My Log 380: Danish film about modern cities concerned with spaces between buildings, not with ovewhelming issues like over-population

Downtown New York (Photo credit: sreevishnu)

Adult Education (song) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

-->Last night I attended a film about the human condition, called The Human Scale which has been screening all week, followed each night by a presentation about cities by the Montreal Urban Ecology Centre. This is a worthwhile effort at public education which reminds one of the old times, when adult education classes were held across the country by the CBC, and in other countries. I remember attending such classes ---not really classes, more like isolated lectures --- as a youth in New Zealand, and I actually went to a non-degree granting college of adult education for a year in Scotland when I was in my mid-twenties.  I am happy to report that last night’s performance attracted a sellout audience.

The film itself was a Danish production, made by Andreas Dalsgaard, a film-maker who also has a degree in social anthropology, and all of whose films have been exercises in that discipline. He says of this film: “I wanted to create a kaleidescope image and sound scape, where the audience can participate in a sort of meditation on modern life. The urban planners, thinkers and architects in the film make observations, ask questions about our lifestyle, and provide some possible solutions. But most of the answers are left for the audience. Who are we, how do we live, and where are we going as a species? And can we even do a damn thing about it?”

On the basis of the interesting meditation he makes about city life, it seems that although there are many things we can do to influence the direction of our society, in most cases we don’t do many of these things.

This is a subject around whose periphery I have been writing for at least half a century, so last night’s film aroused many echoes in me, many thoughts, relevant and irrelevant.

The film begins with China, where in the last 30 years a massive transformation has taken place: for one thing, the greatest urban migration in history, with hundreds of millions of people moving from the countryside to the newly built cities, a movement accompanied by the lifting out of poverty of 300 million people --- think of that number, more people than in the United States ---  with the promise of another 300 million meeting the same improvement in the next 30 years.

This is astonishing enough in itself, but one has to cringe slightly when confronted with the reality, the sheer overwhlming bulk, vast size of the cities that have been built to accommodate these people.

He asks people who have animated this change why the actual lifestyles of people have not been taken more into account, why these millions have been housed far from their places of work, so they have to be transported back and forth twice a day, why the spaces between buildings have not been better designed. What it brought into my mind was that when I was in China 35 years ago, they did, in fact, have a workable system. In the city where we made a film about a cotton factory, the apartments built to house workers were all built within cycling distance of the factory, and most of the workers cycled to work, or took the local bus. The so-called industial park so beloved of Western world planners did not exist in China at that time: factories, apartments, schools, shops were all intermingled in a way that made sense, especially when considered as a demand on energy. It was energy-efficient, compared with our current methods, in which houses are confined to suburbs, and work-places, especially industrial work-places, are situated at the other side of town.
The sequence on China ends on a Chinese planner reflecting morosely that they have simply copied the Western model, and have made all the mistakes that the Western planners made, without learning anything from them. 

The film moves around the world, picking examples from different cultures of ways that people live, and of successes people have had in adapting their cities and their living spaces to the sort of lives they are actually living, or would wish to live. 

I have to say that almost all the long shots of the modern megalopolis leave one with a vision of vast size, impersonality, and over-crowdedness that is, quite simply, horrrendous.  A great deal of attention is paid to New York, and transformations that have been worked in such iconic places as Time Square --- which, as the film-maker points out, never was a square, but rather an avennue for traffic, always full of taxis. Space has been made there, apparently, for people to walk where cars formerly drove; for people to sit and smell the coffee, as it were, where before they were crowded on to narrow sidewalks, surrounded by noise, hustle and bustle.

When the film-maker considers Bangladesh, it aroused another memory for me. In 1975 at an international  conference held in New Zealand of this same Human Ecology group, I was staggered when someone said that at the turn of the century Bangladesh would have a population of 125 million. Trying to find out how much land would be available for these people, I discovered that the country was about the same size as the South Island of New Zealand, which at that time could not have had a population of more than a million. (That, is, around 50,000 square miles, roughly half the size of England, Scotland and Wales). I worked out that to accommodate the coming population of Bangladesh, every settlement in the South Isand of 1000 or more would have to be expanded to hold a million people. In other words, the coming population explosion in Bangladesh was literally unimaginable. Today, a decade past the turn of the century, Banglaesh has more than 140 million people, who, as this film shows, are living so packed in against each other, and whose resources of food and other products are so limited, as to make life a sort of living hell.

