BOYCE'SPAPER

2012-02-07T07:07:00.002-05:00

Link of the Day, Feb 7 2012: Hillary Clinton (a strong candidate for the post of school marm to the world) says the Russian, Chinese veto of the Security Council resolution on Syria is shameful, deplorable, and a travesty.

Nothing, of course, like the more than 160 vetoes cast by the United States over the last few decades. Here is a partial list of them, from Jadilliya.com a Web site published in Arabic and English by the Arab Studies Institute, “committed to discussing the Arab world on its own terms.”

My Log 288 : Nagging sense of déjà vu in watching CBC documentary series on native Canadians

2012-02-03T20:11:00.003-05:00

I watched “8^th Generation”, the admirable CBC series on contemporary Canadian Aboriginal life, but with a nagging sense of déjà vu.

This series, expertly anchored by the youthful Wab Kinew, may not have had this effect on most viewers, to whom the subject would have been more or less new.

But I began to write about Canadian native people in 1968, to make films with and about then, to write books about their history and lives, and so many echoes came forth from these programmes of things that people told me more than 40 years ago, or conclusions I came to at that time, that I couldn’t help but be moved by a kind of sadness.

There certainly was something winning about the young people, their energy and hopefulness, their sense that if only they could get an education, they need not relive the traumas that have afflicted their parents. But I think I have to convict the programme’s producers of being too optimistic, of painting too rosy a picture, of in certain cases, not telling quite the whole truth.

For example, the way they described the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, signed by the governments of Canada and Quebec, with the Cree and Inuit people of northern Quebec in 1975, had more than a tinge of euphoria. To hear them tell it, this was a sort of model agreement, one that could be followed by other native groups around the country to their advantage.

In actual fact, it was an agreement that was brutally enforced by the governments, to such a point that the First Nations involved had no option but to sign what they were offered, and hope for something, because if they had refused to sign, they would have got nothing, nothing at all, and would have found a $16 billion hydro project being build across the length and breadth of their traditional lands, whether they liked it or not.

Like every other agreement that has been made with native groups in the last half century, they had to agree to the extinguishment of their rights and titles, which are, oddly enough, protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms --- in other words by the Canadian constitution.

The governments of every stripe have been adamant on this extinguishment as the bottom line for every agreement they have made. Why is it necessary? The evidence suggests it is not. When Toronto’s “tiny, perfect Mayor,” David Crombie, briefly strayed into federal politics, and was made Minister of Indian Affairs by Brian Mulroney, his first action on taking office was to ask 64 questions of his civil service, dealing with the actual way Canada’s government had fulfilled its constitutional responsibility as trustee for the interests of the native people. Those questions were never answered.

Of more relevance to this article, Crombie also struck a task force to advise him whether this extinguishment policy was necessary. The task force after an exhaustive investigation of the subject, advised him the extinguishment policy was not really necessary.

Within three months Crombie had been removed from office, generally supposed to have been undermined by his senior civil servants, who bristled at the idea that Canada might sally forth into the Indian world on a basis of genuine trust with its native partners.

When the James Bay Agreement was negotiated, the federal government’s need not to alienate the Quebec government took precedent over their constitutional responsibility to defend the interests of the Indians in Quebec. In fact, no Agreement would have been signed at all, if it had not been for the judgment in favor of the Aboriginal people made by Mr. Justice Malouf in the Quebec Superior Court, a judgment ordering Quebec not to trespass on the Indian lands, a judgment so powerful that the federal government put pressure on Quebec to enter into a serious negotiation with the native parties to the dispute.

To describe what arose from these negotiations as some sort of model for others to follow would be to pile injury on top of insult. On the other hand, there are lessons to be learned from what has happened since, For example, in recent years the Crees have knuckled under to the governmental pressures, have signed agreements with both governments, have been given many millions of dollars for their new obedience, and have managed to obtain for themselves limited powers of government that at least give them the illusion of having influence over the greater part of their traditional lands (so-called Category Three lands), and have been able to settle into a role as a sort of regional government that is far beyond the powers given to other native groups across the country. The cost of this --- what they have had to surrender in return for their millions of dollars --- is that they have had to sell their cherished, wild, magnificent Rupert river, to Hydro-Quebec, which is now engaged on the work of modifying it, and, in essence, destroying its intrinsic, irreplaceable qualities, Environemntal groups who have tried to save the Rupert have found the Crees, this time, to be on the side of the government, not that of the river. That is a sorry thing.

None of this downside to the James Bay Agreement made it into “8^th Generation,” the CBC film.

Another thing that rang a bell with me was the that the younger generation have heard enough about Indian problems, and are more interested in getting on with solutions to these problems. That is a conclusion I came to in about 1970, when I realized that by writing about their problems all the time, I was somehow missing something that was going on in native communities. (It was Harold Cardinal, head of the Alberta Indian Association, who identified at that time what he called “the problem problem”, that is, since most people identified “Indians” with “problems”, to keep harping on about their problems was merely to feed this particular stereotype.) I began to ask the young men who could speak English and were willing to translate for me to take me to their old people, where I found these aged and highly experienced, wonderfully skilful people were more than willing to keep me talking all day, so long as we were talking about things they thought were central to their lives. But then here, again, although I was glad to hear it mentioned, I had a certain sense of sadness this week that this was still worth mentioning after all these years.

Of course, there is a paradox at the centre of modern native life in Canada, and it is one that struck me forcibly forty years ago. I met so many young or youngish native people who were angry that they had been taught to despise the very fact of their Indianness, and were wondering how that had happened (the answer to that: they had been through a process of brainwashing, designed to destroy everything that meant anything to native people).

So it had become obvious that the first task at that time was for a new leadership that could revive the indigenous values on which they had been raised, and that the government had exerted every effort to destroy. It seemed to me that over the 1970s, 80s and 90s, that task was undertaken, and had been achieved to a considerable degree. What was also needed, going in lock-step with the revival of their indigenous beliefs, was a better education, so that they could confront the government machine that was trying to put them through the wringer. This was, and still is, the paradox: on the one hand, they needed to become more proudly native, embracing their values; on the other, they needed to embrace white man’s education just to enable them to defend themselves against the white man’s governance machine.

This is why, when many people seriously try to understand aboriginal people and their lives, there still is such a tendency to laud those who are more successfully assimilated to the white value system. This seems an almost inevitable consequence of where these people are at nowadays: this CBC series of films placed education at the centre of the desiderata for a beter native life. Ipso facto, they have a difficult road to travel between becoming successfully integrated into Canadian society, complete with their graditional values; and the assimilated future held out to to them by their improving mastery of white man’s education.

They need wise leaders to chart these courses. The CBC series revealed a great deal of self-awareness among their younger people, a necessary ingredient as they make this difficult journey.

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

2012-01-29T18:23:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-25T06:50:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-19T11:42:00.004-05:00

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' ".

2012-01-17T09:09:00.002-05:00

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

2012-01-15T10:14:00.002-05:00

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.

2012-01-12T14:25:00.003-05:00

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

2011-12-04T13:09:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-12-03T08:18:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-01T09:35:00.003-05:00

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

2011-11-24T12:52:00.002-05:00

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

2011-11-20T09:33:00.002-05:00

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

2011-11-19T09:59:00.003-05:00

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!

2011-11-12T07:56:00.002-05:00

Udi aloni Image by aavarnum via FlickrLink of the Day (2), Nov 12, 2011: An Israeli writer, Udi Aloni, brought up in the heart of Zionism, tells in salon.com the agonizing story of how Israel has gradually turned into an apartheid state, denying rights to Palestinians. “My father was implementing agrarian apartheid policies, and long before the occupation of 1967…” “…A couple of years ago I approached my ardently Zionist mom, a woman who carried a weapon for the Jewish community of Jerusalem in 1948, and asked her a simple question: ‘Mom, is all this apartheid?’ With the sigh of a betrayed lover she indicated that, yes, this is apartheid. My heart broke….”

2011-11-12T07:49:00.002-05:00

Bill Moyers Image via Wikipedia

Link of the Day (1): Nov 12 2011: Bill Moyers, in a remarkable article in
The Nation magazine, How Wall Street Occupied America, details the steps taken by the wealth-owners to take over the government and the running of the United States. It has all happened since 1971, and it has been a deliberate strategy run by major corporations, with heartbreaking results for the quality if American life.

2011-11-08T12:17:00.003-05:00

Joseph Stiglitz Image via WikipediaLink of the Day: Nov 8 2011: The last words of my book, Memoirs of a Media Maverick, published some years ago, were that I agree with Arundhati Roy the wonderful Indian writer, that the only globalization we can embrace is the globalization of dissent. I am therefore delighted to find Joseph E. Stiglitz, noted Nobel laureate and professor at Columbia University, coming to the same conclusion this week, in an article in Project Syndicate, A World of Ideas, in which he explains why the Occupy Wall Street movement protesters are pursuing aims that are essential for the survival of the human race.

Read this notable article, The Globalization of Dissent, here.

2011-10-28T08:18:00.002-04:00

Cairo University Image via Wikipedia Link of the Day: October 28 2011: A remarkably eloquent message has been sent from some activists in Cairo, of advice and encouragement to those in North America and elsewhere who are occupying the seats of financial power. It sets the whole movement, on both sides of the world, in a global context that makes a lot of sense. Dissent, and struggle, is all….

2011-10-18T08:12:00.001-04:00

Link of the day, Oct 18 2011: A series of charts published online by BusinessInsider, compiled from statistics by Henry Blodgett on October 11, shows what the Wall Street protesters are mad about. Read it here and get mad, too.

2011-10-17T08:09:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Link of the Day, October 17 2011: ‘The slogan of Occupy Wall Street is “We are the 99%.” So, who are the 1 per cent in Canada? A 2010 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) by Armine Yalnizyan documents “The Rise of Canada's Richest 1%.” There are 246,000 of them and their average income is $403,000. They hold 13.8 per cent of incomes, and pay some of the lowest taxes that the top 1 per cent have ever paid, historically.'

Read the facts here about our 1 percenters, in the article by Justin Podur in Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 556 October 16, The Logic of Occupy Wall Street for Canada. This establishes that inequalities in Canada have grown faster even than in the US, under recent Conservative governments.

2011-10-09T09:55:00.002-04:00

John Pilger (left) with Julian Assange...Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Link of the Day:October 9 2011: John Pilger brings us up-to-date on the international effort to smear Julian Assange and the revolution he brought to the media with his leaks of US classified documents. Read his article from The New Statesman of London.

My Log 277: “It’ll be the last time,” mutters Chris Hedges in face of Kevin O”Leary’s insults

2011-10-06T21:12:00.002-04:00

Chris Hedges: Image via Wikipedia
I came across a fascinating example this week of how the CBC’s love affaire with right-wing populists can deprive us of the diversity of opinion that the CBC was established to encourage.
I am not a watcher of the Lang and O’Leary exchange, but I happened on it while flicking the dial tonight, and came across the last few minutes of an interview they were doing with the redoubtable US social commentator Chris Hedges. He was explaining to O’Leary and Diana Buckner the objectives of the many thousands of people who have joined the Occupy Wall street movement. What he was saying would not come as any surprise to anyone whose eyes and ears are open to what is really happening in the recent economic meltdown, which has exposed so cruelly the corruption, greed and dysfunctionality of capitalism, but it all seemed to come as a new idea to O’Leary, who became so agitated as Hedges began with his impressive dismissal of the corporate mind-set that he interrupted testily by saying, “You sound like some leftist nut-bar.”
At this point, justifiably, Hedges said that normally he did not accept invitations to speak on television programmes that could be expected to engage in personal abuse. He was interested in discussing the issues. And he went on to say that corporations don’t produce anything….
“Oh, really?” said O’Leary, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Of course not, said Hedges. He was, he said, talking about the financial gamblers who appear to have taken over the economy, and continued with his root-and-branch denunciation.
“So you want to do away with all corporations?” blurted O’Leary. “Where are you going to get a job? What would you do with Goldman Sachs, for example?”
Hedges told him in words of one-syllable. They should be prosecuted, because their sale of mortgages to people whom they knew could never repay them, which they then gathered into funds whose failure they then bet on, was fraudulent.
Buckner thanked him for giving his views, and Hedges muttered, as he took his hearing instrument out of his ear, “It will be the last time.”
Now I am sure I am not alone in believing that Canadians would be much better served by hearing regularly from Chris Hedges, who has an eloquent and challenging criticism of American society, than they are by the ubiquity on CBC screens of Kevin O’Leary, with whose brash arrogance the CBC seems to have fallen in love since they discovered him in the Dragon’s Den program.
I can only speak personally, but I find everything about O’Leary, his persona, his opinions, his overbearing manner, to be extremely off-putting, especially his constangt reiteration that only money matters, that nothing else in life is important, an opinion so idiotic that it amazes me that the CBC can’t get enough of him.
If there is anybody with some sense among the CBC brass, he or she will recognize this exchange between O’Leary and Hedges as a warning sign that it is time for the corporation to rediscover the impartiality that once allowed them to broadcast the widest possible range of opinion, unfortunately now denied to us.

My Log 276:Documentary on “Experimental Eskimos” throws a sorry light on the arrogance, ignorance of Canada’s northern administration --

2011-09-29T00:20:00.001-04:00

Image via WikipediaI hardly know where to begin to write about the documentary film screened tonight by CBC --- The Experimental Eskimos. It dealt with the experience of three notable Inuit --- Petger Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak, and Eric Tagoona, --- who were especially chosen by educational experts in the north, because of their exceptional abilities, to be sent south for higher education. That the experiment had both positive and negative effects was shown by the film, directed by Barry Greenwald. But what has to be written first, I think, is that the positive results, such as they were, were political and formal; and the negative results were entirely, devastatingly, personal.

Allow me first to go back into history just for a moment. The great panjandrum of Canadian anthropology in the 1940s and before, was a man called Diamond Jenness, a man born in New Zealand (like quite a few others who have become prominent in the affairs of aboriginal Canadians).

