Reading list

I've been unable to get Blogger to upload my photos this week so l jettisoned my little piece on James Bay, Victoria's original 'village.' I didn't feel like writing anyway, but I like taking pictures of Victoria. She's quite an attractive old gal. Our weather suddenly warmed up and when that happens my appetite for writing always cools down- but I can never stop reading. The St. Augustine book is one of those that sends me off in all directions. I'm reading Plato again and maybe trying harder to understand the nuancess of his thinking than I have before. And then there is Plotinus, the fountainhead of Neoplatonism. Although I've never read any of the Neoplatonists I've learned to recognize their influence in just about every aspect of Western thought. That whole era of the Late Roman Empire was a seething ferment of religious and philosophical ideas that affects us still.
And I'm reading the Koran, although I'd rather not, with the intent of comparing
I so enjoyed the "Out of the Past" DVD with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Rhonda Fleming that I exceeded my budget and bought Volume Three of a Film Noire series. Arghh. It's not very good. Particularly disappointing was "Lady in the Lake," an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. MGM massacred it. One of the attractions of these thrillers, as I prefer to call them, is that many of them had Southern Cal location scenes. Small towns, old cars when they were new, and a general feeling of how the world felt in those days. It's something hard to convey in words but there was a wholesomeness to people then, along with a mental toughness that is instantly recognizable in these scenes. One of the best examples for that is "Suddenly," a movie where Frank Sinatra plays a psychotic hoodlum with a plan to assassinate the president. Frank Sinatra played a great hoodlum, but even he seemed almost wholesome compared to the kinds of psychopaths we hear about now. And everybody was presumed to be patriotic. Anyway, MGM had not a single location shot in this film, a real shame since so much of the novel takes place in sites in and around LA in the '40's. Yikes, no freeways! It was pretty obvious the script writers and producers didn't think much of the book.
Another one with Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell and Vincent Price was better but nowhere near as good as "Past". Vincent Price made it worth the admission and Jane Russell looked pretty hot. Raymond Burr played an Orson Wells-like villain. I still have a few more to watch in this series.
PS Got a couple snaps uploaded, of Fisherman's Wharf and Heather St. in James Bay.

Film Noire

On one of my regular web reads a writer enthused something about American Idol. Apparently I was on Mars or some such place as that's where he thinks someone would have to be to be unaware of the Idol show. I dumped my TV years ago and I have never regretted it, and so I have never seen an episode of American Idol. Perfectly content in my innocence, I was blissfully ignorant that some sort of climactic event was due that night. From what I've heard about the program it should be called "American Idiot."
No, I wasn't on Mars. I was in 1947 in rapt wonderment at how good a movie could be. That was the year RKO released "Out of the Past," with a cast of stars who were in the early stages of their careers and last night I had the pleasure of viewing it for the first time. What a treat. This film has been consigned to the 'film noire' by the artsy fartsy intellectual class but at the time of its making it was just a low budget thriller intended to make money for the studio. All these films have lurid titles to draw in the rubes. That doesn't mean it was tossed off in a slovenly manner. Far from it. This is a work of art. It makes even the best movies of today look sick. Kirk Douglas played the crooked big shot who lived in a palatial residence overlooking Lake Tahoe and Robert Mitchum played Jeff Markham/Bailey, the private detective who had crossed him years ago and was now leading a quiet life as a gas station operator in a small town on the edge of the Sierras. In the opening scene his bucolic existence is disrupted when one of Douglas' thugs informs him that the boss wants to see him.
It's not necessary to adumbrate the typically byzantine plot complexities, which are delicious. I would simply like to rave over the quality and intelligence of the production. First of all, what wonderful acting. This film was made before Stanislawski ruined the American acting fraternity. Then acting was still a craft but how did they learn it? The characters in this film are not passive sufferers of life's iniquities. They are struggling and striving, they have complexities that are revealed under the pressure of the struggle. This is what drama is about. There are five death scenes in the movie but nowhere are we regaled with the gory details. It's not about blood, it's about right and wrong. and the sometimes fine line between the two. There are no sex scenes except one that was implied but sex played a central role in the subtext of the film, more particularly the relationship between sex, love, and power...in a word, passion. Sex is about the genitals, and sometimes I think nature has played a cruel joke on us by locating the organs of reproduction in the same place as the organs of elimination. Passion is not identical with sex but is concerned with it. In this film, the passion Kirk Douglas has for Jane Greer is more closely akin to the desire to own things. He himself seems rather sexless. But between her and Mitchum passion triggers sex, not the other way around. What moves her never becomes clear. Does she love Mitchum or is she just using him for some purpose that not even she knows? In many ways the film illustrates my dictum: women use sex to get power and men use power to get sex.
How is it possible to for a mere 97 minutes of film to evoke so many levels of meaning? I don't know but it's a trick that can only be accomplished by a team of pros at the top of its game, and I know that the product is what we mean by a work of art.
The other day I ran into a friend of mine who writes poetry for children. We stopped to talk in the entry of the Bay Centre and in the window of one of those hip fashion shops hung a poster of a young couple barely dressed. They were both dark and thin in the tired old James Dean manner. They looked feral, as if they were contemplating some gruesome crime they had just committed. Another poster showed a young blond girl dressed a little like Barbarella staring up into the sky. She was pretty but also had that feral look. They weren't at all sexy to my way of thinking but were obviously meant to be. My friend pointed to them and said to me, "It doesn't look like any of them has ever read a book, does it?" And I had to agree. As much as possible I try to avoid any contact with the celebrity culture all young people seem to admire but it's impossible to go through a checkout line without one's eyes lighting on the latest escapade of whoever it might be. Is there even the slightest hint of any intelligence at all behind all the slathered on make up? None that I can detect. And how can an unintelligent woman be attractive? Not to me. I will admit that Paris Hilton is pretty. She has a lost little girl look about her that no amount of degradation can seem to erase. But there is also a blankness in the eyes, a deadness, as if some essential human ingredient was left out when she was made, as if all the time spent in a vain alcohol- and drug-fueled search for self gratification left her with no time to really taste the wonder of life.
What a contrast with the beauties of 1947. Jane Greer, who I had never previously heard of, was the female star, the femme fatale. It was her Kirk Douglas sent Robert Mitchum to find. The trail led to Acapulco and a seedy bar where Robert Mitchum sat drinking a beer. Then one day she "walked in out of the sun," and immediately we see why Kirk Douglas wanted her back. My jaw goes slack, she is so beautiful. It's not her physical appearance that draws this response. It is a presence. There is the intensity of her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth, which seem to endow her with some sort of ageless wisdom combined with innocence. She has a noticeable feral quality, too, but no. Feral means a domestic creature gone wild. She is just the opposite, a wild thing who hasn't been fully tamed. And every single scene reinforces those initial impressions. She has complexities. She has thought deeply about things. She knows herself, not in that phony self regarding way of modern celebrities, but because she looksat the world and herself with unblinking honesty. Rhonda Fleming is another beauty whose small part later on in the film shows an entirely different kind of beauty. Hers is more buxom and fecund, more fully sexual. And somehow she is able to convey the essence of her character to perfection.
None of this would work, of course, without a first class script, and I'm afraid writing like this is a lost art. Too bad.

