My Log 565 Dec 25 2017: Chronicle from (almost) the Tenth Decade: 2 Christmas (ugh!) descends on us, along with some terrible news: that La Presse is about to publish its last printed paper

Christmas is one of those religious impositions that personally I have always hated. It is supposed to represent the probably fictional birth of a man accepted by millions of people around the world as their Prophet. But to me it is a total farce: a celebration that has been so grotesquely commercialized by businessmen and customers --- those two essential characters in the human lexicon of capitalism --- that I cannot understand why it doesn’t sicken everybody. As soon as, a few decades ago, I realized it was to be punctuated by the plummy upper-crust voice of the queen expounding her bromides, I have made every effort to avoid at least that indignity. So for years I have just tried to live through the Christmas holidays as if my eyes and ears were closed to all stimuli.

I know we are constantly told that we must respect everyone’s religion, that we must respect the freedom of anyone to practise the religion he or she follows.  I am okay with that, I don’t want to deprive anyone of such freedom; but I do draw the line when told I have to respect the fact that millions of people believe absurd things, like those Moslem suicide bombers who believe they’re headed for a heaven where they will be surrounded by 72 virgins, and who use this as a cowardly excuse to blow up hundreds of innocent people; or like those Christians who believe their saviour was the result of a virgin birth; or who seem genuinely to believe that he ascended to heaven after X (I’ve forgotten the number myself) number of days, a huge rock having been rolled aside miraculously to enable him to make the ascension.  Pu-leez! And while I am at it I think in return for my abstention from imposing my views on religious people, they could perhaps not impose their views on me. Unfortunately, this is where the matter becomes serious, for everywhere in the world we see religious people trying to impose their views on the rest of mankind, and being so serious about this that they are willing to kill, imprison, maim and excommunicate anyone who does not bow to their wishes.

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Today I came across a piece of bad news hidden away in the business section of a Toronto paper,  namely, that the Saturday editions of La Presse, which ceased to publish its weekday editions on January 1 two years ago, will cease as of December 30 at the end of this week. In other words, this means the disappearance of the number one newspaper published in French on the North American continent. Of course, it will continue as they say these days, online. But that is no substitute for a real live newspaper in the hand.

It was only after I arrived back in Montreal five years or so ago that I became a regular reader of La Presse.  I had gotten into the habit in Ottawa of going to a coffee shop to read the morning newspaper, and so I  continued the habit Montreal. I took an internet course in French to facilitate the business, and I quickly found I could read the newspaper easily, and soon developed an appreciation for the newspaper that I had never had when previously living in Montreal between 1957 and 1975.The first blow came two years ago when La Presse ceased to publish a printed paper on weekdays, thus forcing me to transfer my reading to the Toronto Globe and Mail except for Saturdays.

In those old-time days, of course, when I first made the acquaintance of La Presse, I had a healthy contempt for all newspapers, for which I had worked as a daily journalist since 1945. And I had as well, a searing distrust of all my bosses, the only exception being a man called Albert Boothe, who had been my City Editor in the Winnipeg Free Press, and was a prince of a man.

The basis for my distrust was that in my observation most of my bosses had attained their positions not from any real merit or skill at the job, but simply from having stayed in the same place so long that they rose to the top through inanition.

I had, however, in those days a certain connection with La Presse which came about from my friendship with one of their reporters, a charming and loveable woman called Celine Legare, who 20 years later contracted a deadly cancer that ended her life prematurely.  On one of my first jobs after joining the staff of the Montreal Star in 1957, I sat next to her when covering a luncheon speech at the Canadian Club, and as we wandered back towards our respective offices she told me she realized I must have come from some other place, because “the English reporters never talk to us.” From that moment on she treated my wife and me as if we were among her closest friends, and through her repeated invitations to meet her friends on Fridays at her house, she introduced us to a French-Canada of which as far as I could tell, my colleagues of the time on the English paper, appeared to be completely unaware. A French-Canada of young men and women who had already shaken off the tentacles of the reactionary Quebec church and all its works, who were progressive in their political outlook, enthusiastic members of the journalistic union that had transformed their profession from one that was traditionally riddled with corruption into one that stood proud in face of their bosses, and were longing for the day when people of their mind might take over management of the entire political system of their province. Many of these people had been members of the Communist party or fellow-travellers, and they did not shrink from anyone about their aggressive disbelief in all the shibboleths still hanging over from the traditional forces that had dominated Quebec society.

Their union in La Presse was in marked contrast to the situation in the English-language paper, whose reporters benefited from the existence of the French-language union to the extent that our newspaper had elevated our wages to something like 10 per cent below those paid to the unionized reporters along the road in the French newspaper, a measure taken in the hope of stalling the arrival of a union.