Oddly enough, the film-maker switches from Bangladesh to Christchurch, New Zealand for his next example: the centre of this city, a quiet, thriving, English-style city of 376,000 people, was devastated by a terrible earthquake in 2010. And the film-maker was interested in the steps being taken to, first destroy what was left of the city centre, and then to rebuild it, according to the expressed wishes of the people. Everyone was asked to give his or her opinion, and the planners were confronted with 100,000 opinions of how the people would like the future to proceed.

Every other exercise I have ever encountered before of a similar nature has led experts to believe  that, if given a choice of  how they would like to live, most people --- at least in the western world --- will always opt for the little suburban house with a garden surrounded by a white picket fence. (This has been the desire on which the revolutionary hopes of such visionaries as Moshe Safdie have foundered. He believed he could solve the problem of good housing for the poor by the use of the mechanical inventions that he tried out in Habitat at the 1976 Expo in Montreal: unfortunately, though a wonderful concept, it has turned out to be nothing more than a living design for the wealthy.)

I didn’t get any clear idea of what the planners took out of the expressed wishes of the people in Christchurch, except that in the opinion of deep thinkers on this subject, to destroy what was left of the city centre would remove not only bricks and mortar, but also the memories of the people who had known it, and that this could be regarded as an irrevocable loss. As to how they are going to proceed in Christchurch, after sounding out the residents, I did not get a clear idea. (I ran across something relevant to this choice years ago when I interviewed the wonderful urban planner and architect, Richard Neutra. He was hired to rebuild the road network in Guam after the war, and discovered that everyone remembered what they had known, and wanted it recreated. Unfortunately the island had been flooded with Dodge cars, and the old network was inadequate as a response.)

My overwhelming impression from the film is that these deep urban thinkers are more concerned with humanizing the spaces between buildings than with attacking the root problems that have brought about the increasing anomie of the modern city. Basic to all of them is the problem of over-population, which is not mentioned in the film from beginning to end, not even in the case of Bangladesh. This seemed to me an extraordinary omission.

However, one has to praise the educational effort:  Mr. Dalsgaard does use documentary film for what I think it should be used for: that is, as a tool for social change.

But one last personal note: even the architect around whose innovative ideas the film was built admitted that he does not know his neighbours at all; and I find myself living in an environment that is posited by the film as the worst it could be. I live on the 15^th floor of a high-rise apartment building, in a small one-bedroomed apartment, do not know any of the other persons living on my floor or even within my whole building, and have relatively little chance to meet other people in the city.

I like it a lot.

My Log 379: Great films available with new technology: From West Indian cricket to French masterpieces....

Omar Sy

Back of an Apple TV (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My son Ben, who lives in Austin, Texas, has spent a lot of money, at least many hundreds of dollars, on buying  whole series of television programmes. Many of these have been expensive. For example, he pickedup  a box set of the wonderful TV series Rome, and it bore a price tag of $84. But he looks at the large bookcase holding all of these videos, and says, “They are more or less useless now.”

. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The reason for that is, he has been caught in one of the many technological changes that keep overwhelming the fields of popular culture. He used to have a vast number of records, then of albums of music, then of CDs, but all of these, too,  have become, to use the word beloved of all these industries dealing in popular culture, obsolete. Ben does not have television itself; he watches only specially chosen programmes. But now he has the new gadget, Apple TV, which enables him to whistle up Netflix,  a programme  he says is one of the greatest ever. For less than $8 a month, hundreds and hundreds of films and TV shows  can be summoned up and broadcast any time he wants them, and although they have to be summoned up by the computer, they can be transferred to the large TV monitors for screenng, so he has little use now for his many collected versions of shows and films. I have Apple TV myself, and as a lifelong lover of films, I have to say I agree Netflix is a genuine innovation that threatens to make even the cinema house obsolete. In recent months I have watched many films of the highest quality, none of which would otherwise be easily available to me.

For music now --- indeed, it seems to me, for almost everything now --- Ben has his iPhone, on which he also carries almost everything he needs in daily life, his music, his access to the Internet, his emails, the news programmes of the day --- indeed you name it, and Ben is carrying it around in his pocket. He also seems to do most of his business on it: he is a tour manager for rock groups (that’s one of his jobs, at least) and he seems to conduct it all on his phone.

It makes me think back to the time I first encountered floppy discs for my first computer: I couldn’t believe it when someone told me I could carry a whole book on one floppy disc (which has long since become obsolete).  Now it seems you can carry almost as many books as you like, only now you carry them on a little device that you can slip into your pocket almost without noticing it, a machine that serves also as camera, telephone, gramophone (to use the nomenclature with which I grew up), typewriter, information storage centre, and almost anything else you like to name.