Victoria Day Parade

It was cold and rainy all day Sunday and I wasn't at all optimistic at the chances for good weather on Monday's Victoria Day parade. However, I got very angry at god and gve him a piece of my mind, and what do you know.He Smiled and the weather turned out to be almost perfect. I know god loves us and all, but I kind of think he likes a guy who stands up for himself more than the weepy type. I pointed out that I have never ever blamed him for any problems I brought on myself, but that this was different. I reminded him of all the eager and innocent high school bands up from the States and how it would be so unfair to them to get rained on. Well, we had our nice day on Monday and today it's raining again- not exactly raining but getting ready to rain.
I was lucky enough to have had one of the better seats in the house. Starting at 9am the first tendrils of the parade reached my vantage point about 9:40 and the last band went by at about 1:10. Well, I enjoyed it, but not as much as I had hoped. Why does nobody ever play the great band music by Sousa and so many others? Let's face it, band music is march music originally military in nature. But I suppose that answers my question. The military is not very popular in educational circles, and to make matters worse most of that music was composed by the dreaded and reviled dead white males. Even worse, it's so much better than what is most played now that it would be embarrassing. Better not to play it at all. Instead we have all this 'jump up' music (as I think of it) which would be fine as a kind of spice added to the dish. But a whole meal of it is tiresome in the extreme. By the end of it I was getting a headache.
Wouldn't it be nice if a conspiracy took place in band music departments of influential American High Schools (the ones our American hating teachers copy) to start teaching again the elements of harmony, texture, rhythm, tonal beauty and melody as illustrated in the works of the great band composers and arrangers? Another little prayer for you, God.
But absolutely nothing can spoil the delight of watching leggy young high school girls high stepping and twirling batons. Thanks a lot to all those who participated and gave us such a wonderful show. I only wish I had the foresight to make up a banner saying, "Thank you America, for standing up for our freedoms."

Evolution and ethical thinking

Over the years I've been quite interested in how ideas of morality and ethics undermine the utilitarian notion of natural selection. The doctrine of natural selection is a cornerstone of Darwinian thinking. According to this model the various species evolved their differences largely through a process where advantageous attributes are preserved which improve chances of survival and reproduction. An ecological niche is found and the species evolves a strategy for exploiting it. Leaving for later the problem this raises of irreducible complexity (of what use is half a wing?) or exactly how the chemistry of a cell translates into physical structure, let's go to the question of behavior. At a deeper level than utilitarianism is the logical positivist view that "mind is an attribute of matter." By mind they mean behaviour. Living things have behaviours unlike inanimate matter. They have preferences, even at the most rudimentary level. Darwinians think this behaviour is determined by genetics. On the other hand I have thought for years that they had it backwards. Somehow, I don't claim to know how, I think that behaviour influences genetics. In other words, I think birds sing because they like to sing and that only as a side effect has that behaviour also become useful. Because for a small animal like a sparrow is it really so utilitarian to advertise its location to every predator within earshot? When Darwinians try to explain such things they become contortionists.
A sense of beauty and aesthetics in birds is rather hard to swallow for a logical positivist. They go through similar contortions trying to cram altruistic behaviour into the Darwinian box. We aren't the only species to practice altruistic behaviour but I'll only talk about human morality here.
As one of humanity's oldest documents, the Biblical narrative provides us with a record of an evolution in ethical thinking that spans 2000 years. You don't have to believe in god or Adam and Eve to be impressed by it. Critics point to various places in the bible that justify violence, such as Jehovah's injunction to kill every man, woman and child of the Canaanites but they miss the point. It is normal in all tribal societies to regard outsiders as non human. That's why the ten commandments given to Moses didn't apply to Canaanites. They didn't count. They weren't people in exactly the same way that Jews don't count to Muslims. Jews aren't human beings. They are children of apes and pigs. A Jew (or a Christian) can be beaten in the street with impunity by any Muslim. Greeks of ancient times thought that people who spoke other languages only made rude noises and could not be considered civilized. It's a well known fact that hunting and gathering societies only consider their own tribesmen to be human beings. I'm not very familiar with east or south Asian thinking on ethics and morality, but in the west a vast leap forward was made with the transition to Christianity. I don't mean to say that people instantly stopped murdering and torturing each other, but if they did it was contrary to the teaching of the Church. The early Christian thinkers spent a lot of time thinking about whether war could ever be justified when Jesus expressly stated that we were to love our enemies and turn the other cheek when injured instead of retaliating. There was nothing like this in Greek thought. The poet Archilochus (a soldier) probably formulated the standard Greek attitude when one of his poems told how if there was one thing he knew how to do it was to avenge a wrong done to him.
It's hard for modern westerners to imagine how callous we human beings can be to the suffering of others even in our own culture and not too far in the past. As recently as the beginning of the 19th Century people still gathered at Newgate in London to watch public executions. The method was hanging, but not using the technique of breaking the neck to assure a quick death. Instead the miscreant was hoisted into the air by his neck. Death came by slow strangulation. People from every level of society showed a strange fascination with the spectacle of life departing a living body. American cavalrymen on the western frontier got good and plastered before a fight because they dreaded what would happen if they were injured in battle and left to the Indians. It was usually the Indian women who prowled the battlefield and they liked to cut off certain parts of any soldier left alive. Any soldier brought back to camp by them knew that the Indians had developed a fine art out of inflicting a maximum amount of pain while keeping the victim hanging on to life by a thread.
These sorts of behaviours conform fairly well to the utilitarian model. Life is competitive. Fear and intimidation have 'survival value.' Of what use is turning the other cheek? If I were a Darwinist I would suggest that such behaviour, while of no advantage to the individual, is of benefit to the group. It would reduce internicine conflict and allow cooperation for the common good.
But the trajectory of ethical thinking, especially in the Christian tradition, is to confer equal humanhood on everybody regardless of race, language, social status or even species. It's a well known fact that people nowadays seem more shocked by cruelty to puppies than to humans. This kind of thinking has led to ideas of social equality, abolition of slavery, idealistic notions of the "noble savage," and now concern with the survival of frogs and toads. What makes all this possible is the human capacity for imagination, which I believe is also a prerequisite for religious faith. Imagination is the faculty humans have of picturing things that don't exist yet in the real world. It's not only necessary for religious faith but for invention of all sorts. Humans have been imagining for thousands of years what it would be like to fly like birds, to swim under the sea, to travel to the moon.
Similarly, when we humans imagine what it would be like to be that person on the cross, what it would be like to go hungry, what it would be like to be a fish on a hook, we put ourselves in that place and actually feel pain. resumably we have had this capacity ever since we became fully modern humans. But in the struggle for survival in a hunting and gathering technology it was not possible to accumulate sufficient surplus to assure life for any length of time. Agriculture improved things and provided enough surplus to sustain a small class of aristocrats. That was when record keeping, priesthoods, writen history, cities and a vastly more sophisticated organizational capacity developed. And it was precisely then and in the Middle East, Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, now called Iraq where this seemingly spontaneous combustion took place. And it is to this time that our bible traces its pedigree, and it is through that bible that we obtained a divine commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." By the time that the Romans put Christ to death on the cross the emphasis changed from being a law of god, to "Imagine what it would be like to die on a cross. Feel his pain. And he died for us out of love all the while forgiving his executioners."
I was thinking of this in connection with Islam. The god who spoke to Mohammed had nothing to say about forgiveness. And ever since Mohammeds followers took over the ancient source of our civilization it has ceased to be a factor in human progress. To mohammed there was only force and conformity. There was only the outsider who must convert or be killed. Sympathy for the foreigner and his ways was extirpated. Jews are only pigs and apes. In spite of what many writers try to tell us, wherever Islam went it inaugurated a dark age.