My close connection to these people --- I once walked on the picket line with them when they were on strike, an action that, if it had become known to my employers would probably have led to my instant dismissal --- was an absolute gift to me as I settled down to try to make sense of what was happening in Quebec. And it was a matter of astonishment to me to see that their strikes resulted not only in wage settlements but in the overthrow and replacement of editorial bosses more to their liking. I was pretty good at my job, and was promoted to become the newspaper’s correspondent in London before the election of the Liberal party government that began to overhaul all institutions in the province in 1960. Even though I was far from it, the election result did not surprise me, nor did the fact that it gave rise to a province that today, in terms of social welfare, is still is ahead of the rest of the country, a province that has been remade very much in the direction desired by my unexpected francophone friends of the late 1950s.

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Watching TV as I pondered what to write, I heard a character dying of AIDS croak to someone sitting beside him, “I used to be afraid of death. But I am not now.” I looked around at my empty house, thinking that my  death cannot be so far away, maybe a few years, maybe shorter, maybe longer. It stands to reason when you are 89, I thought. There’s not much time left.

I have  never been afraid of death, and am not now. I suppose the most likely thing is that I will die unexpectedly,  while alone, and be found some time afterwards when someone perhaps misses seeing me around. That doesn’t bother me: I will be, after all, dead. The world will go on just as if I had never lived. I can’t say I will  can’t say I will welcome death; I enjoy mooching along through these last years, nowadays doing nothing particularly useful.

I wonder how long any of the millions of words I have written will  be read by anyone after I am dead. I have no illusions about that; not long, I am sure.

My Log 564 Dec 22 2017: Chronicals from (almost) the tenth decade:1 My major discovery is that physical decline is exponential after 80

A friend I have known for 60 years once told me that in relation to cold weather he had never heard me say anything more startling than “it’s a bit nippy out there.”

Well, today was a bit nippy, minus 18, feeling like minus 25 with the wind chill, but I have never liked surrendering to the cold, and I pulled on my winter coverings, adding for this slightly extreme occasion  my old ski mask that I hadn’t worn in years,  and set off to walk the three-quarters of a mile to my favorite coffee shop, and back. It was invigorating, I’ll say that.

As the great Irish journalist Claud Cockburn once observed,  a fact, such as the one above, attains meaning only when picked up by someone who places it in the context of his or her own outlook on life.

So here is the context to give my unremarkable journey on a cold day some meaning: almost ten years ago, when I had passed 80, I  decided to write a series of pieces called Chronicles from the Ninth Decade. I wrote 20 or so of them before they petered out, to join that vast assembly of begun-but-never-ended articles, books and plays that repose in various drawers and files around what is left of my dwelling space  (that is, a one-bedroomed apartment, on the 15^th floor above downtown Montreal.)

I am within three months of reaching my tenth decade, and although I don’t want to tempt fate, I have begun to think about reviving my old idea, of constructing a chronical from --- wait for it! --- the tenth decade. First, I looked for what I had written to begin this ninth decade series: after a lot of back and forth, clicking on this and that I found them in a file called “Archives”, that I didn’t even know existed.

Here is the first of them:

In the second decade of their lives, most young men and women  are expected to be --- and usually are --- bursting with life and shining with good health. Nowadays called teenagers, these young people know nothing about things that by the ninth decade of their lives will have become wearisomely familiar to them --- post-nasal drip, hearing loss, deviated septums, enlarged prostate glands, eye cataracts, hypertension, arthritis, osteoporosis and so, on and on without end.  Or I should say, until the inevitable end that even they, the young, will eventually come to.

If one works at it, however, even in the ninth decade one can show occasional bursts of life, ignoring all the ills that man is heir to. To come through life more or less whole requires a willingness to curse, to drink, and even (in rare cases) to go on screwing, as if one were still in his --- shall we say? --- fifties.

I am writing this in my son Ben’s house in Austin Texas, after spending most of my day hanging around in Dulles International Airport, Washington DC, waiting for a plane to arrive from Providence that had not been able to takeoff because air traffic over New York was stacked a mile high following a storm. This is the kind of  thing --- a mere storm --- that exposes the extent to which  we have all become victims of these huge, lunatic, centralized, electronic systems of governance that we take so much for granted nowadays: one hitch anywhere, one switch thrown by accident, or one airport thrown off its stride causes immediate repercussions everywhere in the continent. And that  is why I spent six hours yesterday talking to an old lady who had flown in from Rome and was waiting vainly to get to Philadelphia on scheduled planes that just hadn’t arrived; and to a young girl wearing a Universita Roma sweater who was actually attending the University of West England in   Gloucester and was hoping to get to Indianapolis. (Like most  old ladies this one simply assumed I was interested in her grandchildren; but there were some snippets of useful social information shared as well: her daughter and son-in-law arrived back in the family home in their thirties with five children, and spent a whole year under the maternal roof. Oh, those Philadelphia stories!)