Well, none of this is news to anyone reading my blog (if there are any such  anachronistic people left). In fact, I am in fairly constant touch with all three of my sons, all of whom have at their disposal the same wide range of electronic marvels. And one has only to walk the streets to see that almost everyone nowadays has machines like this, especially everyone below 30. (I tried one of these mobiles once when I first moved to Montreal, but after a month I gave it up. I just didn’t like it.)

Well, all this is more or less introductory to telling about some of these films I have recently seen. The finest of them has been a French movie called Intouchables. It stars the well-known actor Francois Cluzet, playing the part of a rich paraplegic, and Omar Sy, a black man who is hired to be the immobile man’s companion and helper. The helper, it turns out, is an ex-con, recently released after serving six months for theft, but he is also a man of remarkable good humor, full of laughter, with a repertoire of jokes that might be considered by more stuffy people as inappropriate for the man he is helping. He is also a man of limited education, in other words, he does not have that patina of good manners and reserve that usually comes with schooling. And this proves to be the perfect recipe to call the man he is helping back into real life.  (There is a delicious sequence when they go to the opera, and the helper cannot restrain his laughter when the main singer turns out to be a tree. It reminded me of the sequence in War and Peace when the great Tolstoy devotes his skill to giving a wonderful, deadpan account of the events of an opera.) The film opens with a marvellous car chase  in which the  helper, who is driving the man’s car, bets his employer he can lose the police who soon join them in a chase. When he is stopped by a police car pulling across his bows, he bets his employer that he can get the police to escort them to a hospital and, of course, with collaboration from his friend, he does. It is exciting and funny, and although it is out of sequence in the film, it does kick it off with a bang.

Halfway through, just as he has settled into his relationship with his employer, so that they become more like friends, his family turns up, and he is called away to deal with their intense problems. He emerges from that ready to quit his job, except that his boss, sensing his problems, tells him it is time for him to go, he cannot expect to be caring for an invalid all his life.

Well, it all comes out well in the end, as one might expect. All that need be added is that it is one of the highest grossing films ever released in France, where it has evoked a warm response. Not much wonder: it is a beauty.

On a different subject I also saw a couple of days ago a really wonderful documentary called Fire in Babylon, about the West Indian  teams that ruled the world of cricket in the 1970s and 1980s. Directed by  Stevan Riley, the film is more like a social history of the West Indies, since it establishes that the society from which these teams arose was traditionally a downtrodden, poorly served, population, in fact one that was customarily treated with contempt,  but they were a people  who, even at the game at which they had traditionally been good, were not considered by more proper people in other countries to be anything more than amiable, smiling, happy, but always poor and unreliable warriors.

That began to change in the early seventies when they visited Australia, with some hopes of doing well (since the West Indies teams of the 1960s had been great), but were thoroughly beaten into the ground by an Aussie team headed by two of the greatest fast bowlers ever to play the game.

The West Indies new captain Clive Lloyd realized that to becme supreme in the world he needed to find fast bowlers of the quality of the Aussies, so he scoured the islands, and began to come up with young men in whom he instilled pride both of race and of skills. When they arrived in England, the English captain, Tony Greig, who happened to be a transplanted South African,  made a public statement that the English team would make the West Indians grovel before them.

They were so infuriated by the comment that in addition to their skills was added a steely rsolve to win, at any cost. And win they did, easily, throwing Greig’s racist comment back in his face. Later, the illustrious batsman Vivian Richards, who hails from the tiny, quiet island of Antigua, a steel-hard man, in spite of the prevailing ambiance of goodwill in the Caribbean islands,  took over the team, and by this time had four of the fastest bowlers who ever bowled, men who were not kidding around, but bowled to intimidate, if necessary to hurt, the batsmen who were facing them. No international team had ever had such an array of fast bowling, and they turned out to be unbeatable, either by the Aussies, the Indians or the English, and, along with much profound commentary on the social impact of their victories, the film establishes something that every West Indian remembers with pride: for 15 years they were never beaten on the field of play, and no sport on earth had ever been dominated by one team in that way before or since.

This is an almost perfect documentary, of interest to people far removed from cricket. And personally I am delighted that Riley, a skilled filmmaker with a list of illustrious credits to his name, has succeeded in telling a story that otherwise could have been reduced by the indifference of the metropolitan media to no more than a minor item in the history of cricket.