Monty Python philosophy

There's a Monty Python song entitled, "I'm so worried." To the mournful sounds of a string accompaniment, Monty sings a doleful ditty. He's worried about the middle east, he's worried about the fashions young people wear today, but above all he's "so worried about the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow." In another song on the same album we are advised, "Never be rude to an Arab." Or an Orangeman and a few other assorted easily offended types. Fearlessly, he even uses the "N" word which is only printable nowadays when used to show the ignorance of rude Southern honkies. The number ends in mid verse with an explosion. But to show his bona fides, in the next song he tells us the he likes Chinese who only come up to his knees. Growing up in a Catholic household and attending a Catholic school I had personal experience of discrimination and bigotry. At Norwood (public) school on my way to Sacred Heart (Catholic) School I used to get an almost daily dose of "Protestant, protestant ring the bell, Catholic, Catholic go to Hell." Sometimes the bullies weren't content with words and I had a few fights right there on the corner of 95 St and 111 Ave. Schoolyard bullies are frequently in the news these days with the moral of the story being that some action must be taken. True. But the action that needs to be taken is for the less aggressive boy to learn how to stand up for himself and tht being nice doesn't always work. That's what bullies are for, to teach us something. Remove that threat and you will also remove the learning opportunity. Of course, nothing will ever stop schoolyard bullies from popping up, and if the inevitable conflicts are forced underground they will be far worse than a few fisticuffs. And as far as the much deplored use of 'stereotypes' for humour, they can be used as much to defuse a situation as to aggravate it. And sometimes they can be used to puncture pomposity. And who could possibly be more pompous than our politically correct thought police?
Why am I going on about this? Or is this also an important lesson in politics, whether local or international. The idea of having international police sounds attractive to many well intentioned people but the problem with police is that they are hard to control or that the wrong people end up controlling them. Sometimes it's betterr to just duke it out and hope the good guys win. They don't always.
A commonplace of conventional wisdom is that wars never do any good. Historical thinking of recent decades has minimised the importance of war, emphasising the impact of economics and other influences. But they are wrong. Economics and sociology are important but sometimes it comes down to one way of thinking versus another. No further compromise is possible. Your way of life, your way of thinking, your culture, your homes, cities, holy places, are being threatened by a hostile force. In previous eras it was possible to pull up stakes and migrate to some other land, taking it away from people already there, but that can't be done anymore. Now the only alternatives are to fight or submit. Today we are in a war. We don't want the war, but we have it anyway.
Make no mistake. This is a pivotal war that will determine the course of history for centuries. It's hard not to compare it to the civil wars that weakened the Greek world following its defeat of the Persian army. Having proven they could defeat the most powerful empire in the world, the Greeks escalated their chronic local conflicts into a conflagration between two irreconcilable views of what it meant to be Greek. The contest was framed as between Democratic Athens and despotic Sparta but it was a fissure that ran through every Polis. It was brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, city against city. One faction would get the upper hand and slaughter the other faction, until that other faction regained power and did some slaughtering of their own. All the previous rules of conduct were abandoned in an orgy of savagery, hubris and betrayal so well chronicled by Thucydides that I have never had the stomach to finish reading it. Athens lost, but so did Greece, leaving it easy pickings for the Macedonians under Phillip. His son Alexander harnessed all that Greek energy and ingenuity and used it for the most remarkable conquest of all time and setting the table for the Romans. It is impossible even to imagine how the last few thousand years of history would have transpired if a few Spartans and Athenians hadn't stood up to the Persians.
Which brings me back to Monty Python. Why should I care what happens for the next 2000 years? Why should I care what happens 20 years from now when I'll probably be dead? Why is it so important to me that all of our western cultural motifs survive and prosper into the distant future? What difference does it make if a new dark age ensues? Or to really put it in context, as I tried to do in our local "Cafe Philosophy" a few years ago when I suggested as a topic, "Why does anything matter since in a few billion years the sun is going to burn up anyway?" Obviously, as archaeologists have proven, no species we know of has survived anywhere near a billion years, and we will be extinct someday just as surely as T Rex. So why does anything matter, other than just getting as much pleasure out of my one little life as I can? Don't really know for sure. Just asking.