He wrote a five-volume study of the Eskimos, as they were then known, and in 1968 published his conclusions in a slim chapbook. Whatever his immense accomplishments in his earlier life, the conclusions he published in this book must remain as a blot on his career. He advocated that there was only one solution to the problems of Canada’s Inuit, which was to move them south, where they would be able to get jobs. That was published when Jenness was at the end of his career.

At about the same time, the Northern Science Research Group, headed by the remarkable AJ.Kerr (affectionately known as Moose throughout the north) published a study of Eskimo Relocation for Industrial Employment, by D.S. Stevenson. This was also a slim chapbook, but it contained one paragraph that has refused to leave me over the years since.

“Frustrated, confused and downtrodden peoples everywhere have had recourse to alcohol, drugs or religion,” wrote Stevenson. “For the Eskimos in the south, the placedo is alcohol…It seems sometimes as if those least assimilated people deliberately use alcohol to blot out reality. I have been at drinking bouts where one woman, holding a naked baby in her lap, sat alternately sipping cheap rye whisky and vomiting into a cardboard box at her feet: she and some others were coimpletely drunk, yet they kept on drinking until absolutely unconscious.”

That, in face of such evidence, a famous anthropologist could have recommended that all Eskimos should be moved south simply to get jobs, could surely stand as a template for the Euro-Canadian insensitivity to the problems confronting them as they moved – uncomprehending, for the most part, ignorant to a very large degree and, it has to be said, prejudiced on racial grounds --- into the north to establish administration.

I mention this because the tale of the three men who were subject of the documentary broadcast tonight is that their personal lives were ruined by the experiment. None of them, or their families, was consulted or asked permission to send these three boys to Ottawa for European advanced schooling. That is typical of the insensitivity and arrogance of much that has passed in Canadian history for governmental administration of our northern regions.

One conclusion that the film comes to after examining the experience of the three men is that possibly --- just possibly, mind you --- the best option would have been for Euro-Canadians to have left the Inuit alone, not to have interfered with them, allowed them to continue their traditional way of life and to make their own accommodations with Euro-Canada as and when these became necessary.

I knew Zebedee Nungak fairly well during the fight over the James Bay hydro project in Quebec in the early seventies. He was an amusing, effective spokesperson for his people, but his humour and goodwill evidently were overlayers to hide the dreadful experience it had been for him to have been chosen by Euro educators for special treatment as an experiment. Zebedee helped to negotiate the James Bay agreement, and was one of its signatories. His evidence in the film was that he suffered from that, because in Povingnituk, where he came from, a large segment of the population opposed the James Bay agreement and held his approval of it against him.

Similarly Petger Ittinuar negotiated a rocky path in the white man’s world. He was the first Inuit elected to Canada’s Parliament, for the NDP. He played an important role in the interface between his people and the government, but later suffered because of criticism of his stand taken in support of this white man’s project. He switched parties, another no-no in the white world for which he was severely criticized. When he left Parliament he took refuge in alcohol, as indeed did all three of the experimcntal Eskimos, at various times in their lives. Eric Tagoona, from Baker Lake, played a role in obtaining the inclusion of aboriginal rights in the Canadian constitution. But he perhaps suffered more than any of them by entering a downpath of alcohol, drugs and abuse that has led him to spend the rest of his life as a recluse in Baker Lake.

One statement rang out from the film for me: when Zebedee Nungak was denied by the white politicians, he said, he would never stop urging his fight for Inuit rights, and his son, standing behind him, and his son’s son later would continue to fight their sons and the sons of their sons.

This is a documentary that it must have been salutary for Euro-Canadians to see, for it exposes, not only the fact that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the lack of wisdom and empathy that has characterized so much of Canada’s interaction with aboriginal people.

2011-09-25T07:06:00.001-04:00

Link of the Day, Sept 25 2011: Pax Americana Is Over in the Middle East. A sober assessment of thesituation by Dr Leon Hader, a Washington-basedanalyst, writing in Haaretz, of Israel.

2011-09-12T09:54:00.003-04:00

Link of the Day Sept 12 2011: Robert Jenson, a professor at the University of Texas, in Austin, writes in an Al Jazeera commentary that ten years after the 9/11 attacks, US foreign policy remains aggressive and unrealistic. “The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles: delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world's resources by whatever means necessary.”

(“….it's tempting to argue that weshould refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honour thosewho died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to dothat if the cheerleaders for the US empire would refrain from using the day tojustify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11.”)

2011-09-06T09:26:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia Link of the Day Sept 6 2011: A calmlydispassionate account by Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz of the cost ofAmerica’s recent disastrous wars. For everything one needs to know about theparlous state of the United States, read his article The Cost of 9/ll,published online in the Project Syndicate.

(“Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and Icalculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% ofreturning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and morethan 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimatethat future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.”)

My Log 275: Surprising outpouring of affection for Jack Layton means his shoes will be almost impossible to fill.

2011-08-29T09:56:00.001-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

The outpouring of public affection for Jack Layton took me by surprise, as it must have taken many other people, and it also set me seriously to think about those Canadian values that are so often spoken about, and so seldom defined.

This remarkable event cannot be seen in isolation: after all, when the CBC gave Canadians a chance some years ago to vote on who they considered the greatest Canadian of all time, their choice was Tommy Douglas, who as premier of Saskatchewan marched Canada into the modern world by creating what eventually became the national health scheme for the entire country.

This program had to be fought for bitterly, as it has in every country it has been introduced, but it is now so thoroughly accepted by Canadians that it is often regarded as the single thing that Canadians believe makes them different from Americans.

Now comes this extraordinary outpouring of affection and respect for the man who has led the NDP to its greatest electoral success ever, making a massive breakthrouth in Quebec, a territory that had previously been immune to the siren call of social democracy, having always preferred to vote for their nationalism, or ethnicity.

Of course, much of the affection came from Layton’s long and fruitful service as a municipal councilor in Toronto, whose citizens remember him as a decent man and an honest man, but also as a man whose optimism and humanity marked him off from the common herd of politicians.

A great deal of the admiration for Jack must have come from the last election, when he was seen --- a sick man --- bravely stumping the country, cane in hand, keeping up a pitiless schedule in his successful effort to lead his party to its huge breakthrough.

Still, the scale and intensity of the outpouring of public regard was a surprising thing. After all, until his recent breakthrough, the NDP had always been very much the third party in Canada, important for its policy initiatives, essential for its success in keeping the social democratic idea as part of the Canadian political discourse, and therefore a major element in the differentiation of Canada from the United States.

But can anybody have seriously believed such support exists for the values espoused by the New Democrats throughout the country: values of community, sharing, the idea that we are our brother’s keeper, essentially the value of equality and egalitarianism, the idea that everybody in the nation has a right to a fair chance, to develop his or her talents to the maximum. This is a way of saying social democracy that seems to suit Canadians, and yet, time after time, year after year, Canadians have voted against these values that they now seemed --- at least for a week or so --- to be so vociferously espousing.

Personally I have only twice joined a political party: the first time was when I arrived in England in 1951 in time for Labour to blow the immense majority they won in 1945 to let the reactionary Churchill back into office; the second time was when Layton was going for NDP leadership, and I joined to give his effort some support.

I have to confess that in neither case was my membership long-lasting. Although I have always supported the NDP in Canada, I have extravagant hopes of left-leaning parties that are never satisfied, and when I saw that Layton was not really a radical leader, I allowed my membership to lapse.

I never met Layton, not really, although on the one occasion I was introduced to him as he worked a room, he delivered a kind acknowledgement that he knew my work. I never heard from him again.

Anyway, politics isn’t about the stroking of egos, and I have always said --- I said this in relation to the fact that it took me 26 years to apply for Canadian citizenship --- that I believed I voted every day through the medium of my work.

The memorial service, as I would prefer to call the state funeral service held in his honour, was a very moving occasion that allowed a wide range of expressions of admiration for the man and his unquenchable optimism and friendliness --- which, I have got to admit, is something that separates him from me, a perennial grouch and pessimist. I could have done with less of the religious gentleman, whoever he was, a friend of Jack’s, who did manage, in the last moments, to invoke God and his blessings on everyone, something that I wuld have thought was against Jack’s inclinations.

Perhaps as a total event, it was a little over-the-top. How could it help but be when graced by one of Stephen Lewis’s over-heated tributes. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the event was that it had been ordered by the Prime Minister. And the most remarkable thing at it was when the entire crowd rose with a burst of wild applause when Lewis described Jack’s last letter as “a manifesto for social democracy.” That caught Harper and his Conservative Cabinet ministers on the hop, not sure whether to rise with the applauding crowd, or to mark their disapproval by just sitting there. Eventually Harper, bowing to the inevitable, rose to his feet and began to applaud, surely some kind of apotheosis for him.

Well, Jack is gone, and the choice os his successor lies ahead. Personally I would like someone like Libby Davies, a sound radical politician, but I know they will never support her, and it is almost certain that she would not succeed in building on Jack’s achievement, if only because she doesn’t speak French.

Some may have begun to wonder whether Lewis’s ringing elegy might not herald an effort by him to take over the party: he certainly would be a good choice, but I doubt if he would succeed in earning the trust of Canadians any more than he did last time when he led the Ontario NDP in the provincial legislature.

Besides, having been involved so internationally, one doubts if his ego would permit him to retire to the national stage again.

I have no idea who should be the leader: clearly, he has a tough act to follow, and whoever he or she is, it seems unlikely to be anyone with Jack’s common touch. We now have to just wait and see to what extent the outpoiuring for Jack has touched the hearts of Canadians, if at all.

2011-08-15T01:15:00.001-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Link of the day: “Another climate-related record will soon be broken, but it's not like those you've been hearing about: the heat waves, droughts and torrential floods setting calamitous precedents everywhere. For a change, mark down this next one as a sign of hope. It's that Washington will play host to the largest act of civil disobedience for the climate in US history,” writes Montrealer Martin Lukacs, in The Guardian, of London. Lukacs is a courageous campaigner for aboriginal rights and environmental sanity, and his excellent article draws attention to a decision that has been taken: that the only way to stop the world’s climate from spiraling into disaster is a massive confrontation between the aware people and the wealth-owners, who are supported by governments like those in Canada and the U.S. He describes our awful Canadian government as having developed into “the foreign branch of the tar sands industry… scrambling to beat back the ferocious attack by the US environmental movement" against the Alberta tar sands – the world’s dirtiest oil.

2011-08-08T02:08:00.001-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Link of the day Aug 8 2011: We are all wondering “What Happened to Obama?” the question raised in an insightful article in the New York Times by Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University.

(“Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue….Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted ‘present’ (instead of yea or nay) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.”)

My Log 274: Sarajevo, desperately trying to rebuild its reputation for culture, multinationalism and calm, unhurried beauty

2011-08-06T05:32:00.003-04:00

Image via Wikipedia
The Moslem quarters, Bascarsija,of Sarajevo

I found a paradox at the heart of the beautiful city of Sarajevo, which I visited this week. It is a city that emanates an unusual sense of human warmth, creativity, amusement and even adventure. And yet it has become a symbol for one of the most dramatic and appalling acts of civic barbarity in modern times. It is a city whose recent experiences would reduce to tears anyone who cares about the quality of human life.

In other words I fell in love with Sarajevo, and felt like weeping for what it had to endure during the 1990s Yugoslav war, when it was besieged by the Yugoslav National Army, and Serbian Bosnian militias, who mounted their guns in the hills surrounding the city and made it almost impossible for anyone to leave their houses.

The four-year siege of Sarajevo has been extensively written about and celebrated in print, song, dance and every conceivable medium of expression, so there is no point in my recalling it in any detail. A sort of grim humour has arisen about the war, and a little book I bought, a sort of fake Michelin guide written in 1992 and 1993, exemplifies how unconquerable is the human spirit. It says its purpose is to instruct visitors on how to survive “without transportation, hotels, taxis, telephones, food, shops, heating, water, information, electricity”, and claims to show the city as a place where “wit can survive over terror.”

“This book was written at the site where one civilization was dismantled in the course of intentional violence…” writes the book’s author, Miroslav Prsojevic, “and where another had to be born.” It is a “picture of civilization that emerges out of cataclysm, which makes something out of nothing, gives some messages for the future. Not because the future is necessarily a future of wars and disasters, but because humans are growing older and being born into a world which is ever less secure.”

They begin their chronicle by saying that in April 1992, appeared around the city “two-hundred-sixty tanks, 120 mortars, and innumerable anti-aircraft cannons, sniper rifles and other small arms…..At any moment…any of these arms can hit any target in the city. And they did hit, indeed, --- civilian housing, museums, churches, mosques, hospitals, cemeteries, people on the streets. Everything became a target. All exits from the city, all points of entry, were blocked.”

Well, on to the present day, to the city that seems to have been largely rebuilt, although it is rather a strange landscape when these shiny new buildings share the cityscape still with innumerable monstrous ruins of huge buildings that once were functional, but were bombed into uselessness, ever-present reminders of what happened.

Under the guidance of a friend who had been there several times we headed for the older part of the city known as Bascarsija. A guidebook writes about a man called Gazi Husrev Bey who was born in 1480, became ruler of Bosnia for 20 years and laid the foundations for the city as it is today, building it up to a city of 50,000. An Islamic school he built has been open for 470 years, and when it was founded it was dedicated to gifted and good pupils who would be taught “rational and traditional sciences.” He built Mosques and Franciscan monastries, one of the most beautiful Orthodox churches, public drinking fountains, inns, Turkish baths and a soup kitchen offering free meals to the poor. A foundation that this man created is still functioning after five centuries, financing stipends for students, feeding the poor and engaging in other charitable work. He is buried next to a former prisoner of war, a Christian, whom he freed and gave the title of a Duke.

In these early acts, surely, can be seen something of the spirit of the city that remains today. For myself, I can say I have seldom if ever been in a city whose inhabitants seem to be touched with such a particular grace.

For example, on our first day there our friend led us to a delightful spot, a courtyard hidden in behind one of the pedestrian streets constructed for the most part of wooden buildings, low-lying, expressive and friendly (every shop has a folding bench in front for the weary traveler or citizen to sit on, for example). This courtyard was quiet, although the streets around were vibrant and full of the bustle of a normal city. It sheltered under an immense tree, and was surrounded by small but elegant shops selling beautiful carpets mostly made in Iran. Some art works, of astonishing vivacity, were made of carpet, and although our friend enjoyed the peaceful ambience, he regretted that a tea shop that had existed there before the war had disappeared. I could not help but think that any people who could create such a perfect environment, so full of quiet human values, must be an exceptional people. And this was confirmed by the next place we visited.