Post from the home of the bizarre: How a (U.S.) traveller got millions of free miles on points by buying pudding

As a temporary resident of the United States

 (ending yeserday) I was exposed in 

the last few days to many bizarre stories, 

since the place seems to have become the

repository of the bizarre story, above 

almost everything else. Here is a typical

example that was posted on my son Ben's

facebook page, apparently.  It speaks for 

itself about the values of the so-called 

greatest country on earth. Bizarre is a mild

description:

 

Air Miles are awesome, they can be used to score free flights,
hotel stays and if you’re really lucky, the scorn and hatred
of everyone you come in contact with who has to pay full
 price when they travel. The king of all virtually free travelers
 is one David Phillips, a civil engineer who teaches at the
University of California, Davis.

David came to the attention of the wider media when he managed
 to convert about 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice chocolate pudding
into over a million Air Miles. Ever since, David and his entire
family have been travelling the world for next to nothing.

So how did he do it? Well, first we need to explain the kind of man
 David Phillips is; he’s the kind of guy who reads every inch of the
small print on things. The kind of guy who learned to count cards
 just so he’d never get ripped off in a casino. In fact, Phillips stated
 that he could have probably been a pro card player if it wasn’t for
 the cigarette smoke. Yes, this guy- according to him- could have
been a millionaire card player, but he enjoyed fresh air more than
 the musky stink of success.

His most famous endevour was back in 1999 when he saw that
Healthy Choice was having a promotion on their frozen entrées
section. The offer was as follows: for every 10 bar codes of their
product a person sent in, they’d be awarded 500 Air Miles.
However, the company had an early bird stipulation that people
who redeemed the offer within the first month of the competition
 would receive double that, meaning a person could potentially
receive 1000 Air Miles for buying just 10 of their entrées.

Upon catching wind of the deal, David scoured his local
supermarkets to see which, if any products offered the best
potential return. After some legwork, he found what he was
looking for- a discount grocery chain that was selling individual 
chocolate pudding cups for 25 cents each. This meant that 
for a measly $2.50, he could get 1000 Air Miles.

Realising the amazing return he was potentially able to receive,
David set out to hit every store in the chain in one day and
buy up every single Healthy Choice pudding they had.

Now, you’re probably thinking a guy walking into several stores
 and asking to purchase all the Healthy Choice pudding they
possessed, even in the back of the store, would arouse suspicion;
and if anyone cottoned on to what he was doing, they’d try to
 get in on it too, because, why wouldn’t they? David apparently
 had the same concern and while buying the pudding, he told
 people he was doing it because he was stocking up for Y2K, 
which was just around the corner.

All in all, David spent just over $3000 on pudding, which may
seem like a lot, until you realise the total dollar value of the
miles he was set to receive was in excess of $150,000. However,
 before that, he actually had to send off all of the bar codes.

According to David, his wife got blisters from peeling off
hundreds of stickers and his kids and co-workers grew
physically sick of the sheer amount of chocolate paste he
was forcing on them. Further, it began to look doubtful
 they’d be able to peel off all the barcodes in time to qualify
for the early bird part of the promotion.

This is when David had another idea- why did he need to
have his wife and children suffer when he could get others
to do the leg work for him?

David approached the local Salvation Army with an offer;
if they gave him a bunch of volunteers to peel off all the bar
codes on his pudding, he’d donate the pudding to them. But
 here’s the beautiful part, doing this counted as a considerable
 charitable donation, which let David claim just over $800 back
 in tax deductions at the end of the year.

But the benefits of David’s scheme didn’t end there. After
sending off the bar codes and getting back his 1,280,000 miles,
 (he got a few more than just from the pudding because he also
 bought some soup at 90 cents a can before he realised that
was the sucker’s method), he now officially had over a million
 miles in his frequent flyer accounts, which automatically gave
 him lifelong access to something called the “American Airlines
 AAdvantage Gold club” giving him and his family a number
 of awesome flying related perks for the rest of their lives.

But we haven’t even got to the best part yet. David will likely
never run out of Air Miles because he’s still earning miles at
about 5 times faster than he’s spending them, despite traveling
 quite often, thanks to various frequent flyer incentive programs
 he keeps an eye out for and exploits just like the pudding
scheme. Today, he has over 4 million miles in his various accounts
 and has flown to over 20 countries and taken numerous
vacations in the meantime.

In the end, for a one time cost of a little over $3000 (or a little
over $2200 if you subtract the tax deduction), and a few other
 similar deals he’s taken advantage of to bolster his numbers,
David never has to pay for a flight in his life ever again. Genius.

My Log 379: Back in Austin, Tx, where Dale Watson, the greatest entertainer of them all, is still holding court to the multitude

Well, here I am in Austin again, this civilized city in the middle of  Texas, a city that --- what with its many universities, art galleries, sophisticated shops, and devotion to music, a city about the size of Ottawa that has 150 clubs offering live music most nights of the week --- seems oddly not to match the image of Texas that Texans like to propagate.  I come here, as readers may already know, because my son, Ben, who lives and works here, does a lot of flying, and whenever he has a surplus of points gained from his peregrinations, he buys me a ticket to come down and observe the scene.