My favourite atheist

The always worth reading Theodore Dalrymple's article in the always worth reading New English review this month is entitled, "There is no God but Politics." Dalrymple is my favourite atheist, perhaps because I know in his heart he has a longing to believe. As a young man he "picked up books of metaphysics with an excitement that I cannot now recapture, and which completely mystifies me..." He is right to be skeptical of belief systems whether of the religious or the materialistic variety because like any intelligent observer he has seen the kind of carnage wrong belief can lead to. While the USSR loomed in the east he had to learn about Marxism and when it collapsed he was very happy that he could dispose of all that "ideological nonsense."
Unfortunately an old ideology, once thought moribund, has arisen to take Marx' place in this turbulent world of humanity and he has to immerse himself in more nonsense. Reading a book by Sayyim Qutb, one of the original modern Islamist writers, Dalrymple notes the many similarities between Marxism and Qutb's Orthodoxy.
I won't bother with the details here but I want to mention that since what people believe is of immense importance to our well being it is very important to distinguish between wrong belief and right belief. Many atheists want to skip out on this question by saying that all belief is wrong and foolish. The word for Christian belief is 'faith.' The scientistic variety of atheist points out that god, the afterlife and so on can't be verified through standard criteria of proof and so must be false.
This ignores the fact that all scientific measurements are really just finely tuned, amplified aids to our normal sensory apparatus...vision, touch, sound, chemical, and so on. They also fail to note that the application of mathematics is a purely abstract kind of logic that is an extension and amplification of our reasoning faculty and has nothing whatsoever to do with material facts. As Plato realized 2500 years ago perfect circles, triangles and other geometric figures exist only in our imaginations. This is why he invented a theory of forms existing in an ideal state in a higher sphere of existence of which our own imperfect being was only a kind of reflection or echo.
Modern science is a dialectical process that sets abstract mathematical reasoning against sensory perception. One is used to verify the other in a circular argument. It's been a very powerful way of looking at things. For instance it is obvious to the senses that the sun goes around the earth. It took the application of abstract geometric reasoning to show that this perception is illusory.
I think the Church fathers must have seen that something was missing in the Greek rationalism paradigm and so they proposed faith. I don't want to get any further into early church teachings here...I don't have that kind of expertise anyway. I just want to say that we have knowledge of things other than through our senses and our capacity for reason. Faith is in a class of knowledge that shares attributes of both. Other species in this taxonomy are poetry, music, art, and an innate sense of ethics and justice...and above all, love. Plato had given this matter some thought and came to the conclusion that poetry was a subversive lie. This is more or less the same argument most scientific atheists use against religion. His idea of love was a little weird.
The trouble with all these psychic animals is that there is no objective way of measuring the value of a poem or even saying whether a given piece of writing is a poem or not. I would argue that Bukowski is not a poet and that Shakespeare was. But how can I prove it? Are there any criteria anybody can use even if they don't like poetry? No. Criteria can be devised that work fairly well but when a true genius comes along he seldom pays attention to those criteria. And conversely it is pretty obvious that if you try to write according to some set of criteria the result will usually be dismal. All this can be said about the other species of art and about faith. We take in the various arts through our senses but they help to illuminate things that are beyond our senses. They help us find our way to a greater reality than that of our senses. Unlike science art deal with things that come from the inside. When we make art or music we bring things into the world that didn't previously exist. The material varies but the source is the same.
My own faith is a bit weak. My religious belief comes more through cognitive reasoning than from an inwelling sureness of belief...except when it comes to music. Often music and faith are joined. As in the singing of Mahalia Jackson. I envy her the joy her faith gave her. The next time Mr. Dalrymple wants to know faith is like when it's pure and beautiful my advice is to listen to the music of Mahalia Jackson and chuck Qutb in the pathology section of his library along with Marx.

