Beyond the West

Fernwood Odyssey

2008-09-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

We've had three straight weeks of beautiful sunshine in Victoria, something that used to be called Indian Summer. Technically, an Indian Summer doesn't happen until after the first frost, but we may not have a frost in Victoria until December or January so we have to make do. When I used that expression a few days ago someone got quite cross. It's not Indians, I was informed, it's 'First Nations.' Well, somehow that doesn't sound euphonious to my ears and if it offends the sensibilities of the politically indoctrinated, so much the better. In fact, I was minded to use the lesser used folkloric term and mention the Squaw Summer that preceded the Indian Winter. That's when a foretaste of winter occurs in late summer, as in the week or two of cool and cloudy weather we had in late August.
Because it was such a lovely day I decided to pay a visit to our local Institute of Political Indoctrination, to wit the University of Victoria. It is actually in a lovely location on a height above Cadboro Bay. It was established during the administration of W.A.C Bennett in the days when it was thought that a university campus should be located off the beaten track. Hothouses of intellectual endeavor. If only he had known that students of 'women's studies' would receive academic credit for walking around the campus hand in hand.
Anyway, the visit didn't turn out very well. I thought I would start out with a coffee at the cafe next to the bus loop. Many others had the same idea and were lined up at the counter. I always figure that businesses who allow long line ups at their checkout counters are more interested in saving a nickle than serving their customers, so I took a pass and went upstairs to the bookstore. There a turnstile blocked the way with a sign that said "Leave Backpacks at Entrance." It seems the acolytes at our Institute of Political Indoctrination are assumed by the management to be thieves. This thought did not encourage me to leave my backpack with my iBook inside unattended at the entry. No coffee, no bookstore, what next? Well, I decided to scrap my agenda of taking pictures around the campus, perhaps finding a shady spot to work on my blogs and use my still valid bus transfer to go someplace else.
The someplace else was the neighborhood known as Fernwood. I've hardly seen the place since I gave up cab driving. Once a precinct of lower level office workers trying to raise status by proximity to their betters in Oak Bay, during the sixties and seventies Fernwood became home to upwardly mobile hippies. Clinging to their hash pipes all the while, they managed to ensconce themselves in this declining neighborhood of older houses and overgrown yards. Without a viable grocery source it doesn't quite attain village status, unless the Fernwood Inn pub is a suitable alternative. Oh, yes, it has Culture, too, with the Belfry Theatre occupying a deconsecrated church.
Since those hippie days it has become a stronghold of Political Indoctrination. Yards often have signs in them expressing support for Tibet, and opposition to tanker traffic along the BC coast. You won't see many Conservative Party signs in this neck of the woods, and and if there were any they would be soon vandalized. When Political Indoctrinaires howl for free speech they mean their own free speech, nobody elses. You will see higher concentration of Green Party signs here than elsewhere, but mostly you will see NDP supporters are most common. I find it hard to tell the difference between them except that the NDP is an indigenous Canadian socialist party while the Greens, a creation of Stasi, the East German secret police, are international in scope. It's like a franchise. The Americans export MacDonalds' franchises, the not quite dead Marxism corpse sends out the products its own- propaganda, subversion, and malice.
The high school was breaking for lunch as I approached downtown Fernwood and I see that gothic is in among the children and grandchildren of hippiedom who settled here. Tattooed and body pierced they seemed to me a sad lot. Still, the neighborhood is quite attractive to me, the streets lined with beautiful trees, the yards planted with flowers. These trees were planted by people with pride in their city and neighborhood. They wanted it to be beautiful, long before anybody had ever heard of an environmentalist. I wonder how many trees the Greens have planted. The original occupants built a cozy neighborhood. I don't think the kids will go too far wrong. But if they do turn out to be contented and proud citizens of our fair city, it won't be the fault of all the drug dealers who also abound in the neighborhood. It really isn't much of a step up from Mommy and Daddy toking in the back yard while the barbie is on to smoking crack or doing ecstasy- its all about having a good time, isn't it?
Fernwood is centered around Fernwood Street and Gladstone, where the pub, the theatre and a few small commercial enterprises congregate. It's bounded to the north by Bay Street, to the south by Pandora, to the west gradually becomes North Park, and almost makes it to the Jubilee Hospital to the east. I started my walk at the Stadacona Park near the Oak Bay Junction. As a cab driver I drove by it thousands of times but aside from the time I chased a runner through it I had never visited it before. Secluded from the traffic by dense shrubbery, it opens out to tranquil green space presided over by many magnificent specimens of the tribe of trees.

BC Day

2008-08-02T06:50:00.000-07:00

The province's 150th birthday was celebrated on Monday. Both Gordon Campbell, the premier of BC, and Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada were on hand to make speeches from the steps of the legislature at noon.
The ceremonies began with the obligatory genuflection to our natives who gave the crowd a little sample of their traditional music. Was it followed by a reading from the bible? Of course not, silly. You see, while all sorts of ethnic groups were lauded for their wonderful contributions, whitey and his religion are incorrigible villains, racists, imperialists, who must apologize for everything that goes wrong in the world.
I have lots of memories of how Americans celebrate Independence Day. It's almost like Christmas, only the weather is nice. Families and neighbors, kids, young parents, old people, gather in back yards all over the country to celebrate. Softball games, lots of homemade fried chicken, potato salad, cherry pie, the men smoking and drinking beer while talking politics, the kids shooting off firecrackers. These good times were spontaneous expressions of pride in their country. They were Americans, and knew how
In Canada on the the other hand, public holidays remind me of summer camp for kids. The kids are only interested in playing and having fun, but the camp attendants have already decided how the little urchins will spend there time. Programs are thought up, and the leaders' job is to whip up some enthusiasm among their charges. A Canadian public holiday is like that. The politicians have to invent slogans and activities to show how wonderful they are- that is the politicians and the bureaucracy who, out of the goodness of their hearts, and with our best interests in mind, run things for our benefit.
You see, something strange has happened in the last thirty or forty years. our history has been deconstructed. Where schoolchildren were once regaled with stirring tales of French voyageurs, intrepid explorers and courageous missionaries, they are now told how evil we were. For instance, in the nineteenth century it was thought that it would be a good thing if native children were taught how to read and write, how to carry on trades and practice agriculture. The reasoning was that nobody in their right mind would want to freeze and starve in a tepee all winter. And of course, to participate in the affairs of the world at large, it was essential to know English or French and so they were not allowed to use their own languages. Because the government itself had no money the task was foisted off on religious orders who were willing to work for nothing. These 'Residential Schools' are now deemed to have been criminal for which every politician must now apologize. Ensuing lawsuits have enriched many a legal firm in the last few years and large quantities of cash have been shoveled out to native activists to assuage our guilt.
That isn't the only demoralizing message drummed into the Canadian psyche over the years, but they all add up to one overarching theme: all us white, heterosexual, Christian Canadians- of the type who built this country from the ground up- are nothing but a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic, fat, intolerant, narrow-minded honkies who pollute the earth.
For some reason our ruling classes are surprised to have discovered an alarming decline in enthusiasm among the hoi polloi for Canada. To solve the problem our rulers have resorted to thinking up vacuous slogans and putting on boring concerts that have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happened a century and a half ago.
You see, unlike Americans, we didn't have to fight for our freedoms.
Well, I liked the Snowbirds. They are the acrobatic team of the Canadian Air Force. The fact that they fly aircraft that are veritable antiques- the country isn't really worth fighting for as far as our leaders are concerned- because all that military stuff doesn't fit our manufactured image of a 'peacekeeping nation.' That in itself says a lot about how much we've declined as a nation since the early post war years.
Still, as the speechifying politicians told us, BC is one of the best places in the world to live. But it is no thanks to our politicians, and the 'progressive' forces they kowtow to, it is in spite of them.

Old Morris Tobacconists

2008-04-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think the human busybody is the lowest form of life in the world. One of Victoria's most prominent busybodies is named John Stanwyck. He is the public health officer for the Capital Regional District and has been in the vanguard of the local anti-smoking brigade since I came here. And don't ask me what the CRD is. I've never figured that out. All I know is that nobody gets to vote directly for the people who sit on it but they have a lot of control over things in our neck of the woods.
I don't really have a dog in this fight. I quit smoking 20 years ago and like a lot of ex smokers I now abhor the smell of cigarette smoke. I quit smoking because it was damaging my health, it was expensive, and I didn't like being enslaved to an addiction. And besides, I hate paying taxes. So I stopped smoking. It wasn't easy to stop but it wasn't that hard, either, and I was a heavy smoker. It was like having a mild case of the flu for a few weeks and for a few years afterward a vague sense of unease persisted that was only slightly more annoying than the poorly healed fracture in my little finger that I got from punching out a marine in an Olangapo bar forty years ago. (Is that how you spell Olangapo?) It's still a little stiff. So as someone who detests the smell of cigarette smoke I rather like it that bars and restaurants now have breathable air. But I was perfectly content with non smoking areas which usually meant I could always find a place to sit. Because I think if somebody chooses to smoke it's their business, not mine.
As the years rolled by, the taxes became more punitive and the smoking regulations got stiffer. A few years ago smoking in bars was banned altogether. Now here's the problem with the busybody mentality: Sometimes their initiatives cause harm. It just so happens that drinking beer and smoking cigarettes go together. It's what you call conviviality, where people get to be friendly and sociable in a public place. That's a good thing. Smoking has a wealth of hospitality rituals, like the offering of a cigarette to a new acquaintance. In many parts of the world a pack of smokes is the most reliable local currency. Some years ago a terrific jazz festival in Montreal had to shut down because the cigarette company that sponsored it was no longer allowed to use its name in the promotions.
We have a very lovely little smoke shop in downtown Victoria that may have to shut down because of the latest set of anti smoking rules which require that tobacco products not be visible to the tender under nineteen youths smoking pot outside the doors. It's one of those shops that you want to patronize just because you like it so much, so I started smoking a pipe a few years ago, and still do once in a while. That's what they sell: pipes, cigars, accessories, all in a store from a bygone era.
But of course it didn't mean anything to the busybodies that those iconic Canadian beer halls went broke, putting their employees out of work, and it won't matter that a 120 year old tobacconist might have to close its doors. Busybodies, you might notice, while deeply concerned for your welfare in the abstractcare nothing at all for individual people. We are merely little pieces on the board of the games they like to play to be moved around or tossed aside according to whatever the latest enthusiasm might be.
I agree that it would be a good thing to reduce smoking. But is it up to an unelected bureaucrat to tell me whether I can smoke or not? That bureaucrat has no compunction about charging exorbitant taxes for the privilege of allowing us to do something he disapproves of. Sounds like a shakedown racket to me, paid for mostly by the poor cigarette butt pickers who can't pay seven bucks for a deck of smokes. And while cigarette smokers (and pipe smokers- the same pouch of pipe tobacco that cost me $10 a few years ago now costs $22) are treated like garbage, junkies get free needles. Go figure.

Trip to Vancouver

2008-04-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

Generally speaking I don't believe governments should interfere in the marketplace- but if they do I'll take advantage of the situation. For instance, now that I'm a BC Senior I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I can now ride the ferries for free. (As a foot passenger) So now I can take a day trip to Vancouver for the price of the bus fares plus lunch. I don't know how it works. Does the government reimburse BC Ferries for my fare, or does the company have to eat it?
BC Ferries is a crown corporation, which is an entity peculiar to Canada, a hybrid government/private monopoly that is supposed to operate at arms length to government but which is entrusted with advancing policy goals. We have lots of them in BC. The auto insurance company is one, the hydroelectric utility is another. Canadians have always been leery of private companies because we prefer to avoid the messiness of competition in favour of safe and secure jobs and a reliable return on investment- if you know the right people. It's a fantasy world we live in. Sometimes they make sense, like when massive capital investments were needed to finance building of hydroelectric dams and private capital wasn't available. I don't know much about that kind of stuff but I do know the Insurance Corporation of BC has become arrogant and a law unto itself.
I didn't mean to go into the pros and cons of crown corporations in this post but wanted to ease myself back into this blog by describing what a lot of trouble it is to get on and off the island. That can be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at life. Some of us like the semi isolation of living on an island with that buffer zone of salt chuck between us and the big bad world. The last ferry for the mainland leaves at 9pm and the last scheduled flight leaves about eleven. That makes Victoria a sleepy kind of place, which is OK with me. For the young and ambitious it's not so good. And sometimes even low key me gets a little bit of cabin fever. So now I'm enjoying the opportunity to get to Vancouver so cheaply.
However cheap it is in cash, it's not so cheap in time if you take public transit. I've been catching the 9am ferry. For that I need to catch a bus downtown at 7:30. If you were to drive directly from downtown to the ferry dock at the top end of the Saanich Peninsula it would take about twenty minutes at that time of day. But on the bus it takes an hour. However, I don't mind it. When you've driven taxi for 25 years it's quite pleasant to sit in the upper section of a double decker bus while it winds its way north. From that vantage point the lush fields, the islands in the distance, Mt Baker even farther are pleasant to look at. I understand they are going to start an express route to the ferry which would make it a little quicker.
The ferry ride is also very attractive as it winds between some of those islands you can see from the highway. Active Pass between Galiano and Mayne Islands is so narrow that you could throw rocks at the boat from shore. They seem near enough to touch and yet remote at the same time. On the boat you are a creature of the water. After you get through the pass the Gulf of Georgia opens out and gradually the low shore of the Fraser River delta creeps closer. Big seagoing coal carriers tie up at Roberts Bank next to the ferry terminal to be fed by the long trains coming from the interior.
There is no direct city bus from Tsawassen to downtown Vancouver where the ferry docks at 10:30 so you have to wait at the Ladner exchange for a transfer. It's a dowdy piece of pavement with only a MacDonalds a block away in the way of amenities.
In all it's another hour and a half before you get to downtown Vancouver about noon. That makes in all four and a half hours of traveling time between Victoria and Vancouver.
After so long away from Vancouver I was surprised at how much I enjoyed seeing it again. It was a beautiful clear Monday and after downloading a bunch of music at the library I walked down to the West End where I had lived for a number of years. I first saw English Bay in summer of '68 when I wasn't exactly straight after hitchhiking from Edmonton. I had just been dropped off by the hippie couple who had picked me up in Hope a few hours before. The sun was getting low on the horizon and the panorama of sea and mountain was astonishingly beautiful. People sat around on logs on the beach to take in the show as if it was an outdoor arena. I found an empty log of my own and watched an attractive young woman come onto the beach from the street...like a mermaid coming from the wrong direction. Amongst all the other people on the beach she picked me out of the crowd and made a bee line for my log. Wonderful, I thought, thinking I must be lookin' good. But, no. I just looked like an easy mark. Something about me just stands out in that way. It turned out she had some sort of religious pamphlet she wanted me to read.
It's just as beautiful as ever, is First Beach at English Bay, right at the bottom of Davie Street. This is one end of the seawall walk that goes around Stanley Park. The West End hasn't changed as much as the rest of the downtown area, although the shops have different tenants. No more English Bay Books or English Bay Cookies. But the Sylvia Hotel is still there as graceful and serene as ever. I treated myself to an ale in their very pleasant pub.
The return trip to Victoria is another seven and a half hours of travel, but I like the ferry trip. A bluegrass/Nova Scotia type band had set up in a corner of the forward lounge of the ship and judging by all the cash that filled the guitar case, everybody seemed to enjoy the impromptu concert.
As I headed back home, realized I really miss the vitality of Vancouver. As much as I love Victoria, it has a small town mentality that gets wearisome after a while.

Victoria in January

2008-01-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

I've not been meaning to neglect this blog but between the holiday season and another blog I'm trying to get underway I haven't been able to give it much attention. At any rate, I intend to spend more time writing specifically about Victoria rather than the more serious topics that I'll be discussing on the other blog.
Victoria is a photogenic old girl and I like to take pictures of her. Tomorrow will be February and any time she will be pinning daffodils and cherry blossoms to her pinafore. During last week's cool sunny weather I looked for the first blooms but the best I could find were these buds almost bursting to pop out.
Victoria has lots of moods. In the winter she can be dull and gray for days and weeks on end, but as the days get longer she brightens up for a few days or a week at a time and cheers everybody up. Some days she can be dull and gray one moment, stormy and windy the next and then suddenly break out in bright sunshine. The signs are in the sky and clouds for everybody to see, and she has a huge sky for a canvas.

Springtime in January

2008-01-16T12:42:00.000-08:00

The Christmas/New Years commotion always incapacitates me. Now that it's over I'll try to get back to posting here regularly. I'll make things easy on myself today by uploading a few photos I took yesterday. It was cool, dry and sunny, a classic Victoria January harbinger of spring. I took a friend around with me to show him a few of my favourite spots which he, lacking a car, had never seen. Esquimault Lagoon is a bird sanctuary,and just up the hill is Fort Rodd Hill, a fortification built in the late 19th Century. Below the fort is the Fisgard Lighthouse. These locations are in the Colwood/Langford area west of Victoria proper, but easily accessible by bicycle from town.

A year and a day

2007-12-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

Often I read that all one has to do to find out some bit of information is to google it. Maybe I'm just not very good at phrasing my query properly, but more often than not all I get back is irrelevancy, triviality and repetition. My most recent attempt concerned the language in Gawain and the Green Knight. This is one of my favourite stories from the period of Grail literature. I was reminded of it because a number of articles in my regular readings brought it up. One of the writers described the language as moderately challenging. Hah! Here's how it starts, as nearly as I remember:

Sithen the assaut was sesed at Troye
The borgh brittened and brent to brandez and askes
The tulk that the trammes of tresoune there wrought
Was tried for his treacherie,
The trewest on erthe...

I can pretty well read it now, with good comprehension of maybe 60% of it, very poor comprehension of another 10% and of most of the rest I'm pretty shaky. I don't take to it quite as readily as to Chaucer who wrote about the same time. The dialect is different. Even today some English dialects sound like foreign languages, and the Gawain poet's language was far closer to Old English than Chaucer's. Old English really has to be studied as a foreign language and there aren't really that many texts to read. So I tried to find a source that would help reduce the opacity of the text. But all I found were essays like "Colonialism and the Green Knight," and the "Wicca symbolism in the Green Knight." Colonialism? In 14th Century English Midlands? Wicca, a bogus invention of silly Neopagans? Obviously departments of medieval studies have descended into triviality as much as classics departments.
So I gave up. I don't really enjoy playing with my computer like some people do. Too bad, because I love our English language, and I love the Green Knight story. I went through my Grail literature phase about twenty years ago and it's still a favourite of mine. Along with Wolfram's Parsifal it seems to stand out from all the others for its strangeness. The strangeness is more than a function of the differences between our modern world and the medieval period. It hints at cultural currents that have largely been ignored by mainstream histories, perhaps because of a lack of records.
One of the elements I find especially curious in most of the Grail romances is the significance of sisters' sons. There are no indications that either Germanic or Latin cultures would be interested in sisters' sons and in the medieval context it would not even make any sense. So why these references? My uneducated guess: evidence of a matrilineal succession of kingship. It would be an interesting way of doing it, changing the psychology of inheritance if a king's son does not stand to inherit the throne. On the other hand, which sister's son gets the nod? Might be bloody.
The story revolves around a strange visitor to Arthur's court at the celebrations for the New Year. But Arthur
"...Wolde never ete
Upon such a dere day, er hym devised were
of sum aventurus thyng an uncouthe tale,.."
And sure enough a giant knight, green of complexion and dressed all in green enters the hall on his horse and challenges the assembled company to deal him a blow. Poor Gawain gets the nod, and finds that it is his task to cut off the knight's head with one blow of the Green Knight's huge ax on the condition that Gawain himself will have to withstand a blow from the Green Knight.
Dutifully, Gawain agrees to the condition and lops off the man's head. At that, the Green Knight picks up his own head by the hair, mounts his charger, and enjoins Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day to await the returning blow.
All very strange and mysterious, and I think worth the trouble of learning to read in the original version.
Happy New Year to all.