Being a travellin’ kind of man all my life, I accept these gifts with alacrity, and the most enjoyable thing about these jaunts is that Ben takes me around as he goes about his work here, and introduces me to all his friends, most of whom are musicians, hundreds of whom live and perform in Austin the year round.

As readers may know, I have seen and heard some wonderful bands in Austin, and names that might be familiar to readers of this blog would be the Canadian guitar virtuoso Redd Volkert, who played with Merle Haggard for years; the almost crippled but magnificent keyboardist and rock and roll singer Earl Poole-Ball, whose song Livin’ in a Cheap Hotel is one of my favorites, (and whose line from that song, Trying not to compare myself with the company I keep tops my list of rock and roll philosophies); the superbly-named slide guitarist Cindy Cashdollar; the sparkling  young violinist  Warren Hood who has picked up where his father, a local legend, left off; a great band of international  renown called the Hot Club of Cowtown headed by a magnificent violinist-singer Elana James; another local institution, the Blues Specialists, who have played a gig at the Continental club every Friday night for the last 25 years or more; the world-class trumpeter Ephraim Owens, who plays upstairs most Tuesday nights; and, it hardly needs to be mentioned, the remarkable entertainer, Dale Watson, a veritable repository of every country song ever written, so far as one can tell.

Well, last night was my first on this brief visit, and we went down to the Continental (a club I have many times described as the world’s greatest night-club, a grungy, dim, not too spotless club whose walls attest to its many decades of activity in delighting its customers) where at 10 pm Dale Watson took the stage as always.  The last time I saw this man he played his regular Christmas Day gig , singing non-stop for four hours, hardly pausing for breath, but always talking to his audience as he related to them in a way that last night I began to think is probably unique.  He played until the early hours of the morning at that time, and the next day was back at work at 2 pm, hosting the fabulous musical spoof, chickenshit bingo, at Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon.

I realized last night that quite certainly I have never before seen or heard an entertainer who so much revels in just entertaining the people who flock to hear him, week after week.

He will talk with the customers dancing just in front of him about their boots, ask where they bought them, compare the various cowboy-boot shops of Austin, and when he finds one customer who can’t remember where she bought her boots, he thunders the question, “What, you can’t remember where you bought your boots?” as if she had confessed she knew where the closest hydrogen bomb was stored, but had forgotten it for the moment. And then, picking up on the fact some girls crowding the stage are from Nebraska, he falls into a sort of jingle that he sounds as if he is making up, about dancing, and its rhythms. Within minutes, and a couple of swigs of the local beer later, he launches into a story about  a character called Shoeshine Charlie who used to have a shoe-cleaning stall outside, but is no longer there, although he waited long enough for Dale to make up a song about him, which he now performs. When that is over he launches into a mock-denunciation of his band, threatening one of them to terminate him if he doesn't get rid of that moustache. Then he looks up and says, "Sorry, folks, just trying an imitation of Buddy Rich...always liked Buddy and his rants..." Or words to that effect.

In fact, the guy seemed so much at home on the stage working his audience that I began to wonder what kind of private life he could possibly have, since all his energy must be absorbed by his concentration on being an entertainer.

That thought reminded me of an occasion when I met the divorced ex-wife of a famous radical preacher who had made an international name for himself as the defender of the poor and downtrodden:  she said he had been so much in love with humanity that for his family he had little, if any love left over.

Okay, folks, that’s if for the moment.  You may not have heard of Dale Watson --- I never heard of him until I came here --- but Ben tells me he goes over big in Europe, where he plays to audiences of 2,000 and up, and is regarded, with his endless fund of colorful, mischievous, funny and sometimes passionate songs, as a real representative of the cowboy-inspired, country music for which the United States is famous, and has been ever since the formative days of the motion picture industry. Of course, in Austin, they will argue that James Hand (a real cowboy, living on a real ranch) is the real thing.

But they will still flock to Ginny’s on Sunday afternoon, as Dale and his band play at one end of the long skinny house, while chickenshit bingo is played to the wild encouragement of the patrons who have invested $2 each for the 44 (or is it 48?) tickets on the bingo square over which a chicken is released, and urged to drop its load on their particular ticket. Another great Austin institution. That, unfortunately, this time around I am going to miss out on.

My Log 378: Bicycle-using McGill students remind me of China in the bicycle-using days under Communism

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I’ve never seen anything like it since China in 1978.