Welfare mentality

Shakedown rackets are all the rage for getting money out of governments and businesses. Greenpeace, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and their like have perfected the art of the victimization con and lots have followed their lead. Maybe there's a "Getting money from the government for dummies" title available somewhere. Canada's natives have been on to the con for quite a while, and today in the Vancouver Province is a story of how it has worked again. "Natives hit the Olympic Jackpot," the headline reads, and the subtitle informs us that they squeezed out of our provincial government "122 hectares of land in exchange for co-operation with 2010 Games development." Don't bet on it. Pretty soon, maybe at the celebratory pow wow down at the Balmoral, one of them is going to say, "Gee that was easy. Maybe we should hit them up for some more."
That was in the Vancouver paper. In the Victoria birdcage liner they are running a series on the "homeless." On the front page a large number purports to be the population of our fair city who lack accommodation. Quel horreur. A picture illustrating this tragic situation shows a certain 21 year old young man who claims to have lived on the streets for four years. I think I've seen him before. He was trying strenuously to get into a locked dumpster in the parkade I was patrolling a few months ago. He was riding one of those tiny bicycles that look so ridiculous, and he was very annoyed when I told him to beat it. I think he was contemplating violence against my person. However, though I'm old I'm also big, and I think that was a factor in his decision to pedal away scowling. I wonder what could have been in that dumpster?
Since then I have, of course, marked him in my memory cells and I recall not long ago seeing him sitting on the pavement outside Swans with a gizzled old dude (not that old, maybe in his forties) having a nice little chat. While negotiating the sidewalk without stepping on the hats I heard a snippet of the old geezer's words of wisdom to the acolyte. "Nosir," he boasted, "I've never worked a day in my life."
Somehow, I don't think that perspective will make it into this four part series. Instead we will be harangued for our heartlessness. We will be told how unjust our society is to let such things happen. We will be lectured and verbally abused and every guilt inducing technique they can think of will be slathered all over us poor citizens who drive cars, watch TV, go to restaurants, sip our lattes and who knows whatall when right there in our very own streets are more than 2000 poor homeless wretches. It's all our fault. Why? Because welfare rates are too low. They just need more money. The reason they are homeless is because-wait for it- they have to pay rent. That will never do. They need to have places built especially for them. And above all, we have to hire more social workers. That's it. More social workers, don't you see, and more programs, and more crisis centers, and, and...They can prove it. Years ago they told us that if there weren't more programs then homelessness would increase, and just look. Oh, these poor people. Obviously, we need more outreach workers. Obviously, we need more people to bring them food, provide them with clean needles, sleeping bags when they throw away their old ones, shoes, tvs, radioes. Don't they deserve to have ipods just like the rest of us? Oh, woe, woe, the cruelty of capitalism. Why should they have to work if they don't want to? Isn't it their own business if they would rather shoot up? Why should they have to do it in in back alleys?
And those of us who wonder why this 21 year old young man is living on the streets of a city where the unemployment rate is the lowest it's ever been, where signs all over town advertise the need for people to come and work and make good money, why we must be just heartless scrooges. Don't we know how hard it is to get up in the morning and go to work every day whether we feel like it or not? How discouraging it is? Shame, shame, shame on all of us.
But I really, really do care. Honest. That's why I asked one woman sitting on the street with her begging bowl who looked rather old and pathetic if she could use 20 bucks. "Why, thank you," she smiled, until she heard the catch. She had to vacuum my apartment, a job that usually takes me about 15 minutes. That works out to 80 bucks an hour, but I guess it wasn't up to her expectations because she suddenly got hostile.
One of my passengers once told me about a young girl who regularly panhandled at one of the skytrain stations in Vancouver. She noticed the girl wore a really nice pair of boots so one day she offered to pay her 50 bucks for them. "Are you kidding," the girl retorted, "Do you have any idea what I paid for these boots?"
Oh, well. I guess only living fossils like me wonder why nobody tells these "homeless" to just get off their butts. However, if we really must do something, I suggest a good place for that something would be on one of the palatial estates in the Uplands neighborhood. There's lots of room out there. That's where all the judges live who refuse to send crooks to jail. As a matter of fact, the owner of the all the free birdcage liner editions in Victoria has a very nice waterfront property there with probably five acres of lawns. Perfect place for a tent city don't you think, with a private beach, handy to the yacht club, lots of parking and everything! Of course, I know it's never enough, is it? Oh, wait a minute, how about free drugs? Perfect fit. Probably a lot of their neighbors in Uplands know where they can get them wholesale. But it's an imperfect world we live in and we can only do our best.
Besides, if some magic wand were waved and all the "homeless" were suddenly to get jobs and families and cars like the rest of us, think of all the unemployed social workers. That would really be tragic, wouldn't it? Wouldn't It? Oh and what would happen to the chorus of scolds? They would be left with beaks wagging and no sound coming out. How cruel. No, when you get right down to it a lot of people rely on the "homeless.' We must never forget that.
The real truth is this: if you really want to help poor people, especially young people who are making a whole lot of really stupid decisions, the worst thing you can do is tell them there is nothing they can do about it. Tell them they are helpless, tell them its all hopeless, tell them that the reason they are poor has nothing at all to do with their own actionws.

Victoria's trails

Why do birds sing? Is it for the shear pleasure of it? Here at Blenkinsop Lake (what I would call a slough) I know I'm listening with great pleasure to a symphony of birds. About halfway between downtown and Cordova Bay the Lochside biking/hiking/riding trail cuts across Blenkinsop Lake via a wooden causeway. Thankfully, this part of the trail is not paved so the skaters and boarders turn around about a mile back where the tarmac ends leaving the birds without any competition from the noisemaking machines people like to lug around with them. In spite of what John Cage and his fellow travelers say there is a vast difference between mere noise and music.
Today (to get a little bit personal) is something of a landmark for me. It's the first time I've been able to enjoy riding my bike for over two years, at which time I became seriously ill with a pulmonary embolism. It came on fairly suddenly. There were warning signs which I ignored according to my usual philosophy of health. But then I couldn't seem to get any air. Nothing wrong with my lungs, nothing wrong with my heart, I had been exercising regularly, eating properly, and had even stopped smoking my pipe. What happened was that unbeknownst to me clots were forming in my legs which suddenly broke loose and lodged in my lungs. No oxygen getting in, no CO2 getting out. Whoops. Just about died.
Anyway it's taken me two years to get back to this point, and am I happy. A bicycle is a happiness machine...as long as you are reasonably fit.
One of the reasons I moved to Victoria from Vancouver was the Galloping Goose Trail, the first link in a growing network of Victoria area trails. The name sounds a bit silly but it reflects a historical fact. The trail follows the route of an old rail line plied by a strange looking train dubbed The Galloping Goose. Starting from the Vic West side of the Johnson Street Bridge the trail eventually wends its way into the Sooke Hills. At the Town and Country shopping center it branches off and heads up to the ferry terminal. This part is called the Lochside Trail.