Oscar Peterson

2007-12-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

One of my crow friends looks to have a broken a leg since yesterday. His left foot doesn't seem to work and he has to hop on one leg. That's life- and death- in the wild lane,and he probably won't survive long. I feel surprisingly sad about it.
In an online publication new to me, Prospect,the January issue has an article about Parmenides, an old philosopher who is also new to me. I haven't read the article thoroughly yet, but it seems Parmenides believed nothing new could come into this world. It had to previously exist in a different form. Maybe this is the kind of reasoning that led the Epicureans to come up with the concept of atoms, indestructible elemental particles out of which all things are made.
I happen to think otherwise. I think the universe is in a constant state of creation and destruction, and that what comes in to being, although seemingly made out of the same constituents over and over, is nevertheless unique and unrepeatable. Only the themes in philosophy repeat each other over and over, rephrased and dressed up in new outfits.
Oscar Peterson died yesterday. There was never before another Oscar Peterson and there will never again be another Oscar Peterson. Yet, by existing he changed the meaning of every musician of his time. Have a good crossing, Oscar, they're waiting for you in the heavenly choir.

Gaggle of crows

2007-12-16T10:03:00.000-08:00

A blustery day in Victoria on Sunday, and the trailer at my construction site was arockin and arollin. A two foot length of 2 by 4 fell out of the sky while I was looking out over the scene, and a large moth fluttered by. Surprising. Made me think of the scene in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up in her house and sees the witch riding by. I gave my flock of crows a can of sardines to go with their cat food today. They know me by now and follow me when I patrol the catwalk, one or two walking behind me and another one alighting on the railing ahead of me. They don't get enough from me to grow too dependent, but maybe it will be enough to tide some of them through the winter. And maybe in the spring they'll bring their fledglings over. I've always wanted to have a wild crow friend. He's got his own life, I've got mine. And I want to teach him to say, "F... off." I think they leave little gifts for me on the railing in front of the office. An old chicken bone, or one of the colourful foam earplugs that get tossed all over the site when the guys are finished with them.
I don't know these crows well enough to distinguish one from the other. Some are bigger, others smaller, some are bullies, others are bullied. I think they might be members of a single family. Crows are often thought of as birds of ill omen, presumably because they are feeders on carrion. In The Iliad being left on the field of battle to feed the birds and dogs is a disgrace. Crows, and all corvines, are considered the brains of ornithology, and obviously much smarter than gulls. Gulls are much bigger than crows and prey on their nestlings and push them off their food. However, I've seen a crow tease a gull by sneaking behind and pulling his tail feathers. Over and over again. Clumsy and stupid, the enraged gull could do nothing to rid himself of the pest. It was hilarious and I had the feeling the crow thought so, too.
One of my lifelong interests is evolution, and looking at the crows' beaks make me wonder about beaks and birds. Not all birds fly. Ostriches and their kin run. Different birds fly differently, soaring on updrafts like eagles, flitting through underbrush like finches, hovering like hummingbirds. But all birds have beaks. A myriad of birds live all over the world, filling every conceivable niche, varying drastically in size. Many navigate thousands of miles when the seasons change. They eat seeds, insects, nectar, grass, rotten meat, fish. Yet they all have beaks.
My first criticism of standard Darwinian theory was over the complexity of the ear. How could there be any advantage to an incremental mutation that had nothing to do with hearing to eventually become an ear, including the complex mechanisms that transfer air vibrations to the neurons. This is something I recently discovered has a fancy name: irreducible complexity. Compared to an ear or an eye a beak seems fairly simple, but I don't think it is. Without knowing anything about the anatomy of a beak I can see it has nerve endings, a nasal passage and all sorts of complexities. So what happened in the great long ago of cretaceous or jurassic times? Did a clutch of birdlike lizards suddenly hatch out of their eggs with beaks while all others around them in the colony had jaws and teeth? Because obviously, unless you are an amoeba, it takes two to have descendants. The complex of adaptations must occur twice before it can be passed on, and at the same time. What are the odds of all this occuring? You'll have to ask the statisticians, but it looks like a very poor bet to me. And yet there is no denying the facts of evolution.
However it happened, did it happen just once, and have all subsequent birds descended from that one mutant? Pretty hard to know, and a real mystery that has yet to be solved deepens the more you think about it. But what is evolution, anyhow? The word itself is inadequate. Incremental change over time through genetic variation (mutation) and adaptation to different habitats and life strategies (natural selection) is what evolutionary theory attempts to explain. It seems on the surface fairly logical that it might work until you realize that genetics is about chemistry- the chemistry of proteins. DNA is a chemical factory able to precisely produce chemicals with an almost infinite range of variation. A whole organism, like a crow, or even Prince Charles, must be at least as complex as the entire physical universe.
This complexity preexists life itself. As Wickramasingh and Hoyle point out in their book, The Cosmic Life Force " Enzymes are polymers or chains of smaller units known as the amino acids. There are enzymes to assist almost every basic biochemical process and without such enzymes biology as we recognize it could not exist...The random chance [of enzymes forming spontaneously] is not a million to one against, or a billion to one or even a trillion to one against, but p to 1 against, with p minimally a superastronomical number equal to 10 to the 40000th power."
But although life is based on chemistry, complete organisms like crows and Prince Charles are not just a collection of chemicals, they have form: wings, black feathers, a beak, in the case of crows, and a potential monarch of an island in Prince Charles. The relation of form to chemistry is something evolutionary biologists don't like to talk about. There is no obvious connection.
I bring Hoyle and Wickramasingh into the discussion because of their theory of panspermia, which argues that life, far too complex to have begun in the short lifespan of the earth, must be a cosmic phenomenon and that comets may be the means of transplanting it to earth. Their book is especially strong on the chemical basis of life, from the standpoint of one of the great physicists of the 20th century. It's well worth a read and I hope to say more about it in the future.

Victoria weather

2007-12-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

For anyone who doubts that the global warming kerfuffle is anything but a swindle, I suggest reading about the wing ding in London recently where the Goracle got paid about $5000 a minute to deliver his spiel. Having won both an Oscar and a Nobel prize this year, he has become an even bigger ass than ever- a feat I would have thought impossible. Too magisterial to be bothered meeting with the lesser mortals, those guilt and angst ridden attendees who paid thousands of pounds to hear him pontificate were severely disappointed not to be allowed to see speak to him in private. If only they had known, they could have jumped in their personal jets and gone to Bali- the better to save the earth, of course.
My view is that we are far more likely to experience dramatic cooling than warming. I'm sorry about that because personally I think a little warming would be a pretty good thing. More biodiversity, y'know.
More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that 'environmentalist' and 'idiot' are synonyms.
Meanwhile, here in Victoria the fag ends of autumn have not been bad at all this year. It's been a little cooler than usual, with snow falling in some areas of the region from time to time, and the obligatory storm blowing down trees, disrupting ferry schedules and so forth. There have also been floods in Washington state and up Island. Nothing unusual. But we have also had a number of very beautiful days. Since November and December are usually the most miserable months of the year, often almost continual rain and gloom, I am optimistic for a pleasant January and February...but with periods of snow.
The lovely weather last week gave me the opportunity- nay, the duty- to provide photographic comfort to those caught in some of the less temperate climes of our great nation where it's snowing like hell and cold as a witch's bleep.

Who is Killing Homer?

2007-11-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

I was looking for another title, but the only book of Victor Davis Hanson's in the library was Who Killed Homer? So I read that book instead, and was glad I did, although most of the material was familiar to me in a general sense. Or maybe I should say I'm sorry I read it because it was another sad tale of the decline of our intellectual life.
More specifically it was about the decline of classics departments in American universities and the abandonment of Greek and Latin language studies. No facet of our culture is immune from the Lilliputians who swarm over anyone of sufficient stature to highlight their inadequacies. He makes the case of why Latin and Greek literature should be read today and in the original languages. I need no convincing. I have always regretted my lack of Greek and Latin, and my feeble attempts to self-teach myself have gone nowhere. It's been a problem. Oftentimes I wonder if the obscurity of some sections of Plato would be cleared up if I could read the Greek.
Most people don't even try, it doesn't even occur to them to try to learn to read Greek, and I suppose wanting to makes me abnormal and odd. But the ideas expressed in the Greek language, from Homer to Plato, to the New Testament are so fundamental to how we understand the universe that nobody can be really knowledgeable without reading the original authors. These are not old, outmoded ideas, but perennial, constantly shifting, multifaceted ideas that must be asked again by each new generation. Besides, they are absorbing and intriguing, even fun. And the Greeks are the best of guides, the most provocative, the most exasperating.
Mr. Hanson is best known as a military historian and he can be pretty provocative, too. The attacks he makes on the academic establishment are telling, and at the same time ominous for those of us who treasure our western heritage. Behind the ivy covered walls a war for domination of young minds has been going on since the infamous '60's and now all the tenured positions of influence have been usurped by individuals who are determined to undermine everything the Greeks taught, and everything that has been learned since.
These were lessons painfully learned, examined thoroughly by serious and intelligent men, commented and elaborated upon by subsequent generations. When classical civilization collapsed (more from internal rot than anything else- as ours shows signs of doing) it left a vacuum that was filled by German tribal groups. They didn't want so much to conquer the Roman world as join it. They wanted to get in on all the wealth of the civilized world, not destroy it. But because they knew nothing about the thought and knowledge that underpinned it, they did destroy it. Most of them were illiterate, skilled at warfare and tribal politics, but without the least idea of running an urban society. So virtually all the intellectual capital of Greece and Rome was lost in Western Europe...with the surprising exception of Ireland which was never subdued by the Romans in the first place. But the Irish had adopted Christianity and preserved the knowledge of both Latin and Greek, which they carried with them as they evangelized on the continent in those centuries known as the Dark Ages.
Are we seeing a return to another Dark Age? It certainly seems that the people who have taken control of our educational facilities are determined to bring it on. Is it on purpose or are they just clueless, like the barbarian Goths of late antiquity? Or are they worse, because the Goths in their kingdoms wanted to retain the glory of the Empire. Like the Goths, the new PC academics want to retain the trappings of prestige and reputation of scholarship, but all they can do is spout the kind of gibberish Davis quotes from their published (but unread) works.
It's all very well for writers like Hanson and others to call our attention to this problem, but what do we do about it? The Lilliputians keep cloning themselves through the brainwashing factories the universities have become and sending them on to teach children, run bureaucracies and write for newspapers. Something has to be done to stop them before they wreck everything. They're extremely industrious, like an army of termites nibbling at the house framing. Lift off any wall section and they will fall out in the hundreds. I hate to say it, but an exterminator is needed.

The end of her line

2007-11-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

A story is circulating in the media regarding one Toni Vernelli, a 27 year old British woman, who had herself sterilized because she didn't want to burden the earth with another despicable human being. This followed an abortion she had because she thought it would be unfair- to the child or the world, I'm not sure. How sad that the brainwashing she has received through her school years, and the unrelenting propaganda barrage from the media has led not only to the death of an innocent child but to the extinction of her line. Remember, we are all directly connected in an unbroken line to the original life forms to appear on the earth some billions of years ago. And if Fred Hoyle's theory of panspermia is right (and I believe it is- someday I want to do a piece on this theory) then the universe is as much a creation of life than the other way around. I doubt if she is the first to take this step in the name of the envirocult. There are probably many, many more who have not made the news, but just quietly did the deed. This is where the logic leads. Ultimately environmentalism as it has been invented is part of a greater culture of death, and it's silly women like the now neutered Vernelli who are paying the price. Only one more step needs be taken: suicide. If David Suzuki really believed the stuff he spouts he should have offed himself years ago. And I'm not sure the world wouldn't be better for it. He, and his venomous creed, is the pollutant that kills, and would kill many more given the opportunity. As he opined once, "I guess there will have to be a massive die off." Perhaps it's unfair to focus on Suzuki as a source for this miasma, but somebody has to serve as an icon and he has applied for the job. Rachel Carson would also be a good candidate. Her grossly inadequate book, Silent Spring, was taken as gospel. DDT was banned. Up until that point, malaria was on the decrease all over the world. Since then there has been a resurgence, especially in parts of the world unable to combat the mosquito with other means. The result has been millions of deaths, mostly children, and mostly in poor countries. But perhaps the desexed Vernelli would think that's a good thing.

The government money spigot

2007-11-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

I should never read our local paper in the morning before my nerve endings are toughened up a little. Of course I already know what the topics of interest are to the poor newspaper folk. Not only are they stuck in a dying trade, the Willie Lomans of our day, but they are stuck in the little Victoria backwater, their dreams of being a star reporter for the New Duranty Times turning to ashes in their mouths.
So what was the lead story today? The plight of the homeless? That was the front page news in the free newspaper, something about cutbacks in 'victim services.' Oh, no. That class of parasites which depends on drug addicts for its grant proposals is being cut off? If so, our government (at which level I don't know) is showing a little common sense.
Wel, how about the dastardly George Bush and his misguided persecution of murderous tyrants? No, nothing about Bush today.
Ah. Smoking. In cars. With children. This nefarious practice is now banned in Nova Scotia, and the usual list of suspects, the cancer society, the provincial public health officer, the minister of health, all promise to take into consideration the possibility that we might follow that example. And probably there is a committee somewhere trying to figure out if there is any aspect of life the government hasn't stuck its nose into. I would suggest something be done about all the drug users at large who discard their government supplied needles after shooting up drugs purchased with their government supplied welfare checks, but that would be considered 'blaming the victim,' as all right thinking people would loudly proclaim.
But the big article today is, "BC sets out tough targets for emissions." I don't suppose this means they are going to shut their cake holes for a while. Imagine the blessed silence! How silly. The announcement coincided with "...yesterday's unveiling of the 22-member Climate Action Team." Wait a minute. Isn't a big confab on carbon dioxide emissions due to take place in Bali next month? Bali! In December! I wonder if the reservations have already been placed. And I wonder how many asses had to be kissed, palms greased, who you had to be related to, to get appointed to the committee. There are always unemployed politicians and operatives lurking near the money spigot. Say, what about those victims' services people. One scam is as good as another, and there's a lot more money in the global warming swindle than homelessness nowadays. Might be time for a career change.
How I yearn for a real conservative party in BC. Not that any of the conservative governments anywhere in the world have made any lasting impression. They have cranked up economies everywhere they have been, but in the end all that extra wealth gets appropriated by their neo-socialist successors, like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. "The fools voted for us! The gravy train has arrived! Let's all get aboard, boys and girls."
I guess it's too much to hope for a return to sanity in public affairs, and I have enough to do keeping my own sanity when I read the papers.

Sunshine and raindrops

2007-11-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

The sun is just barely up when I start my morning walk to work and it's almost down when I walk home in the late afternoon. Pretty soon it will be completely dark both ways. And today a small cloud scattered it's load of moisture on me as I crossed the Blue Bridge while the sun was shining all around. Just a friendly, puppy dog lick, no need to bother with an umbrella.
On Monday the weather gods were not so benign. I couldn't hold my camera steady enough for a good picture of the waves threatening to put Clover Point awash so this one will have to do. All day the wind pounded the coasts, downing power lines, canceling ferry sailings and so forth. Just a normal November preview of wintry days to come. Last year we had already had our first snow. We don't get very much snow in Victoria and that's a good thing because we are never prepared for it. Although we don't get much snow here (usually two or three spells in the course of a winter) the snow we do get is nasty stuff because it melts during the day- but not completely- and then freezes at night. That makes our streets and roads quite treacherous.
The storm was on Monday but by Tuesday the sun was out again, the winds had slacked off, and the sky was darkened by the odd stray cloud. It was a beautiful day. So I took a little spin around the peninsula in my little car and took a few pictures. The one of Prospect Lake was taken from the Observatory hill. Take a good look at all the green. You are looking at forests that have been logged more than once- clear cut. The trees grow back. The meadows and glades support healthy populations of deer, and the deer support the cougars. Vancouver Island, of which the Victoria area is one tiny corner, has the largest population of cougars in the world. Or so I have read. I've never seen one myself. Bears, yes, black bears, no grizzlies. Vancouver Island is mountainous and heavily forested these days, unlike the situation 10,000 years ago when it was under a mile of ice and only the highest peaks protruded above the glaciers. Isn't global warming wonderful? I wonder how it happened. As one irreverent soul joked, maybe the wooly mammoths were driving SUVs.
Although most of Vancouver Island is covered with coniferous forests of diverse types- cedar, hemlock, fir, spruce, and others depending on soil, elevation and other factors, Victoria and southeastern Vancouver Island have a special ecosystem known as Garry Oak Meadow. The arbutus with its peeling red bark is a favourite tree of mine. It is classified as a broadleaf evergreen and shed its leaves throughout the year. The wood is very hard and will burn well and very hot even when green. I heated a cabin for a couple of winters with arbutus I scavenged from road building crews. That was when I was trying to be a back-to-the-land hippie. I'm too old for those silly games now, but I remember those days with fondness.

The soul of a people

2007-11-07T09:14:00.000-08:00

If by some chance you've been following my maundering prose and have missed it these several weeks past, I apologize. I was going through one of those phases when the fact that I really don't know anything rose up and bit me. What, then, is the point of blathering away on the internet, a place that makes me think of Yeats' line about the 'bee-loud glade.' Is there anything more to it than the buzzing of bees, an inbred, introspective noise signifying nothing? After all, and here are the big questions, will anything we do or think matter a billion years from now, does anything we think or do matter in another galaxy, or even on our nearest inhabitable planetary neighbor? How about our non-human cohabitors on this earth. Does a Beethoven symphony mean anything to a garden snail?
According to certain shapers of modern opinion it doesn't. This is the lesson humanity has ultimately (wrongly, I think) gleaned from Galileo, a lesson that is expressed very succinctly in the phrase 'dead white males..' Because if there is no significance to the thoughts, beliefs or actions we leave behind, then life consists solely of the me and the now. That's it. But if that's the case why do we humans, all humans, have the nagging compulsion to bequeath a legacy to future generations? Even those who reject the contributions of those nefarious dead white males seem passionately committed to propagating that belief- but not children, who often turn out to be men. Personally, as a future dead white male, I am not so much offended by that bit of spitefulness as saddened by the paltry, dreary mentality that utters it.
Not only do we humans want our achievements to persevere after the death of the body, we also yearn to endow the products of our industry with beauty and grace be it as exalted as the Great Pyramid or as humble as a doily on the back of an easy chair. We are tireless composers of tunes and verses, we polish our cars, we clad our bodies with fashion statements, we populate our northern domiciles with captured tropical plants. The list of things we do to beautify ourselves and our surroundings is endless. And are we the only species that cares about beauty? Peacocks would beg to differ. Without a suitably colourful tail poor bachelor peacock hasn't a ghost of a chance with the discerning peahen. Darwinists twist themselves into pretzels trying vainly to fit such phenomena into their scheme of randomicity and determinism.
Scientists, philosophers and theologians argue endlessly over these issues trying to fit them into some grand scheme of things. I applaud these efforts, but when I need rescuing from the doldrums of insoluble questions I like to turn to music or poetry. Somehow the poets and composers perceive the big picture directly, not without the intellect, but the intellect illuminated by an interior kind of light without which Plato's light of pure reason is a pale and wan little candle sputtering in the dark. Sometimes I think reason operates in much the same way as natural selection. It doesn't create anything new, but it weeds out bad ideas and sorts things out into their proper places.
I've been struggling in the last few years with certain texts, especially the Semitic Bible and the Greek thinkers, both of which have molded our civilization beyond any reckoning. But we of the northern European races had a vital cultural life before the Roman law, legions and road-builders spread the cross and Plato into Gaul and Britain. There is something about the poor remnants of that older heritage which thrills me in ways that the new-fangled stuff doesn't. Introduced to us a mere 2000 years ago, the desert patriarchs and the Aegean poleis in many ways still seem as foreign and alien as ever. Indelible images abound in the few remaining muddled Celtic and Germanic texts which hint at a lost literature of vast proportions. Hard now to fit them with any context, our lives so much different now, and so all the more remarkable how striking those images are, even when translated into a language that didn't even exist when they were current.
Take for example the picture painted in "Pwyll Lord of Dyved" of the King, Pwyll, at a feast. (found in the Welsh Mabinogion) After the meal he decides to get away from the festivities and go for a walk to Gorsedd Arberth (a mound, possibly identified with Glastonbury) where he sits down with his retinue. He is in no way discouraged when he is informed that anyone who sits on the gorsedd will either be badly beaten or he will witness a Wonder. Spared the beating, the Wonder takes the form of a young woman clad in gold silk riding by on the road below. Curious about who this apparition might be, Pwyll orders a lackey to run after her and ask who she is. But although the lady is only traveling at a leisurely trot, and the lackey runs as fast as he can, she recedes further and further into the mist. The next night Pwyll comes back, bringing a lackey with a fast horse. Yet as fast as the lackey rides after her when she reappears, he cannot catch her in spite of her leisurely pace. The next night Pwyll decides to take on the job himself, bringing his fastest horse. And yet as fast as he rides, it is not enough. He cannot catch up with her. As the distance widens, he calls out to her: Lady, for the sake of the man you love the best, stop for me! I will gladly, she replied and it would have been better for your horse if you had asked me that sooner. I am doing my errands and I am glad to see you. I welcome you, said Pwyll, for it seemed to him that the beauty of every woman and girl he had ever seen was as nothing compared to the beauty of Rhiannon.
As the story progresses we become aware that Pwyll has entered another world. It may be he was originally sacrificed, as the prechristian celtic rituals were quite bloodthirsty, if the descriptions of Roman witnesses are to be believed. But I can't help comparing the Welsh vision of the other world with the sad view of Hades as depicted by Homer.
By comparison to the dreaminess of the Welsh stories, the Scandinavian counterparts seem blunter, coarser, more fatalistic. Heroism is a matter of stoic endurance, a defiance of death and suffering, but for all that, life is preferable. Hjalmar and his brother defeated twelve Goths in an island duel, but in the end:

"My armour is split, I have sixteen wounds,
I cannot see, my sight is darkened,
My heart was pierced by Angantyr's sword,
The steel-edge, steeped in venom.