Summer is over on the Canadian University campus, the beautiful girls in their little shorts have been replaced by amazons in scruffy jeans, and they  ---- young women and young men, both --- have arrived in their thousands by bicycle.

The McGill university campus, through which I walk every day on my way for my morning coffee in downtown Montreal, has suddenly become infested with bicycles that are attached by strong locks to every available space to which it is possible to attach them. The university has provided lots of long bicycle stands, and not only is every one of these full, but it is overcrowded and so is every available fence, as bicycles are piled on top of each other by the young  people as they hurry to classrooms where wise men and women are ready to transfer to them the wisdom of the ages --- at least, that is the theory of it--- a very moving thing to see as this hopeful self-selected elite embarks on learning something they think is so precious that it is worth plunging into masssive debt to acquire it.

But I’m not kidding, I have only once in my life before seen such a gathering of bicycles, and it was in the  Chinese city of Shijiazhuang, known in those Communist days as the repository of the corpse of the famed Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, who, in 1978, was still being held up to the Chinese people as an exemplar of all that is good in humanity.

I was there with a National Film Board team to shoot some films that had been agreed upon by the two governments in an exchange of  film crews. We filmed for six weeks in a nearby People’s Commune, the most fascinating working experience of my life; and when finished there we moved into the city to film everything we could find out about a state-owned cotton mill, which, as it turned out, happened to be a lot. It was there that I saw the bicycles. Shijiazhuang was an industrial city of the new China, full of wide streets, hundreds and hundreds of apartment blocks, and factories intermingled with them. I’ve forgotten how many people worked in the mill, but it was several thousands, and not many of them had far to travel to work. Some walked, some took the public buses, but most of them bicycled.  Every morning, and every shift change, the streets were thronged with thousands of bicycles, intermingled with impatient drivers of the relatively few motorized vehicles honking and cursing their way through the throng. And one of the most important functions at the mill was the bicycle park which had enough space for 4,000 bicycles that turned over three or four times a day. I had never seen so many bicycles in one place, and it seemed kind of miraculous that each worker could find his own bicycle, when all were completely identical --- except, I suppose, for the ticket.

The city, which then had about 2,000,000 people, including its periphery, was a rough-hewn place, but it struck me as perfectly laid out to meet the demands put upon it.  I would think, every time we sallied into the streets to get more shots of the incredible press of bicycles, that although it was working well under this pressure, they woud be in the deepest possible trouble if ever they adopted the Western world’s fascination with automobiles.  Still, surely they  would never be that crazy. After all, all the cycling, in addition to its town-planning advantages,  was keeping people so fit that it was rare to see an obese Chinese person. In fact, put together with their massive production of  food to feed that huge population, food that came from the Communes in the surrounding counties, producing markets groaning with piles of food, day after day, I figured anyone mad enough to suggest a switch to capitalism would get short shrift from the peasants, who simply wouldn’t allow it.

Well, what d-you know?  The peasants didn’t have any say in it. The little guy who was running things there, Deng Xiaoping, said just before we left that one American worker could produce as much as 10,000 Chinese workers, so he concluded the American system was 10,000 times more efficient. Of course, he was not including  the energy demand made by the American production system, and it struck me as being a silly thing to say, but how much did I know?  Deng managed to foist the implications of his thought on to the Chinese economy, with the result that today, while producing enormous quantities of goods (most of which the world hardly needs), China today has imported capitalism with all its ills. Shijiazhuang today is an urban centre with 10,000,000 people, with, at last count, 387 hotels and  is said now to have  such severe pollution as to make life almost unbearable. Some improvement!

Dr Bethune is still remembered there, today memorialized by three institutions in the city, the  Bethune Military Medical College, Bethune Specialized Medical College and Bethune International Peace Hospital. I remember the last of these fondly, because I broke my little toe while working in China, and had to go to the Peace Hospital every Saturday for treatment, where I was expertly tended by a little doctor who told me how satisfied he was with his iron rice bowl that guaranteed him his needs in life but would never allow him to rise above --- or at least not far above ---

other ordinary workers.  

My Log 377: Remarkable documentary, brought to us by The Guardian’s film unit and Al Jazeera, detailing American complicity in Iraqi torture centres

Donald Rumsfeld, speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011, after receiving the "Defender of the Constitution Award". (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of Multi-National Force - Iraq, briefs reporters at the Pentagon April 26, 2007, on his view of the current military situation in Iraq. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week  Al Jazeera is broadcasting an extraordinary documentary called, “Searching for Steele,” made by two women filmmakers Teresa Smith and Mona Mahmood, under the aegis of Guardian Films, a new arm of the Guardian newspaper of London, which is under the leadership of the remarkable journalist, Maggie O’Kane, whose reports from the Yugoslav war are never to be forgotten.