This section of town is the Moslem section, of course, and --- perhaps this was exceptional because Ramadam had just started --- it was impossible to find a place in any of these beautiful little streets that served any alcohol. We asked a taxi driver, a garrulous, helpful middle-aged man, who undertook enthusiastically the assignment to find us a place where we could have a meal with some wine,by driving us up some very steep hills until reaching a point that he couldn’t go any further.
We had to walk the last precipitous slope up to a restaurant which, like the coffee shop in the courtyard, was another example of creative design. The restaurant existed on several levels, each room being complete in itself, each sharing the exceptional views over the city. (I counted 19 mosques in sight as I ate my meal.) Over an ember fire at the back of the room turned a lamb on a spit for which, unfortunately, we were too early. But we left it to the helpful and friendly waiter to choose what he served us. So we started with a totally delicious Bosnian soup, went on to a mélange of dishes comprised of chopped meat, marinated and cooked in sauces, mushrooms, vegetables, and ended with a superb dessert of the eastern variety. The cost of this triumphant invention was about half of what a similar meal would have cost in Toronto or Montreal. I know both of those cities have superb eating places, but I doubt that either could rival this Sarajevan restaurant for atmosphere, its air of quiet civility, and its magnificent view.

On the way back we had to order another taxi. But again we found an enthusiastic middle-aged man anxious to fulfil what we wanted: our objective was to go somewhere we could have a final drink before retiring, He took us to a place across the river from our hotel, to a pub the like of which I have never seen in all my wanderings. It was a tall building, open to the roof several stories above, its central space surrounded by balconies where meals were served while the ordinary people got on with their drinking downstairs. The design of this place was amazing: exquisite designs on the ceilings, even those above the bar, just another evidence of the civilized air of this whole city.

It was raining lightly the next morning, but not enough to prevent us from wandering through the city streets, themselves a feast for the eyes, past the dozens of coffee houses, and shops selling everything under the sun. If this part of town was damaged, rather little evidence of it remains: that stands to reason, because the rebuilding of these low-rise streets of mostly wooden buildings would not have required the vast financial operation needed for your modern high-rise blocks of offices, which have been built further along, although not verfy far away, in town.

We visited a modest little museum devoted to the occasion in 1914 on which the 20-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, an event that is said in history to have precipitated the First World War. There were seven assassins among the crowds through which the Royal coach moved. One of them threw a bomb that hit the coach and rolled under the following vehicle, exploding. Incredibly, the procession continued. Some of the assassins lost their nerve. Princip went to have a coffee, and when he emerged he discovered the procession had taken a wrong turning. Finding the Royal couple right in front of him, he fired twice, and killed both the Archduke and his glamorous wife Sophie.

That evening another equally helpful taxi-driver took us out of town to a roadside restaurant where we enjoyed the Bosnian specialty dish, lamb, again an excellent meal. On the way back the same taxi-driver --- who had told us he was bringing up his children to believe we were all brothers, everyone, no matter of what religion or ethnicity, belongs, and is one of us --- offered to show us around at his own cost. He took us to a small park built around a spring, a beautiful place.

Well, we didn’t spent a lot of time in Sarajevo, but long enough to contract a deadly disease Sarajevo-itis, which will no doubt demand that I make another visit, if I live long enough to do so. On the way back to Dubrovnik we passed through immense mountains of bare rock, stratified and exposed in an unusual way, which seemed to suggest that the whole area had at some time in the distant past been thrown up by some convulsive movement of the earth’s surface.

Dramatic though these mountains are, they can’t hold a candle to the city, the work of men and women, people of evey race and religion, the city pre-eminent in Europe for its successful building of a multicultural, multilingual, multireligious civilization that was relentlessly attacked just 18 years ago by men bent on imposing their barbaric ethnicity and nationalism over all others.

My Log 273: Award-winning Croatian film eloquent on the problems of the diaspora

2011-07-31T03:10:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

I saw a Croatian film last night that dealt in subjects that should be familiar to Canadians, including the agonies of people who become members of diasporas of whatever country, and of the problems of families that are divided by emigration. The name of the film was Kotlovina, a reference to some local dish that was being prepared for a monster family gathering when three sisters who had not seen each other for 35 years finally managed to get together. The director was Tomislav Radic.

This film only last week won the grand prize at the Pula film festival. Radic is a former head of production of Croatian TV, and in 2005 he made a widely praised film called What Iva Recorded, about a 14 year-old girl who was given a present of a video camera with which she began to record her family.

That probably gives a clue to Radic’s interests --- family dramas --- and this film was entirely about the whole family, the sisters, their husbands, their children, their neighbours, as they all set up for the party.

My knowledge of Yugoslav film is sketchy. I remember well the remarkable film W.R.: The Mysteries of the Organism, made in 1971 by the experimental Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev, which purported to be an examination of the work of William Reich, but actually was an examination of the role of sex in a Communist country. The film was a great success in the Western world,it came like a breath of fresh air, but it was banned in Yugoslavia and earned Makavejev exile from his home country.

During his exile he made a scandalous film called Sweet Movie, so sexually explicit that the Canadian actress Carole Laure quit it before it was finished in disgust at some of the actions called for by her character (she was making love on the Eiffel Tower when she was interrupted by a group of nuns, for example) and Laure’s resignation from the film prompted the director to shoot an entirely different sequence around a different actress. Later, Makevejev made a film in Australia called The Coca Cola Kid, starring the remarkable American actor Eric Roberts (brother to Julia), so it seems that the diaspora has never been far from the thoughts of Yugoslav directors.

I found the opening sequences of Kotlovina to be almost tiresomely slow, although they did succeed in delineating the characters. Two of the sisters were traveling by car to the home of the third, in these earlier sequences, and on the way the one sister, a 40-ish widow, who had returned from Australia, where she had been taken as a child of four, got involved in a sexual romp with the stepson of one of her sisters, a virile 20-year-old lad. During the course of her liaison she was bitten by some insect, and her bite required treatment. She had also lost her panties, which her sister found later in the young man’s overcoat. This led to a huge confrontation after the Australian returned from a visit to the hospital for a shot of anti-rabies vaccine.

The film ended with a really remarkable sequence of the family party, as all the participants became drunk, and started yelling at each other. A visitor (daughter of the woman doctor, who was invited to the feast, thus establishing the neighborliness of Croatians), began to yell her detestation of the diaspora, populated, as she claimed, by a group of people whose only objective in leaving their home country was to have a swimming pool. Finally, the visitor in her turn burst out her resentments with her unsatisfactory life in Australia: she had had no pool, she complained, all she had was a marriage to an older man who didn’t love her any more than she loved him.

The party almost broke up over these quarrels, and would have done if the doctor’s daughter had not flaked out entirely, having drunk far too much. Seeing to her, getting her home, occupied everybody’s attention, taking their minds off their quarrelling, and the film ended with the three sisters clutching each other affectionately, and laughing gently at their ridiculous quarrelling.

I don’t think this film is destined to do particularly well abroad. I can understand if it becomes a success in Croatia, but its slow beginning will prevent it from capturing the attention of foreign audiences.

What was interesting was to find a movie that dealt with such important subjects in such an intense, concentrated manner. After all, in a world rent with emigration, much of it designed simply to improve the conditions and standards of living of the emigrants, these resentments are bound to become more intense as time goes on.

I felt I could relate to it myself. I lived in Canada for 26 years before becoming a citizen, and for all of that time I never considered myself truly Canadian, although I felt I was qualified because I was performing work that was essential to the quality of Canadian life. At least I thought so.

After returning briefly to New Zealand, my home country, I realized I didn’t belong there, either. I could have complained, as the protagonist in this movie did, that I was neither one thing nor the other, neither a Kiwi nor a Canuck. But I figured I had been operating according to an outmoded set of beliefs about one’s personal roots. Your roots, I discovered are created by your friendships, acquaintances, working life, your beliefs and actions, the whole corpus of your life, not from some phony attachment to a particular place.

The Australian protagonist in this film announced her intention of going back to Australia. How many emigrants have done exactly this: gone home, discovered it is no longer your home, and returned to their new home, more contented for the experience.

My Log 272: Quebec minister’s visits to Algonquin communities takes me down memory lane from 50 years ago

2011-07-29T02:21:00.002-04:00

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Lake Kipawa

Some news has come across my e-mail that the Wolf Lake Algonquin community in Quebec has been given a grant of some $200,000 by the Quebec government to rebuild a camp located on the shore of Lake Kipawa, which will be developed into a centre for ecotourism.

Wolf Lake is a small community of people who live in what used to be called the Hunter’s Point settlement, on an island in the middle of Lake Kipawa, and is one of nine Algonquin communities in Quebec, seven of which I visited over the years when I was more active.

I made a trip around these communities in 1969, when I first started writing about native communities as a reporter for The Montreal Star. My guide was the chief of Timiskaming band, Mike Mackenzie, who was interested in signing up as many of the Algonquin people as he could to become members of the Indians of Quebec association, in which he held some executive position. Mike had been for many years a worker in the paper mill in Temiskaming, and he took me not only by plane to the community of Hunter’s Point, but north along the course of the Ottawa river to Ville Marie, and then east by logging roads to the community of Winneway, today an Algonquin village of 461 people which is the site of the Long Point band.

Already as we moved on from one Algonquin community to the next I had become accustomed to the fact that none of them ever appeared on the maps of Quebec, and that their few people --- there are still, even today, only a total of some 6,000 people in the nine communities --- were existing on tiny reserves that had been carved out for them, usually without their participation or consent. I was surprised to find in these remote, hidden places that people were still speaking their Algonquin language, but there was a fairly common assumption in those days that the language was doomed.

Years later, in the late 1980s, when I became involved in the struggle of the Barriere Lake people to defend their traditional hunting territory, which was contiguous with La Verendrye wildlife reserve --- a highly ironic title, since the reserve was and is being clear-cut by loggers --- I discovered that the language was still in use, as it still is today: in short, the Algonquins of Quebec, hidden away for the most part in their nine remote communities, were expected by many Canadians to more or less disappear. But they have defied these somber predictions, and appear at the moment to be on the verge of a comeback.

One thing that struck me in the late 1960s was that almost everywhere we went, even when it was just by some rough logging road through the wilderness, when we would come to the site of an Algonquin community, we would always have to ask where the people lived --- and then we would find them living around some corner, hiding even from the small amount of traffic that passed through their settlement. I remember one such community, known as Rapide-7, where we discovered a beautiful young woman who had been out somewhere for schooling, but had returned to her home in this wilderness where she was doing --- well, what was she doing exactly?

The only two of these communities I have never visited are Grand Lac Victoria and Lac Simon, but I still remember running across some anthropologists or scientists of some kind who had just come from these villages, and who assured us if we wanted to see aboriginal life in its natural state, those were the places to go to.

On other occasions I have visited the Algonquin communities of Maniwaki (known as the River Desert band, or more recently as Kitigan Zibi), and Amos (now known more generally as Abitibiwinni or Pikogan First Nation, a sort of northern outlier on the Harricana river more in the region of Abitibi than the other reserves).

As a result of these travels I have discovered that the history of the few surviving Algonquins is a typically infuriating, tragic Canadian story, but one which lies at the very centre of Canadian history, although it is not mentioned very much in Canadian history books. As a tribe the Algonquins have been divided for many years between the few small commuities in Ontario, and those in Quebec. That is the result of the machinations of the white invaders who worked their way into the Algonquin territories along the Ottawa river as they began the intense logging industry on which white European prosperity in the region was based. First, they displaced the Algonquins whom they encountered living along the river in Ontario, but they had less success in dislodging the northern Algonquins, who lived in Quebec. The people fought persistently for their rights, but were always swept aside by the arrogant governments. Then the government/church tandem decided on the grand gesture of gathering all of the displaced people who had collected around the monastery at Oka into a big reserve at Maniwaki in Quebec. This was a decision of the priests and the government, but it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that its real purpose was to remove the Algonquins from the path of so-called European progress --- in other words, to get them the hell off the land so the Europeans could do what they wanted with the land and its resources.

In this they have not been altogether successful: the northern Quebec communities decided not to join the rush to Maniwaki, and when I asked about that once I was told that they did make a long canoe journey down to Maniwaki on one occasion, but a number of their paddlers fell ill by contracting one of the European diseases, and they then withdrew for good.

After that, the history of, for example, the Barriere Lake people has been a terrible one, a story of white arrogance and greed, and of church and state collaboration which has left the reserve today one of the most impoverished in the entire country, but one that is fighting like a tiger to defend its right not only to exist, but to have some control over the remaining resources from the land that they have always considered to be theirs, land that they have neither surrendered by treaty, nor lost through conquest.

In other words, these Algonquins who have received four visits from the Quebec minister, Geoffrey Kelley, are fighting for their lives. They deserve to be better treated than they have ever been before --- their historical treatment being a virtual template for how not to treat native people decently --- and with any luck, with support from non-native supporters, of whom there is a determined nucleus in Montreal, and with the sheer naked determination they have recently begun to show not to be any longer the doormats for European civilization and its acquisitive values, they will eventually win through to a better life.

Let’s hope so, anyway.

My Log 271: Once again, I stray among the classicists, and am put off when they pander to my depraved tastes

2011-07-28T06:10:00.001-04:00

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The Rector's Palace, Dubrovnik

Last night I attended a concert by musicians whom I had reason to expect were among the best in Europe.

They were all members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, playing together as a smaller group as Soloists of the Munich Philharmonic, founded in 1999 by a musician called Sreten Krstic, who previously had founded a group called the Munich Philharmonic String Sextet.

There were 12 of these musicians, playing in the open air patio, or atrium, of the Rector’s Palace, a beautiful building constructed in the mid-15^th century, damaged later by an explosion, and rebuilt after a huge earthquake in 1667, with
Renaissance and baroque architectural elements. The building was the seat of government when Dubrovnik was a city-state, and a republic, and the Rector after which it was named was an official elected by the Great Council to represent the Republic for a month during which he wasn't allowed to leave the palace at anytime except on government business.