France profonde

I am taking great interest in the French elections today and of course I'm a partisan of Sarkozy, who is as close to a conservative as you can get in Europe these days. According to the polls he is way ahead of his socialist rival, the very attractive but politically dismaying Segolene Royal. I haven't been following the coverage in the French media the way I should but I understand a relentless demonizing campaign has been waged against Sarkozy by all the outlets. I've seen how that works in Canada where the state owned CBC dominates our TV news. When Stockwell Day led the conservative forces a few years ago the CBC was unbelievably vicious and poor Stockwell, a very decent and intelligent but slightly naive man, was defeated. They tried it again with Harper who has the knack of turning a stupid question back on the interviewer, leaving him sputtering impotently. However Harper never quite managed to turn the voters of the entitlement dependant Maritimes and Quebec in his direction so he only managed to eke out a minority win.
What encourages me about the French election is firstly the huge turnout and secondly the fact that the demonizing campaign seems to have fallen flat. According to reports about the debate between the two candidates, Royal's demonizing efforts came across as hysterical and Sarkozy appeared calm and competent, leading to gains for him in the polls afterward. The demonizing seems to have backfired.
France has two overwhelming problems. The first is a dependancy on government handouts. These, while popular in the short term are destructive of the economy and of public morale and confidence in the long term. I'm not an economist and won't elaborate on this point.
The second problem is a large and and pugnacious Islamic minority that has managed to intimidate much of the governing apparatus of France. Formerly, anyone foolish enough to object was branded a racist, just as Doug Collins was here in BC when he argued against unrestricted immigration from cultures incompatible with our own. When you take an issue like immigration and brand critics as racist then you can avoid the laborious task of using reasoned debate. And when reasoned debate would inevitably be fatal to the mission it is to be avoided at all costs.
Multiculturalism is the catchall phrase in this context. Laudably, it aimed to prevent a recurrence of the Haulocaust by promoting harmony among the various races. Science, with its reputation of infallibility, was often enlisted in the cause. Genetic researchers tell us, for instance, that we all have a common ancestor, we are all Africans and there is more genetic variation within any racial grouping than there is between any two races. So, not only are discussions of racial difference branded immoral but are also ignorantly unscientific. This has just served to shut down any further research into the issue.
For instance a doctor in Northern BC, having worked for many years among the native peoples had the temerity to publish a paper in which he claimed that Natives were more susceptible to alcoholism than Europeans. His thesis had nothing to do with promoting racist 'stereotypes,' as he was accused of doing. On the contrary, he saw a public health problem. He wanted to help them. Anybody who has been around our native population knows very well how destructive alcohol is to it. But that is not allowed to be said let alone studied. And so the squalor on Naitive Reserves continues.
It was while I was in the American navy that I first became aware of the depth of racial tensions in the US. Until then I had very little contact with black people and only knew about the segregation problem from news reports---in the abstract. One of the first things I noticed was that black sailors usually got along better with white southerners than with white northerners. Strangely enough, even though white southerners believed in keeping the races separate, they usually liked and understood black people better than white northerners. The second thing I noticed was self-segregation on the part of black sailors. I was stationed in Japan, and there were black sailor bars and white sailor bars. Generally, black sailors didn't go to white bars and white sailors didn't go to black bars. There was no law against mixing, it was just the way things were. Some white sailors wanted to go to black bars but they weren't welcome.
The third thing I noticed was that despite all the history of prejudice and bigotry both whites and blacks were decidedly American. White sailors were generally more interested in Japan than blacks. For blacks, being in Japan was like being in jail. They called the US, where home was, The World. When do you get to go back to The World, Clink? Oh, I got another year to serve. (groan) Personally, I really like black Americans. I'll never forget the great sessions we had playing hearts in the barracks. Nothing but laughs and good times.
In Japan I also learned about the status of ethnic Koreans and Chinese in that country. No matter how many generations had lived there they were not considered to be true Japanese. So the common charge that racism is a disease of disgusting white people, especially Germans and Alabamans, I knew was false. Racism is normal with everyone on this planet and it's not wrong unless it turns into something virulent, as in Hitler's Germany and among hate groups like the KKK. A sense of belonging to one's own racial grouping is normal and healthy. As for me, I love the races. To quote an old blues tune, "I like de brunettes and I like de blondes." I hope there are always separate races. Noble Nubians, seductive houris, Cree princesses, I love em all. And I like de blondes, too. Who are really the racists, the multiculturalists or me? Doesn't the multicultural agenda point toward submerging racial and ethnic differences? To me that reveals a hatred of race. Some of my white southern shipmates didn't like the idea of what they called the mongrelization of the races, but my word is homogenization. Imagining a world where everyone looks the same horrifies me.
Along with race comes a sense of place. Jews have a sense of place in Israel. And why not? Jews have lived there for at least 5000 years. Why would anyone deny them the right to have their own country? In fact there is something miraculous about the Jews. How many attempts have been made to destroy them or drive them out of Israel? The Babylonians tried it, the Greeks tried it, the Romans tried it, and the Germans tried it. Evicted from their own homeland, they have been wanderers on the earth. And yet where is the Assyrian Empire now? Where are Alexander's phalanxes, where the Roman legions? All in the dustbin of history. And yet the Jews are still with us, reading from the same book their ancestors authored, and wherever they have gone they have enriched whatever polity has hosted them. So when it says in their book that they are God's chosen people it's hard to disagree.
Being a North American by birth, and having ancestors going back almost four centuries here I should feel that this is my home, and I do. But there are two other places on this earth I think of as my home, and maybe more my home than this one in the depths of my heart. One of those places is Ireland, where I have never been, and the other is France where I spent a mere two months, even though I have no traceable ancestry there. But France is the heart and soul of Europe. This is something I know instinctively. Even genetic studies show that the majority of people who now live in western Europe have DNA markers distinctive to themselves- despite invasions from every quarter of the old world- as well as other markers in common with other Europeans. While in France I sat on the hill outside the Lascaux caves I sat in the grass and looked out at the same valley those artists saw 20 or 30 thousand years ago. The ice sheets are gone and there are no more wooly rhinos or mammoths but I felt certain that valley had been bequeathed by them to me.
So I am very interested in the French election, and find it ironic that a Jew cares more about that age old heritage than a native French woman. It's possible the homogenization of all the racial strains from all over the world is inevitable but why should France commit cultural suicide in anticipation of that day? And if it's going to happen it should be by the agency of the marriage bed, not the suicide bomber or the religious police. Islam is alien to France, no matter how often has tried to establish a beachhead there, and whatever happens to the current Islamic invasion, they will eventually become French if they stay. The genius of the place may yield temporarily but it will never die. I don't think the genius of any place can ever be overcome and so I don't believe the homogenization of the world's peoples will ever occur.