The Steele named in the film’s title is Colonel James Steele, an American expert in counter-insurgency, who learned his lessons when he established, trained and directed para-military units in El Salvador, which, in the words of the filmmakers, became virtually death squads. Under Steele’s direction these squads were so deadly that some 75,000 civilians died in the troubles in El Salvador, and a million people were displaced.

Steele moved on to Honduras, where he was involved with the infamous Contras, Ronald Reagan’s favorite force. It was here that he came to the notice of the up-and-coming David Petraeus, who, when he became the supreme American commander in Iraq 18 years later called Steele out of retirement in Texas, brought him to Iraq posing as an energy consultant, and from then on, along with a colonel who said he was Donald Rumsfeld’s eyes and ears on the ground in Iraq, a man called James Coffman, handed over to him the job of creating the so-called special police units whose job was to hunt down and kill any Iraqis who might be considered as harming the American effort to subdue the country.

At the time American soldiers were dying at the hands of a well-organized Sunni militia force, and Steele is now credited with having established a Shia counter-revolutionary force that eventually numbered 17,000, and who, at their peak, were distributing 3,000 dead bodies around the streets of Iraq every month.

The film shows that this para-military force --- Rumsfeld is quoted as saying publicly that Steele was doing a tremendous job in Iraq --- although not formally part of the American military, nevertheless operated like an army under military rules of engagement, rather than under the rule of law.

They were, more specifically, under Iraqi command, and the film quotes their leader, Adnan Thabit, a giant of a man, who when confronted by the filmmakers with allegations that his force engaged in torture, denied any such thing before adding that, of course, many of the insurgents refused to give information so his men had to get “a little rough with them sometimes” to extract the information they knew these prisoners had. This man in his interview seemed to be fulfilling the stereotype from feature films of the third world apparatchik, totally without the values we like to think of as civilized.

Another retired Iraqi general Muntadher al-Samari, who was more forthcoming with the film-makers, said he was disturbed by the fact that the Special Police Units ran 14 or 15 secret prisons around Iraq. He said Steele and Coffman worked hand in hand, and added (in a recent article in The Guardian newspaper), "I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ... the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture…. Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation …. Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts."

They did not allege that Steele actually committed the tortures himself, but one witness described being with him when he opened a door into a room to reveal a man under torture, hanging upside down from a hook, and simply closing the door, with showing any emotion of any kind.   General Samari said he could best be described as a man “who lacks human feeling.”

Two New York Times representatives, a photographer and a reporter, told the filmmakers how they visited one of these detention centres which was full of blood, and in which they heard the most blood-curdling screams of people who were obviously under torture.

When it was put to Rumsfeld at a press conference that Iraqis were being taken to these interrogation centres in their hundreds, and there tortured, he blandly said he had never heard reports of such a thing happening, and denied such centres existed. But the film produces evidence by people who underwent these tortures and survived them, and who described the reign of terror these special units imposed as they swept through the country and targetted Sunnis for interrogation and punishment.

The film suggests forcibly that it was these units that stimulated the bitter sectarian warfare that is still going on in Iraq between Sunnis and Shias.

This is an amazing revelation, complete with chapter and verse, of the depths to which United States operatives descended as they struggled to bring Iraq under control, in their effort to fulfil George W. Bush’s solemn promise to Iraqis that their country would soon be free (a clip included in the film no doubt for ironic purposes). Any hope of bringing the perpetrators of these horrors to justice disappeared with the election of Barack Obama and his bland assurance that all this was in the past, and he wanted to look to the future. So, Steele is retired and living in Texas among the medals bestowed on him by a grateful government. And of course neither Steele nor Coffman, nor Petraeus would consent to be interviewed for the film.

I had a strange thing happen to my TV as I was watching this film: suddenly, as it was describing Steele’s activities in El Salvador, the picture disappeared, struggled to reappear, and then collapsed entirely. In an effort to see what I was missing I tried to pick it up on the streaming of current programming that one can pick up on Al Jazeera’s web site, but there, far from helping, something tied up my computer so I could not bring up the stream that would have shown me what I was missing. I had to close my computer by emergency means and restart it, by which time the picture had come back on the TV.  I had never experienced anything like this before: only this one channel was affected. And I began to get a horrible feeling that those super-sleuths who are said to be watching everything we are watching and reading everything we are reading had become active to shut off this information from the public.