This was held to have fitted exactly the principle of the Dubrovnik republic that is inscribed in Latin over the door of the Great council hall, "Forget private and deal with public business" (a message that we could do with in our own capitalist-controlled times in most countries of the Western world.)

The Atrium is regarded as an ideal location for the chamber music concerts that are held frequently during the Dubrovnik summer festival: indeed, last night I noticed various members of the 12-person group of musicians looking around them in wonderment at their surroundings.

Well, that’s as may be: the musicians were clearly expert on their fiddles of various kinds, and the soloist, a woman cellist called Monika Leskover, was a wonderful artist.

Readers of this site will not be surprised, nevertheless, to know that this music left me more or less cold, since I have no knowledge of classical music, and would, to be perfectly honest, rather attend a concert by my son’s raucous rock and roll band, Grady, out of Austin, Texas. I was not surprised to read that she had been highly spoken of by such luminaries as Mstislav Rostropovich (whose master classes she had attended) and Yehudi Menuhin, but the information that she had performed with three “world famous conductors” (none of whom I have ever heard of), and with four of “the world’s leading musicians” (whose fame has also escaped me during my 83 years) kind of suggested I had strayed into an environment I should have avoided.

Okay, call me a slob. One thing I discovered last night is that classical musicians are at least as self-indulgent as rock musicians: it seemed that Ms Leskover went on and on with her piece from Haydn, which, to me sounded like she was repeating the same phrases over and over, and I came to the conclusion that her piece would have benefited from being cut to the length my rock and roll experience has made more familiar to me.

The group had previously played works from Handel,
Charles Avison, and a Croatian composer called Dubravko Detoni, who was present at the concert, and whose work I thought was the most interesting of the night. He has composed some 130 productions around musicals, books of poetry and radio and TV programmes, and they were, to me, more evocative than the more classical works.

But then, with all this completed, the group launched into a bizarre evocation of what I have always considered the tripe composed by the Beatles, whose rubbishy tunes were disguised (though barely) as baroque compositions. She Loves You, a Hard Day’s Night, Here Comes the Sun? As baroque compositions? Do me a favour, fellers, better that you stick to your last and don’t try to curry favour with slobs like me.

Maybe my uneasiness was caused by the fact that, with a standing room ticket, the only place I could find to perch was on the medieval stone staircase, on to which I was crowded with dozens of others, (who seemed just as uncomfortable as me).

I gotta admit, the audience was enthusiastic, as they should have been before these master musicians. But I was glad to escape with my sanity more or less intact, and my bum bruised, cold, but still functioning. I think.

My Log 270: Tribute to Merchant-Ivory film productions, whose work is at an end following Merchant’s death

2011-07-26T06:10:00.005-04:00

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The late Ismail Merchant

I have always loved the film productions of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, most of whose best work over forty years was written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Last night I went to one of their last productions, The White Countess, which was written not by Ms Jhabvala, but by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born, British-raised writer who became famous with his novel The Remains of the Day, that was translated into one of the most wonderful of the Merchant-Ivory productions, for which Ms. Jhabvala wrote the screenplay in 1985.

Part of the success of this trio surely must have come from the fact that they were such a mixed bag, Merchant being an Indian Moslem, Ivory an American Protestant, and Jhabvala a German Jew. Yet from 1965 when they burst on to the scene with Shakespeare Wallah, until the present day this team has produced one intelligent, thoughtful, inspiring film after another. Personally I can remember Heat and Dust, (1983), featuring one of the most delectable performances by the glorious Julie Christie, A Room With a View, (1985) an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, Howard’s End (1992) another Forster adaptation by Ms. Jhabvala, and the wonderful Remains of the Day (1993) that the team adapted from Ishiguro’s superb novel.

Merchant died in 2005, which has brought an end to this string of successes, and it seems that at the age of 84 Ms Jhabvala has laid down her pen, which gives me permission to say that The White Countess was the least successful Merchant-Ivory production I can remember, although it was crowded with distinguished and excellent actors.

Unfortunately Ishiguro’s screenplay moved too slowly to really grab one: and for that matter, for a story set in 1930s Shanghai, the tale was too convoluted and interiorized within its major characters. The Merchant-Ivory productions, although always about interesting personalities, also usually managed to lay out the socio-political background in which the major characters found themselves. In this respect, this movie was somewhat deficient, I felt, although it certainly tried hard to suggest the confusing politics of those years as the Japanese were preparing to invade China.

The main character was played by Ralph Fiennes, and was called Todd Jackson, a former American diplomat who had lost his wife and child, and himself become blinded, in an explosion. No longer active in politics, he wanted to open a high-class night club in which he could rub shoulders with the leaders of society. He made the acquaintance of a Russian émigré countess who was earning a living as a taxi dancer for herself, her daughter, and a family of hangers-on, all of them White Russian nobility, and, impressed, he asked her to join him in his enterprise, which he named The White Countess, after her. (In the cast were a parcel of Redgraves, Vanessa, Lynn, and Natasha Richardson, filling the roles of the White Russians.)

This was all clear enough, but one kept wondering when the real action was to start, and what form it would take. Great prominence was given to a mysterious Japanese who befriended Jackson, but against whom he had been warned, because he was said to be a man who turned up just before the Japanese walked into wherever he was. In other words, a dangerous man, as indeed he eventually turned out to be.

With the arrival of the brutal Japanese, the expatriate citizens of the French, British and European sections of Shanghai decided to decamp, and rushed for the boats that could take them to safety. The countess’s family had insisted on keeping from her young daughter knowledge of the disreputable work she did to keep them all alive, and decided they should leave her behind when they left. The denouement, as the blind diplomat, obviously now in love with the countess, struggled to find her in the crowd, and finally did so, was full of action and tension.

The acting of Fiennes and Natasha Richardson (who died from a head injury while on holiday in the north of Quebec) both gave beautiful performances in the featured roles, but these were hardly enough to rescue the somewhat somnolent pace of the movie, or the confusions of Ishiguro’s script.

This is probably the last we can hope to see of the great Merchant-Ivory productions, and I cannot let them go without expressing my appreciation for their wonderful work over the years and my regret that we will see no more of them. They have been an ornament to the craft of film-making, and no mistake.

The night before I saw an even more confusing Italian psychological thriller called The Double Door, which was about a couple who were attacked by robbers as they were guarding a palace full of precious works of art, which the robbers got away with. The man was supposed to have been killed, leaving the woman to undergo a series of remarkable events, all of which turned out to have been figments of her imagination while she was in a three-day coma. Rescued from her coma, she got together with the man who had been thought to be dead, but was very much alive. And the climax to the film came when the woman was discovered to have been involved in the robbery, after which she went off to South America with her lover, one of the robbers. A bit of a struggle to keep all these confusing strands straight in one’s mind. I am not so good at that as I used to be, I guess I have to admit. One of the penalties of age.

My Log 269: French and British: two versions of working class reality in two enjoyable films

2011-07-24T03:55:00.001-04:00

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On successive nights I have seen two interesting movies dealing with working class subjects, but movies very different in their approach. Both were set in the early 1960s, but one was French one English, and perhaps that was one of the major differences between them.

The French film was called The Women on the Sixth Floor, and it was a sort of domestic comedy contrasting the mores of a French bourgeois couple with those of the floor-full of upstairs maids who served them, without being seen by them in any real sense for many years.

The English film was Made in Dagenham, a hard-nosed political film about how a group of machinists working for Ford in Dagenham, east of London, decided to go on strike for equal pay for equal work. Both were full of humour, but the humour was quite different in each film, although both had what might be called a soft-core centre allowing good to triumph in the end. But I have to admit I preferred the English film, mainly for ideological reasons.

The French film, directed by Phillippe Le Guay, opens in one of those ancient Parisian apartment buildings that are normally presided over by a concierge past whom even an army would find it hard to penetrate, usually an aging battleaxe with her nose in everybody’s business. This was true in this apartment house, which appeared to be owned by a character expertly played by Fabrice Luchini, married to an idle rich woman who filled her days with trivia of one kind and another. Into Mr. Luchini’s life came a pretty young woman from Spain, come to join her aunt, who is one of the maids living upstairs. Mr. Luchini welcomes her, tells her her predecessor has left, that she earned 250 francs a week (or was that a month?) and he immediately finds a piece of steel behind her affable, smiling exterior.

“Four hundred,” she says firmly.

He pretends he didn’t understand what she was saying, and insisted the pay would be 250. “Four hundred,” she said again, still smiling affably. He promised to talk to his wife about it, and the next day, somewhat entranced by the pretty new maid, comes back with a solution. “You will be paid 400, but as far as the mistress is concerned, you will be getting 250 --- not a word about this arrangement to her,” says the brave bourgeois, and so the arrangement is made.

The predecessor had worked for the family all her life, but when the family’s mother died she could not adjust. Quarrelling with the master, she is given her cards. Monsieur explains her severe loss to the pretty new maid, telling her the old girl was like family. “Where is she now?” asks the new girl. Monsieur did not know. “And yet she was like family?” asks the impertinent one, setting a tone for the mores on show in this film.

The new maid is a model of modernity, she boils his morning egg exactly as he demands it (three and a half minutes, he explains, anything either softer or harder spoils his entire day), she keeps the dishes washed, the clothes ironed, everything turns upward in the household arrangements, and he finds himself attracted to the young woman in a way that seems rather strange to him.

Somehow or other she persuades him to go upstairs to meet the other Spanish women who have been living up there, unregarded, for years, and he finds their toilet is horribly blocked, and orders in a plumber to clear it out. Thus the film gets underway, and the comedy is broad among the working class women from Spain, who seem to have inherited a much more modern attitude to life than the hidebound French bourgeoisie, in spite of having been dragged up under the tyrannical Franco regime. At least these women stick together: one of them has only to send out a call from her window for help and the rest appear as if by magic to wash, dry, vacuum and the like. Eventually the master quarrels with his uptight wife, who doesn’t believe his story that he was invited to dine with the maids upstairs, and she kicks him out, expecting him to return any moment. He moves upstairs into a cubby hole, living with the maids, and suddenly finds himself happier than he could have ever imagined being, as he is alone for the first time in his life, and making his own decisions without any interference from mother, father, wife or anyone else.

Part of the solidarity of the maids comes from their adherence to the rituals of he church, which appear as a joyful inheritance, that rather turned me off, to tell the truth. But eventually monsieur’s beautiful young maid confesses she has an eight-year-old son born out of wedlock, and surrendered for adoption. When one of he maids her aunt says she knows where the boy is, the young woman decides she must return to Spain to be near him. And after surrendering briefly to the romantic advances of monsieur, she disappears, and he is left with no option but to return to his loveless marriage.

Three years pass: and I will aleve it to readers to guess what happens: it is all resolved with delicacy, and most happily.

Well, that’s the French version of a working class dilemma: the British version is rooted in the poverty of he Cockney workers at the Ford plant, women workers who are egged on to demand equal pay for equal work by their shop steward, in a beautiful performance by Bob Hoskins. He confronts the comfortable senior pooh-bahs of the union movement, who call in the striking women and tell them how they should go back to work, and leave it to them to negotiate an increase in wages. No, says the young woman who is discovering leadership qualities as she becomes the spokespeson for the women workers. No, we don’t accept these compromises. We are striking for equal pay for equal work. But that will ruin the Ford company, cry the bosses, echoed by the union pooh-bahs.

As the strike drags on, the plant runs out of the materials provided by these women, and the factory closes. Then the pressure comes on their husbands: will they support their wives? In a pig’s eye they will. They tell their wives to stop all this nonsense and get the factory working again so they can get some money into the house.

The film is excellent as it shows the intense pressures created by strike action. It also ha wicked portraits of the higher-ups who are forced to make decisions about this kind of industrial action: the company executives, under pressure from Detroit; the Labour government ministers, compromising all along the way since they got elected (“I wasn’t running the country then,” as Harold Wilson remarks when challenged by his active socialist minister Barbara Castle with a memory of his policies when in opposition). Anyway, this too has a happy ending. This strike apparently actually happened in 1968, and the victory of the women workers led to the passing of Equal Pay legislation that was quickly followed in other countries, and has helped to transform the situation of working women.

I liked this film very much: one seldom sees serious movies dealing with politics, and when one crops up, one is obliged to give it its due, recognizing that almost all of the media, including films, are biased overwhelmingly in favour of establishment attitudes and practices.

My Log 268: A trip to Mostar: monument to our modern capacity to carry out outrages as bad as any in the past

2011-07-23T12:52:00.003-04:00

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I visited Mostar yesterday, and if I ever needed reinforcement in my view that war is berserk (I don’t need it, actually) I found it there.

Mostar is that beautiful little town, 150 kilometres from
Dubrovnik, in the heart of Bosnia, where, in an act of monstrous cruelty and cultural blindness that we all watched on television, the Croats destroyed a famous bridge that had spanned the river Neretva since 1566, and was regarded as one of the marvels of Ottoman architecture.

As The Guardian remarked in an article published in 2004 when the bridge was officially restored: “The Old Bridge stood for 427 years until a failed Croatian theatre director-turned militia leader, Slobodan Praljak, trained his artillery on the structure in November 1993, when his forces were driving Mostar's Muslim population into an east bank enclave.”

Along with others who collaborated with him in the destruction of Mostar, Mr. Praljak has been in custody in The Hague for some years, undergoing trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. This is the tribunal that issued indictments against 161 people for crimes against humanity and the like during this ridiculous war, and the last of these 161 people was arrested last week, 16 years after hostilities ceased. Some 64 of these people have been sentenced, 13 acquitted and 14 trials are still underway. (To plunge into the Web site of this tribunal is to take a voyage into the murky world of ethnic hatred, and to expose oneself to a recital of the follies and absurdities of which human beings are capable.)