Ben had been tracking the progress of my flight throughout the day by computer, so the variations in schedule did not discommode him in the slightest. He picked me up and suggested I might like to go to the Continental club, where, if we were lucky, we might hear the last set by Ephraim Owen, a superb jazz trumpeter I had heard a couple of times before.

I say it frequently with pardonable exaggeration, that the Continental club is the world’s greatest night club, a scruffy old place whose walls bear the detritus of half a century of ceaseless devotion to live music. It is owned by Steve Wertheimer (who bought it when the street was depressed 20 years ago, a condition he has almost single-handedly reversed), and is managed by a couple of beautiful young women, Celeste and Kelly, who are my favorite Americans. The upstairs gallery had been closed for several months to conform with various city ordinances, but in my absence the bar had been moved three feet to the right, clearing the exit of encumbrances, and Ephraim, a modest, cheerful type, was back at the old stand with his trio. When his set was over I went up and shook his hand, telling him I was Ben’s Dad. “Oh, yes, Ben’s dad, I remember you, I remember you! I am honored you have come back and are here with us again,” he said (tending towards one of those American show-biz overkills. But, you know, the guy did sound genuinely pleased that I was there). We had some drinks, and when we came to settle up, Kelly, with whom I struck up a warm friendship on my first visit a couple of years ago because of her fearless denunciation of Dubya, charged me the minimal total of $6! That’s Texas, or more precisely, Austin, hospitality and warmth:  or maybe it could be respect for those who are sear and yellowed and gradually withering  with advancing age.

Then Ben and I sat in the open air on his verandah until after 4 a.m.,  deploring the temper of our times, and, true to my recent form, I got hammered without its having the slightest effect the next morning on my head. The advantages of old age are few, but occasionally worthwhile.

Comment after ten years: These disquisitions on old age have been modified only slightly as the result of the passing of ten years. My major discovery has been that after one reaches the age of 80, the rate of physical decline is exponential. I wasn't quite prepared for that, to tell the truth. I thought, since everyone used to congratulate me on how I didn't look anything like my age, that I would never be one of those old people one sees dragging themselves painfully around the street. But the fact is, I have had a couple of serious old-age health incidents that have very much slowed me down: the first happened two years ago when I snapped the Achilles tendon on my right leg as I was trying to mount my bicycle. The second was an incident in which my bladder became so full of blood clots that I couldn’t perform my normal functions. That introduced me to the delights of the catheter, and the cystoscope. Two marvels of technology that I wouldn’t wish on anybody.

The Achilles has never totally healed, and I don’t see myself ever riding a bicycle again, something I hate to admit, but it has slowed me down and reduced the amount of walking I used to do. Then to these unexpected delights, nine months ago was added a mysterious attack that felled me in the street, shivering and trembling from head to toe: the next thing I knew I was in a hospital, surrounded by people whose language I could scarcely understand, which I attribute both to my failing hearing, as well as my inadequate knowledge of French, and subject to antibiotic treatment for nine days that appears to have cured me, but again has had the effect of making my general speed around the world much slower than it used to be.

Another  effect of the passing years has been that I am no longer able to sit up until 4 am getting hammered. In fact, I can hardly abide any alcohol unless it is accompanied by collateral sips of cold water. So gone are those delightful pub crawls in Austin with my eldest son.

I think the major effect of this physical deterioration is to have turned me into one of those old bores whose primary topic of conversation is their ailments. With which I sign off this first piece celebrating my approach to the tenth decade, with a vow never to mention my physical condition in this chronicle again.

My Log 563 Nov 13 2017: Senate does something good: insists on government abolishing sexism from the Indian Act: and not before time!

The news that the government is bringing in legislation to abolish all sexism from the Indian Act is good in more ways than one.  The second way it is good is that this measure has been forced on the government by the stubborn insistence of the Senate, a body usually dismissed as having no useful function. 

On this occasion, led by two indigenous Senators, Lillian Dyck, of Saskatchewan, the offspring of Cree and Chinese parents, and Murray Sinclair, an Ojibwa from Manitoba, both of them with distinguished records of public service in the indigenous as well as the general interest, the Senate rejected the government’s first version of a bill designed to correct some anomalies in the Indian Act, then rejected a second attempt on the grounds that it still contained some unacceptable provisions, before finally, after long consideration, the government caved before the upper chamber, and has promised  a corrected version of its proposals, which even now, the Senate has delayed from passing because they want to be sure the government has done what it has promised.

If all this works out as promised, some of the most ridiculous provisions of Canadian law ever perpetrated will have been corrected.  I remember the first time I learned of these unconscionable provisions of Indian law, which happened a few days after I first met Indian people in 1968.