"The farms I posessed were five in all,
But no joy have I known from these,
Bereft of life, I must lie down,
Sword-wounded on Samsey's shore.

The Norse poems are also more concerned with everyday practical matters. In one of Gudrun's songs she is forced by family pressure and international diplomacy to marry Atli the Hun. Gifted with the ability to foresee the tragic outcome, as the daughter of one king and the widow of another she may not escape her duty. On her way from her home she crosses the continent to meet her new husband:

The brave ones mounted the backs of horses,
But the Gaulish women in wagons rode,
Seven days were carried through cold land,
Seven more sailed on the waves,
Rode seven more through mountain country.

(From Norse Poems, as rendered by W.H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor, Faber and Faber, 1983)
There is much in the Norse literature that is vivid and sharp. You can be reading along and then all of a sudden you can see in your mind's eye the scene portrayed as if you had witnessed it yourself. But rarely is there humour, or the imagery of love and beauty one finds in the celtic sources.

'The burial of the poet, dead for love' contains these sentiments: My bright shaped girl, with the brow like the lily, under your web of golden hair, I have loved you with a strong and enduring love... (From a Celtic Miscellany, Penguin Classics, 1971)
Gory scenes of battle are common in these stories, but there always seems to be at least a hint of mirth. A man's end is not so much a matter of inescapable fate as it is of his own foolish actions, and as often as not resembles a pratfall more than anything else. But what I love best about the celtic stories is the irrepressible sense of wonder they all convey. The world, whether this one or the other one, not so easily distinguished from each other, and the boundaries easily traversed, are marvels to be wondered at. Life in either realm has more to it than mere accumulation of goods- though the celts were well-known in the ancient world for their love of gold. In the story called Branwen, daughter of Llyr, Bran a champion of the Isle of the Mighty leads a host to an invasion of Ireland. They win the battle, but Bran, like Achilles before Troy, is fatally wounded in the foot. Homer fails to see the humour and very grimly lectures us on the topic of eternal fame vs a long but ordinary life. Before Bran dies he tells his men to cut off his head, take it to London and bury it facing France. But on the way they may stop for seven years of feasting in Harddlech, "...with the birds of Rhiannon singing for you, and my head will be as good a companion as it ever was. After that you will spend eighty years at Gwales in Penvro, and as long as you do not open the door to the Bristol Channel on the side facing Cornwall you may stay there and the head will not decay." The men do as he instructs but even the bravest warriors will get bored after eighty years of carousing. "One day Heilyn, son of Gwynn said, 'Shame on my beard if I do not open this door to see if what is said about it is true.'" As soon as he did he and all his companions "...became as conscious of every loss they had suffered, of every friend and relative they had lost, of every ill that had ever befallen them, as if it had just happened."
Strange. As I read this passage I'm reminded of the story of Adam and Eve. A door of knowledge instead of a tree of knowledge, but still an act of will that loses them paradise, and sends them down into a world of sorrows. But how much differently it is played out, without the moralizing and the punitiveness.
Of course there are similarities among the literary outputs of these different peoples, the Hebrews, the Hellenes, the Norse, the British, but at the same time there are clear distinctions, and the distinctions are important...vitally important. The misnamed multicultural crowd advocates a flattening of distinctions and would have us believe everyone is the same. But we are not. Multicultural theorists, most of whom are of North European descent, are not lovers of any culture, and in particular seem to hate their own. That's why they are so determined to suppress public symbols like crosses and Christmas trees. They are really statists who want to substitute the state in place of family, country, homeland, history. And what is this state they so assiduously serve? They have turned into an army of mice nibbling away at the store of wealth amassed in the chambers built by their ancestors, not comprehending the damage they do. There is an adage which says if you don't love yourself you can't love anybody else. I'm not sure if that's true when applied to an individual, but when applied to a heritage, I'm certain that if you don't love your own you can't possibly love another's. This is what they have in common with Islamists. But the Islamists are more fully aware that they are on a mission to destroy what they see.
But can the soul of a people really be destroyed? Or maybe it's the genius of place that accounts for the retention of characteristics by a people which predate a massive transformation of culture and language. For instance, the Persians. Islamic, yes, but Semitic definitely not. And how much of that literature we call Celtic originated from a preCeltic substratum in Britain? Very hard to know for sure, or at least to prove in a scientific sense. But when I respond in my heart the way I do to these ancient stories I believe it. My ancestry is American (in the broad sense) for hundreds of years and yet I still think I belong to certain parts of the Old Country in ways I don't belong in the Americas. Highly irrational.

Victoria Fire and Rescue Team

2007-10-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

On Saturday at my construction site post I watched about a dozen fellows with backpacks march through the gate and up the steps to the catwalk. Who are these guys and what are they doing here I wondered. It seems they were members of Victoria's special rescue team, arrived for their yearly crane rescue drill. Its gratifying to me to see these young guys willing to take on such dangerous work. They are conscientious, take the the work seriously, and practice so they can do it right when it's for real. Here are a few pictures.

The Goracle

2007-10-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

So Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It just goes to show that not all of the quislings were run out of Norway after the war. I suppose it was like Canada's own Red Cross big boys who, having presided over a tainted blood scandal leading to the deaths of thousands, are quietly reabsorbed into the upper class fabric instead of sitting in jail where they belong. Gore joins an estimable fraternity. Kofi Annan, architect of the oil-for-food ripoff, and Yassar Arafat, inventor of the use of children for suicide bombers, are alumni. With company like that I suppose someday in the future Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler will be awarded the prize posthumously. But what has Gore done to deserve the honour? I can only speculate. So far, although the potential is clearly there, nothing he has done has led to mass murder or thieving on an industrial scale. (He is working hard on the latter with his carbon credit scheme) He is arguably the world's biggest ass, and that certainly deserves an award of some sort, but personally I think that Allmadinthehat fellow from Iran is the real Nobel material. Of course, I know Arafat had already done a lot of work toward extinguishing the only prosperous, functioning democracy in the Middle East, keeping his Palestinian constituency in a state of abject misery and poverty for all those years and so far Allmad has only started a small war or two with his good neighbor policy. Weasels like them are more Nobel-like than asses. Maybe Allmad's time is yet to come, especially if he succeeds in setting off a nuclear device somewhere in the middle of, say Antwerp. A worth attainment for an honour funded by the estate of the inventor of dynamite. Self flagelation seems to be the default setting of the European intellectual class these days so I'm sure it would shiver and squeal with pleasure.
I can only guess at the reason for including Gore in this company, but maybe it's this: Arafat, a murderer, Annan, a thief, and Gore fraud... all three masters at their trades. A trifecta.
But seriously, folks, where is the absurdly wealthy patron who is willing to endow an anti- Nobel prize? Something is clearly needed to reward human beings of genuine courage, high purpose and integrity as opposed to the frauds and schemers so admired in Norway. And there is certainly one human being living on this planet right now who deserves elevation to sainthood, a modern day Joan of Arc. Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and she has been run out of Holland, which is a good sign in itself. Not only does she think with a rare clarity and express herself in plain, unvarnished truthful words, she is beautiful and endowed with a wonderful nobility. It's no wonder the religion of peace hates her: she seems to be hated by all the right people.

Autumn in Victoria

2007-10-12T12:43:00.000-07:00

Some leaves are falling in Victoria but much of the city is still green. Methinks that means we have a pleasant Indian summer in store, my theory being that the trees are the best forecasters of upcoming weather patterns. Even the trees are wrong sometimes, so I tried my best to enjoy the sunshine. The days get shorter and shorter and at this time of the year and you never know for sure how long it will be before the next really gorgeous day comes, or if I'll still be here when it does.

Murder in the north

2007-10-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

We haven't had much good weather in Victoria this year and so a lovely autumn day like this is precious. Some leaves are turning but most trees are still dressed in green. In places the ground is littered with horse chestnuts, acorns, and apples, and the wasps are ravenous for their last meal. A few weeks ago the hanging flower baskets were taken down from the light posts, and the light bulbs on the parliament building are being changed. But at Goodacre lake in Beacon Hill Park it still looks like summer.
It's too bad a certain young RCMP officer in the Northwest Territories can't enjoy these photos, but someone cut his life off last Saturday.
The article in the paper Monday made the front page but it didn't tell us much. Skim it quickly and you might be forgiven for thinking he had met with an unfortunate accident while raking the lawn. We were mostly told how his young wife felt, as if there were something unusual about her grieving for her murdered husband and their life together. In fact, I don't remember the word 'murder' being used. A few more specifics, not many, were furnished in a separate article inside the paper. Ho hum, another dead cop. Nothing to get angry about. That would be so uncool. I don't blame the reporters so much, they're probably young and haven't thought about these things very much. They've seen lots of murders in the movies, and when was the last time you took a movie seriously?
But I have thought about it and it does make me angry, very angry, that reporters, movie stars, and left wing politicians are more apt to sympathize with the murderer than the victim. And don't let me forget the criminal justice industry who profit from crime. The lawyers, judges, social workers, advocacy groups, they all have a stake in maintaining a high crime rate. The police are a part of the system, too, and it's a wonder most of them aren't corrupted by it. But I don't think they are as a rule. They are the ones who see every day the consequences of a justice system that refuses to enforce the laws. They are the ones who do the dirty work.
The name of the suspect in this case is Emrah Bulatci who came to Canada from Turkey when he was four years old. He doesn't seem to like his adopted country very much. In the last three years he has been up for 25 charges in four Alberta towns. People familiar with him say he is violent and aggressive. His father had an interesting response with regard to his son's whereabouts: "Even if I know I won't call the cops. Why should I? Maybe they are lying." Sounds like the father is part of the problem.
Today's Edmonton Journal gives us a look at Emrah's rap sheet. Assault, uttering threats, vehicle violations, possession of proceeds of crime, and many more. But aside from a few slap-on-the-wrist fines, and one 'intermittent' ten month sentence, almost no convictions. But lots of court time, I'll bet. Lots of counseling sessions, I'll bet. Lots of publicly funded defense lawyers, I'll bet. But what do I know? Maybe he's just a poor, misunderstood young man who is being unfairly persecuted.
One thing is sure: I wouldn't know anything about his rap sheet if the mountie hadn't been killed, just like I seldom hear about other rap sheets until some innocent person is killed. Then I wonder: why wasn't that person put in a cage? Why was he on the loose? A few months ago the Victoria police shot and killed a fugitive driver who rammed a police barricade. His rap sheet was right up there with the best. You would think the reaction would be to pin a medal on the chest of the cop who shot him and kept him from killing some innocent party who got in the fugitive's way. Writeups by a rational newspaper reporter would have questioned the judiciary on why this guy was on the loose in the first place. Nope. To the newspaper writers it was the cop who had to explain himself.
Why are things like this in enlightened, modern Canada? The answer is that the people who have taken on the responsibility of enforcing the law do not believe in the punishment principle. That went out a long time ago and was replaced by the rehabilitation principle. However that was only a passing phase. Nowadays there is no longer any concept of 'criminal,' there is only the victim. Who is the victim, you might ask? Certainly not you or I who may have had a windshield smashed by vandals, or purse snatched, or tools stolen out of a truck. Oh, no. The victim is the person who did the crime...and it's all our fault because we have crated such an unjust society. If you work hard, have money in the bank, a regular job, a mortgage, that means you are an oppressor, you capitalist pig. If you are a heterosexual white male who supports a family, pays taxes, contributes time and money to your community, and maybe even (god forbid) attends church, you are the epitome of evil, the true criminal. It only follows that when law breakers are released on parole or given minimal sentences and while they are free to roam whatever violent acts they commit on you- why, it's all your fault.
I don't know when this slide into idiocy started exactly, but I think it must have been when we became too squeamish to use the noose. When murderers are allowed to walk away from their crimes, then what happens to lesser felons? It becomes like a devaluation of the currency. If a murderer only serves a year or two then what do you do with someone who steals? Why, it's catch and release. What about someone who scribbles graffiti on the side of your grocery store? In Victoria you, the proprietor, are the one who gets fined. The scribbler, often one of the "homeless," is one of your victims. That's why he breaks into your dumpster to stash his drugs and leaves his government supplied needles strewn in your back alley.
The same people, philosophy, advocacy groups, whatever, that have brought us to this sorry state are currently working openly to 'decriminalize' drugs altogether, and in the background are quietly working to legitimize what they call 'intergenerational sex,' or what you or I would call child abuse.
I have no idea what to do about it, but I get angrier by the day. Not to excuse the murderer of the young Mountie, whether or not it was Emrah Bulatci, but he is a victim all right. He is a victim of the prevailing unwisdom that there is no absolute right or wrong, and its companion unwisdom that our actions are predetermined and so we can not really be held accountable for them.
But the fate of the murderer when he is apprehended is easily foreseen. There will be endless hearings, depositions, court appointed lawyers, counseling sessions, all subject to a court ordered information ban. Because we wouldn't want to violate his rights, would we?
Meanwhile Christopher Worden's widow is left with an urn of ashes. Yes, I get very angry sometimes. My condolences to her and their child.

The meaning of miracles

2007-10-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

An interesting piece on the First Things blog last week by Matthew J. Milliner recounts an experience he had while visiting a church in Crete that dated from the period of Venetian rule. Catholic Venetians and Orthodox Cretans had divergent liturgies, a problem that was resolved by building churches with naves on opposite ends of the structure so that services from each rite could be celebrated in the same space. I was unfamiliar with this bit of historic lore and so it caught my imagination at once. I like stuff like this.
Milliner was there in his capacity as an art historian, and while there he encountered an English speaking Cretan who was well-versed in the iconography on display. In response to an inquiry about a depiction of Mary consoling the infant Christ, the Cretan explained the story behind it.
"Mary was permitted, due to her wisdom, to study in the Temple from an early age. Because of her access to Solomon's mysteries, she knew what was to happen to her son. And so, as Gabriel confronts Christ in this icon with the instruments of the Passion, Mary comforts her son."
Milliner, not believing the historicity of this legend, launches into a meditation on how these mythic tales could be true and untrue at the same time. The story contains a code, the Cretan elaborated, something that needs interpretation to be intelligible. Because, how could it be literally true? He tells us about other legends that require similar readings, like the Turin shroud. Never fear. They do not contradict the gospels but amplify them.
This is familiar territory for me, a long time enthusiast for poetry in general and mythic literature in particular. The challenge for a poet is to transcend the limitations of language itself, just as a painter is challenged by the two dimensional limitations of his medium. This is somewhat easier to do when poetry is transmitted by a blind harper like Homer, a mythic character himself. He used gesture and vocal expressiveness to augment his words. Verse itself has no literal meaning but without verse the meaning of the words in the poem are diminished, even neutralized or altered to an entirely different meaning. A great poet, as opposed to a hobbyist versifier, turns these limitations into opportunities. The limitations amount to a kind of traction. Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" is an eye opening introduction to reading myth, if you can figure out what he's talking about while trying to separate out all his misdirections. But I'm convinced he understood myth better than anyone else I have ever read.
The specific problem Milliner mentions in the reading of that icon is Mary's presence in the temple. The story is new to me, and surprising. Were women taught religious doctrine in the Temple? Wasn't the Judaism of that date as patriarchal as Mosquism of today? Milliner doesn't say anything at all about the angel Gabriel. Does that mean he believes that part, or is he avoiding that question? I don't know.
But these are important questions in the context of Christian belief since the authenticity of the religion itself depends on the literal truth of supernatural events occurring in real, literal, historic time. IE, the Son of God, come to earth, suffering torture and death, only to come to life again for a few days before returning to heaven. Stories in the gospels of miracles he performed are important only if they actually happened.
A school of thought among Christian believers doesn't care for these tricks and would prefer to forget about them. As for me, I have never seen a miracle performed. I have never seen an angel. I have never seen or heard of a documented case of a dead man coming back to life. To the skeptical mind that seems preposterous, and I have a skeptical habit of mind. I always subject ideas and theories to critical assessment. For someone like me claims of a virgin birth, a resurrection, visitations by angels and so on are hard to accept.
At the same time dogmatic skepticism is a trap that unimaginative minds often fall into. The classic example is the case of the museum curator who didn't believe there could be such an animal as a platypus even after examining a preserved specimen. Skepticism shouldn't be a closing of the mind to unfamiliar phenomena. Often skepticism is a mask for the kind of intellectual laziness that doesn't want to go to the terrifying trouble of reexamining all previous premises.
The reason I can take the gospels seriously is not just because they are great literary works written by intelligent and honest men of serious purpose who set them down because of something utterly momentuous they had witnessed. The reason I am open to ideas of the miraculous events they recorded is that I already know life is an astonishing miracle. Nevertheless, I am still troubled over the built in limitations of my ability to know what it all means. These limitations are not transcended by means of reason or through an accumulation of information or an amplification of my sensory faculties. They are inherent. All I know is that there has to be something more to it.
That's where the 'tricks' in the gospels enter into the discussion. We do see people who set themselves up as gurus and prophets and anyone with half a brain can tell they are crackpots. Presumably things weren't much different in the Roman province of Judea, a place literally crawling with preachers and prophets. Mystery religions were a shekel a dozen. Can Pontius Pilate really be blamed for not wanting to get caught between warring factions in his own consulship? It would look bad on his resume, and interfere with the Roman penchant for accumulating plunder.
The problem for the gospel writers was to distinguish Jesus from all the other preachers, and the miracles were the proof. The kinds of miracles Jesus performed were contrary to the natural order. In the natural order of things corpses do not come back to life. In the natural order of things cripples do not throw their crutches away and leap in the air. In the natural order of things the blind remain blind. In the natural order of things loaves and fishes do not proliferate in baskets. According to the scriptures all these miracles occurred in the presence of witnesses. If a man was blind, he was known to all in the vicinity as a blind man. There would be no faking it. Even in the Temple in front of the most hostile of skeptics Jesus was said to perform miracles.
We are told Jesus' reasons for performing miracles. He was backing up his claim to be the Son of God. He was proving that he was not bound by the rules of the world. He was proving he was not as others so that when he submitted to the same sufferings as thieves and murderers the world would know that it was through his choice. Even more it was to prove to the descendants of Abraham that he was the Messiah and that he was therefore entitled to change the terms of the Covenant made with Moses. Through the miracles he left the skeptics with no option but to reexamine their doctrines.
We moderns don't have the evidence of plain vision before us. We only have the words of the gospel writers and in spite of my own habitual skepticism I find them convincing...though not quite enough to salve all qualms.
As for the icon in the Venetian church on Crete, I wish I could see it for myself, and I wish I knew more about the legend that goes with it. The gospels are the bedrock of Christian belief, but that doesn't mean the gospels were the only accounts recorded or memorized by the early congregations. The gospels were accorded privileged status by the early Church Fathers as a preemptive strike against promulgators of mainly gnostic cults that would have been fatal to the Church. For an excellent discussion on why heresies are so important to counteract I refer the interested reader to a website- The Great Heresies, by Hilaire Belloc. These issues never fade, but we have been disarmed by philosophical trends that trivialize their importance.
I would think feminist researchers into Christian history would be very interested in this icon...if their minds weren't so closed to anything but the blather preached by the sorority.