The bombing of Dubrovnik is one crime that the tribunal has concerned itself with, and the destruction of Mostar is another. Mostar was said to be the most ethnically integrated population in the whole of Yugoslavia, but the war put a stop to that. At first the Croats fought with the Moslems against an attack by the Serbs, whose leaders had declared that they wanted to unite all Serbs in Yugoslavia under one government. But in the middle of this, the Croats turned on their allies, and began a vicious attack against the Moslems, driving them across the river into the east section of the town, and then bombing their houses mercilessly.

Today, Catholic Croats and Moslems still both inhabit the town, but they live separately, on opposite sides of the river. The Catholics have built a new church, complete with a huge tower that looms over the entire town, and along with the rebuilding of the bridge, the market areas around the bridge have been largely rebuilt too. But the Moslem side of town lags in redevelopment behind the Christian side, which, naturally, has been favored by Western world supporters. I believe the Serb population from before the war was driven out of town, and has not returned.

During the war the city was first attacked by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), essentially a Serbian outfit, which established control over the town. Within three months, forces of the newly-established republic of Croatia managed to force the Yugoslav Army out of the town. The JNA then shelled the town, destroying a Franciscan monastery, the Catholic cathedral and the bishop's palace (with a library of 50,000 books), a number of secular institutions as well as fourteen mosques.

In 1991 Croats living in the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had proclaimed the existence of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, as a separate "political, cultural, economic and territorial whole," on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A result of this was that Mostar was divided into a Western part, which was dominated by the Croat forces and an Eastern part where the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was largely concentrated.

When the Yugoslav Army moved out fanatic Croat Catholics destroyed Orthodox monastries and cathedrals, and bombed the ancient bridge, for which their leaders are still on trial in The Hague.

We went on a bus tour to Mostar. It took more than five hours to travel the 150 kilometres from Dubrovnik, not because the roads are bad --- indeed, they are beautifully surfaced --- but mainly because the modern Yugoslavia-as-was is now divided into six independent nations which maintain border posts whose utility is beyond the understanding of a simple guy like myself. We passed these border posts six times on the way there and back: it was never clear whose nation controlled the post, and the personnel running the posts appeared to be dressed identically. By peering closely at the small notices posted up one could gather that this post might be Bosnian, this one Croat, but there is nothing like what one has become accustomed to at most border posts, a clearly demarked area between an exit post of one country and the entry post of the next. In fact, I noticed at one post that on the way to Mostar our bus pulled into a long line of buses which were facing in one direction, with a small low hut in front of us through a window of which the drivers had to produce some documentation or other, which had a tiny notice that it was Bosnian, but on the way back the buses pulled up in the same line, except it was facing in the opposite direction, and an identical window in an identical hut seemed to belong to the other nation: the two posts were together, in other words. If this is the only benefit they have received from their war, it can hardly have been said to be worth it.

Nevertheless, the journey was very much worth taking. On the way to Mostar we stoppd at a village that I can only describe as amazingly beautiful. This was Pocitelj, a tiny place on a hill beside the Neretva river (the same one that runs through Mostar) whose population before the Homeland war in 1991 was 900. But this village was founded in the fifteenth century, and came under Ottoman rule for four centuries, during which a walled town was built, testimony to its strategic importance as a defensive position. When the Ottoman rule was replaced by Austro-Hungarian rule the town lost its strategic importance, which fortuitously enabled it to maintain its unique architectural mix. But in the 1990s, once again, Croatian forces bombed and shelled it destroying Pocitelj's sixteenth-century master works of Islamic art and architecture and displacing most of the town’s Moslem population.

Since the war, outside experts in ancient monuments have expressed their concern over the fate of this exceptionally beautiful town and in 1996, thanks to work of the Universities of York and Sarajevo, it was named as one of the world’s 100 most culturally endangered heritage sites. A restoration program arising from that designation has brought about the rebuilding of damaged and destroyed buildings, the encouragement of the return of the refugees and displaced persons to their homes, and the long-term protection and revitalization of Pocitelj's historic urban area.

We enjoyed a luncheon in the Mostar market area, an old-time local dish known as “under the bell” --- meaning lamb cooked under a bell that is submerged in glowing embers, utterly delicious --- served by an old-time waiter in a modest café sitting above the river. Not far away the merchants were just wrapping up their morning at the market, and shops selling tourist trinkets, and for all I know, precious, locally-made artifacts, were crowded with tourists. I suppose it could be said that Mostar has returned to some kind of normalcy --- but the populations appear to be living still at dagger’s drawn, on either side of the river. Mostar is, if anything, a monument to the fact that our modern civilization, with all our knowledge, artistic sensitivity, and ethnic tolerance, is still capable of outrages that rival those of past centuries.

My Log 267: Immersed in a world of mass tourism, where mobs of people follow guides mindlessly around ancient monuments

2011-07-19T07:15:00.002-04:00

7Image via Wikipedia
The island of Hvar

I remarked to someone the other day that after spending a few weeks in what used to be called Yugoslavia, there is one thing I can definitely say about it: in any group of what we used to call Yugoslavs, there will always be at least one, and probably many more, young women wearing the shortest possible shorts, below which are visible a pair of slim, beautiful legs, tanned to the nth degree. Where were such girls when I was a boy, I have asked myself.

The person to whom I made this remark protested that this was a somewhat superficial observation, but I am not so sure. It seems to indicate quite a lot about the changes that have overcome what was until recent decades a workers’ state, in which enterprises were owned by the workers, and the economy was run with the interests of the ordinary bloke uppermost in mind.
After a brutal internecine war that seemed to be designed to entrench capitalism in what once was a welfare state, what exists now, so far as I have seen (which admittedly isn’t a hell of a lot), seems to be a captive state completely given into the hands of tourism, both of the luxury, and of the mass varieties.

Of course, my judgment has been clouded, perhaps, by the fact that I have spent most of these weeks visiting a friend in Dubrovnik, which is today a very strange place of human habitation. It is an ancient town set at the tailend of a small state, Croatia, that, after having defended its independence staunchly through the ages, has finally surrendered to the god of tourism.

The town seems to have no function except to be looked at by gawking tourists, who emerge daily from one of those immense cruise ships that ply the Adriatic, calling from time to time at one or other of the ports they pass along the way. These people, who appear to come from all over the world, are ferried into the town by tenders, where they are attached to a local guide who stands there holding up a sign to identify her, and thereafter, they are obliged to follow this person around as she gabbles off her spiel, allocating to the maximum, half an hour for each medieval attraction. This is a holiday?

I have it on good authority (a trades union official in Dubrovnik), that Croatia, in this new dispensation, owns nothing. Foreign money has taken over, and the Croatians have been reduced, by and large, to being the waiters, cooks, and tourist guides to the new millenium. I have seen this before, in the West Indies, where an island like Antigua, once a prolific producer of sugar, closed all its sugar mills at a stroke, thereafter reducing the possibilities for its population to be waiters, taxi drivers, beach boys, or hookers.

So, as an economic engine in the modern state, Dubrovnik can be more or less discounted.

Okay, you might argue, Dubrovnik is an exception. It was bombed severely by the Serbs during what they call the Homeland war. This brings me perilously close to discussing the insanity of that war, a temptation I intend to resist.

I went this week to Hvar, a small town on a bleak, elongated Adriatic island. I had gathered the impression from what I had been told of Hvar that it was a rural kind of place: forget it, Hvar is a tourist trap, just like Dubrovnik, but with a few more signs of real life. Its beautiful harbour is crowded with boats, ostentatious boats of the super-rich, ugly boats of the nouveau-riche, bustling, companionable boats of the ferry service that takes people to and from the many islands that surround the city.

But Hvar, let there be no mistake, is a tourist city. It does have a splendid small market selling fresh fruit and vegetables, but otherwise it is, as someone once complained to me about Durbovnik, a town full of shops selling T-shirts made in China.

We had to catch a hydroplane at 6.30 am, and when we arrived at the dock at 6 am, we were confronted by boatloads of noisy young Europeans, some of them horribly drunk, others delirious with love, emerging after spending the entire night on one or other of the islands, where night clubs purvey their trade. A young Norwegian, intoxicated by all the heat and sun, told me one night club on one island has an Oslo Week, for which 300 young Norwegians have come south to participate. The very peak of modern-day tourism.

Where we were going on the hydroplane was to Split, and here I found something slightly different. Although this city of roughly half a million people is a centre for tourism, it does bear the marks of a real, functioning place. The immense harbour is crowded with huge ships, many of them designed for carrying cars back and forth around the islands, and others, more modest, for just simply taking people around.

The town itself is a wonder. The city centre exists inside what is known as Diocletian’s Palace, a place built by an Illyrian from these parts who became emperor of Rome around the third century AD, and decided to surrender his power voluntarily, apparently the only Roman emperor ever to do that. He came back home, built this huge palace, and today it is the centre of this amazing city, a veritable World Heritage Site within which ordinary people live and carry on their business from day to day, a place around whose every corner lurks a visual delight --- perhaps a broken down Roman wall, perhaps a building built in by later generations and very much still occupied, perhaps --- a delightful touch this --- a gallery of doorways built above the city square all of them giving on to a balcony, in which is situated a bar, run by a beautiful young woman who, unfortunately, appeared to be a chain smoker. (Never mind, although she left her butt smoking into our nostrils, after a few minutes she returned to stub it out completely.)

Split has a wonderful market that sells everything under the sun. I sat on a chair at a bar in this market, and was delighted by the arguments, yelling, laughing and crying of its inhabitants, who, so far as one could judge, were simply carrying out their functions of everyday life. They looked as though they spent every day in this same place.

Unfortunately Split had a major festival underway, so we weren’t able to get a room close enough in to make it worthwhile. So at about 3 pm we climbed aboard a bus, and embarked on the five hour drive south to Dubrovnik, along a landscape of the most forbidding character. Most of the houses along this highway appeared to be more or less new: one had the impression that many of them must have been holiday homes of the city bourgeoisie. The only touch of realism came from a place where, under Tito, they had filled in a swamp over an immense area, and turned it to productive fields. The houses there were mostly rather dreary apartment buildings built in the days when the government was serious about providing work and accommodation for its people.

I have never been a supporter of tourism, not even as an economic engine. I remember once being moved by the realization that all the people who, like me, were climbing around the Acropolis in Rome were diverse peoples from all over the world, and that in this activity they were paying some obeisance to the past, to the history and achievements of earlier civilizations.

Today, even that reassurance seems to have disappeared from these trailing mobs of tourists, following along after their guide, hoping for their half hour inside the cathedral or the medieval palace. What are they getting out of it, these people, could somebody tell me?

My Log 266: Beware of what you read: the guys with the facts don’t really want you to know them

2011-07-17T03:46:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia
Ronald Reagan, faker-in-chief

I remember when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States reading a story that said he had decided to cook the books --- in other words, in future new rules would be applied to how the U.S. calculated its unemployment figures. In future, the story said, the official unemploymentrate in the United States would be only about half of the real rate, because of some legerdemain with the way they calculated the figures.

I am reminded of this every time I read an article today about how much unemployment there is in the U.S. Officially, they have only 9.1 per cent of the work force unemployed. But, as so many dissentient economists keep saying, if the U.S. calculated unemployment the way every other nation does, they would be admitting that just on 20 per cent of their workforce are without work.

Ever since the Reagan change the mainstream media has gone along with the changes, reporting straight-facedly figures that they all know are barefaced lies.

An article someone has sent me today from Aljazeera, by Ted Rall the political cartoonist and author, indicates that not only the unemployment figures are cooked but so are most other indicators of economic well-being.

One of Rall’s points is that the bottom line --- that mythical point at which American corporations declare their profit or loss --- isn’t an entirely believeable account of the health even of a particular corporation, let alone of the economy overall. “For example,” he writes, “the Internet search giant Yahoo! saw revenues decline 12 percent in late 2010 yet doubled its profits. How'd they do it? They fired one percent of their workforce. If Yahoo! were to continue this trend, it would soon cease to exist.”

Rall calls in a quote from the Wall Street Journal in support. "While the US economy staggers through one of its slowest recoveries since the Great Recession," the paper wrote July 5th, "American companies are poised to report strong earnings for the second quarter --- exposing a dichotomy between corporate performance and the overall health of the economy."

Most modern economies depend up to two-thirds on consumer spending. But, writes Rall, Consumer confidence, the measure of people's willingness to part with cash to buy goods and services, is in the tank. When 60 percent of Americans rate the economy as poor, don't count on them to buy stuff. They're not.”

Obama’s response had been to transfer trillions of dollars to investment banks, insurance companies, airlines and automobile manufacturers. This was in accordance with pure Reagon voodoo economics (as George Bush senior once called it when contesting the presidency nomination with Reagan) the theory that wealth that is given to the rich will eventually “trickle-down” to the workers and middle class. This theory, a favorite of conservatives everywhere, has been exploded a gazillion times when actually put into operation.

Rall writes that just to keep pace with the growth of the population, it is necessary for the economy to add 1.2 million jobs a year, so when Obama boasted in January that the recovery was underway because 1.3 million jobs had been created in the previous year, he was as they say, whistling in Dixie. Since the so-called economic recovery began, in fact, some two to three million more jobs have been lost, to be piled on to the 8,000,000 jobs that had been lost when the economy collapsed originally. So when the Department of Labour boasts that 18,000 jobs were created in June of this year, they are actually disguising the fact that 82,000 jobs had been lost.

Another shattering fact revealed in this article (which quotes from a website called Shadow Government Statistics) is that if the United States calculated inflation as all other nations do, the real inflation of recent months would be admitted to be 11.2 per cent, which would account for the fact that the real gap between the wealthy and the workers is galloping along at a fine old rate.

At the core of the question when is a recovery not a recovery, writes
Rall, lies the question of vocabulary. Since the 1970s, he writes, American economics have defined a recession as being when the Gross Domestic Product falls in two succeeding fiscal quarters. By this definition, very often a recession is over before it is actually declared to have existed.

“This contributes to a strange reality gap: We are not in a recession until we are in a recovery. Effectively, then, it is rare for the American news media to state at any given time that the US economy is then in a recession. Naturally, this contributes to the perception that newspapers and TV stations lie, and that they do so on behalf of an uncaring regime.”

The message from all this should be: beware of what you read. The guys with the facts don’t want you, the average citizen, to know them.