I now realize that hardly seems credible, since a few minutes later, after the show was finished, I was able to pick up a stream of it from beginning to end on the Al Jazeera web site, and in fact, the same thing seemed to be available from the Google search page.  But I mention it, and my suspicions concerning it, merely to illustrate how paranoid we are becoming with all these revelations about how Big Brother is watching us every minute of the day and night.

My Log 376: A question no one ever asks of the political leaders of the United States

English: President Barack Obama with the Nobel Prize medal and diploma during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Raadhuset Main Hall at Oslo City Hall in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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There may be something wrong with me, but whenever I hear --- as one does nowadays almost every day --- the political leaders of the United States waxing indignant at the use of chemical weapons, one question keeps popping into my mind: “Would you have so enthusiastically recommended international action to stop the United States from poisoning Vietnam with Agent Orange?”

After all, in the use of chemicals as a weapon of warfare, the U.S. must take the cake. Not only did they set out to destroy the very land on which the Vietnamese people lived, but they sewed chemicals and their deadly effects so successfully in that soil that children born years after the war had ended are still ending up with horrible physical and mental deformities.

Of course, this is just one aspect of the hypocrisy that seems uppermost in almost every decision taken by the powerful “in these days,”  if I may quote Dorothy Parker, “of horror, despair and world change.”

It is no news, of course, that the rules of justice are dictated by those who win the wars, or, if they don’t win them, nevertheless retain the preponderance of power. But the behaviour of Barack Obama, a well-known student of constitutional law, in suddenly, on his elevation to the presidency, turning into a hawk for war, was not only unexpected, but seems completely hypocritical.  Rebuffed recently in his effort to drum up support for armed intervention in the Syrian civil war, he and his mate John Kerry --- a veteran of the Vietnam war himself --- have not shrunk back even a step, but are continuing to travel the world, pressing other nations to support their decision to extend the war, even though they must be aware of the fraught possibilities that could arise from such a decision. It’s as if the Americans, having absorbed from the movies they saw as children that the only answer to any problem is a good sock on the jaw, are now expecting the rest of the world to have absorbed that message.

This guy got the Nobel Peace Prize?

This weekend the BBC screened a debate held in Australia around the topic that “the United States is our (that is, Australia’s) best line of defence.”  Before the debate, which featured the American ambassador in that country on the one side, and a professor from the Beijing university, allied with a retired Australian general, on the other, the audience was about a third for the motion, a third against, and a third that had not made up its mind. After the debate, the undecided had fallen to 10 per cent, the people against the motion has swollen to an overwhelming 56 per cent. In other words, the arguments put forward in such honeyed tones by the U.S. abmbassador did not go down well with that Australian audience.

One thing that struck me was that when speakers, both from the platform and the audience, spoke of “this region”, they were talking about a part of the world that is almost as far from the United States as it is possible to get, and yet there was the United States parading its belief that it is part of their essential interests to set up a military establishment in Australia. Australian governments, of course, have acquiesced, as they had always done, largely, one would have thought, because of a continuing strain of inferiority complex by the people Down Under (as we used to call ourselves in that part of the world.)

The very reasonable-sounding professor from Beijing seemed to have won over many in the audience when he said that the U.S. has surrounded his country with nine military bases which made Chinese people nervous. The ambassador coolly denied that these bases were in any way directed against China, and said they had nothing but peaceful purposes. If that is how the Americans customarily think of their global network of 840 military establishments in every part of the world, it is no wonder that the ambassador’s argument fell on deaf ears.

At one point the moderator had to remind the audience that they were not gathered to collect grievances against the United States, since so many complaints about U.S. presence were being  expressed, but to consider the motion.

The debate illustrated one other thing, to my mind, which was the efficacy of humour in argument, for the Austraian general, who had served in the forces in Iraq, had the audience laughing quite often with his good-humoured quips, all of which seemed to have gathered support for his argument, as against the deadly serious argumentation offered by the other speakers.

Of course, it is terrible that chemical weapons have been used. I wrote my first article against chemical weapons in the late fifties, when details of Canada’s own chemical weapons centre in Alberta at the Suffield base,  were just being revealed for the first time. I remember commenting with some acerbity on the fact that a woman--- whose name I reemember after all these years, Dr. Dorothy Latimer --- had been granted a medal by the United States government for her sterling work in inventing some new chemical weapon designed to kill people.

But if the United States wants to  demonstrate how thoroughly it opposes the use of chemical weapons, perhaps they could put more resources into helping Vietnam overcome the effects of the chemicals they dropped on the people, and the plants, of their country, years before anyone in the Middle East had decided to follow their example.