I had been assigned to go to a remote village in North-western Ontario, a village accessible only by railway, where a group of native people were reported to be living in appalling conditions. En route I was directed to a native woman in Thunder Bay, Mrs Paul McRae, who had married a non-Indian school principal. Although from a well-known Indian family, one of her brothers the chief of a large local reserve, and a sister one of Canada’s foremost aboriginal artists, she told me she no longer was recognized by the government as an Indian, because of her marriage to a white man.  I could scarcely believe my ears, but she assured me it was true.

She generously handed me on to Chief Willie John, chief of the Lake Helen reserve, at the foot of Lake Nipigon, the lake that lies directly north of Lake Superior.  That was one of the luckiest accidents that ever happened to me, because Willie was a wonderful little man with whom I spent the next week or so as we travelled north to Geraldton, where we caught the train across the wilderness of north-western Ontario to Armstrong, the small town in question.  When I went to pick him up,  Willie introduced me to his wife, whom  he had married while in the army. She was a full status Indian, he said, because though a Yorkshirewoman  born and bred, she had married a status Indian.  Once again my jaw dropped at this insanity. But it was only the beginning of  similar shocks I received in the next thirty years or so as I familiarized myself with the legislative record of what Canada’s settlers from Europe, who had arrived equipped with a formidable arsenal of ignorance and arrogance,  had imposed on the original inhabitants. It was a vast assembly of laws designed to destroy the way of life of these people, of whose reality the settlers had only the vaguest idea, and even that dramatically out of focus. Indeed, it was a programme designed to wipe the Indians, so-called, off the face of the earth, a full-scale attack of genocidal proportions, that, fortunately, never really succeeded.

That week I spent with Willie John, who was a man of vast experience, successively a soldier, a tugboat captain, a heavy-equipment operator, a social agitator on behalf of returned aboriginal servicemen who arrived home after fighting for freedom to find they still couldn’t vote and had to sit in their own section of the cinemas, and  were forbidden to do this, that and the other because they were treated as children in the care of their big-brother government, introduced me to a Canada I could scarely have imagined existed.

Before I returned to Montreal I met Mrs McRae’s brother who was a major chief, and we engaged in a vigorous discussion as he attempted to defend the sanctions taken against his sisters because they had married white men. Brain-washed, the poor fellow, as so many of the Indian leaders I met in succeeding years appeared to be, ready to defend any foolish government law in order not to disturb their own small centres of power.,

When I returned I wrote a piece saying the people Willie had introduced me to as he, an operative of the Company of  Young Canadians, listened to their problems and undertook to represent them to the relevant authorities, were living lives that reminded me of nothing so much as  the characters in Gorki’s Lower Depths, and I felt sure that some day they would throw up their own artists to describe their condition to Canadians who for the most part had no idea what had been done to these people in their name.

It is hardly the place to go into a catalogue of the terrible laws passed to control Indians. I have already done that in a book I wrote in 1993, which sold some 300 copies, and was almost completely ignored by the media, most of which carefully abstained from reviewing it.  Suffice to say that if Lillian Dyck and Murray Sinclair had lived at an earlier time, neither of them would have been legally entitled to claim Indian ancestry, because they each have a passle of university degrees, and at one time, the moment an Indian received a University degree, he  or she was automatically stripped of his Indian identity  and declared to be a white man or woman.

In the chapter in my book outlining “the wonderful world of the Indian Act”, I have listed the more oppressive of these legislative acts taken against Indians in categories that give a sense of how all-embracing were the oppressive controls:  land; community government; restrictions on movement, assembly and speech (at one time a pass was needed for an Indian to leave a reserve); production (Indians were encouraged to become farmers, and then forbidden from selling their produce);  liquor; health; enfranchisement; inheritance; ceremonies rituals and amusements; and education. In each of these categories at one time or another repressive laws were passed.

The now well-known scandal of the residential schools in which from the age of six students were abused sexually and physically, often died and were buried without notifying the parents, flogged for speaking the only language they knew, their native tongue, and all administered by various religions (which have since apologized for the very existence of their schools), all in the name of the national objective “to detach the children from the barbarous lives of their parents” --- a prescription actually written down at the time, which is in itself surely one of the most barbaric objectives ever established by this or any government, is merely the  apotheosis of this vast architecture of genocidal legislation designed to wipe the Indians from the face of Canada.  

Throughout this entire story the government of Canada has played an equivocal, weasly role, illustrated by the latest wheeze discovered by the Dyke-Sinclair team: that in their revised programme designed to abolish sexism from the Indian Act, they have prescribed that children born of male Indians before 1951 who were denied Indian status should be retrospectively given status, but that should not apply to children born of female Indians who before 1951 had lost their status by marriage.

Still at it, eh? Nuff sed!