Mickey Rooney

2007-10-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

I had despaired ever again of finding any new issues of Hollywood Golden Age musicals in A&B Sound. Since being bought out by a computer maker, Victoria's best source of good music and DVDs has drastically downsized. And they wonder why customers have been turning to online sources. I wouldn't go in there that often anymore if it wasn't just across the street from my bus stop.
But on Sunday I hit the jackpot. They had a nice boxed set of Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musicals at under 50 bucks. I only hesitated a minute before running down to the bank to refresh my wallet. Didn't even miss my bus.
I have only watched two of them so far, "Babes in Arms," and "Girl Crazy." Bookends, the first and the last of that collaboration. Early on in the first film, Mickey is sitting at the piano while Judy sings "Good morning, good morning...it's great to be out late...good morning, good morning, to you." It's a cheerful, upbeat ditty written by Arthur Freed, producer of the movie, and his song writing partner Nacio Herb Brown. I think Judy was seventeen when she made the movie. Standing by the piano she is dressed demurely, looking perky, neat and stylish, with a wicked little sparkle in her eye. She and Mickey are in a music publisher's office trying to sell this, Mickey's latest song. Toward the end of the song Mickey sees he has caught the interest of the music publisher and he looks at Judy and says, "Hit it, mama!" And boy, does she hit it. Judy Garland could deliver more smoldering sexuality by just arching an eyebrow than Paris Hilton can dream of by spreading her legs.
The plot sounds corny. Judy and Mickey are both children of vaudeville parents who have been put out of work by 'talking pictures.' A social worker threatens to put the children of all the out of work performers into reform school so they can learn honest trades. While all the adults are on the road trying to restart their careers, Mickey decides to organize a show using the talents of all the kids left behind and put it on in a local barn.
It isn't so corny when you know that both Mickey and Judy were children of vaudeville performers, and that when Mickey became MGM's top star he persuaded Louis B. Mayer to hire his father, who was playing in a run down L.A. burlesque house, for the studio. One of the threads of the movie plot duplicates this real life experience of the real Mickey Rooney.
Judy Garland I have always been in love with, but I have never known that much about Mickey Rooney. The more I know about him, though, the more I like him. He made his stage debut at the age of 17 months, and he worked constantly from then on. It was work he loved, not really distinguishing his life from his work. He could do everything: dance, sing, play piano, play drums, write songs. Many of the big stars who knew him said he was the most talented movie actor ever. A bonus disc in the set replays an interview he did as an old man for TV that really helps to give a sense of what it was like to be Mickey Rooney, and I envy him. All that exuberant youth erodes inexorably into old age and death, but what a life to look back on. I'm absolutely certain he was in love with Judy, has been in love with her all his long life, and not even Ava Gardner, to whom he was married for three years, was a satisfactory substitute. Mickey Rooney was definitely a guy with little man's syndrome who punched above his weight! Everyone was above his weight! Even Frank Sinatra had trouble handling Ava. Now that I do know more about what kind of a person he was, I have developed a real fondness for him, and the more I see of his work, the more respect I have for him. Singing and dancing,and kissing some of the most beautiful women who have ever lived...it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. And what a gift to the world these performances are. When you watch his movies you can see that Mickey was often better than his scripts. By the way, Mickey did his duty and went to war when his country called, earning a few medals in the process.
"Girl Crazy" was an an adaptation of a Gershwin Broadway production and has a lot of great songs. As with all Hollywood adaptations it's a mixture of good and bad. Hollywood had trouble just leaving things alone without adding overblown spectacle. Sometimes it works and you just have to accept it on its own terms, like Busby Berkeley's infatuation with Art Deco effects. But when Gershwin's music is involved any embellishment amounts to gilding the lily, and we have just a little too much embellishment in this production. At least Arthur Freed didn't try to shoehorn one of his own songs into it. He wrote good songs but he was no Gershwin. However, many of the songs were over orchestrated, and some good songs were removed from the score. But believe me, Mickey and Judy could rescue any song from maltreatment and they make the movie a delight all the way through.
For anyone who loves music and great singing and dancing, this set is highly recommended. I know I'm going to be able to enjoy watching these movies over and over again.

Miss Hanley

2007-09-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

Most people buy ipods so they can listen to music, but I have an ipod so I can avoid listening to 'music.' Most bars, coffee shops and so on where I might otherwise enjoy sitting in silence are apt to play 'music,' which I use the music on my ipod to shut out. 'Music' I regard as that which has been used by the entertainment industry to cultivate a docile mass market of teenagers too ignorant to know any better. This is a strategy that has been in place since the fifties. This 'music' is otherwise known as "Rock and Roll." Real music demands one's total attention. 'Music,' if the sixties is any indication, causes brain damage. Especially in combination with marijuana.
Being a teenager at the time of its inception I was vulnerable to the media manipulation, too. Not for long. There was something about Elvis I never really liked and I soon noticed that I was only pretending to like him to be cool. At home I discovered the local classical music station and was enraptured among others by Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Beethoven's Violin Concerto (Jascha Heifetz soloing the latter) Let's be kind: Elvis suffered by comparison. And so do the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and all the subsequent icons of faux music.
In childhood I think I must have been inoculated against its ravages by a few good teachers and by the Walt Disney recording of "Peter and the Wolf." I say inoculation because I now regard Rock and Roll as a disease, a maladaptive mutation that has the same effect on music as phyloxera had on the vineyards of France, because it destroys the beautiful work of generations of careful and conscientious workers and several inspired geniuses.
I vividly remember the Peter and the Wolf recording. The composition was pretty new then, having been written by Prokofiev in 1936 and the popular music industry was quite open to real talent then. Disney made an animated feature out of it and the recording came from that. The production drew on a It doesn't seem to be available any more, maybe because it's not considered politically correct to have little boys wandering around in forests hunting wolves with a pop gun. In those days boys were good and wolves were bad, but today it's the other way around.
The name of the teacher I am thinking of was Miss Hanley, and she taught grade four at St. Margaret's Separate School in Edmonton. It was a time when a teacher taught the same class all day, every day. Arithmetic, social studies, language, catechism, she taught them all. And music. I think it was almost a requirement for employment that a teacher could play the piano. Anyway, I can still remember the day she took the class down to the music room and started to play the piano accompaniment to Schubert's setting of "Ave Maria." Schubert's melodies and piano accompaniments are very tightly interwoven and I was dumbfounded. The piano part didn't sound anything at all like the melody of the song. It took me a little while to grasp that idea but once I did I couldn't hear it often enough.
Thank you, Miss Hanley for the gift of Franz Schubert, and thank you Walt Disney (and Prokofiev, of course) for Peter and the Wolf.

Max Roach

2007-09-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

Max Roach died a few weeks ago. He was one of those human beings who seemed to be an elemental force of nature and it's hard to believe that such a force is quenched. Of course his music is still around, caught on tape, frozen in amber. Not all of the life of it is preserved in the electronic amber but enough so you can fill in what's missing. You all know he was a drummer in the bebop era of jazz, famous for his polyrhythmic capabilities. I made a little trip to youtube because while I have some of his recordings I had never known what he looked like. Then, running out of the small supply of his videos I started searching through the ranks of some of the famous jazz drummers of past decades. Chick Webb, Cozy Cole, Jo Jones, Dave Tough, Buddy Rich and a fantastic film of Barrett Deems. I don't even know who Barrett Deems played with but he was phenomenal. Feeling too confined by the limitations of his drum set, in this clip he migrates from the bandstand to the club floor and finds a chair to beat on. Then, just for comparison sake I took a look at some rock drummers. But there is no comparison.
There was a koto player I saw and heard at Vancouver's long defunct Classical Joint in Gastown. Japanese music is an acquired taste for westerners and I acquired it during my two year stint in Yokosuka. Takemitsu is one of the few modern composers I like. Abstraction comes naturally to zen conditioned Japanese and his music reminds me a lot of haiku. Never liked saki or sushi, never learned to use chopsticks, but I like Japanese music and poetry. Music has the advantage of not requiring knowledge of the spoken language of the composer. Listening to that koto player I realized what was unique about Japanese music. I don't know anything about scales and harmony so I have nothing to say about that, except that the 'frets' on a koto are adjustable according to the scales and harmonics the performer wants to use. What really struck me was that the rhythm of her music was implied rather than stated openly. This has the effect of releasing the musical phrase from the confinement of a strictly observed beat. This was a very emphatic impression. Haiku is like that, too. Most of the meaning of a haiku is not in the words used in the poem. The words on the page are meant to stimulate the mind so that other, deeper, meanings are sensed. In the koto song the rhythm is not stated overtly so the listener must supply his own rhythm, which may be more subtle and meaningful than even the finest musician can express. Or at least those were the thoughts I had when I came away from that lady's performance.
When thought of this way western music, even the music of the master composers seems crude. Not really. The great composers incorporated rhythm into the structure of the musical line. They knew what they were doing. And they were aware of the confinement problem, if the story is true of Wagner's putting down a famous conductor by calling him a Bavarian timebeater. Mediocre musicians pay excessive attention to timekeeping, as all good conductors know. It's the hobgoblin of little minds.
One of the reasons Negro music in America became so popular, I think, is that it found a way of keeping a strong rhythm while still leaving room for phrasing. Synchopation they call it, and it's what they mean when they say "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." I think it's just as important for jazz development as the blues -inspired bending of notes. All those influences evolved together in the early twentieth century until it reached an apogee in the bebop era. But by then it had become too arty and self indulgent to speak to an ordinary audience. Myself, I like the jazz from the swing era the best, before it got too proud to play for dancing teenagers.
Still, here I am listening to Sonny Rollins' quirky take on "The last time I saw Paris" -I'm not sure who's doing the drums but it might be Max Roach- and loving it.

War and Peace

2007-09-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

Sunday was cold and rainy, a foretaste of soon-to-arrive winter, but this morning is almost perfect. The sun is out, a few clouds dapple the sky, the temp is 12C/54F- what could be better for a walk into town along the water? From my place I can take the quick way along Esquimault Rd or dawdle via the Songhees walkway. I like to dawdle. It's not just that Songhees is winding that makes it slower. It's just about impossible not to stop and sit on a bench for a while and watch the harbour sights, so if I'm in a hurry it's not the way to go.
A little drama: a flock of gulls foraging right about where a twin otter was landing. I'm not sure if they all got away. What were they finding in that particular patch of water that made them so reluctant to abandon it? We humans are so wrapped up in our own daily concerns that we tend to forget about the other critters who also get caught up in their daily concerns. That means obeying the demands of the belly. For seagulls, unable to store up provisions for the future beyond the capacity of its belly, as soon as one feeding is done, the next is sought. Urgently. The needs of Safety are always in tension with the need to eat.
We humans have devised ways of storage and distribution that would require a catastrophic and global disruption over a long period of time to thwart. Hunger and deprivation are no longer technical problems, but a really inept and corrupt political structure can do more to disrupt our well-being than all but the worst natural disasters. As examples in recent history I would cite the Marxist- inspired regimes in Russia and China. Stalin's collectivization program in the Ukraine, for millennia one of the breadbaskets of the world, resulted in millions of Ukrainians dying of starvation. Mao, not to be outdone, presided over the deaths of tens of millions of his countrymen. Nowadays we can readily see what Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe. Once the breadbasket of Africa, the country is starving. It looks like Hugo Chavez has ambitions to follow these examples, starting with a campaign against the investors who finance the Venezuelan oil industry.
In our western system of private property and personal innovation, where individuals reciprocally offer up their services to others, it is possible for an individual as low down in the economic order as me to live within a five minute walk of a pleasant waterway and know that my little economic contribution is enough to provide me with comfortable shelter, good food, and security. Capitalism and free enterprise are wonderful ideas. I also am glad that I live in a political culture that tolerates divergent ways of thinking with differences decided through open debate. People forget the most important aspect of freedom of debate: I have a right to be wrong and you have a right to correct me on it. This is how we learn from each other.
We Anglo Americans have lived so long in this system that we take it for granted. We live in such peaceful and prosperous circumstances for so long that we have difficulty with the idea that some people in the world hate us and want to destroy our way of life. But if you pay attention then you will know that the Marxist inspired movements have worked tirelessly against us for nearly a century. Aided and financed by the Soviet and Maoist slave states, they have done a lot of damage. The Marxists have not gone away, they live and breed on campuses all across the continent. They are joined now by the Islamists, a much older scourge with a far deeper hatred than the Soviets had. At least some aspects of western culture were valued in Soviet Russia, and even Maoist China. They may have hated traditional religion but they cultivated many of the western inspired arts. But the Islamists hate everything about us. They hate our belief in freedom of expression. They hate our belief in equal rights before the law. Democracy to them is foolishness. Emancipation of women is lunacy to them. It hasn't been easy for westerners to learn how to live together while respecting different ways, creeds and languages but we have done it. Precariously, perhaps, and always under pressure, but we have done it. Islam proclaims itself the only possible and permissible creed. Every single human on the face of the planet must submit to that creed, either as a full-fledged member or as a lower class being with no rights to protection from the law.
Because of our inexperience with people who hate us just because they hate us and have no compunction against killing us, we have a hard time understanding that there are times when we have to defend ourselves, and that means war. That means a generation or more of young people who will not have the privilege of walking along the Songhees shore without a care in the world. There are a lot of people who refuse to believe that we are in danger. They think that if we stop fighting then we will have peace. Au contraire, mes amis. The reason we have peace now is that we have had generations of citizens willing to fight to preserve our peace.
Wake up, folks

September in Victoria

2007-09-10T20:23:00.000-07:00

On one of Victoria's patented summers it's hard not to think you have arrived in paradise. We didn't have much of a summer this year so today was much appreciated- better late than never- and if the weatherman is right it's going to stay this way for a while. Sometimes this kind of weather persists until the end of October.
And I think I must be blessed to live just over the bridge from downtown Victoria. The walk along the Songhees walkway is always full of interest with boats and planes coming and going, joggers and dogwalkers out for a stroll, the sky and the sea always changing, always the same. Theme and endless variation. This morning I stopped for a moment to size up a picture of one of the harbour markers with the tide down. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a little movement on the sidewalk. I had already spotted a mouse (shrew, vole?) scurry into the underbrush. This bit of fluff was a fledgling and at first I thought it was a sparrow or finch or one of the other varieties of small gray birds I am unable to identify, but this one had a bedraggled little crest on top of his head. I think he was a quail. We see a few families of them strutting along the railroad tracks, and somehow they have survived all the construction in our neighborhood. I always enjoy seeing these dapper characters. This little guy looked like he had gotten separated from his elders and wouldn't have survived much longer if I hadn't been there. Three or four drooling sea gulls had also spotted him. A bite sized morsel for a seagull. So I herded him into the shrubbery. See? I may be a paleocon but I've still got a heart. And I like quail a lot better than seagulls.
I often hear locals brag, "I haven't been downtown in years." I never say anything, but I'm incredulous. Are they idiots? Victoria has one of the loveliest downtowns in North America. You wanna see ugly, go to Tacoma. I remember in Vancouver I had a young couple in my cab. We were driving down Arbutus from Kerrisdale, it was a beautiful day, and the North Shore mountains were awesome. The girl was saying how beautiful it was, and then the guy chipped in. "Yeah, but what use is it?" He was from Ontario, of course.
Now that it's September the majority of tourists have gone home, leaving the artisans with slim pickings. But a few die hards are still on the Causeway and in Bastion Square taking care of their customers. Good on ye, guys and gals!

Death of the spirit

2007-09-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

Two things I read this morning reminded me of my theme of aliveness from the other day. The first was a review of Christopher Hitchens' book "God is not Great," by another well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins. There is quite a crew of these evangelistic atheists trying to whip up a bit of religious bigotry among the anti Christian crowd. The other item is in today's First Things blog, a posting by Peter Leithart called "The Pagan West." The arguments of Hitchens and Dawkins are old and tiresome. But Leithart has noticed something interesting.
It's a well known fact that in Europe and countries of European extraction, the force of traditional Christian faith is moribund. This is especially true of the mainstream protestant denominations, as well as the 'progressive' wing of the Catholic Church where the core doctrines of Christanity have been largely abandoned. Not coincidentally, as the 'progressive' clergy abandons the core beliefs, the congregations abandon the churches. Away from Europe and the American 'blue states,'- what Dawkins calls the cerebral cortex of America, as opposed to the reptilian brain of southern and middle America- notably in Africa, Christianity is vibrant, growing, and alive.
Leithart informs us that Christianity is growing fastest in those parts of Africa where traditional African religion is still strong and suggests that this is not mere accident. "Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience."
In other words Africans are attuned to the aliveness of existence and so the idea that a creator god animates this aliveness is only common sense. Unlike Dawkins whose seething hatred of everything religious blinds him to the beauties of both religious tradition and the aliveness of the world. This can't be too good for science, either.
Sometimes I wonder if this deadness of spirit is a product of urban living. The traditional Paganism of the Greeks and Romans lost credence among the educated as their civilization matured and was only retained as a set of rituals used to cement loyalty to the city. Our educated class has even lost this remnant of belief, and maybe this is why patriotism in Europe is pretty much a thing of the past, and only survives as a hatred of America. It's as if all the ecclesiastical architecture that crowds the European landscape is occupied by twittering mice- as the shades of the dead were imagined in Homeric Greece.