Left, right, left, right

Now that I have a more intimate aquaintance with blogging I see why the blogosphere resembles an amateurish volleyball game. The ball (whatever issue of the day reaches critical mass) gets bounced around from team player to team player on each side (the left and the right) of the net (each side has a ball in play in this volleyball game) without ever making it across the net. It's just a lot easier this way. Everybody knows what you're talking about. Personally, I don't want to know anything about Don Imus or Anna Nichole Smith so I try to stay away from that stuff. I loathe the celebrity culture. I haven't the slightest interest in ever seeing Rosie O'Donnell's ugly mug (one benefit of not having a TV is that I have never seen her jaw actually wag) or hearing the latest pronouncement of Sean Penn. (I was relieved to find out that he really isn't Irish at all- is there any chance Ted Kennedy is lying about his ancestry? It would be a great relief to me if he was. Penn's no more Irish than he is an actor, or Madonna is a singer.)
Enough with the parentheses and on with the topic, which is: the Right and the Left, or the good guys vs the bad guys. I used to identify with the left but at certain stages of the evolution of our political culture there were more and more leftie things I didn't agree with. First came abortion. As a bastard- you know, born out of wedlock- I realized right away that the word abortion was a euphemism for killing unwanted babies. As one of those unwanted babies I took it personally. Nevertheless, I could see how others might see things differently and thought that pro abortionists would listen to my point of view just as I had listened to theirs. That was when I discovered what kind of venom the idiotically yclept pro choice faction was able to spew. I know pure hate when I see it. The next stage of my little political journey took place at a time when I somehow became friendly with a circle of Marxist-Leninist true believers. Up until that point I thought communism made a lot of sense, at least in principal. In practice, I didn't like the totalitarian nature of the communist regimes of Russia and China. My idea of communism was more utopian and communal. I liked the idea of friends cooperating for each other's mutual benefit and some of us got together to persuade the new Socialist government to let us try out our ideas on some crown land in our vicinity. Nothing happened with that. Socialism for the NDP was always more a scam to funnel public money into unions than anything else. It's a model that the econazis are trying to emulate.
The Marxist/Leninists I knew had no use at all for such utopian twaddle. The Cultural Revolution, then in full swing, was the ticket. Since I was raised to be respectful and polite and to always listen to other points of view I didn't really object but that was when I began to doubt their sanity. Did they really want lynch mobs roaming the country? Where was the upside? But what really changed me were the more philosophical discussions about, say, dialectical materialism. It takes me a little while before I can actually make any sense of those kinds of locutions. And this might have been the first time I connected such an abstract idea with its implications for the real world. Ever since I've been a committed idealist. However, I like the dialectical part.
One of these days I'll clutter up this space with my ideas about dualism in general but today I want to talk about the dualism of right and left in present day politics, and specifically why I identify with the right more than the left. Some say that this is an artificial split, and I can see reasons for saying that. For instance just because I detest the econazi movement it doesn't mean I want to destroy the planet. In fact, the reason I'm so upset with the global warming crowd is that I'm afraid that once the general public becomes aware of the deception it will turn against legitimate environmental issues, like overfishing of the seas. And there is one element of the conservative movement that I am completely at odds with on a certain issue. That issue is atheism, and some very intelligent and admirable atheists are conservatives. Two exemplars I can think of are Theodore Dalrymple and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom I admire and respect. Hitchens in particular sees with crystal clarity the danger the Islamist threat presents to his way of life as the cultured and educated British gentleman- but he doesn't seem to see at all the reason for our weakness: our rejection of 2000 years worth of religious teachings. He rejects those teachings and not only regards them as nonsense but follows Edward Gibbon's assessment that Christianity was responsible for the downfall of Classical civilization. Naturally, I completely disagree with this viewpoint and consequently I don't think Hitchens is a real conservative. But at least he has the brains to see a real and present danger when it arises.
Not so the lunatics who cluster around the Daily Cos and the Huffington Post. They are vile, disgusting and delusional. They just can't believe that there is a predatory religious group that wants nothing more than the opportunity to chop off their silly little heads. And it isn't a Christian religious group that lusts for their blood. Why does the left hate Bush so much? Is it a matter of disagreeing with his policies? No. It wouldn'tmatter what his policies were. It's enough that he's white, male, heterosexual, a good family man, and follows the moral precepts of his Christian beliefs. Oh, and he's from TexasThere is no rationality to their attitudes at all. They hate him because he has the temerity to point out the obvious: that an enemy exists which hates them, wants to kill them and wants to obliterate everything their forefathers struggled to achieve. Among those achievements; a workable representative democracy; an economic system that rewards anyone who cares to work and contribute; the abolition of slavery; freedom of religion; the right to publically debate contentious issues; an enormous expansion of scientific knowledge. I could go on. This has been driven by the American way. They can see nothing of this. If the American system has flaws, and I think it has a few, one of them would be that it seems to be fertile soil for the growth of several species of noxious weeds. The irony is that the man they hate is doing his best to make sure these noxious weeds have a safe place to grow.
However, these weeds aren't flourishing without the help of a few evil geniuses. From this worms eye view it's a little hard to see what's really going on in nephelokukugia but one of the cultivators is clearly George Soros. Without his ill-gotten gains they would probably wither and die. I have no idea why he hates America so. Another source working toward the destruction of the American experiment is lubricated with Saudi oil money. The Saudis are the ones who have systematically exported all over the world their brand of Islamic fundamentalism. My main objection to Bush is that he doesn't make it plain that these are the true enemies. Why he didn't just take the bull by the horns and deprive the Arab world of its control of the oil fields I don't know. The rest are just the footsoldiers. Without that oil money they would just dry up and blow away. There would be no war in Iraq, there would be no more bombings and beheadings all over the world. Even the Sean Penns of the world would be happy because then there would be no competition for the limelight.
It seems as if the Democratic Party, in its lust for power, has chosen to ally itself with these sworn enemies of their own country. After all, there is a lot of oil money to go around. Canada's own Maurice Strong, always a quick man with a bucket when the money spiggot is turned on, appears to be part of the cabal but his activities are usually below the surface. Whatevah, as they say. They are all a bunch of rich dudes, too. In fact the Democratic party has become kind of an alliance between really rich dudes (and cowgirls, too) who want to pontificate while they get ever richer and the lunatics who read the Huffington Post. (Is it possible Al Gore actually believes that global warming drivel? Personally, I doubt it. I know he's sort of like the village idiot- he invented the internet, y'know) but nobody with the resources he has available could be that stupid.
Even if I still thought of myself as a socialist, an agnostic, an environmentalist and agreed with all the peities of the left I would not want to be associated with any of these people. And I guess 'the Left' has become just a synonym for idiotic...or maybe something quite a bit more sinister.
I've tried to find some meaning in all this but it baffles me. There is the economic explanation, the greed factor, Freudian analysis, and they are all wanting. And the more I look the more there seems to be an upwelling of evil. Everything from the left seems to be a lie of some kind or another. I have always had more trouble believing in Satan than I have in God. Maybe the whole reason for this upwelling is to teach us that evil is real, not just as an abstract principal but as some kind of malignant being originating outside of our plane of existence. But that's way beyond the scope of this blog.
I had meant to devote an equal amount of space to the positive reasons for being conservative but that will have to wait for another time.