My Log 265: I become a culture vulture and am exposed to the secret world of European opera and song

2011-07-03T01:51:00.003-04:00

Image by Stuart Pinfold via Flickr
Fireworks celebrate the launch of the Dubrovnik summer festival

In the two weeks I have spent in Croatia I have become a culture vulture, for my host has dragged me to no fewer than six musical/entertainment events, only one of which I would have even considered had I been in Ottawa.

Last night’s event was particularly memorable, for it was held in the open courtyard of one of Dubrovnik’s most regal buildings during a heavy rainfall, the first they have had here in months, and both orchestra and audience were obliged to huddle under the verandahs surrounding the courtyard while the fiddlers fiddled on, and the seven singers gathered together from all over Europe, ran through a programme of favorite opera songs.

The orchestra was that of the Opera and Ballet of the Albanian National Theatre, and the singers were obliged to make themselves heard over the incessant rattle of the rain pouring down from the overhead spouting on to the stones of the courtyard. Two sopranos from Poland and one from Russia had to suffer the indignity of their long gowns getting wet around the hems, but they maintained their sangfroid admirably, and as far as I can tell their form was maintained to the satisfaction of the knowledgeable audience. They were aided in their programme of stuff from Puccini, Bizet, Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Donizetti, by four tenors and baritones from Mexico, Columbia, Austria and Croatia, the whole thing conducted by an Albanian conductor and a local one who presides over this summer festival.

All of these performers were just names to me, unknown names, since there is probably no one less knowledgeable about classical music than me. They did provide most informative and complete programme notes, however, which led one into a whole world of European academies where these performers had studied (from the age of four some of them, poor little sods), because all of them had played in opera and concert halls in every small town and several major cities in Europe, it seemed. The whole ensemble presented to my innocent eyes and ears was of a huge underground of classical music that has been sawing away, regardless of whether the government was communist, nationalist, conservative or fascist: all of them seem to have eagerly supported these particular arts.

That got me going on one of my premiere hobby horses: that in all of these subsidized entities, the poor pay through their taxes, but the events are designed to be enjoyed only by the rich, for the poor could not possibly afford the ticket prices.

This is why I have always objected to paying for entrance to the museums and concert halls in Ottawa, when, after all, my taxes have already gone to establish these palaces of culture, and they should thereafter be available to me at no, or very minimal cost. This is not how it works: opera and ballet are the arts of a small elite. The only opera company I ever saw --- I have not seen many, I am sure readers will not be surprised to learn --- that I wholeheartedly approved was one in China whose job it was to take Peking opera around the communes of the particular county in which they operated. All performances were full, the halls packed with peasants in their sweatshirts, after a long day in the fields. The audiences paid close attention, reading the modern translations of the medieval Chinese language used in the operas, that was projected down the side of the stage. Oddly enough, these audiences never applauded, even when it was over, but just got up and left, although they seemed throughout the performance to enjoy it thoroughly.

Okay, that was last night, and part of the Dubrovnik summer festival, which has so far, in a mere two weeks, exposed me to the conducting talents of four separate conductors, None of them is household names (and even if they were, I probably would never have heard of them) so I will abstain from commenting, except to say that one of them, a Russian, seemed to be behind the beat most of the time, one of them, an Indonesian, who gave an energetic, rousing performance and pulled a remarkable variety of faces in the process, and the two last night were elderly men who were models of decorum and modesty in face of the orchestra hey commanded.

Most of the other performances were at an event called Le Petit Festival du Theatre, which took place also in an open air arena, the weather here usually being settled and warm enough to support these outside experiences.

There were two notable events at this festival. The first was a recital by a Yemini singer from Jerusalem who greeted each of us at the door as we filed into the arena, her purpose apparently being to establish some kind of rapport between herself and her audience. She had some obscure purposes, which were never adequately explained, but seemed to have to do with her wish that we should all shake off our outer snake skin and get down to the real us. To accomplish this she asked us to do all manner of things, such as touching the top of our head with our hands, shimmering and shaking so as to loosen that proverbial snake skin, thinking of a word, and, when asked, declaiming the word so everyone could hear. (I was sorely tempted to tell her my word: crap! But didn’t want to put a kibosh on the show).

I told myself, however, that when the moment came that she asked us to hold hands, I would be outa there. And that is exactly what happened when the request came. I headed for the door. I have a constitutional inability to lay myself open to any pseudo-religious revivalist who happens along, preferring to keep myself cautiously at a distance from all proselytizers, especially those who do not fully reveal their purposes.

However, the next night was a concert I thoroughly enjoyed, because, of course, it was the only one that came anywhere near my limited experience of music. A young woman from Paris named Laetitia de Fombelle performed a number of songs in English and/or French which enabled her to reflect upon life, love, its betrayal and fulfillment. This is the well-trodden territory of the French chanteuse, and when after the show I congratulated her on her performance and remarked that I was surprised that she sang a Jacque Brel song inEnglish, she said she was unable to sing it in French because it had become far too personal to her. Notable, to me, in this perfromance was the contrast between her effortless credibility and comfort when singing in French, and the somewhat strained, rather tense atmosphere when she sang in English. Her choice of songs was not hackneyed, and she got a rousing reception from a packed house. This sort of culture, feeding into my lifelong love of the French and American popular song, I could take every night of the week, if it was available.

So there it is: my cultural level is being heightened and improved to such an extent that I think I am about to embark on a protest, and refuse to be dragooned into anything else that I could classify as culture vulturism.

My Log 264: Report on delegation to UN in defence of Abdelrazik's right to be removed from no-fly list

2011-06-28T14:02:00.002-04:00

Recently a seven-person delegation went from Montreal to New York to plead the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, the Canadian citizen who has been persecuted for no reason, because of his Arab descent, and who was returned from a six-year enforced exile in Sudan, during which he was tortured, but eventually cleared of all wrong-doing, only because a Canadian court ordered the Harper government to allow the man back to Canada, as provided for the in Charter of Rights.

Since his return, Abdelrazik has continued to be persecuted because his name was placed on the UN Security Council 1267 No-Fly list, and he has been struggling to get his name off the list ever since.

A group of sympathetic Canadians has steadfastly represented his case to the higher authorities, and their latest move was to send a seven-man delegation to New York to plead with the relevant committee to remove his name from the list.

The report of their mission has been issued, and I reproduce it below:

On June 16th, 2011, a seven-person delegation, acting in solidarity with Abousfian Abdelrazik, met with a representative of the German Mission to the United Nations (Germany currently chairs the 1267-Committee) and representatives of the 1267 Monitoring Team. The delegation travelled to New York to support Abdelrazik's five-year struggle to have his name removed from the Security Council's "1267" blacklist.

During the almost two-hour meeting, the delegates, most of whom knew Abdelrazik personally, stressed the urgency of removing him from the list and pointed out the obvious inconsistencies of the blacklisting regime with the founding principles of the United Nations as articulated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; including the right to freedom and to a fair trial, the prohibition on torture (false information obtained under torture seems to have been used against Abdelrazik) as well as rights to security of the person, to earn a living, and to free association.

The delegates argued that the blacklist should be abolished, not simply reformed. They were able to convey the fact that people are increasingly aware of the issue and that mounting numbers of organizations and individuals are calling for the regime to be scrapped.

The diplomatic reserve of the UN officials was briefly punctured when they were suddenly brought face-to-face with Abdelrazik via a personal video message, in which he invited those present, "and the rest of the committee to walk in my shoes. I invite you to come to live with me for one day ... I am sure this is going to touch you, because you are human beings. Please, I have suffered enough. I want to end this suffering." As the spokesperson for the 1267-Committee remarked, it was good to be reminded that there are real human beings involved.

* Full message from Abdelrazik to the 1267-Committee:

http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/video/abousfian-abdelraziks-statement-un-1267-committee/7513

Asked for a response that delegates could bring back to Abdelrazik, the 1267-Committee spokesperson asked Abdelrazik to trust in the delisting process. As Karl Flecker, National Director of the Anti-Racism and Human Rights Department of the Canadian Labour Congress and one of the delegates, explained to media after the meeting, "What that means for Abousfian is that he has to, once again, trust the people who have had control over his life for the last five years. And to wait longer for justice. We cannot acquiesce to the hope for modest reforms to something that has fundamental injustice."

* Video of Karl Flecker and Sameer Zuberi, Canadian Muslim Forum, speaking at press briefing outside UN after the meeting:

montreal.mediacoop.ca/video/project-flyhome-delegates-discuss-meeting-un-german-mission-concerning-abousfian-abdelraziks-s

After the press briefing, the delegates were joined outside the gates of the UN by supporters from New York and a fabulous marching band, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra:

* Audio of RMO (yes! they are singing, "hey hey, ho ho! 1267 has got to go!"):

www.mediacoop.ca/audio/rude-mechanical-orchestra-playing-abdelrazik-nyc/7516

It was clear from the meeting that the 1267-Committee is feeling international pressure and hoped to relieve some of that pressure by introducing a few modest reforms. Indeed, the meeting with the Project Fly Home delegation took place on the eve of a Security Council meeting where reforms to the blacklisting regime, as well as the political imperative of removing the Taliban from the list (in order to advance a negotiated deal in Afghanistan), were due to be discussed. However, in the end, the reforms adopted on June 17th by the Security Council to the delisting process, in resolution 1989, failed to make any significant progress towards justice. In essence, instead of 15 states having an unconditional veto over a delisting request, now only five do (the five permanent members of the security council).

* Press release from FIDH on the reforms

www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/fidh_june_2011.pdf

The delisting caravan was a focal point for support for Abdelrazik and for mounting opposition to the UN 1267-blacklist and to blacklisting schemes in general. The delegation was composed of spokespeople from seven diverse organizations: Emilie Breton, Project Fly Home; Dolores Chew, South Asian Women's Community Centre (SAWCC); Karl Flecker, Canadian Labour Congress; Pierre Jasmin, Artists for Peace; Nicole Leach, Regina Solidarity Group; James Loney, Christian Peacemaker Teams; and Sameer Zuberi, Canadian Muslim Forum. Each were backed by an extensive network from very different sectors of society.

* Delegate biographies:

www.peoplescommission.org/en/abdelrazik/past.php#caravan_delegate

The delegates delivered a letter to the 1267-Committee, calling for Abdelrazik to be delisted and for an end to the 1267-Regime, co-signed by almost 100 organizations across Canada, collectively involving millions of people: student groups, human rights organizations, faith-based organizations, labour unions, community groups, NGOs and more. These organizations were joined by American allies, including the AFL-CIO - the main American labour umbrella, with 12.2 million members - and the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in calling for Abdelrazik to be delisted and the 1267-List to be scrapped.

* Read letter to Chair of 1267-Committee and see list of endorsers:

www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/letter_to_1267_en.pdf

The blacklist spokesperson also received a stack of letters from individuals across Canada, most of whom had donated to Abdelrazik in open defiance of the sanctions imposed on him. The letters offer a snapshot of the diversity and strength of support for justice for Abdelrazik across the country.

* Read quotes from some of the letters (well worth a read!):

www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/wittig_excerpts.pdf

The delegation was preceded by events in Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Ottawa, Kitchener and Halifax, including two sanctions-busting events, as well as a press conference in Montreal and a caravan to the border to see the delegation off. The initiative was covered by the media quite sympathetically in Canada and internationally and two editorials called for Abdelrazik to be delisted.

* Select media coverage of the delegation:

www.peoplescommission.org/en/abdelrazik/articles.php

My Log 263: Follow-up to Tar Sands horror: huge shipments of machinery being fought by Oregon citizens

2011-06-28T00:49:00.003-04:00

A reader of this blog has sent me a follow-up to my piece on the Tom Radford film about the Athabasca tar sands and its horrors.

The piece is from a magazine called Eugene Weekly, published in Eugene, Oregon, and it gives details, suitably horrendous details, of the proposal to transport monstrous machines through that pristine part of the world to Alberta to take part in the rape of the earth there; and of the fight being waged against this proposal.

The link to this article is

http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2010/09/02/coverstory.html

and I urge anyone who has any interest in these tar sands to read the piece. The proposal is to send shipments the largest of which is 210 feet long, 30 feet high, 24 feet wide and weighing 500,000 pounds, along the ordinary roads of the West, which, in the opinion of the protesters, pose all sorts of dangers en route, not even counting the harm these machines will do when once installed.

My thanks to Dana Magliari for providing this link.

My Log 262: Film on tar sands screening on Al Jazeera, gives Canada huge black eye

2011-06-27T01:07:00.003-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Collage of tar sands

Canada has been receiving a well-deserved, mighty black eye around the world in the last week or so as Al Jazeera, the Arab online station now equipped with a full range of sophistication and excellent reporters, has been broadcasting a superb and persuasive film made by Niobe Nicholson and Tom Radford about the Athabasca tar sands.

The programme makes no bones about it: not only is the oil extraction from the tar sands in northern Alberta the biggest construction programme in the world, but it is also “the dirtiest oil project ever known.”

Furthermore, the programme produces a lineup of ridiculous Canadian politicians, from Stephen Harper down to the environment minister of the province of Alberta, who disgrace themselves and their nation by pretending there is absolutely nothing wrong with this project that is almost single-handedly responsible for nullifying all global efforts to reduce the emission of the carbon gases that are so gravely damaging our planet.

Radford recalls on the Al Jazeera website that he made a similar film, Death of a Delta, in 1972 using a hand-cranked Bolex camera, whose subject was the right of the small community of Fort Chipewyan to “to have a voice in the construction of a massive hydroelectric project on the Peace River, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. At stake was not only the survival of the oldest community in Alberta, but the protection of a World Heritage site, the Peace Athabasca Delta, a convergence of migratory flyways and the greatest concentration of waterfowl on the continent. In the David and Goliath struggle that ensued, David won. Water was released from the dam and water levels in the Delta returned to normal. The unique ecology of the region was saved. The town survived.”