The Medieval Sourcebook

2007-09-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

I'm still pretty new at this internet business and am only beginning to plumb its depths. The political blogs wherein all the latest contoversies are debated are the easiest to find. It doesn't take long to find pornography either. Every time I poke the 'next blog' box there's about a one in five chance a porn site will appear. The rest are Spanish. Sadly, I have never found a blog by that method I thought was worth revisiting.
I'm quite interested in literature, music and science but only a few of the professionally produced sites have caught my interest for more than a few reads.
But now I have The Medieval Sourcebook to turn to whenever I lose interest in the tiresome news of the present, although it's not much easier to figure out what did happen than what is happening. But at least we know the results, and it's always revelatory to me when I listen to the words of someone who was caught up in the events of his day, someone who had no way of knowing how it would all turn out, someone who was involved in the disputes, who had an interest in the results. I always marvel that nobody is interested in these stories.
Here is one, found at random while I was looking for something else. It's from a Chronicle of the Counts of Anjou written about the year 1100. Anjou is the lovely region of France on the lower reaches of the Loire River and its tributaries, an area I cycled through. Somehow or other these Counts ended up as kings of England, among other things. An anecdote of one Fulk making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem while it was still controlled by the Saracens tells how he was only allowed to visit the Holy Sepulcher if he agreed to piss on the altar. The Saracens, "Knowing him to be a man of quick temper, mocked him, and said he would never get into the tomb he wanted to see unless he were to urinate upon it and upon the holy cross. The prudent man, though unwilling, agreed to this. A ram's bladder was found, cleaned and washed and filled with the best wine and then placed between the count's thighs. Shoeless, he approached the Lord's Sepulchre and let the wine flow forth upon it..."
Still looking for Honorious of Autun I stumbled onto something I was looking for a few months ago. This is a series of letters between wealthy landowners in Roman Gaul written just before the complete collapse of Roman authority and the assumption of power by illiterate and uncultured German war chiefs. What is astonishing about the writer is that the was unaware that history as he knew it was at an end. Rome was done, but that was a concept he didn't grasp. Sidonius was the name of this Roman and he paints an idyllic picture of the countryside around Nimes and the great aquaduct where it crosses the Gardon River- known now as the Pont du Gard. I also cycled through this area- occassionally on a Roman road- and camped right next to the aquaduct for a few days while I explored the vicinity. He is visiting friends. "Their estates march together; their houses are not far apart; and the extent of the intervening ground is just too far for a walk and just too short for a ride..." So far were they from any concern over attacks that he amusedly describes being 'ambushed' by his friends waiting at all approaches for his arrival. "Into this trap we willingly fell, no unwilling prisoners; and our captors instantly made us swear to dismiss every idea of continuing on our journey until a whole week had elapsed..." He goes on to describe the amusements prepared for him, including discussions of philosophy and theology, and tells how he had his servants dig bathing holes for him into which were placed hot stones.. the better to help him recover from excessive consumption of the local wines.
In another letter he describes for his correspondent a meeting he had with a king of the Goths. What impresses me is how ordinary a thing it seems, this crashing down of an ancient civilization, how unheroic, how unremarked. Until a generation or two has come and gone and people realize what has been lost. The king is a man of parts. Not sophisticated, but plain. Not educated but intelligent. And he is a man of action, not especially interested in the effete pleasures of his Roman visitor. Sidonius, thinking himself the clever fellow, relates that in dice games, "I myself am gladly beaten by him when I have a favour to ask..." never thinking how obsequious he has become.
Strange as it may seem, this is how history happens.

Fog

2007-09-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

The classic boats from the festival had to leave Victoria in the fog. Foggy days are romantic if you are safely ashore.

Classic Boat Show

2007-09-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

Labour Day weekend is when the Classic Boat Show is held in Victoria. Right downtown in front of the Empress Hotel, the location is right on the main tourist route. I love old boats and I try not to miss it. I'm working on weekends now so I had to get there early. It's a lot easier to take pictures without the crowds that show up later. There are always some real beauties here. I favour the small and graceful sailboats, and there are a few absolutely lovely pocket cruisers here this year. My imagination immediately puts me in a lovely picture: a quiet cove too shallow for big boats, a glass of wine in my hand, and the blissful peace embellished by the twitter of birds and the quiet lapping of the tide against my hull. No sirens, no phone, no rock and roll or worse, all the rude noises of human activity far, far away. No such place exists, I know, except in my imagination.
Although it's nice to see these boats in the tranquility of an early morning, I rather wish I could get over here later and watch the little steamboats do their regatta.

John Mayall and Shakespeare

2007-08-31T08:40:00.000-07:00

When I get to work in the morning I usually set up my ibook to play my itunes library while the office workers come through the lobby on their way to work. Set on shuffle, any of about 3500 items may come up, including opera, Hank Williams, Bing Crosby, Bach's cello suite, Scotch bagpipe music, and even some Van Morrison and Chuck Berry. I still like the Beach Boys after all these years. In other words, just about anything, as long as it's good. Volumes and volumes of really good music have been recorded since Edison made his first grammophone cylinder and I haven't even scratched the surface.
While I wait for the staff to file in I usually stand by the door until it unlocks, so I get to listen to the music and observe people's reactions. Often they stop and ask me what I'm playing or what radio station it is. Most of it they've never heard before, but they like it.
Poetry and all art has this quality that it makes the biggest impression when it hits you while you're not looking. Your guard is down, your habits of mind have not been erected, the door is left open to that deeper stream of consciousness where it can be deflected for a moment from the relentless task of protecting your psychic space. In pagan times it was claimed that you were most likely to see a god out of the corner of your eye when you weren't looking. Poetry and music are like that, too. You can listen to something a hundred times without it making any particular impression, but that hundred and first time you might hear it as if for the first time and your eyes open to it's wonders. Jazz has been like that for me. I have heard jazz or jazz influenced music all my life without paying much attention and I think it was Sarah Vaughan who finally penetrated my inattention. I've always liked great singing and it was obvious she was a great singer. Then I started to notice the sidemen backing her up and I would say to myself, "Who are these guys? God, but they're good."
The conventional wisdom is that improvisation is what distinguishes jazz from classical but I think the difference is this: classical is all about the composer and jazz is all about the performer. A classical performer's main concern is to fulfill the composer's intentions. To that end scores are studied, historical information as to instrumentation is researched, and the interpreter, whether conductor, singer or instrumentalist devotes all his efforts to getting as close as possible to those intentions. The composer is looked upon as a demigod.
A jazz player by contrast takes a song apart and reassembles it, sort of how a hot rod enthusiast takes apart a '49 Ford or a computer modder transforms his logic board. To some extent this has to do with how music has been disseminated since the invention of recording devices. Previously, the only way to learn a piece of music written by someone who lived far away was through a written score. It was an incredible innovation in its own right. Good music readers do not have to play a score to know how it sounds. They can hear it in the inner ear where it is unaffected by deficiencies of performance. I wish I could do that, but to me when I was a boy music was something that came out of a radio.
Without detracting from the great jazz artists of the last century I think it's important to point out that they were blessed with a plethora of wonderful song writers who provided them with themes for their variations. I'm astonished at how many great songs were written in that period. These are still the songs that mean the most to me, the songs I grew up hearing on the radio, the songs I took for granted, never imagining that it was the end of an era.
Usually I think the fault of post modern popular music is a lack of intelligence. But this morning as I listened to the tunes that came on I realized it a decline in aliveness is also involved. This would be the kind of aliveness needed to percieve the god in the first place, and if there has been any poet who was alive to the presence of the god it was Shakespeare. I don't read his dramas very well, but his sonnets amaze me. It was the sonnet number two that came on as I waited by the door:

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field

and I was almost thunderstruck at how alive he was to every nuance of existence. As you get older you get lots of opportunities to see spritely little girls change into sleek beauties who turn into buxom matrons, and at last become elderly. I can't help now looking for the young beaty in an old lady's eye or the serene elder in the ypung woman's prancing figure. This is love, not in the abstract as in 'love of humanity,' but love of one special, unique, never to be duplicated person.
A song by John Mayall came up next, "Thoughts on Roxanne,' and I was thunderstruck
by the contrast. John Mayall was one of the best of the British blues artists but he was fully infected with the post modern malaise which I identify as a failure to be alive to another person's being.

I think she's pretty as a rose
I take her out and buy her clothes
I'd like to take her home with me
But I must wait until she's free.

There is almost nothing in this lyric about Roxanne as a person, she is wholly reduced to being the object of the singer's needs.

Roxanne will always be my friend
And that's the way I'll keep her there

But what does Roxanne get out of it? And who exactly is Roxanne? What is she like, how have you changed by knowing her? The song doesn't say, but one senses the only thing of interest to the singer is that she lets him screw her. A saxophone bridge alternates between hopeless languor and manic furtiveness, and then:

I love to touch her when we walk
I love to listen to her talk
The way I feel I can't explain
But I will wait for her again.

There is a bit more to it but the singer hasn't the wit or aliveness to even wonder why this girl more than others makes him want to make his little sperm donation. He has no interest whatsoever in any consequences.
John Mayall is perhaps enough of an artist to be aware of the sub text of his song, unlike most of his contemporaries, but let's go back to the match up with Shakespeare's second sonnet which continues:

Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.
Then when asked where all thy beauty lies...

We see a difference. Not only does this sonnet sing of her present beauty, it foresees the inevitable decline of her youth. And yet the singer loves her still, and offers his gift of immortality.

If thou could answer
This fair child of mine may sum my count

Because, of course, without her lover's gift she would not merely die but become extinct. Sex for the sake of pleasure alone leads to death, while love leads to life and more than life. These sonnets of Shakespeare explore all the permutations of love and the infinitely variable meanings of love in the same way that Bach in his Goldberg Variations explores all the permutations of key changes and chromaticism. In neither case are these mere technical exercises, the real intent being to show the gifts God has provided for his poor creatures, if only we can open our hearts. This is the aliveness I mean.
It may seem unfair to John Mayall to use Shakespeare as a touchstone. But I don't think an artist should mind. Shakespeare is the standard, like the North Star to navigators.

Elvis

2007-08-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

The thirtieth anniversary of Elvis' death was marked by a predictable buzz on the net with the usual confident assertions of his greatness. He changed things forever, we are told. I don't give him that much credit myself. There were many factors at work that brought about the decline into absurdity and banality popular music has wallowed in since the fifties... but I don't think that's what is meant. In one article it was said that he rescued music from the likes of Hugo Winterhalter and elevator music. What the writer doesn't realize is that Elvis and his successors made elevator music for juvenile delinquents. Same thing, different audience.
Another article pointed to Patti Page's hit song, "How much is that doggy in the window?" as a sign of how low music had sunk in the fifties. He clearly has never listened to Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald who were just reaching the peak of their careers. In fact the fifties was a golden era of singing and Patti Page was one of the best. The fact that he doesn't realize this doesn't say much for his knowledge of music. And what's wrong with a cute little song about puppy dogs? I wonder what is wrong with a musical culture that can no longer produce songs to smile at. Maybe it's because the fan base doesn't know how to smile anymore. Maybe humour is another one of the many unfortunate casualties of the political correctness disease.
Previous to the fifties novelty bands were quite popular, for instance Spike Jones and his City Slickers. Any popular song, any performer was fair game for these guys. And they were damn good musicians, too. Although they were funny they were never vicious. On one song they took a swipe at Liberace. Liberace (pronounced liberatchy) was an unctious and effeminate piano player who had a TV show that was very popular with middle aged ladies. Elvis copied his outfits. Out of curiosity I recently played a youtube segment of one of his appearances, and you know what? He was pretty good and he had a great sense of humour.
Elvis wasn't the beginning of an era, he was the end of one. He marked the end of a century or more of great American song writing. From Stephen Foster to Johnny Mercer there had been a seemingly inexhaustible fountain of wonderful songs, lyrical, witty, sentimental, patriotic, religious, emanating from both black and white Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, Yankees and Confederates, country folk, cowboys, Jews in the ghetto, and share croppers in the Delta. For a glorious fifty years it all came together and gave rise to probably the best and most sophisticated popular music ever. Who would have guessed it would all come crashing down half way through the century.
Music split in two. The good musicians like Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus turned their backs on popular audiences. Essentially, they played for each other. They made interesting music but not music to dance to or sing along with. I guess they thought they were too good to lower themselves to that level. The other fork of the musical tree was thus left empty and a species of charlatan occupied the premises. Elvis showed the way and Colonel Parker was quick to come up with a business plan. It had nothing to do with music.

Chapman's Homer

2007-08-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

About once a year I read the Iliad and/or the Odyssey, and today I bought a Wordsworth edition of the Chapman translations of both works. George Chapman was a contemporary of Shakespeare and his is the first rendition into English of these seminal epics. It took a brave man to be the first to undertake this task, but England was full of brave men at the time. Like the Homeric Greeks Englishmen roamed the world, founding colonies and trading stations wherever they went. Brave, full of energy, indominatable, the flaws of Englishman and Greek alike became their strengths. Clear, direct, no mincing of words for these fellows, no sanctimonious twisting of meaning. They said what they thought.
We know who Shakespeare was. (Though his history is sufficiently nebulous to provide opportunities for all sorts of wild conjectures- all of which seem motivated by a kind of bigotry: how could this country bumpkin possibly be posessed of such genius?) But the identity of Homer is lost in the mists of time. Was he one person? Were his works the product of a guild of poets, possibly refined and put into final form by the blind Homer? I haven't the expertise to offer opinions here, except to say that oral tradition has over and over proved to be more accurate than modern scholars can credit. The Bible spoke about the Hittites long before their remains were rediscovered by archaeologists. The stories Herodotus told seemed so unbelievable he was called the father of lies, but almost every year some new corroboration of his reporting surfaces. Troy itself was considered a fabulous place that couldn't possibly have existed until Heinrich Schliemann made fools of all the skeptics. His discoveries led to the uncovering of a previously unknown phase of Greek civilization. The academic establishment has hated him ever since. Not only was there a Troy, there was an Argos, a Mycenae, an Agamemnon, and it even turns out that these protoGreeks were the scourge of the Mediterranean at the time. These are the Phillistines so well known from the Bible. They also invaded Egypt.
What puzzles me most is what happened to the Trojans. Modern scholars seem singularly uninterested in the Trojans, but not so the Ancients. Trojans are feature actors in the founding myth of the Romans. In the Middle Ages interest in the Trojans persisted. A number of British- not English- legends say that Trojans founded their country, too, and that Britain is named after Brutus, another refugee from the Trojan War. Naturally, these stories are believed by thescholars to be entirely fictitious. However, these same legends give an account of a British army attacking Rome and Delphi and it is historically verifiable fact that these places were attacked by Celtic invaders. The leader of the British raiding party was said to be Bran, a name that means crow. His head is supposed to be buried beneath the Tower of London, which has had a colony of crows roosting there since before there was a tower. Personally, I love these stories, and I like to think one of my ancestors came back with some loot from one or more of those expeditions. If only I knew where it was buried!

The Second Roman Empire

2007-08-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

When America is accused of establishing a world empire, what is meant is that it has a hegemony of military, economic and political power in today's world. They are not the same thing, empires and hegemonies. An empire is a system whereby one country -as in Rome, or more recently the Soviet Union- controls all the power structures of another, alien country. Americans have never been interested in such a thing. If they were, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, at a minimum would now be ruled from Washington, with Senators sent out as governors. Castro wouldn't have lasted two days.
America has a strong undercurrent of isolationism on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. Outposts of American power obtained in previous conflicts have often been returned to the local political entity, as in the Philipines. Where overseas military bases exist, as in Japan or Germany, they have been for the purpose of protecting, not ruling the local populace.
The fact that American policy has always favoured elected institutions, rule of law, freedom of conscience and free enterprise in countries like the former USSR, Japan and Germany is not evidence of a desire for conquest but of a belief that the virtues of the American system will lead to increased peace, prosperity and well-being wherever they are tried. Perhaps this belief is naive, but it is not without nobility. The fact that American businesses may profit from the arrangement hardly adds up to hypocrisy when it is remembered that in America it has always been perfectly honorable to set up a business and earn a profit. It's a cultural characteristic that has helped to make America the most dynamic and prosperous society the world has ever seen. The key insight Americans have had is that as one business prospers, so do others. As President Kennedy put it once, "A rising tide floats all ships."
The rising tide of American prosperity has floated all ships willing to cut loose from their old moorings. Where socialism leads to impoverishment and totalitarianism, the American model leads to super abundance. Maybe, like David Suzuki, you object to that, thinking that it's a death sentence for the planet. But the evidence suggests otherwise. As countries become wealthier, they become cleaner and more concerned for the environment. In America, as farming has become more efficient, many areas are more heavily forested than they have been for centuries. London's air was lethal in my lifetime, but those poisonous fogs are now a thing of the past thanks to the replacement of big coal by big oil.
None of this should even be a matter of controversy. The information is readily available to anyone who wants to learn the truth and it shouldn't even be necessary to say it. But the relentless rewriting of history in recent decades by the media and in the schools has produced a generation with very little knowledge of the facts of history, but deeply imbued with a jaundiced interpretation of history.
The latest hysteria over American "imperialism" has to do with Iraq. If ever there was an example to refute that hysteria, Iraq is it. American dust ups with Islamic regimes are nothing new. In its infancy the Republic sent a force of marines to put a stop to the Barbary Pirates that had terrorized the Mediterranean from their bases in North Africa. For some reason, Europeans wouldn't do it themselves. In my time the trouble with Islam really began for Americans when their embassy in Iran was seized. Mr. Peanut was president then. For all that he was willing to do, American embassy staff would probably still be languishing in a Persian dungeon if they hadn't been rescued by Canadians. Since then there have been numerous other incidents, in which Americans have been reluctant to respond. Islamic militants have interpreted this lack of response as timidity and like dogs excited at the smell of blood have stepped up their attacks. They are making a big mistake. Americans did not want to go into the First World War, but when they did it was over in months. They did not want to go into the Second World War, and if Japan (a true imperial power) hadn't made the same mistake of thinking that Americans were just a bunch of fat softies, then the outcome of that war might have been vastly different.
The post war period seemed to signal the end of isolationist thinking in America, but during Viet Nam it cropped up again. Previously, isolationism was primarily favored by conservatives, but this time it was taken up by the left, and it is still mainly part of the left's ideology of peace through being nice. Pretty dumb, but that's the left for you. That's why the Islamic miltants were jubilant when the Democrats regained control of congress. They think the Pelosi crowd will turn America into a replica of socialist Spain, which is employing the puppy dog defense against terrorism. That's where you roll on your back and piss in the air. The Islamists hate Bush because he has led America in it's first assault on Muslim territory since the Barbary pirates days, and they think they will have free rein when he's gone.
Same mistake the the Japanese generals made. Bush comes from the conservative side of the spectrum which has a fairly well thought out military strategy. Much of that strategy was to minimize civilian casualties through the use of an arsenal that places a premium on precision placement. It tends to be minimalist, but effective. So when the decision was made to respond to 9/11 by deposing Saddam and trying to establish a democracy in Iraq, contingency plans were already in place. By contrast, the Pelosi crowd doesn't have a clue. They seem to think that the best thing to do is not to stir up the hornet's nest. The trouble with this non-plan is that hornets, when left alone, go on to establish more nests. If it turns out that a Democrat becomes president next time and the inevitable follow-up to 9/11 comes along he/she won't know what to do. Panic. Strike out blindly. One thing's sure: the American public is going to be really pissed. The worse they are hurt the more pissed they are going to be. I sure wouldn't want to get in their crosshairs if I was you, Mohammed. Goodbye, Mecca. And I wouldn't want to be the president who let it happen, Hilary. Remember what happened to Marie Antoinette? Probably not.
Getting back on topic, what does America do with its hegemony? Does it just hunker down and ignore the rest of the world? Does it become the policeman? That's what the real debate should really be about. Maybe it will become an empire some day, but it isn't one now.

Ogden Point

2007-08-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

Had another little photo expedition after work last night, this time at the Ogden Point Cruise Ship Terminal. I was expecting five ships to come in, the number that normally docked on a Saturday evening last year when I was cab driving, but only three were scheduled. Never could just enjoy the sight before. Had a chat with the nice gal who was holding the reins of the horse trolley. I told her I didn't mind the horses (they kind of block the roads) as much as the pedicabs. She told me about an incident when a limo deliberately bumped one of her team. All the various conveyances waiting for the cruise ships go into a feeding frenzy during the few hours the ships are in.
It was a beautiful evening, I would say a perfect evening. Warm, not hot, with just a bit of a breeze. Rode my bike down there and afterward stopped at Spinnakers across the way from Ogden Point and enjoyed a pint of their IPA. Walked my bike the rest of the way home. Boy, does an IPA go down well after a bit of a bike ride.