Miss Lee from Korea

If there's one thing good about growing old it is this: you are no longer the slave of sexual passions. This makes it possible to concentrate on other things which are decidedly more interesting than the old in/out, in/out. Still, those hormones never entirely subside and you never know when some female is going to come along to get them boiling again. Maybe not boiling, but at least asimmer, with unmistakeable signs of wanting to start bubbling. That's how old guys like me get into trouble.
Yesterday a young Korean girl sat down next to me at the coffee bar and when she tried to take a picture of herself I offered to do the honors. This led to further conversation. Now it seems Korean girls haven't been brainwashed into fearing old guys the way their North American sisters have and I was a bit surprised at how friendly she was. She was visiting friends in Victoria but had been studying English in vancouver for the past few months. Victoria does a roaring trade in ESL schools so young Orientals are quite commonly seen in the various caffeine joints and most of them are Korean. She mentioned that she was going on a bus tour to the Rockies and I said, better watch out for the bears. That was a word she had never heard before and when I tried to find a picture of one in my laptop she perched on the arm of my chair. That's when the heat came on. The pilot light hadn't gone out and enough fumes were available to ignite a small flame. Her hands were what did it, hands being for touching. Oh, nothing came of it. She was on her way to catch the ferry.
No, I'm not one of those honkies who idealize oriental women. The two years I spent as an American sailor in Japan cured me of those illusions. I rather disapprove of older white men who shop for wives in poor Asian countries. I know a few who have done it and I don't hold it against them but then I try not to think of reservations when I meet them. Once done you want it to succeed, of course. And knowing all this I would have happily made a fool out of myself yesterday if I had been given half a lightly larger window of opportunity.
A book I often go back to without ever quite figuring out what he's talking about is Robert Graves' "White Goddess." Ostensibly about the origin and meaning of archaic European alphabets, it's above all about poetry, the language of poetry, the craft of poetry, and what it's for. The White Goddess in her various manifestations is who the poet serves. Her service is far from gentle. Now from where exactly Graves derived his wild speculations I do not know. I think modern anthropologists and mythographers would question his sanity. But there is something irrevocably true about his ruminations, but it's poetic truth which differs from prosaic truth. In his words, a real poem that engages the worship and awareness of the godess will makethe whiskers on your face stand out enough to shave. I'm not acutely sensitive to poetry but when one catches me unawares (that seems the best way. When you sit down to study a poem its 'meaning' seems to evaporate) Afterwards, when the shock dies down a little and I try to analyze it, the music of the words obviously has a significance over and above the literal meaning of the words. Not that the poet is thereby absolved of the requirement that the words make sense. Quite the opposite. Through the music the words devlop an aura, a super meaning that isn't constrained by the linearity of normal language. Most of these thoughts I'm trying to express I got from The White Goddess.
Although he tried to backpedal from the implications of some of the ideas he wrote about, I carried some of his logic a little further. I can't say I can prove it, but let's say I have a working hypothesis about one essential element of poetry. Only men can be poets. A poem is an offering of love to a woman...not just to any woman but to the woman who the poet identifies as an embodiment of the Goddess. Only a man can love a woman in that way. And so, although a woman can write verse as well as any man, she cannot write a true poem...any more than a man can have a baby. And I don't think a man can write a poem without the stimulus of a beloved, just as Graves contends.
Graves envisioned a return to an imagined prepatriarchal era of European culture but I don't. I think there may well have been such a phase, but I don't think it was as idyllic as some of us believe. For a long time I have thought abortion, which has become acceptable since the advent of feminism, is a form of human sacrifice. On the other hand I think something is missing from Christian belief. The three aspects of the Goddess as Graves saw it was the Goddess as virgin, the Goddess as Mother, and the Goddess as bitch/slut and I think he wanted to say that modern patriarchal cultures have supressed knowledge of the third aspect at a heavy cost, and sometimes I think he's right. Poetic language is above all ecstatic and our Judeo/Chritian/ (and especially) Islamic religious legacy is revolted by the ecstatic. Maybe frightened is a better word. All I know is that these are deep waters.
The image I keep on my desktop most of the time is of Alice Faye. A very popular movie star of the '30's and'40's, she died about ten years ago and I only saw her for the first time when I bought a DVD of a musical, "Alexander's Ragtime Band." I can't look at this face without feeling like I'm falling into some deep chasm. A sweet ache comes over me. I want to touch her, kiss her. So what is it about this face, her face? Why not another face? Don't all faces have lips, eyes, nose, hair, skin? Why should it matter? But any man knows that he's attracted to some faces and not to others. Women, too, are drawn to certain faces and not to others. My Korean friend noticed the image right away. And she had some quality of her own, not only in her face but in her movements, her manner, unfathomable depths I wanted to explore. Sex? Is it only sex? The old in/out, in/out? If that was it why should the face matter at all. You've heard the age old coarse male joke, "They all look the same upside down." It's not true. The face matters, and for some reason the face is a signal of something else. Sometimes the signal is wrong. Sometimes a lovely young thing gets in my cab who looks absolutely adorable but as soon as she opens her mouth and spews the vulgarisms of the street she doesn't look so lovely any more. She reminds be of the dead dog I found under a hedge when I was a boy. He looked like he was asleep, but when I turned him over he was stiff and underneath he was swarming with maggots.
In another musical, "42nd Street," a song goes "I'm young and healthy and so are you." This could be a theme song for a Darwinist theory of human attraction. Utilitarian. The genetic imperative. There's something to it. Biologically we are animals and must reproduce. Youth and health are essentialfor 'reproductive success.' Until the last few generations in modern societies hard, demanding work was required for survival. But it isn't the sturdy ones we men go for, is it? I go for the delicate and demure every time. Like the little Korean girl.
No there's something else involved. It's almost like gravity. We do speak of magnetism but usually as a metaphor. But I think it's a fundamental law of the universe, maybe even more fundamental than gravity or space and time. That's one of the reasons I believe in god.
Here's a little poem of mine I wrote many years ago after meeting a beautiful young woman From Seattle at Second Beach in Vancouver. Since I can't get this blogger software to put the lines down as I want them I'll use slashes to denote line breaks.

I met lovely Linda so proud and so free,/
From soggy Seattle's steepy streets a refugee/
At English Bay- down by the edge of the sea./
We talked about something, everything, nothing,/
While the tide licked our feet- bare feet, felt neat, frothing./
I'll always remember the wealth of her hair, falling/
Over the glint of her eyes, green eyes, May eyes, searching./

I saw something sad there/
I wanted to kiss;/
After many a long year,/
When I strain to remember,/
It'll be something I'll miss.