In
the last week or so I have spent many hours --- I am not exaggerating ---
slaving over an idea for a piece that simply has refused to jell. The idea was
to illustrate the efficacy of my customary scattergun approach to information,
reading and news, that I drew attention to in My Log 685, on January 19.
The piece was to be based on the
morning I spent literally watching two things at the same time. One w s a
symposium held at McMaster University about the federal government’s so-called
reconciliation project with the indigenous people; the second was the latest
tumultuous event in the struggle of the British Prime Minister Theresa May to
persuade her House of Commons and her government members particularly to
support the deal she had agreed with the other 27 members of the European Union
for Britain to leave after 46 years of membership.
Each of these had extraordinary
features, which gave me the idea of comparing them. When I had written 1800
words and was only halfway through explaining the reasoning of the two major
participants in the indigenous symposium, I realized it was never going to
work, and abandoned it. I started these
Chronicles on December 22, 2017, three months before I was due to turn 90 (if I
ever made it that far), and this is only the second time I have not been able
to bring an idea to fruition, and as you can se I have written 123 of them. I
am not accustomed to this kind of failure. Usually, as always happened when I was a
working reporter, I have the idea, and the column follows.
Thinking about it, I realized I had learned
a lesson, which is, not to try to do too much in a single piece.
It was only when I awoke at 5.30 this
morning that the idea occurred to me to turn this failure into a success, by
writing about the failure itself. I have run across this at various times when
persistent creators have refused to be beaten. A notable example was a charming
film made at the National Film Board in the 1970s by the Australian film
director Mike Rubbo, who accompanied Newfoundland’s former Premier Joey Smallwood, an idiotic little man
lost in his visions of self-aggrandisement, on a trip he made to Cuba with the
intention of meeting Fidel. Joey said he had met Fidel for a few moments in
Gander and told him he would love to go to Cuba with a film team, and Fidel had
told him he would always be welcome. So he set off, dreaming that he might be
able to shake Cuba free from the American blockade, and become an international
hero. The Cubans apparently were expecting him, set him up in a comfortable
house, and Joey began to fill in his time visiting various achievements of the
regime, and preparing the questions he
was ready to ask Fidel, and reading them aloud for Rubbo’s camera.
So, waiting for Fidel to walk through
the door, they waited…and waited…and waited, until they could wait no longer. And
the only thing that came out of the trip was Rubbo’s clever film, Waiting for Fidel, in which he demonstrated that for the man of action there is
no such thing as a failure. Rubbo himself
is a born hustler, who, after directing 40 films at the NFB returned to
Australia where he has followed a career of notable success as an artist,
filmmaker and community activist. He is now 80, a relative youngster.
So here am I, a guy who in 25 years
as a daily reporter missed only one deadline, trying to emulate Mike Rubbo’s
example by turning my failure into a column --- and, ipso facto, a success.
I have to end it by just mentioning the
extraordinary features of the indigenous symposium and the Brexit imbroglio. Two very mild-mannered native people, Janice
Makokis, a Cree lawyer from Alberta’s
Saddle Lake reserve (one of many native reserves across the country that
I visited as a reporter in my effort to ventilate the issue of the rights,
titles, and poverty of the indigenous people); and Russell Diabo a Mohawk from Kahnawake
reserve across the river from Montreal, were responsible for some
blood-curdling statements. Ms. Makokis said Canadians should think of genocide
when considering the Trudeau government’s reconciliation démarche; and Diabo called the whole programme “the federal
government’s war of extermination” against the native people of Canada. He did
admit that funding for his people has been increased in 2016-17-18 by $16.5 billion on top of the $10 billion
normally spent every year, so it seems the extermination is by being suffocated
by money. I can’t dismiss that idea either, because I long ago observed that
the deathknell of Cree life in northern Quebec would be the monetarization of
their subsistence-driven society as hunters and trappers. And from what I hear
--- although I do not base this statement on personal observation --- a people
who used to be models of hardened fitness from their lives in the bush,
nowadays seldom walk even to the corner store, but ride around everywhere in
their newly- acquired four-wheelers, with a resultant surge of diabetes to
near-epidemic proportions. (I know this is as more complex issue than as above-stated.
Diabetes is the inevitable result of our long-running, centuries old
determination --- this brings me back to Diabo’s description of “the war of
extermination” --- to rob the indigenous people of everything that means
anything to them, first, their economy; then their beliefs and customs; then
their livelihood; and over everything, their land.)
On the British side, Theresa May has
returned after a two-year secretive
negotiation with Europe with as deal than no one in the British House of
Commons likes, and as a result when she finally did allow a vote to be taken
--- after many weeks of shilly-shallying, postponements and the like --- her
deal received the biggest margin of defeat ever suffered by a government at
least in living memory, and even longer.
She seems to be a woman who, once she
has an idea in her head, is completely inflexible. So she has said that the
deal she has signed up to is the only deal available, and there is only one way
to prevent Britain from lurching out of Europe without a deal --- which
everyone seems to agree would be equivalent to a car spinning to destruction
over the edge of a cliff --- is to vote
for her already rejected deal.
Given an opportunity to return with a
Plan B, she did so on a recent Monday, and observers were unanimous that her
Plan B was for the Parliament to accept Plan A.
Come to think of it, I have learned a
second lesson from this failure: that
you are never too old to be learning. I can almost hear my son Thom remarking
sardonically to me, “There you go again,
Dad; you are really playing the old-age card a lot these days.”)
Well, wot the hell, wot the hell. Toujours
gai, toujours gai.
No comments:
Post a Comment