The inner harbour

2007-08-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

After work last night I walked down to the Songhees side of the harbour and attempted to get that perfect shot of a float plane just about to hit the water, but I didn't get it. The bright red Twin Otter that I really wanted to get was coming in before I had a chance to get my camera out. But lots of other good shots were on the menu. The Inner harbour on a summer day is always busy. Three different ferry services from the US service Victoria, two from Port Angeles and the Victoria Clipper from Seattle. Then there are the float planes. The one with the rooster tail was the third in a queue of five waiting for the Coast Guard cutter to get out of the way. Harbour ferries, whale watching boats, private yachts, kayaks, tug boats, barges, and just about everything else throngs the port and I'm not at all sure how they keep from running into each other. Sailing is not allowed until outside the entrance, but an exception was made a few years ago when a replica of Captain cook's ship paid a visit. That tall square rigger was a sight that gave me a bit of a thrill. I can imagine how it must have astonished the natives of this coast the first time they sighted one of these white sailed phantasms.
The upscale condo dwellers that live on this shore are wont to complain about the noise of the float planes, but personally I would rather hear the sound of a Beaver's rotary engine gunning before a takeoff than a decelerating diesel semi any day. And I would far rather watch all this harbour activity in a setting of shimmering water and everchanging sky than TV.

False gods

2007-08-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

Why would any rational person be a 'truther'? When I saw a trio of them manning a sign by the bus stop on Douglas and Fort I suggested to them it would be a lot simpler if they just wrote 'idiot' on their foreheads with a magic marker. Actually, I was a little surprised they looked so normal...clean-cut young men, not dreadlocked, wild-eyed, drooling, drugged out refugees from a Hornby Island commune. I should have stopped and spoke when one of them replied to my sarcasm by asking me if I had 'proof.' "Proof," I thought, "is this some sort of metaphysical question?"
It would be as if he had asked me if I had proof that the world was round or if my thigh bone was really connected to my hip bone. The whole world (except for reprobates like me who don't care for TV) saw it happen over and over again. Airplanes truly flew into those buildings. The buildings truly did collapse as a result. Thousands of innocent people truly died in the conflagration. Another jetliner did fly into the Pentagon, and still another crashed into the ground which was aiming for the White House. Some courageous passengers sacrificed their lives to frustrate this last scheme. All four of the planes were hijacked by Islamic terrorists. The whole operation was planned and organized by Al Qaeda, an organization dedicated to conducting a war on all infidels. Anybody will do in a pinch but they especially hate Jews, who are called apes and pigs in the Koran. Jews are prominent in the financial world, so the World Trade Center was the target of their dreams, smack dab in the middle of the Great Satan, ie the USA. They did it with help from Saddam's Iraq.
That's the story. All that's left is to fill in the details. The evidence is available for all to see. So why were these young men trying to sell passersby a harebrained story about it being an "inside job,' a diabolical conspiracy by an assortment of villains-- Haliburton, Bush/Cheney, Big Oil, the Jews, the Pope and anybody else they can think of?
Now, it's perfectly legitimate to look behind any event to see if hidden factors might be involved, and that's an entirely honorable exercise, no matter how far fetched the theory becomes. Some people get carried away and become delusional about these theories. We've all known people like this, and sometimes they turn out to be right, but more often than not they become cranky old bores--and wrong. Some 'truthers' clearly belong in this last category.
But what about these young men on the corner of Fort and Douglas? I really don't know. They looked sane. In fact, they looked professional. They reminded me a little of the clean cut young men and women I met when I was a young sailor in San Diego. They were very friendly, and the girls were pretty. They asked me if I wanted to come to a party with them. There would be a live band and lots of people would be there. What young sailor can say no to an offer like that, especially when it's accompanied by a pretty smile? I got in the back of their car with a couple of other sailors and we drove through the streets for about a half hour. New to San Diego, I had no idea where we were and started to feel a little uneasy. However, eventually we arrived--at a church. We went into the basement. There was a band, all right, and they were playing church music. But this was not at all like Catholic church music. This was a rock n' roll band, and they were really rockin', rockin' for Jesus. The next few hours I spent trying to avoid being converted. I am a fairly religious kind of guy but I don't like being sold a bill of goods. Eventually I escaped and found my way back downtown, but I had learned a good lesson: beware of smiling faces. It's stood me in good stead as I've deftly avoided involvement in all sorts of movements since then. There've been a lot of 'em. Moonies, Scientologists, Jehovah Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, Vegans, and many others. And now 'truthers.'
I feel absolutely no obligation to refute any of these ideologies. Why should I make an exception for 'truthers'? It is a kind of religion, isn't it? Just not as interesting as most of the others I've mentioned. A type of faith in the unseen is involved that cannot be shaken by mere evidence. True faith is not like that. True faith seeks a dialogue with evidence. They are two ways of 'knowing,' and one helps the other, like the right hand and the left hand.
But is there more to the truthing phenomenon than just a few superheated imaginations gone awry? Maybe dastardly villains do lurk in the shadows, pulling strings, dimming the lights, building sets, teaching the actors their lines and footing the bill. But who might they be? Why are they doing it? This is a conspiracy theory that might be worth pursuing, and I think the trail starts with one name: George Soros.

Good bye, Robin

2007-07-31T10:43:00.000-07:00

Munro's bookstore on Government Street always has an excellent remainders table and it contributed another inhabitant to my overflowing bookshelf this morning, The Italian Renaissance Reader, edited by Julia Conoway Bondanella and Mark Musa. How could I resist when I encountered lines like this, from Leonardo himself:
There are some who are nothing more than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies, because through them no other things in the world, nor any good effects, are produced, since nothing but full privies results from them.
Who did he have in mind when he wrote that, I wonder?
Fom Castiglione we have this advice:
You must, therefore, know that there are two means of fighting: one according to the laws, the other with force; the first is proper to the man, the second to the beasts;but because the first, in many cases, is not sufficient, it becomes necessary to have recourse to the second...
Since, then, a prince must know how to make good use of the nature of the beast, he should choose from among the beasts the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot defend itself from traps and the fox cannot protect itself from the wolves...
But the page that would not let me walk out of the store without purchasing the book held these lines of Petrarch:
come quickly now, because death steals away
the best ones first and leaves for the last the worst;
this one, awaited in the kingdom of the gods,
this lovely, mortal thing will pass, not last.
And later today when I learned that my cousin Robin passed away last Saturday, I found in that verse a measure of comfort. His was a gentle soul that could never come to grips with this rough and tumble, deceitful, false world. But Robin, I don't think it was very friendly of you to leave without saying goodbye, considering how I used to have to change your diapers. I love you anyway, little brother, and you will always be in my prayers. Say a good word for me up there. I sure need it. By the way, I know you'll like that quote of Leonardo's.

The Prairie Inn

2007-07-30T20:29:00.000-07:00

I had to pay a visit to Saanich Peninsula Hospital today for a medical test. Not what I really wanted to do on a day off, but old age brings on its ailments. No matter.
Saanich Peninsula: it's like a vertical plank on the wall that has separated from the rest of the house except for one nail holding it on at the bottom. Victoria is at the bottom, the BC Ferry dock is at the top. If you want to get up Island (the rest of the house) from the ferry dock you have to drive almost to Victoria first, or else take the little ferry from Brentwood Bay. Our airport is also located on the peninsula. Otherwise it's a quiet, rural sort of place.
I like quiet, rural places, green crops ripening in the sun, the smell of manured fields and freshly mown hay, and Central Saanich is as picture perfect a rural scene as you'll find anywhere. If you went to sleep in Spruce Grove, Alberta and woke up at Keating Cross Road it might be a while before you realized you had been whisked off somewhere else. Only the mountains in the distance would give the game away.
Saanich Hospital is on Mt. Newton Cross Road and so is the Prairie Inn. I don't know how old the Prairie Inn is, probably from the early 1900's. If it was waiting for me, it's wait is over. I finally got to try it out after I was finished at the hospital. That way the day wasn't totally wasted. It's a cozy little place, oriented to sports fans. Lots of TVs. Pool table. The food was plain but good and reasonably priced. I had a reuben sandwich with potatoe salad. I love reuben sandwiches, and the Lighthouse IPA went great with it. The waitress was pretty and attentive. I liked the place. It caters mostly to the farmers around there, but a burgeoning population of well-to-do city folk buying up property all over the peninsula adds to the clientele. A special bonus at the Prairie Inn is a free and speedy wireless connection.
One thing nice about taking the bus is that you don't have to worry about having a few beers.

Little Deuce Coupes

2007-07-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

It's a cool and cloudy Sunday but fans of the classic Deuce Coupe have not been deterred. Traffic trying to get down to the Empress where a gathering of the clans is taking place has been clogging Douglas Street all day. I sure wish I could get down there because I love old cars, but I'm stuck here at my job site. Lots of duded up deuce coupes going by...and is there any classic more appealing to us red neck types than a souped up Deuce Coupe? I don't think so. A lot of them were cruising around Saturday, too, and I managed to get a few pictures before my camera batteries gave up the ghost. Looks like I'm going to have to get new batteries and charger as these old nicads of mine don't want to take a charge anymore. Can't complain. I've had 'em for about ten years and recharged them hundreds of times.
This event, to commemorate the 75th birthday of the V8 Ford, is a little special. This is not the first time local organizer Al Clark has got a show together, but it's definitely the biggest. This year he had to cut off entries at 752, with 400 of them '32's. Participants were from as far away as California and New York.
It always perplexes me why people get into there cars and head straight to where they know a traffic jam will be, but they do. I always hated special events when I was a cab driver. If you can't get to your fare you can't make any money. But now I don't have to worry about that anymore--I just watch from on high, like the gods on Olympus.
Although I love old cars I'm a total dunce when it comes to mechanical stuff--so I passed on the opportunity I had of getting a '68 XKE in the early seventies, and I gave my '62 Spitfire back to the finance company when the bendix went. I had no idea what a bendix was, let alone a ring gear. But now I wish I had stuck with that little guy and had him safely under cover every winter waiting to be let out to play in the summer. But that was the year I ruined my life and a few others. The Spitfire is the least of my regrets, but if I'd spent more time on learning mechanics and less on partying things might have been different.
These guys who fix up their old cars have my respect and admiration. Wives and girl friends who grow impatient with their grease monkey men just remember--it keeps them out of mischief.
Victoria on Vancouver Island and the lower mainland are a lot less destructive of metal than most other Canadian locales. It seldom snows and so the streets and roads don't get that buildup of salty slush. And most car owners are quick to wash their vehicles following those few occasions. This means that quite often an old car in a fairly good state of preservation can be found in a barn somewhere. Even cars on the road continuously for thirty or forty years are not all that uncommon. When I lived in Vancouver's West end several years ago an old lady who must have been the original owner had a '30's era coupe which she tried to drive about once a month. I say tried to drive because she seemed to have a lot of difficulty getting it in and out of her parking space. I see an early '60's Dodge Dart convertible with what looks like the original paint is parked beside my construction site as I write. It looks a little shabby but perfectly serviceable. Probably got a slant 6 in it, one of the all time great motors. Somebody's project car. I wonder if it has push button transmission. Whatever happened to those, anyway?
I wonder if there is an equivalent to the Deuce Coupe today. Frankly, I can hardly tell one car from another anymore.

The New Roman Empire?

2007-07-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Romans have always been popular as a benchmark in making comparisons to one's own culture, so much so that the practice has been out of style among the scholarly types recently. But apparently it's a respectable practice again as I've noticed a number of writers comparing present day America to the Roman Empire. Personally, I don't think there are many points of congruence between the two. To begin with, compared to Augustan Rome, the USA is still a mere infant. According to Titus Livius, the origins of Rome date back 1200 years before his time when Aeneas, a Trojan prince escaped the destruction of Troy at the hands of Agamemnon's famous army. That would be the equivalent today of something that happened during the era of Charlemagne. Another 1000 years were yet to pass before the founding of the American Republic.
Traditionally, Rome itself was founded by Romulus ca. 750BC, and a lot of things happened between then and the time Rome came of age, when they at last triumphed over their most deadly adversary, the Carthaginians of North Africa, in 246BC, following more than a century of warfare. This conflict decided who was going to control the Western Mediterranean. If the Romans had not destroyed Carthaginian power there would never have been a Roman Empire.
I enjoy Livius' history of Rome. Modern historians criticize the ancient historians, but i think the ancients compare rather favorably with these moderns, both for honesty and depth of understanding. Of course, the earlier writers didn't have libraries or the internet to help them. Books there were, but without printing they had to be laboriously copied by hand on expensive materials. Not many people could read or write, writing being a fairly recent invention. Travel was slow, difficult and dangerous, presenting many obstacles to research. Nevertheless, Livius was assiduous in seeking out sources such as inscriptions and family records. Family records, of course, were intended to glorify the family and may have been largely fictitious. Adding to his problems, the Latin language had rapidly changed over the centuries, so much so that it was difficult for him to read. Taking into account all these considerations, I think he did a remarkable job.
It's a fascinating account in which he shows that Rome expanded as a result of being attacked. First the neighboring Latins, then the Etruscans, then the other peoples of italy, and so on. He doesn't speak much about one of the primary benefits of warfare to Rome: slaves. But this would be like a modern historian writing about the California citrus orchards and failing to say much about the petroleum industry- without which there would be no way of marketing oranges outside of California. Slavery in ancient times was ubiquitous, the only way of organizing labour beyond the scale of family operations. I'm not justifying it, just pointing out that it was so common as to be barely worth mentioning to a Roman readership. But there is no doubt that war in those times was a way of getting rich. For the Roman senatorial class, the governorship of a province was the route to fabulous wealth. Rome, it can be reasonably argued, became an entrepreneurial warfare economy. They developed a model of tactics and strategy that was unbeatable in its day, and after conquest sent out traned administrators to organize the new conquest and to keep the peace.
For the United States slavery was an aberrant phenomenon economic structure that had the effect of holding back progress in the South. That's why the confederacy was at such a disadvantage in the War Between the States. The North had wage labour and this is always an incentive for a business to innovate. The innovation of the cotton gin was what led to industrial scale labour in the South by creating a huge market for cotton. Up until that time cotton was the most expensive of all the textiles to process. So while this innovation led to more jobs and business, an expansion of wealth to all segments of Northern society, in the South the institution of slavery led to stagnation.
The other difference between ancient and modern slavery is that the latter was race-based. But history has a way of going in unexpected directions. If it hadn't been for race-based slavery there would be almost no people of African descent in America today. Jazz would probably never have been invented. Strangely, when the blame game is played these consequences are rarely mentioned. Neither is it mentioned that the African slave trade was largely controlled by Arabs, and that it was the most important source of wealth to the West African kingdoms. Some of the loudest opponents to the abolition of the slave trade (a crusade led by the English Christian abolititionist William Wilberforce) were those very African Kingdoms.
It's true that the American Founders were inspired by Greek and Roman theories of governance, and the architecture of the capitol was based on classical models, but the circumstances of the founding of the Republic were just not comparable. Rome was a military society throughout it's history. America has always been entrepreneurial, individualistic and innovative. What the founders tried to do was to fulfill the promise of the Classical era, not imitate it. They saw not only its virtues but also its failings and tried to prevent their new country from falling into the same traps. Governing by consent of the governed was the principle. Putting in structures to prevent government from becoming too powerful was the object of the constitution they devised. For instance Republican Rome had a practice of appointing a dictator during times of emergency because the corporate method of lengthy debate was not agile enough to cope with a sudden invasion. The President in American practice was given certain powers to override a divisive legislative branch. Thus he is commander in chief of the armed forces and has other powers of his own such as the right to veto legislation. However there are checks on his power as well.
American expansion on its continent was one of the fruits of giving the presidency the powers needed to lead the country in a new direction. Thomas jefferson was able to take advantage of Napoleon's need for money to obtain the Louisiana Territory. This was an exceptionally prescient move since nobody at the time had much of an idea of what lay between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Most experts of the day thought there was a series of large lakes from which some rivers flowed east and others flowed west and south. It was for Lewis and Clark to discover that instead of lakes in the middle of the continent there was a series of mountain ranges. Nevertheless, Jefferson new that the viability of the country depended on its control of all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific. After the Civil War settled the political direction of the country, its energies were devoted to filling up those spaces.
Yes, it's true there were already people there who thought of it as there own. But let's face it folks. Hunting and gathering, stone age farming, and buffalo herding are just not viable economic strategies any more and nothing in that environment could possibly prepare the tribal leaders to function in the coming century. Undoubtedly injustices were committed. The treatment of the Cherokees comes to mind, a very sad and tragic episode. But there was never a national policy of extermination, and this is in itself an innovation by historic standards. Generally, when a new populace took control of another's territory the old one was exterminated...when they could. This includes native American groups. There were no compunctions about it. Overall, the American policy was to try to integrate native Americans in the new ways. In Canada residential schools were established for that purpose. Little did they know that the main beneficiaries would be future lawyers.
Although the Romans tried to adapt the peoples of its empire to Roman ways of doing things they didn't hesitate to exterminate whole populations. The example that comes to mind is Caesar's slaughter of the Helvetians, a Celtic people who tried to migrate into Gaul from Switzerland under pressure of German tribes. Caesar massacred them, man, woman and child... a very labour intensive task in the days before explosives.
There's a lot more to say on this subject and I'll try to return to it in the near future.

2007-07-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

It was nice to se the sun come out after a week or more of cloud and rain, so I took the opportunity to take a little photo walk. I took the bus to Gonzales Bay and walked back along Hollywood Crescent and through the Ross Bay cemetery. At one time it was called Foul Bay but at some point the name was changed to protect the sensibilities of the residents. The street that comes to an end at Gonzalez Bay is still called Foul Bay Road, however. No matter what it's called, I think it has one of the prettiest beaches in Victoria. And Hollywood Crescent is one of Victoria's prettiest streets. Unfortunately, with the gentrification of the neighborhood all the old cottages with their flower filled front yards are rapidly being replaced by larger houses with pretensions and paved front yards. It's a pretty short street and it connects Gonzales Bay with Ross Bay and the Ross Bay cemetery.
I read something the other day about San Francisco that absolutely shocked me. I'm not sure of the details, but I think it has been since the earthquake or shortly after that it has been illegal to bury anyone in that city. All the previously established cemeteries were closed and the remains reintered elsewhere. How extraordinary for a city to want to obliterate its past! Surely this must have something to do with what it has become, and how it can elect a Congresswoman who seems to hate her own country.
But Victorians have always paid reverence to their predecessors and so we have many well known cemeteries, and I am always rather moved when I read the inscriptions on the stones. Since this is not a modern industrialized cemetery, the headstones are mostly of the upright variety.