Today, that same David, the one thousand native residents of Fort Chipewyan are fighting an even more imposing Goliath, this monstrous development of the tar sands whose “expansion will have an estimated $1.7 trillion impact on the Canadian economy over the coming decades. An area of boreal forest the size of Greece will be affected by industrial activity. Once again the issue is water, but this time it is not just the flow of the river, but the chemicals the current may be carrying downstream from the strip mines and bitumen upgraders. In recent years, according to the Alberta Cancer Board, Fort Chipewyan has experienced an unusually high rate of cancer. Local fishermen are finding growing numbers of deformed fish in their nets.”

Radford’s online notes record that “gripped in a Faustian pact with the American energy consumer, the Canadian government is doing everything it can to protect the dirtiest oil project ever known.”

He produces a string of very calm and factual scientists who have discovered the facts about what is happening, placed those facts before the public, and are challenging the two governments to reveal their own data which has apparently persuaded them that there is nothing unusual occurring, nothing dangerous, in spite of the spike that has been recorded in cancer in the area, and who do not admit that if they were to introduce remedial measures, the cost of them would be so high that the whole operation would cease to make money.

Heaven forbid! Faced with the inexorable logic and honesty of a man like Dr. David Schindler, also a hero of the earlier struggle, the government produced an investigatory board which unequivocally concluded that improvements are needed in the governments’ methods of collecting facts about what is in the Athabasca river and delta. The local natives, led by chief Alan Adam, know that their rights --- constitutionally guaranteed, by the way --- to hunt and trap, and catch fish, have already been nullified because of the pollution of a huge area of the boreal forest in which they have always lived, along with the animals on which they have depended for their living since time immemorial. At a meeting of the chiefs of communities who inhabit the area of the tar sands, and the Athabasca delta --- a World Heritage site --- Chief Adam said bluntly, “If I am standing alone against this, I am going to have to make a deal with these mining interests,” something which, in the context of this whole development, seems unthinkable.

Already thanks to the tar sands, Canada has become the biggest supplier of oil to the United States, and the most chilling statement in the film comes from Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State in the Obama administration, that they have to depend on dirty oil from the Arabian gulf, or on dirty oil frm the Athabasca tar sands. In other words, money is primary; the incessant demands of the modern economy for ceaseless exponential growth, a mantra that is shared by every government on earth, so far as one can tell, must be fed, one way or the other. This is a suicide position.

Never mind the boreal forest; never mind the animal populations that are already under immense pressure; never mind the rights of local native tribes. Give us that oil, Jack, we need it…

Tom Radford is to be congratulated for this movie. Al Jazeera is to be congratulated for screening it every day for nine days on the trot.

And our Canadian politicians have surely been given a warning that they cannot afford to stand at the head of the lineup of people who don’t give a damn about the health of the earth. Something’s gotta give, and Albertans and the rest of it, if we have any say in it, are going to have to face up to what we are doing to the earth.

My Log 251: The world of the traveller today: mass tourism, or luxury tourism, and its deleterious impact on the human environment.

2011-06-26T02:21:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Dubrovnik, Croatia: the mass tourists arriveI have done quite a bit of travelling in the last two or three years, and have begun to develop a stronger than ever distaste for the impact of mass tourism on the human environment.

First, on a visit to my home country of New Zealand, I found evidence that the luxury tourism business into which New Zealand has now slotted itself, has reduced what was once an agreeable, modest little country of mostly small towns, into a major rip-off place. This was later confirmed by a British Rugby writer, Peter Bills, of the Independent, who had exactly the same feeling about it, after many trips. And it has been reconfirmed by the reports of the extravagant prices being charges by many operators for the coming Rugby World Cup, the most recent of these, unless my memory betrays me, suggesting that one operator is charging $15,000 a night, or something equally ludicrous.

At the moment I am on my second visit to Dubrovnik, in Croatia, a small, walled city, extremely beautiful, but one that after being more or less restored to its full glory following Yugoslavia’s disastrous wars of the 1990s, has now been completely taken over by the tourist industry, not so much just luxury tourism, as mass tourism.

Not a day goes by without the arrival of some cruise liner, which shuffles its passengers ashore in tenders, disgorges them in one or other of two harbours, and then sends them marching off around the town under the guidance of guides who hold up signs with numbers and languages to indicate where each tourist can find his proper place. These guides, who do presumably know a lot about the city and its history, pause on the streets from time to time as they go through their spiel. They are under strict orders to perform certain functions, to show their packs of people certain notable landmarks, and at each landmark they have an allotted time, beyond which they cannot dare venture for fear that the following group might overtake them. In one palace, currently used for symphony concerts in the evenings, but traditionally one of the central buildings in the choosing of the Parliament, they have had to build a second door so that the occupying group, if one may call it such, can escape by the back as the following group is marching through the front door.

Why anyone would regard being herded about a town in this way as having anything to do with a holiday is beyond me. Personally I am here staying with a friend, who I am helping as she tries to build an autobiographical account of her rather remarkable life. Yesterday we went as a small group of five to have a meal along a river that runs into the second harbour, called Gruz, on the other side of town. Just getting on the bus among these crowds of tourists, with their baby-carriages and their backpacks, and their intensity, an experience to which one apparently commits oneself voluntarily in the full flowering of one’s mind, gave me as much of a whiff of this kind of tourism as I will ever need. Verily, it was a sort of nightmare, until the mob disembarked from the bus en route, leaving us to find in solitude a very pleasing riverside restaurant free of the pack.

My friend, who has lived here for 40 years, complains that in the old days the city was full of little shops offering services of all kinds –— barbers, tailors, grocers, wine merchants, drapers, and so on. Now, she says, these have all gone, or nearly all gone, and been replaced by shops selling T-shirts made in China.

One is constantly being solicited by beautiful young woman with brochures advertising this or that thing: one I picked up yesterday advertises the locations of three stores within two streets of a firm called T-shirt World, which promises to transfer anything anyonewould want on to a T-shirt, “within one minute.” This has apparently become the quintessential event of mass tourism, allowing the participant to offer a hackneyed T-shirt to nieces and nephews on return home. “We are offering a catalogue with over 500 applications --- funny, new, always actual, with Dubrovnik motifs or desired text and picture,” says the brochure, which, although quite small, is printed in six languages.

I love that expression “always actual”, whatever it means. Of course, only 20 years ago they were pummeling each other to smithereens, these people, in favor of each of their nationalisms, so that “always actual” might contain some sort of hidden message. I hope not.

My Log 260: Air Canada: the perfectly Incommunicado Social System, isolated from their customers, never a real voice to answer a phone

2011-06-09T09:42:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia
Ottawa Airport

A few years ago I worked for a few months with a sociologist Ben
Singer, from the University of Windsor, who gave me a copy of a paper he had written called Incommunicado Social Systems. His thesis was that every major entity in our society --- government or private --- was sheltering behind a wall of electronics that effectively isolated them from their customers.

To prove his point, he loved to go into a bank with a cheque which he would demand they cash. Oh, no, sir, we can’t cash this cheque. Of course you can, Ben would sad, let me talk to your supervisor.

Ben knew quite well that by simply picking up a phone to confirm the cheque, they could cash it. And he was prepared to wait for hours until he had persuaded them to do it.

I thought of this yesterday when I was trying to confirm an air booking I made online in March, for next week. I had the ticket, but I wondered if I could either check in, in advance, or book my own seat, and print my own boarding pass. When I got in touch with Air Canada, they demanded my booking number. I gave them two numbers that seemed to be what I had been given as a booking number, but they did not recognize either of them, so I couldn’t take my inquiry further without telephoning them directly.

So I did that, and after hanging on for ten minutes or so was advised that the wait time for a telephone connection would be 45 minutes.

Forty-five minutes! Unheard of. Oh, well, I thought, I will just pop into their booking office downtown and check all this out.

Think again, old man. I discovered to my amazement that they closed all their downtown offices years ago. Their only office in Ottawa is at Ottawa airport, which would require for a guy without a car, a ride costing $30, and another $30 coming back. No thanks, old man.

So it seems Air Canada has fulfilled Ben Singer’s requirements as an Incommunicado Social System. They have isolated themselves into a remote place where they can’t be visited, and further isolated themselves behind a telephone system that doesn’t give a connection.

I tried again today, and although they still rejected my numbers, they did, somehow or other this time print out my ticket, which at least proves that they know about me. As for checking in and printing my own boarding pass, not until 24 hours before I leave am I able to do that.

Twenty-four hours! Don’t they realize that is almost as long before departure as I have to be at the airport just to go through their stupid, pointless, intrusive security checks.

Wow! The modern world., It isn’t like it was when I was a kid riding my bike around a New Zealand village.

Of course, that was almost eighty years ago.

2011-06-09T09:10:00.003-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Link of the Day June 9 2011: Central Asia is alive with intrigue, according to this fascinating story from the Asia Times Online, written by M K Bhadraku, US breathes life into a new cold war. Kazakhstan alone has the biggest reservoir of natural gas in the world, and the US has been angling to get hold of it: but Russia is using energy policy as a prong of geopolitics, has become the major energy supplier in Europe, which suggests a weakening of the American hold over Europe. And there is a great new alliance forming embracing China, Russia and the central Asian republics that the US doesn’t like at all. This is great stuff, as so much in the Asia Times Online is.

2011-06-08T09:07:00.001-04:00

Link of the Day June 8 2011

Here is an article of relevance in Canada: why do people vote for centre-left parties (like the NDP) that are proven to be useless in confronting the enemy of the people, namely, the owners of capital, and their neoliberal politicial policies. Steve McGiffen, writing in Dissident Voice, says such votes are useless --- as has been proven over and over again in Europe, most of whose citizens are natural supporters of the welfare state, but have been disappointed by their left-leaning parties, but some hope may rest in the extra-parliamentary movements of dissent that are emerging everywhere. Read Social Democracy and Social Progress….

My Log 259: A man of strong will and unquenchable spirit has died, who was an inspiration to everyone who knew him

2011-06-07T18:40:00.003-04:00

Jacob Diegel, with whom I have hung out in the Morala coffee shop on Bank street in the Glebe in the last few years, has died. In his memory I posted the following piece in the window of the coffee shop. Since I wrote it I have been told by his son that he was not only a man of amazing resilience and spirit, but in his younger days he had tremendous physical strength, having been known to lift a 45-gallon oil drum (500 pounds) on to the back of a truck by himself.

With that small addition, which certainly hangs together as all of a piece with what I knew of him, my piece stands:

Jacob Diegel, a regular customer of this café, and a friend and inspiration to many of us, has died, and these few words are designed in memory of him.

What made Jacob remarkable was his indomitable spirit. In 1985 he suffered a severe accident when working one of the machines he owned as he worked in the bush close to Thunder Bay, and from that moment until his death a quarter of a century later, he was in constant pain. Somehow or other he contrived to ignore this, and to maintain his cheerful outlook on life, until almost the end. His suffering was intense, and would have stopped most men from being ambulatory, but nothing could stop Jacob.

A few years ago he fell over and broke his leg in several places. His doctors doubted that he would ever walk again, but after a longish stint in hospital, his leg healed, more or less, and he was back among us, now hobbling on two sticks instead of one, but still ready for a joke and a laugh.

I enjoyed his company many times, and my memory of him is of the many laughs we had together. We were the same age, within a month, and pretended to be wiser than those around us. At one point I had Jacob and the others who usually gathered around schooled to react when I would say on arrival. “You know what it is out there?” Jacob was always ready with the answer. “It’s bloody criminal out there,” he would say, borrowing my antipodean slang.

Jacob’s wife, Mrs. Diegel, came into the café occasionally, and although she was not in the best of health was always able to carry on with us a serious conversation not only about their life together, but about the affairs of the world --- a charming, good-humoured woman, the essential life-long partner needed to help Jacob through his many trials.

How many times did he tell us how, when his son was a teenager, he gave management of one of his cutting machines to him during the school and university holidays, and told him he could keep the profits from his work on the machine, which, Jacob proudly added, was evidently good training, for the boy had become a successful lawyer in Ottawa?

How many times did he tell of his three grandsons, of whom he was so inordinately proud as he introduced them to us when they came into the café in search of him?

Jacob came to Canada from Germany in 1951 as an immigrant, but after a few years during which he worked in the bush, enjoying the outdoor life, he was called back to manage his family’s large restaurant. It was not work that he enjoyed --- “too many drunks,” he used to say --- and one day, as he was passing a Canadian consulate, on an impulse he went in and began the formalities for returning to Canada. Then he went back home and told his wife, who had no particular wish to return to Canada. (A brave man, Jacob, to do such a thing, but Mrs. Diegel, however reluctant she might have been, was up to the challenge, went along with his decision, and they returned to Canada for good).

He built a good business close to Thunder Bay, bought a small shack on 12 acres of land in the countryside, worked it over and expanded it in the succeeding years, and when he left it to join his son in Ottawa (his effective working life having been cut by his accident) he had a beautiful home, the fruit of his and his wife’s labour and their love of the countryside he had always worked in.

Once again, after that recent severe accident, he fell and again damaged himself: one would have imagined that would almost have finished him off. But within a few weeks he appeared again, even more shaky than before on his two sticks, but always with his customary bright smile and cheerful greeting.

Often he came into the café on his way back from the frequent visits he had to make to the hospital. In his last few years his health problems became intense. If it wasn’t his leukemia, with which he had lived for many years, it was his internal bleeding that required him to have numerous blood transplants; or just the need to take such care not to knock his arms, or bang his legs against anything, which could create severe bruising.

I can say one thing for sure, for everyone who knew him in the cafe: we were all cheered to see him appear at the door, put away his two sticks, and make his way painstakingly to the counter to order his coffee. He had that gift for bringing optimism and good cheer with him, just by the sheer doggedness and unquenchable spirit that kept him going, and smiling.

We will all miss him terribly. He was an inspiration to all of us, and we extend to his wife and family our sincere condolences in their loss. We know how much he meant to you all: and I can say he meant as much to all of us.

Boyce Richardson

2011-06-06T09:19:00.002-04:00

Link of the Day June 6 2011: In a significant article in the New York Times, Justin Gillis raises and investigates yet another major global problem: the suspected impact of climate change on agricultural yields. Read this important information, which signals a halt to the success of the Green Revolution, and the problems that lie ahead for scientists whose budgets are being squeezed, as they race to find a solution to inevitable problems.

