencies in the United States and in some other countries. I am going to try to write that in figures.

$16,000,000,000,000. Would that be right?

It is an unimaginable figure, an amount of money that, I am quite sure, doesn’t really exist, except in the books of banks and government institutions. No one has ever had that much money, ever. But the enormity of what happened is even greater than I had imagined.

Let’s see: banks and insurance companies, and other similar agencies that have, all my life, ranked number one among by unfavorite demonic institutions, were granted sums in gazillions of dollars, for the most part without any conditions, to rescue them from their own horrendous mistakes that were caused by their own massive greed and lack of the qualities of citizenship. Meanwhile, the many hundreds of thousands of people who had been forced from their homes by these same institutions have been left to swelter, or freeze, depending on their location, without any aid of any kind. Many other consequences have been borne by the ordinary people: for example, education has been priced beyond the reach of everyone except the well-heeled, and food costs have spiraled upwards, as has the cost of living in general. Students leave university now crippled with a load of debt so huge that they probably are never going to be able to pay it off. And it has become common to hear people moan about how can a young couple ever aspire to owning a house?

It is too discouraging to go into all the many ways that ordinary people are stewing as a result of these machinations by the financial lords of creation.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been an impressive response to all this: that it should have spread to more than 900 cities around the world is an indication of how close people must be to saying: we have had enough. We need a huge change in this self-sustaining, criminal, greedy, appallingly amoral system of capitalist goverance. The only problem is that unlike the situation in Egypt, the movement has been unable to mobilize the milllions into street demonstrations in their support. That is the missing ingredient that would lead to the overthrow of the whole rotten system.

I can conclude this by quoting (not for the first time, as readers of this blog over the years will know) the Indian novelist and polemicist Arundhati Roy,who recently made a speech in New York to the Wall street occupiers. In response to the bleatings of the establishment media to the effect that the Occupy movement has no comprehensible objectives, she produced four objectives, which I support:

“They (the 1%) say that we don't have demands… perhaps they don't know that our anger alone would be enough to destroy them. But here are some things – a few 'pre-revolutionary' thoughts I had – for us to think about together:

“We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality. We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations. As 'cap-ist'" and 'lid-ites', we demand:

• An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health funds.

• Two, natural resources and essential infrastructure – water supply, electricity, health, and education – cannot be privatized.

• Three, everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare.

• Four, the children of the rich cannot inherit their parents' wealth.

“This struggle has re-awakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way, capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just 'human rights', and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to just tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.”

And so say all of us!