The Cathar Conspiracy

2007-07-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not I've never read a Harry Potter book. Probably the only person on the planet. I've never been to Thailand, either. From what I saw yesterday it does make me think I would not want to write a book that inspires people to wear funny hats.
Neither have I read The DaVinci Code but I have read some of the sources the author used to concoct his tome, such as Michael Baigent who wrote an unintelligible account of some mysterious doings in southwestern France. I forget the title and the co-author. Alignments, paintings, codes, in which with a really fertile imagination someone could discern the most astounding things. Templars and Frankish Kings, oh my. Great stuff. I've always been a little bit gullible when it comes to mysterious doings that might illuminate unknown forces in history. Although antediluvian civilizations are my favourite fantasy, a good conspiracy theory can be fun, too. But when you already know that Dan Brown's thesis is poppycock then it spoils everything. Opus Dei as a candidate for a subterranean force that has shaped history just doesn't add up.
However, I'm not dismissing the possibility that there has been a hidden influence, an organization unknown to conventional historians, and I do have a candidate. The Manicheeans. That's just a label of my own convenience I use to designate what most students call Gnosticism. A protean creed, it is rather difficult to describe but it is basically a kind of materialism where our bodies and all matter is a creation of an evil being. Who that evil being is may vary according to which version is being studied, but usually it's the creator god depicted in Genesis. The true story according to the Manicheans is that this god was a fallen angel who created this world as an act of rebellion. We human beings are actually sparks of the divine imprisoned in matter. All matter is therefore evil, including our bodies. A good source of texts (intended I think, as promotional material) is Willis Barnestone's The Other Bible. When I first came across this very interesting collection I was inclined to his position, but it was while comparing these gnostic writings to orthodox Christian scripture that I came to realize they were not comparable at all. The Christian scriptures are on a different plane altogether. But The Other Bible taught me a lot, and I still like to read from it from time to time, if only from a historical point of view. It tells us a lot about how religious belief evolved during a time of great spiritual ferment.
Manicheeanism, a sort of bastardized amalgam of Neoplatonism and Judaic lore, was very influential in the Roman Empire during the early years of Christianity. In fact, they were competitors. I'm pretty sure the false teachers St. Paul warned about in his epistles were Manicheeans. The impulse by the early church to regularize the scriptures was probably due to Manicheean influence. Barnestone and others of his like call this regularization of the canon suppression and try to claim that these non canonical writings are as true or even truer than what we read in the Bible. But the Church Fathers knew what they were doing. They had a strong oral history to draw upon that was in direct line from the apostles, and they had a very sharp understanding of the logical implications embedded in any given religious dogma.
There were many versions of this belief system floating around in the late Roman empire. There was a Judaic Manicheism, a Pagan Manicheeism, a Christian Manicheeism. St. Augustine was originally a Manicheean. It was after meeting an apostle of that creed that he converted to Christianity.
The vital difference between Christianity and Manicheeism (from the point of view of doctrines) is that according to Christian belief the world and ourselves are creations of God and therefore good. It's true we have a fallen nature due to Adam's sin, but we are redeemable, and have been redeemed by the intercession of God, who took on the form of a man, suffered as a man, and gave up his life in the place of ours so that we could be redeemed. Logically, of course, if you think the world is evil then it follows that its creator is evil, and this cannot be countenanced by a religion that believes God to be infinitely good and infinitely loving.
Nevertheless, I think a lot of Manicheeism did infiltrate Christian beliefs and may be responsible for the aversion to sensual pleasure which led to the mortification of the flesh, a prominent feature among the early Christian hermits.
After Christianity became the official religion of the Romans, Manicheeism seemed to die out. But did it? During Medieval times there were repeated breakouts in widely separated European locations of cults that were obviously very similar to Manicheeism. One peculiar logical consequence of viewing the body as evil is that it doesn't matter what you do with your body. Thus there is really no morality. The world is intrinsically evil, so you can do whatever you feel like. Thus many of these cults were orgiastic. I'm pretty sure that well known trove of medieval poetry known as the Carmina Burana is a Manicheean document. I think it's more than likely that Manicheeans were deeply involved in alchemy and the 'black arts.'
There were Bogomils in Eastern Europe but it has been the Cathars in southwest France who have attracted most of the attention lately. The inquisition was largely a response to the Cathars, who were accused of witchcraft. After that they seem to have disappeared from history. But what if they just went underground? What if it continued as a religion but in secret? Is it possible that Cathars have blended in with every Western institution since then, including the Church, the banks (an early center of European banking was located in Cahors in southwest France), the courts of princes, and learning institutions. Maybe there were Jewish Cathars, and Cathars networking throughout Europe. Maybe there were Muslim Cathars in Spain. Maybe they learned how to occupy positions of influence wherever they went, in universities, publishing, etc. Maybe they were the original Masons, maybe they were the Templars. I don't know. It's just a wild speculation. Dan Brown has proved it isn't necessary to let facts stand in the way of a good book but I would hesitate to put forward this speculation of mine as truth. Nevertheless I halfway believe it.
Those ancient Church Fathers were a lot smarter than people today realize. They knew beyond any doubt that what people believe is incredibly important, that beliefs have consequences. This is in direct contradiction to the modern commonplace that one belief is pretty well as good as another. Well, thanks to bellicose Islamists we are finding out all over again that beliefs do matter. Islam may teach of the existence of one god, but that is where the similarity to Christianity and Judaism ends. Islam glorifies force and conquest, the methods used from the beginning in its expansion. Christianity teaches love, not killing. True it is that many who claimed to be Christians used the faith as justification for war, but that's not how Christianity came to dominate the Roman world and what came after. Christianity was spread by persuasion and acts of charity. Unarmed bishops stood up to barbarian invaders with nothing except moral force to back them up. The story of Christianity in Dark Age Europe is of Christian preachers gentling warrior chieftains. A lot of gentling was needed, as Gregory of Tours chronicled. They were taught by the Christian preachers, who often wandered alone in pagan territories, of a new way of thinking which was instrumental in growing the West into the greatest civilization the world has yet known while Islam, centered in the Near East where civilization as well as Christianity was born, languished and stagnated.
Our ability to stand up to the new Islamic onslaught has been compromised by a secularism that bears many similarities to Manicheeism. Whether this secularism is attributable to an occult organization or to some sort of cyclical turning of social beliefs I do not know, but I do often wonder how people come to believe the things they do.

Youth and beauty

2007-07-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday when I sat down at the bus stop a pretty girl sat down next to me. I've always had radar when it comes to pretty girls, and this one was very pretty, indeed, as I noticed even while I was putting my newspaper in my pack and getting my fare ready. Those little chores completed I looked in her eyes and smiled, trying not to look too much like a dirty old man. She reminded me a lot of Natalie Wood- that kind of cool and elegant good looks always makes me go gaga. Tastefully dressed as she was in a light sleeveless wine red sweater and a pleated white skirt, the waiters at Maximes would treat her like a princess. Her lips, cheeks and eyes were only touched lightly by the makeup brush. There was only one problem: she was only about twelve years old.
Of course it's commonplace to see twelve year old girls dressed up like tarts these days, and I think it's sad they are in such a rush to stop being little girls. Who can blame them when all the cultural influences conspire to sexualize them as soon as possible. Even in elementary school they are taught about oral sex, or so I've heard. I remember I picked up four girls in my cab from their soccer game a few years ago and they started off the conversation by asking, "Do you get laid a lot?" I didn't have a comeback for that one. I was stricken dumb.
But in a way I found this Natalie Wood reincarnation even more disturbing. She was only twelve and she had already mastered the art of looking the elegant young woman. This implies much more careful study than is needed for the coarse, slutty MTV look preferred by her schoolmates. I can imagine her poring over tons of fashion magazines looking for the right 'look,' just like them. Only she has a more carefully cultivated and artful sense of taste. Personally, I wonder if their great grandmothers who spent their own freshly flowering years making cookies and darning socks weren't a lot happier than this crop. Of course young people have always yearned for the imagined independance and freedom of adulthood, not knowing about the burdens and duties that are inescapable concomitants of maturity. They don't know that the rules their parents impose on them so unfairly are nothing compared to the rules the world imposes once they are outside that protected space.
I remember reading a story a few years ago about stores like Gap selling thong underwear for preteens where it was claimed it was the girls' mothers who were buying them. This did not surprise me as I had long before come to the conclusion that mothers get a certain vicarious pleasure at seeing their daughters dressed up to look sexy. It's as if they get to relive their own ingenue days. They like their daughters to have boyfriends...boyfriends to whom they are attracted to themselves. Maybe it's analogous to fathers who like to see their sons win fights. On the other hand fathers tend to be jealous of their daughters' boyfriends, so in a family setting a balance is maintained.
When I was twelve girls of my age didn't dress like tarts. Girls dressed differently than women, with an emphasis on innocence rather than sexuality. They were rarely allowed to wear lipstick, paint their nails, wear high heels or anything like that. What was allowable started changing pretty rapidly in the late fifties but it was still assumed that every girl's goal was marriage, a home of her own and children, and it was every boy's assumed destiny to be a husband and provide for him and his wife's joint home and family.
You know, I do think Middle America was a much happier place under that system.
I hope my Natalie Wood lookalike has a lot of happiness to look forward to, with a husband and family
who still love her when her youthful bloom is a distant memory. Sometimes I wonder how my schoolboy sweetheart and her bratty little brother are doing these days, so many years later.

Live Earth

2007-07-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

In the blogs I read there has been lots of commentary about Al "Chicken Little" Gore's concerts to save the planet from global warming. Since I hate rock and roll as much as I hate TV, the whole affair hardly crossed my radar. The spectacle of environmental activists jetting all over the world to telll people to stop driving their cars is beyond parody. No wonder comedy is almost dead. Who could make up anything stupider than this? I can't bear to look. And I'm really, really tired of all this global warming BS. Listen. It's really simple. About a million years ago, maybe more, maybe less, glaciers started forming in the higher latitudes of the earth's surface. Before then the whole world was semitropical. There were no glaciers, none. You could easily call this phenomenon global cooling, but the name that stuck was 'Ice Age.' Previously it was thought that fossils, unusual soil deposits and so on were evidence of The Flood. As time went by researchers added data, refined their analytical skills, and came to some interesting conclusions. The Ice Age was really a series of glaciations. For most of the past million years vast sheets of ice covered areas where we now have farms and cities. But there were also periods of melting, called interglacials. These interglacials varied in length but 5,000 to 20,000 years seems fairly normal. We are living in an interglacial that began about 12,000 years ago. The Ice Age is not over. It is merely in abeyance. It could come back at any time. And you know what? This wasn't the first Ice Age that the planet has experienced. There have been others that were far worse. All this is common knowledge, stuff that should be taught in any grade 7 general science course. Is there any reason to think that human beings can have the slightest effect on these geological cycles of climate? No, none at all.
So why are we deluged by warnings of disaster? Some say it's because all this scare mongering puts a lot of money into funding for climatologists. That is undoubtedly a factor, but I have generally favored the "Global Bureaucratic Conspiracy,' a theory of my own devising. In Europe they are going to make it a crime to disagree with global warming, putting it in the same category as disagreeing with the haulocaust. I have never believed it should have been made against the law to not believe in the haulocaust because I think reasoned debate is the best way to tackle idiotic ideas. And now we see the result. At least the haulocaust, the shoa, was a verifiable historical fact. It happened, and a case could be made that denying this fact could lead to another pogom. But the outlawing of a thought has set a precedent and we can already see what's next. In Europe parents are being sent to jail for the crime of teaching their children at home. This is what the bureaucratic conspiracy is about: abolishing human autonomy. And what better tool than a law to make inconvenient thoughts illegal. It would like to extend this model of justice over the entire world. Having to justify policies to the public is such a nuisance. We can be so stubborn. Remember the Meech Lake Accord, Canadians? The Brian Mulroney government made the mistake of thinking it had us all sufficiently brainwashed to vote the way we were supposed to. But we didn't, to the consternation of the combined forces of government, media, union brass and bureaucratic mandarin.
The global warming theory is just a theory originally based on an oversimplified computer model of atmospheric circulation. It has since been puffed up by blatant examples of scientists fiddling with the statistical evidence, selectively reporting facts which support the story line while suppressing evidence that contradicts it. That's the way they work.
I stand by my earlier analysis, but I've come to an alternate hypothesis of why the Jackass Brigade has become so frantic over the issue of global warming. The credibility of the whole environmental movement is at stake. Once the public realizes what a bunch of hooey it's been peddled then it will look at the Greenpeace canvassers with different eyes. And who knows, once the public has learned to be suspicious of this bit of propaganda who knows where it will all end. It could be big. We might have help from the jihad in this. A few more bombs going off just might wake us up. It's tragic if that's what it takes to make us come to our senses.

Tourists

2007-07-06T04:48:00.000-07:00

This Saturday morning crews are on site to take down the forms from the six foot thick slab that will be the support for the whole building. That's one way to get rid of a hangover from Friday night. Now that the crane is up things are supposed to go a lot faster but there's still a fair amount of blasting to be done. I thought that six foot thick slab was massive but it's small potatoes compared to the one in San Diego they've posted in the office here which took a 258 vehicle "truck ballet" over a period of ten hours to pour ten feet of concrete. The prices of the condo units on that project are pretty massive, too...starting at 800k going up to 12 million. I moved away from San Diego 40 years ago this year and I have a soft spot in my heart for the place. Can't remember the geography very well so I couldn't make out exactly where the project was being built. The name 'Bayside' suggests Mission Bay, one of my favourite SD locales, but there was no light rail at that time.
Every winter around the end of November I get a strong craving to escape to Mission Bay until April. That would have been feasible 20 years ago when those little cottages could be had for $100 a week but if condos now cost 12mill I guess those days are over. In the summer and early fall I much prefer Victoria weather and it looks like summer has arrived at last. Victoria has perfect summers: warm sun and a cool breeze with very few hot nights. The summer sky at twilight reminds me of a line in a Hank Williams song: Have you ever seen a falling star light up a purple sky. The sky isn't exactly purple but somehow has a purplish character to it that I love to see. The word 'gloaming' comes to mind, that scotch word related to glamour which originally had supernatural connotations. The horizon glows with a halo above it until 10 or 11 in early summer. I have seen such a purple sky change within minutes to black clouds and torrential rain. Fifteen minutes later it's all over but the tourists are in their hotel rooms watching TV and won't venture out again. Too bad for them. They miss out on that fresh smell rain always leaves behind when it soaks our dry earth. Victoria has a mostly stony soil and it doesn't take long for the grass to dry out and turn brown.
For the first time in many many years I won't be hustling for that tourist buck. A lot of Victorians complain about tourists but as a cab driver I'll take a polite and interested American tourist over a drunken Canadian university student any day. Canadians in the 'hospitality' trades delight in telling stories about dumb questions American tourists ask but in fact I think Americans are quite well informed. There are exceptions. Black Americans especially have some difficulty comprehending the idea that Canada is a separate country.
Canadian tourists in the US have a reputation too...for being cheapskates. These would be the mythical snowbirds who delight in telling their friends back home about how little they paid for etc, etc. It's a little hard to understand how a country that spends almost nothing on its army can still have higher taxes than Americans but so it is. Part of the cheapskate reputation Canadians have relates to their reluctance to tip. There's no doubt that Americans are the best tippers but I can't complain about Canadians. Some tip, some don't. Teachers, who seem to think everyone is out to cheat them, are the worst. In fact, they might take it into their heads that you've taken them by the infamous 'scenic route' and refuse to pay the full fare.
Australians don't tip either if they've never spent any time out of their own country because tips are included in the price there. Some people think this is a good system, but think about it. When the customer has control over a good portion of what a server earns then that server has a good incentive to give good service. When the gratuity is spread evenly among the staff regardless of the quality of the service then shirkers are rewarded as much as good workers .
You don't see as many Japanese now as in years past. I'm not sure why that is, but you can't expect a tip from a Japanese either. For one thing, they don't like to travel alone, only in groups. So the tips are usually rolled into the tour price and the tour operator wouldn't think of sharing tips with a cab driver. There was one restaurant in town that used to specialize in Japanese tours. They would order anywhere from 5 to a dozen cabs to the hotel where we would usually have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes to take the customers to the restaurant. It was a short trip for which we were paid a flat rate which was a little less than the meter rate. And the Japanese tourists were advised not to tip the cab driver. You can imagine how enthusiastic the drivers were about servicing that account. When I heard the radio message 'car 18 first car to blah blah' I would suddenly discover I already had a fare. The restaurant went under a few years ago, not to be missed by me.
They say that tourism has gone down over the last few years, what with the more stringent border security and some other factors, but cruise ship traffic increases every year. Most ships only come in for a few hours but the tour buses, the horse buggies, the pedicabs, antique cars and just about every other possible conveyance are lined up waiting for them on shore like starving vultures. Yeah, that includes taxis.
People who drive downtown during the tourist season usually complain most about the buggies. They move pretty slow it's true but at least they make a pleasant clip clop sound, and the residue they leave behind is good for gardens. I don't mind barnyard smells, 'that familiar oaken reek of horse piss." You can't really get mad at a horse because a horse is just a horse, a dumb animal who isn't there on his own volition. (I don't think there is any cruelty in it. These breeds of horses have to work to stay healthy, and they seem to enjoy being out and about just like dogs and people)
They don't bother me in the slightest now but it was the Kabuki pedicabs that used to get my goat the way they were always cutting in front of me and blocking lanes. And then there are the buses, endless streams of buses, spewing noise and diesel fumes. Since the cruise ships can't come into the Inner Harbour due to their size, they use the docks at Ogden Point in James Bay. So to get downtown the cruise ship passengers, most of whom are not physically able to do the 15 minute walk into town, usually take one of the many buses waiting to relieve them of their money.
I meant to take a few pictures of the cruise ships last night. They are quite impressive in the dusk lined up with their lights blazing. But circumstances beyond...
And today those purple skies have been replaced by grey clouds.

Strategic Victoria

2007-07-04T21:46:00.000-07:00

It may seem that Victoria will always be a little out of the way place where history or great events pass us by. Wars, revolutions, all those sorts of things happen in other places, not here. It wasn't always that way. The British who established a port here set up naval batteries in 1878 to prepare for a possible war with Russia and if it hadn't been for the Royal Navy Victoria would probably be an American city.
Vancouver and Seattle are the metropolises of our area where rail and road connect the North American heartland with the Pacific sealanes. Seattle is home to two large corporations, Microsoft and Starbucks as well as a large part of Boeing's operations. North of Seattle, in Everett, the US Navy keeps its Pacific Carrier fleet. Vancouver has the best harbour north of San Francisco...or I should say harbours in the plural. There are docks in Vancouver proper, on the North shore, in Burnaby, Port Moody, on the Fraser River, and there is the huge Roberts Bank port where trains continuously supply the steel miills of Japan from BC's coal fields.
Again, it wasn't always so. Before the railways arrived Victoria had a larger population than Seattle- in 1880 almost 6000 compared to less than four thousand. In the days of steam ships Vancouver Island was an important source of coal to keep the boilers going. Sailing ships, which persisted into the 20 C did not need coal but by unloading their cargoes in Victoria avoided the tricky waters and finicky winds of Puget Sound. Victoria was an important supply center for the Yukon Gold Rush and was just as wild as San Francisco, opium smoking Chinatown and all. Looking at Victoria's surviving buildings from the 1800's it's easy to see that the city had ambitions in those days.
But now Victoria is a quiet government town with very little international trade prowess. It would be senseless for shipping companies to unload their goods here only to have to load them up again for major population centers on the mainland or overseas. We don't do much manufacturing here and we don't have much in the way of natural resources. Besides, Victorians tend to think small. Ambitious people with big ideas tend to leave. And so the bombings and so on that we read about seem unreal and unconnected to us. It makes it easy for us to pontificate and tut tut about how it could never happen here, it's all the fault of George Bush who is responsible for all the trouble in the world, blah blah. A lot of Victorians think that way. Our self image of a slumbering backwater makes it easy to either ignore history or to fantasize about it. It doesn't matter what we think, it is assumed. But this is a very naive attitude.
Victoria, while it shows no sign of ever becoming a financial or industrial powerhouse, occupies a very strategic geographical position. There is the long corridor of Juan de fuca Strait that terminates at Victoria where the waters open out to Puget Sound and Georgia Strait. Anybody who controls Victoria could potentially control the whole works. Plug it up and you could cripple the world's largest economy. If you want to get in or out you have to go by Victoria. We are sitting on a powder keg. I don't think many Victorians understand this, and I doubt if anybody in Ottawa has given it the slightest thought. It may not happen in my lifetime but wars will be fought over this beautiful place. Undoubtedly people hostile to our way of life are perfectly capable of looking at maps and figuring things out so history could happen to us any time. They may already have plans in the works which we probably wouldn't like. Most people, rather than face this possibility prefer to hide their heads in the sand. This will make it all the easier for bad things to happen.
So I'll try to forget about history when I go out for my walks or bike rides around this beautiful part of the world and try to enjoy this transient sense of peace and security.