My Log 258: Remarkable Spanish film, Even the Rain, shows that our modern version of colonialism is as bad as the historical version

2011-06-04T08:38:00.002-04:00

I saw a remarkable Spanish film last night which dealt with a number of issues of importance in the modern world ---- the problems of neo-colonialism, the oppression of indigenous people, the greed of multinational corporations, the corruption of governments. In other words, it was the kind of film that personally I think most films should be like --- committed, radical, and determined to face the real world.

The name of the film is Even the Rain, its director was Icíar Bollaín, a woman, and the film was one of those on the fringes of nomination for an Academy Award this year as best foreign language film.

The film deals with an attempt by a low-budget film crew to shoot a movie about the arrival of Christopher Columbus among the indigenous people of South America. Bolivia was chosen as the location for the film-within-the-film because of the easy availability of cheap extras, who could be hired for a few dollars a day. The movie opens with a huge line up of impoverished Indians who had responded to the promise of the filmmakers that everyone would be considered who showed up, which turned out to be the first of many promises they were unable to fulfil.

A leader among this straggle of impoverished people turned out to be a riveting personality called Daniel, played with extraordinary intensity by Juan Carlos Aduviri, who had turned up with his daughter, and whose demand that his daughter be given a chance to act in the movie attracted the attention of the filmmakers. Daniel was chosen to play the lead, but what the filmmakers did not know was that he was also the leader of an immense movement of the Indians who had taken to the streets to protest the handing over of the Cochambamba water supply to a private company.
This was a real event in Bolivia, fought by impoverished peasants against the local authorities.

When the filmmakers discovered this, when Daniel was arrested and beaten, they pleaded with him to stand aloof from the protest, at least until they had managed to shoot their essential scenes, and offered him a large bribe to do so. He took half of the money, but did not keep to his bargain, arguing, when upbraided by the producer, that the argument the Indians were undertaking was about water, that water was life, and the filmmakers did not understand the real priorities.

Thus the themes of colonialism, as illustrated by the story being told about Columbus, and of neo-colonialism, as illustrated by the behaviour of the film crew, and of the government in forcing the people to accept huge payments beyond their means for the very water they depended on for their lives, were intertwined from the beginning, and were forcing the filmmakers to act in the brutal way customary in colonies, whether of the ancient, or of the modern world.

The director of the film-within-the-film, played with a winning hesitancy and charm by the well-known actor Gael García Bernal, at first argued against accepting the ultimatum of the government that if Daniel was allowed to play his role in those essential scenes, then the producers should agree to surrender him to the army when they were finished, The producer agreed, the director did not. But later, after yet another violent demonstration, when Daniel’s daughter was injured and needed urgent medical attention, it was the producer whose heart melted and the director who insisted he must get his whole crew out of the area before they were endangered by the violence. In these shrewd plot twists the filmmaker, Senora Bollain did not dodge the fact that colonialist attitudes are human and stem from moral decisions made by those who are imposing their power on weaker groups.

This is the kind of decision that is seldom confronted in your usual Hollywood film: but it was confronted in this movie, and no one in the audience could have been left without knowledge about what was really involved in the story told by this movie.

The only film I can remember that dealt with this theme was Celui Qui Doit Mourier (He Who Must Die), the first film made in Europe by Jules Dassin in the 1950s, after he was exiled from the United States because of his political views, and incidentally the film in which he first met Melina Mercouri, the great Greek actress, who later became not only his wife, but a minister in the post-colonels government of Greece. Mercouri was such a figure that when she died more than a million people came out in the streets to be present at her funeral. The Dassin film was made from a Kazantzakis novel, and dealt with the ironies of a desperate group of refugees arriving in a Cretan village, and being rejected, as the villagers were mounting the annual Passion play, emphasizing the contrast between the cruel behaviour of the local powers, and the moral of the story they were telling.

In our own era, when such huge sums of money are spent on making the most trivial and absurd movies, it is good to be reminded by films such as Even the Rain, that films should be about the major problems confronting people, especially (at least in my view) the relationship between classes, between power and people, between decency, humanity, and naked greed.

2011-05-30T18:24:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia Rupert Murdoch

Link of the Day May 30 2011

In yet another remarkable article, one of many they have been publishing recently, the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine exposes the right-wing propaganda machine Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, run by the sinister Roger Ailes, whose unscrupulous specialty has been to make propaganda sound like news. Read the article, written by Tim Dickenson, here.

(“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”)

My Log 257: Arthur Goldreich dies in Israel : I remember him as a courageous fighter, and a superb orator

2011-05-26T20:53:00.004-04:00

Image via Wikipedia
Pile of rocks worked on in prison by Nelson Mandela

I see that Arthur Goldreich has died in Israel at the age of 82. He was remembered in a Globe and Mail obituary as a romantic revolutionary, but I remember him as one of the most eloquent, riveting orators I ever heard.

He is certainly a man who deserves to be honoured, because he was one of those white activists in South Africa who, in the 1950s and early 60s identified themselves with the struggle for freedom of the black people of the country, who were being treated as worse than animals by the Africaans government and its lunatic policy of apartheid. Goldriech was a rich, Jewish architect, one of a number of remarkable Jews who joined the African National Congress, and did not shrink from it when armed struggle was the only action left open to them.

Rivonia was a wealthy suburb of Johannesburg, where 19 leaders of the ANC were arrested on July 11, 1963 in a house owned by Arthur Goldreich called Liliesleaf Farm, that had been used as a hideout place for ANC leaders. Mandela had previously been imprisoned on various charges, and was not among the 19 arrested, but when the trial occurred he was among the leading accused. It was at this so-called Rivonia trial that he made his famous speech to the court in which he said:

“This is the struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society, in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if needs be, my Lord, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

With that he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and was not released until 1990, after 27 years in Robben Island prison. A man of such moral courage that he dictated the terms of his own release.

Five or six white Jews were among those arrested, along with two Indians, and several Xhosa, symbolizing the fact that the ANC programme was for a non-racial South Africa.

Goldreich and his friend Harold Wolpe bribed a guard during their imprisonment who allowed them to escape. They hid in various safe houses for two months, and finally escaped from South Africa by posing as priests. They went to England, and on arrival directly to the annual conference of the Labour Party, which was already underway. That is where I heard them speak to one of the many side meetings that always took place at this conference, where their presentation of the facts of South African life electrified the crowd, especially when presented in the golden oratory of Goldreich.

I interviewed Harold Wolpe after that meeting, and became a close friend of him and his wife Anne-Marie in succeeding months. He has always been my model of what a hero should be. He had been for many years a solicitor who had represented the ANC leaders in the many court cases that were brought against them, often, but not always, for the most trivial offences. He ran through for me the legal history as he had experienced it. It was a shattering story because although they often succeeded in winning victories in court, the apartheid government saw to it that the laws under which they had succeeded were changed so that they could never again win under those laws. One by one, in this manner, the outlets for peaceful protest were closed to the oppressed black Africans, until, if they were to resist at all, no outlet was open to them except armed rebellion. That they formed a wing of their movement devoted to armed struggle was against all their inclinations: in fact, since the party had been founded in 1912, they had always tried to follow lawful and peaceful means to express their programmes, but were prevented from doing so.

At this time I also became a close friend of the ANC’s representative in England, Robert Resha, a man whose only wish in life had been to become a sports writer, but whose treatment by the government, simply because of his skin colour, was so barbarous that he was forced to enter politics if he was to retain any dignity at all. In those days a black man could be stopped at any time and required to produce his pass: Robert was arrested 28 times on pass offences, I remember him telling me.

Goldreich did not linger too long in England, but left for Israel, where he lived the rest of his life. According to the Globe obituary, he was always bothered by the fact that he had never paid the guard the bribe he had promised him, and after South Africa gained its freedom, he returned there and paid off this debt of honour.

Harold Wolpe and Anne-Marie lived for several years in England, Harold became an adult education teacher somewhere in the north of England, and returned to South Africa after liberation. Today his memory is honoured in that country by a Harold Wolpe lecture that is given every year on some important aspect of South African life.

Robert Resha died while still a young man, only 53, before liberation had been achieved. He had lived a most frustrating life, touring around the world trying to drum up physical and political support for the cause of the ANC and African freedom. He was a wonderful man, the only man with the qualities to have become a Prime Minister I ever knew, yet one who could never aspire to such an office. Sadly, he fell into some political disagreement within the ANC, and the occasion of his death was mentioned in the ANC newsletter only in an abrupt two-line item. Some reward for a lifetime given to the struggle. But he was honoured at a special service in St.Paul’s cathedral, presided over by the leftwing cleric, Canon Collins.I have heard that his memory has been rehabiklitated since liberation was achieved. I certainly hope so. His sidekick in the London office, Raymond Munene, a poet, became a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles for several years, and on his return became the champion of Xhosa literature, a professor at the University of Natal, and a writer much honoured for his contribution to the African cause.

I have always regarded my friendship with these men as one of the most important events of my life. They were all people ready to put their lives on the line when the crunch came. Not only South Africa, but all of us, owe a great deal to them and the honorable lives they led.

2011-05-17T15:39:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia Link of the Day 1, May 17 2011 If there is anybody out there who still believes the USA is in a position to lecture other nations about democracy and the rule of law, two articles recently published should disabuse them. First, Jane Meyer in The New Yorker for May 23 offers an astounding account of the National Security Agency, the world’s biggest and most secretive agency for intelligence-gathering; and of the whistleblower who is being prosecuted as a traitor for trying to alert the public to the Agency’s breaking of the law. Read her article, The Secret Sharer, here. It is astonishing. The second article is linked to in the item below.

2011-05-17T15:30:00.004-04:00

Image via Wikipedia Goldman Sachs tower

Link of the Day 2 May 17 2011: Matt Taibi writes a remarkable article in Rolling Stone: The People vs. Goldman Sachs: A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

(“They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.”)

My Log 256: On the lookout for the first ducklings and considerations of instinct, and what the hell it is.

2011-05-16T18:48:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

For the last three weeks or so I have been watching carefully, as I cycle around Dow’s Lake and the canal, for the first family of ducklings to appear. The earliest date I have ever spotted such a family was May 13, but for some reason this year I was hoping to beat that record.

No such luck, I’m afraid, although I identified many couples among the ducks who looked like they could become proud parents at any moment. Pure imagination, of course.

About he only interesting things I saw during these weeks were some loons, which one can depend on turning up during the migratory year. At least, I think you can. And I think they were loons. Can’t be altogeher sure, of course.

My concentration on ducklings got me to wondering about the method of their birth, emerging from an egg. And that set me to wondering how a duck knows that if she sits on this egg, it will produce a small baby. The only reason I could come up with was that it is instinctual, they just have an instinct that this is the way to do it? Instinct? Does it exist somewhere in the living organism, or is it like that other puzzler, among humans, the soul? Personally, I always deny that there is any such thing as a soul. No one has ever seen it. No one knows where it is to be found. In fact, most people find it impossible to describe exactly what it is. Therefore, it seems to me there is a good case for whichever philosopher it was who claimed that to talk of a soul was simply a way of talking about something. The ghost in the machine, I think is how this bloke described it.

Well, what the hell is instinct? When I tentatively suggested it is something inbred, one of my friends said, ah, yes, but the duck knows to sit on the eggs by having seen it done before, it is a learned behaviour.

Really? That surprises me, if it is so. It would be like saying that for a goose to set out on a migration route to some place it has never been before would be a learned experience. Impossible to have learned it if he has never done it, right?

I looked up various definitions of instinct, and since I tend to reject anything that might be described as faith-based, I veered towards the scientific description.

If anyone is interested, the American Heritage and Science Dictionary says that instinct is an inherited tendency of an organism to behave in a certain way, usually in reaction to its environment and for the purpose of fulfilling a specific need. The development and performance of instinctive behavior does not depend upon the specific details of an individual's learning experiences. Instead, instinctive behavior develops in the same way for all individuals of the same species or of the same sex of a species. For example, birds will build the form of nest typical of their species although they may never have seen such a nest being built before. Some butterfly species undertake long migrations to wintering grounds that they have never seen. Behavior in animals often reflects the influence of a combination of instinct and learning. The basic song pattern of many bird species is inherited, but it is often refined by learning from other members of the species. Dogs that naturally seek to gather animals such as sheep or cattle into a group are said to have a herding instinct, but the effective use of this instinct by the dog also requires learning on the dog's part. Instinct, as opposed to reflex , is usually used of inherited behavior patterns that are more complex or sometimes involve a degree of interaction with learning processes.

So far so good. But where the hell is this instinct? Can I touch it?

It makes me think of a young woman friend of mine, a recent mother, who, every time I see her tells me she has moments of unexpected pure joy, as for instance, when her baby smiles at her. This is something she didn’t expect, although it is also something that many people would describe as part of a mother’s instinct. Yet it is known many woman don’t have this particular instinct, but prefer not to have any children at all.

Don’t ask yourself questions that require knowledge to answer, Boyce. You are too dumb for this game.

Meantime I continue to look out for the first ducklings of the year.

BOYCE'SPAPER

My Log 288 : Nagging sense of déjà vu in watching CBC documentary series on native Canadians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Log 277: “It’ll be the last time,” mutters Chris Hedges in face of Kevin O”Leary’s insults

My Log 276:Documentary on “Experimental Eskimos” throws a sorry light on the arrogance, ignorance of Canada’s northern administration --

My Log 275: Surprising outpouring of affection for Jack Layton means his shoes will be almost impossible to fill.

My Log 274: Sarajevo, desperately trying to rebuild its reputation for culture, multinationalism and calm, unhurried beauty

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My Log 260: Air Canada: the perfectly Incommunicado Social System, isolated from their customers, never a real voice to answer a phone

My Log 259: A man of strong will and unquenchable spirit has died, who was an inspiration to everyone who knew him

My Log 258: Remarkable Spanish film, Even the Rain, shows that our modern version of colonialism is as bad as the historical version

My Log 257: Arthur Goldreich dies in Israel : I remember him as a courageous fighter, and a superb orator

My Log 256: On the lookout for the first ducklings and considerations of instinct, and what the hell it is.