The secular roadside bomb

2007-07-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

I think I went a little bit overboard yesterday in my 'Canada day rant.' Every country has skeletons in its closets and when I'm in a generous mood Canada's skeletons seem pretty tame. What always gets me about the 'Canadian character,' if there is such an animal, is that there isn't one. Maybe Quebec is an exception to that rule, and not just because of language. The influence of the Church is definitely a factor. For centuries the parish priest was the main pipeline to the outside world for all those farming communities stretched along the St. Lawrence River. There is also the matter of blood- an unfasionable word now- which included the idea of genetics but also a spiritual sense of ancestry and connection to the past that modern genetic scientists would find suspect. During this period of Quebec's history Its population burgeoned. The priests, keen to spread the faith, knew that the key to success was located in a mother's womb. It was this progeny that explored North America before anyone else. "How about the 'First Nations?" you scoff? Well, the fact is the North American natives' knowledge of continental geography was severely limited due to the incessant warfare between adjacent tribes. To venture out of one's tribal territory was to risk the most fiendish tortures imaginable. That's why the inquiries made of them by the early explorers were met with such fanciful replies. But while the French voyageurs were endowed with indominatable courage, unbelievable physical endurance and a native intelligence so great that they routinely learned dozens of Native languages in their travels, they were uneducated and so left no written journals or maps. That was the work of literate Scots and Americans.
What was I saying? Oh, yes, about national character. Quebec, to its misfortune, became afflicted along with the rest of us with a certain disease in the '60's. Unfortunately, no adequate label has yet been invented to describe this destructive cancer. Political correctness, socialism, leftism, secularism, even postmodernism fails to do it justice. In Quebec it was called the Quiet Revolution, a catchall term that had room in its nebulosity for every socially destructive fad of the 20th century. Quiet. But effective. Today the Nation of Quebec is on a fast track to demographic oblivion. Quebecers should have listened to those priests. The leaders of the Quiet Revolution detonated a time bomb far more destructive than what the Islamists did to the World Trade Center.
Looked at from that perspective the Islamists are doing us a favor. They are showing us how bankrupt the various isms have been. We have even been convinced that it's all right to kill our babies. If you can believe that you can believe anything. Islam is a backward facing religion that closes down the human spirit. In my own analysis it is the ultimate atheism, but I won't go into that now. It has one virtue. It supplies an identity and an iron clad formula for social cohesion. It may lead to a dead end, but it is stable and it is able to go on the attack. It supplies its adherents with focus and passion. And it produces babies. Our isms do the opposite. They are corrosive and dissolve all the ties that bind our societies one to another and between the generations.
Isn't it a bit ironic that a society under the influence of a celibate clergy should be so prolific while the secular society's abandonment of sexual morality has led to the collapse of populations all over the world? This may not seem like a bad thing to the envirocultists who regard mankind as the scourge of the earth. They fail to take into account that well known dictum that that says nature abhors a vacuum. Certainly, the human ecosystem abhors a power vacuum and a community that fails to have children is just asking to be replaced by one that will.
The secular society has substituted the pursuit of pleasure for the self sacrifice of child rearing. They aren't compatible. Children crave the stability of a home. They want to know who their parents are, and they want to know they are loved by them. The creche works for ants but not for humans. But children get in the way for people who want to earn lots of money and want to spend it. They get in the way of promiscuous sex. They cost money to maintain with no obvious benefits in return. They require a long period of education and by the time they are old enough to look after themselves the parents are getting old and have missed out on the good life. And who wants to confine oneself to having only one bed partner for his entire life, one who gets older and less attractive with each passing year. Who wants to cheat himself out of all the fun he could have if only he didn't have a wife with saggy boobs and squabbling brats all over the place.
A strange thing about the logic of feelings and sensual gratification is that in very short order it grows boring. You can only eat so much. You can only screw so much. You can only live in one house at a time, wear one pair of shoes at a time, drive one car at a time. And then what? A sense of grievance. What's missing. Who is responsible. Try drugs, anything to stop that dull ache, anything to shut up that busy brain. After sex, after all the chocolate you can eat, after the single malt scotch palls, and if you don't go in for arts or have an all consuming interest, like electric trains or Ming vases, then there is one pleasure left, more potent than all the rest: power. And if there is anything that stands out about the left it is their craving for power. Not power to accomplish good but power for its own sake. They will do anything, say anything to get power. Whatever works. Lie, steal, cheat, but above all lie. Don't worry about getting caught, brazen it out. Bill Clinton showed how to do it. The trick is not to let anything embarrass you. Eradicate any sense of shame you may have, and cultivate an easy grin. Women especially are suckers for a loveable rogue. Cultivate grievances among the resentful. Pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible. Make promises you have no intention of delivering. It's a well worn path. We have lots of that type in Canada, too.
What is surprising, and I always have to remember this, is that in spite of the best efforts of Michael Moore, Al Gore, and every lying, BSing public figure you can think of, the average everyday jerk just chugs along living his life, raising his kids, doing useful work and being a good friend and neighbor. I was thinking about that as I watched the crew that set up the crane last weekend. They had worked three weeks straight but there was no slacking off. Every man on the crew knew his job and did it well. They never complained, being too busy joking around, kidding each other and doing their work for that kind of nonsense. True, they were getting overtime, holiday pay and everything else. I said to one of the guys that it would all be worthwhile when they got a chance to spend some of that money, "They'll only take it away in taxes," he said matter of factly. I had forgotten, we live in a country that punishes people for working hard. These were real Canadians and when I'm around guys like that I'm not sorry I'm a Canadian, too.
Somehow or other, despite the tireless efforts by our elites to destroy everything that matters in our culture, most people are still pretty good. And there is something distinctive about Canadians that I like. Luckily, it seems to be indestructible.

Canada Day Rant

2007-07-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

"Canada Day" was commemorated on the weekend. I put that in quotes because the national holiday used to be called "Dominion Day." Apparently 'Dominion' was too strong a word for the tender ears of our kinder, gentler era and the wise folks in charge of these things toned it down. Dominion, domination, sounds a little bit cheeky to me, like something Hillary and Bill might like to do in the privacy of the white house with the cameras rolling. Grokked at in that light, it might deserve a second look as a name for our holiday. Goes with the drag queen parades, don't you know, whips, leathers, tatooed goth babes leading muscular she males around on leashes, that sort of thing. Think of all the possibilities for innuendo and veiled references to the evils we face in the modern world, like the deprivation of poor Saddam of his job, the joos who everybody knows are responsible for the melting glaciers, avian flu, the obesity of our youth, and leave us not forget the Great Satan aka the United States of America and GWB, its evil mastermind.
By whatever name, Canada Day was a gala affair. After the lavish fireworks display that lasted at least ten minutes, our local youths, by now filled with liquid courage and eager to lay to rest the myth of the well-behaved Canadian showed their affection for the Dominion by throwing as much garbage on it as they were able to bring to the party.
Perhaps the real reason it was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day was because the old designation was too truthful to be allowed. Because Canada isn't a real country. It's a patchwork of discontinuous jurisdictions with very little in common with each other spread across the part of the continent directly north of the USA. It's essentially the empire of Upper Canada, Upper Canada being that area on the left bank of the Great Lakes that was mainly settled by refugees from the English colonials to the south who didn't want the responsibilities that come with freedom. Ontario, I mean. They much preferred the system of patronage and dependancy that came with sucking up to the crown. That was the era when the predominant economic theory was mercantilism. In that system the goal is captive markets. You get captive markets by having an empire where you don't give the colonials any choice in which companies to deal with. This way you can charge whatever you want and don't have to worry much about customer satisfaction. Originally that meant The Hudson's Bay Company owned Canada. Steady profits for the well-connected. Have you heard of the Highland Clearances? That was what happened in Scotland when the landowning class discovered that sheep were more profitable than tenants. This meant that The Hudsons Bay had a big pool of labourers to draw who had little choice but to accept employment in the godforsaken Canadian Canadian wilderness where they would be surrounded by howling savages. So the Canadian hinterland was administered by employees of a corporation, unlike the American free for all.
We prefer to forget about these inconvenient memories (unless there is profit to be gained by the legal profession as in the residential school scam) they are so untidy.
Unfortunately for Canada, all the romance of our history took place in those days. The stories of the missionaries and the fur traders are amazing. But if CBC suddenly decided to embrace that history in a TV series it would surely find some way to make it dull and boring. It would probably spend so much on commitee meetings trying to twist it around to conform with politically correct ideology there wouldn't be any money left over to actually film anything.
Ahh, the CBC. Over the years I gradually (being a little slow on the uptake) came to the realization that, according to the CBC, since I am from Alberta I'm not really Canadian. Alberta is a region, you see, and not part of the civilized world. Albertans are primitive, ignorant tobacco chewing yokels who should just shut up and leave the running of the country to their betters...who run the CBC. Now, as long as Albertans were mere dirt farmers and cowboys they were at least quaint and picturesque and tolerable, but now that Alberta is the richest province in Canada Ontarians are livid. Why, we even had the temerity to vote into parliament a political party headquartered in Calgary. You should have heard the howls of outrage. I did, and I haven't forgotten.
When I was a boy we were taught to be proud of our past. Today the only time we are urged to even remember it is to show how evil and oppressive we white males were. But how can you be proud of your country when you are taught to despise your history as we are taught now? Why would anyone want to fight for such a country? Obviously, the socialists and liberals don't think it's worth fighting for. Armies, ugh...they're so imperialistic.
Here in the west it is our duty to shut our mouths and just hand over our money because at the other end of the country Upper Canada has a different strategy: bribe them to stay in the country. And in order to bribe the maritimers they need our money. And let's not mention that before Nova Scotia joined Canada it was one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Now it's a welfare state and if you want to get a vote in Nova Scotia you'd better not say anything against 'equalization payments.'
This is pretty well the same policy Upper Canada has to entice those inconvenient Frenchies who plug things up in what used to be called Lower Canada. Appeasement? It's the Canadian way. So it's not too surprising when a few dozen Indians setting up a blockade on a railway track can shut the country down. Who in his right mind would want to admit to being a citizen of such a dumb country? Quebec, whenever it wants us to cough up more cash threatens to separate. I've got news for Quebec. I wouldn't miss you. The only condition I would impose is that you take Ottawa with you. As for the Indians- excusez moi, First Nations- who claim the whole country and expect the rest of us to be their slaves, my idea is they can have the rest of Ontario.
Well, for some reason I still prefer living in Canada to anyplace else. Edmonton is still my hometown and I'm still very fond of the place. But I now feel my home is the whole west coast and have often wished the border was somewhere east of Alberta instead of inconveniently located between BC and Washington. And I care more about what happens in Seattle and San Francisco than in Toronto or Montreal. It would be really nice if I could vote against Patti Murray or Nancy Pelosi. Let's face it. The USA is where the action is and I would rather vote against them than Jean Chretien who I despise every bit as much as these American nitwits. But Jean Chretien is a nobody. The American Republic is the engine of the world's economy, the fount of innovation, and the only country in the world where the contribution of the average citizen is valued. The US has a cutural life beyond anything that Canada has and the culture kampfs really matter. The destiny of the world is now in American hands, for better or worse. Canada is a backwater, deliberately made that way by the mediocrats who run the country. They think small. They quiver and wring their hands. Since they don't matter, since nothing they do has any consequences they can stand on the sidelines and be sanctimonious.
I wish I had more to offer on this Canada Day week than just a meandering complaint. But just to show I'm an equal opportunity complainer I would like to mention that I'm not too crazy about Washington DC either, and I've never liked Texans. As a matter of fact, I'm in one crabby mood today.

Animal souls

2007-07-02T06:12:00.000-07:00

I always look forward to the first of the month when new issues of my favourite 'e-zines' come out. The New English Review is one of those favourites and John Derbyshire has a good article in this issue which I haven't finished reading yet entitled, "The I's Have it." He cites a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary named Nancey Murphy and John F. Haught a theologian at Georgetown University who want to erase the traditional distinctions that set humans apart from the rest of the animal world. My own position on the matter is pretty close to Epictetus.' It's our capacity for self examination that sets us apart, and that's what leads him to reserve for man the possession of an eternal soul. However while I concur with the first part of the argument I have some doubts about the second part. The most important points in discussing the soul (the existence of which I haven't the slightest doubt) is will and sensation, both of which definitely set the lowest of life forms apart from inanimate matter. A rock doesn't care what happens to it but the meanest paramecium does. It seeks food, it reproduces, it prefers life over death, and presumably distinguishes between things that feel good and things that don't. Therefore it has purposive behavior. Darwinists by some tortured logic that has never made any sense to me seem to be saying that matter is inherently purposeful. And then they say it isn't, it's just random. Whatever that means. Maybe so, but it doesn't seem to have occured to them to propose any theories to account for it. Is it just complex carbon-based molecules that have this capacity or are other elements like aluminum or argon also able to spontaneously start moving about and striving to increase in complexity, or do the various constituents of living things we know about have unique properties? Because if just any old material can tranform itself into brain cells why don't we see it? Or why do we never see a Sahara sand dune spontaneously make itself into a medieval castle? I believe our material bodies are like machines that have been assembled and directed by a force or power outside what we normally think of as the universe and denying that possibility blocks our progress in understanding the makeup of our world.
Leaving that train of thought, I should mention that I have a bit of a problem with Christians who cite 'Christian thought' in arguments against animal souls. Although I read the bible regularly I don't even come within a mile of being an authority on it, but isn't the idea of a soul a fairly recent innovation in the bible? My guess is that the Hebrews got it from either the Greeks or the Persians. It was really at the time of the advent of Christianity when theories of the soul abounded in the Roman sphere, and the New Testament takes a definite position, but it is as a participant in a widespread debate. So I think it's perfectly fair to say that Christian thinking on the subject could be more accurately described as a variety of late classical thought on the subject. Thus I do not regard Christian teaching on the soul as the last and final word. It's something that has to be thought about a lot more than it has. The modern materialist view is that there is no 'proof' for such a thing. I am convinced they are wrong but they bring important ideas to the debate. And so does somebody like Nancey Murphy who wants to show that we aren't the only ones with souls. This may be wrong, too, but it's an extremely valuable line of thinking and should not be dismissed.
Derbyshire is rightly worried about the knee jerk deconstructionalist thought patterns of our wacidemics, but Epictetus dealt with that one almost 2000 years ago and his point is still valid. A wish to deny that there is any such thing as a lower or a higher form of life is at the root of the deconstructionist fad and it's so easy to demolish that logic it's almost proof positive that the academy has been taken over by cretins. In the navy we used to have a lot of Marine jokes. One of them was about the Marine Corps IQ test. It's just the same as all the other IQ tests except that if you score over fifty you fail. Some ideas are so stupid ridicule is the only response necessary. You do get tired of being polite.
Further along in the article Derbyshire takes us on a bit of a tour of some of the thinking that goes on behind the campus gates and an entertaining tour it is. It makes me think of the tours they used to have of Bedlam, the famous institution for the demented they had in the London of yesteryear.
It is important to point out that while the English language is well equipped with technical jargon it's metaphysical vocabulary is extremely vague. In contrast, Greek, which was the educated language of the Roman world, had a very precise metaphysical vocabulary. Many of our problems in modern metaphysical discourse can be traced to this deficiency in the English language.

Putting up a crane

2007-07-01T20:24:00.000-07:00

They were busy putting up the crane at my weekend job site and judging by all the passersby its a process everyone is curious about. One fellow (pictured) is a bit of an afficianado of cranes. According to one of the crew members he has shown up to see every single crane erection they've done in the Victoria area. And they've been busy, having worked for three weeks straight. But after this one they were due to head home to the Lower Mainland for a few days off. As another crewman told me toward the end of the day, "It's almost Miller time, and I'm getting excited."

The good old days

2007-06-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

They seem to be on a ska kick at Chapters today, or is it reggae. I don't know the difference, I only know I've hated that stupid rhythm from the first time I heard it. That would have been the mid-seventies when I was staying at Lynda's place in the West End. Haven't seen her since she ran off to Newfoundland with a coke dealer. I always liked Lynda and kind of miss her, even if we never were more than friends- but came pretty close to it a few times. I had met her in the U of Alberta Blue Room a few years before. She wasn't a student, she was a fifteen year old who thought she was too cool to waste her time with kids of her own age. She made the acquaintance of University students by offering to give back rubs and by sharing her hash pipe. I got my back rub and I shared a few of her hash pipes. By the mid seventies she had a nice hippie apartment in the West End (I think it was on the corner of Nelson and Barclay) she shared with her husband and a few others, and I stayed there for a little while. I liked her little place, especially the kitchen table by the window where I could watch all the office girls walk by on their way to work. Since the apartment was in the basement of the building my eyes were just about at their knee level which provided a pleasant viewing angle. But she didn't give back rubs any more. That was more than thirty years ago. Damn.
Alas, she used to play reggae a lot in that hippie pad. What does that idiotic beat remind me of? A sort of dance of the dead? A Samuel Beckett character trying to do the mambo? It could be an accompaniment for a crack or meth head gyrating jerkily down the street. The drug culture began innocently enough in the sixties and we laughed at warnings from our elders that it would lead to far worse things. They were right. The drug scene very quickly morphed into a death cult. The last hippie house I lived in turned out to be full of junkies. I watched as their eyes went blank after shooting up. I heard them puking in the bathroom. I watched them spend hours afterward just sitting gazing at nothing. Most of those guys are probably dead by now. Too bad. They were good guys, but the haunted look in their eyes is something I'll never forget.
In Edmonton I used to be friends with a girl whose dad promoted most of the shows that came into town. Ice shows, circuses, rock concerts, lots of stuff. Her family was pretty cool, I thought. Her mother liked to come to our parties and flirt with the young guys. You could sit around in their kitchen and smoke pot, they didn't mind. The kids pretty much did what they wanted without any interference. And then a few years later when I was living on Vancouver Island they were in the news. The mother had come home and found her youngest son and some of his friends dead of an overdose. I never found out of what, I never asked. Sex, drugs and rock and roll was the mantra in those days, but it was really about death.
I wonder how Lynda is. Of course she will be old now, just like me, but I'm sure she'll be a scrawny old bird and still full of ginger if she's still alive. But I still hate reggae.
Today is welfare day in BC, the last Wednesday of the month. It's popularly called mardi gras, even though it's mercredi. It's the whores' day off because they will be able to get drugs on the taxpayers' dime. I have often wondered how much of the province's welfare expenditure goes directly into the pockets of the drug dealers.

More Epictetus

2007-06-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

Quite a few moderns might be offended by Epictetus' use of the expression, 'wild beasts' as a pejorative. Several generations of children have now been Disneyfied. Bambi might not have been the first cartoon character to anthropomorphise the animal world, portraying an entirely fictitious harmoniousness of nature, but Bambi is the one I always think of. No longer red of tooth and claw, the Forest would be an Edenic place where peace and love would rule- if it weren't for perfidious Man. Many others followed that lead, for instance Farley Mowat in his work of fiction, "Never Cry Wolf." I know he doesn't say it was fiction and I, being young and naive, took it seriously at first. According to this book wolves are gentle and playful creatures that have been unjustly persecuted by perfidious Man.
Jane Goodall must have been inspired by some such work to eschew the company of her fellow humans and become a sort of voyeur of the simian world. I don't mean to trivialize her efforts but we have to remember she saw what she wanted to see. Even so, it eventually came out that chimps weren't the comical figures shown in Hollywood movies nor were they the wise old ladies and gentlemen of the remote jungle Goodall longed to find. They hunted for meat, engaged in lethal territorial conflicts, and had a hierarchical social structure with many points in common with human society. But at least the females seemed to rule the roost which gave the feminists lots of talking points. At least they all lived in harmony with the rest of nature, unlike perfidious Man while observations of tool use among them helped demote perfidious man from one of his privileged positions. Or so it seemed to the faithful ecocultists.
All this appealed immensely to the urban audience that read of these exploits in National Geographic and watched the contrived presentations on PBS. Urbanites are insulated from the realities of nature. The wildest thing seen in most cities is a flock of pigeons. In recent years, however, coyotes have discovered they quite like being town dwellers. These urban sophisticates cultivate a taste for dog and cat meat, to the consternation of ladies out walking their cockapoos. Quite the tasty snack for a coyote. Eagles have always provided a thrill to nature lovers. What could be more noble than the stern keen-eyed gaze of the bald eagle, what more inspiring than to see a pair of them winging upward and upward in a thermal until they are so high they can no longer be seen. But, oops, those talons and that cruelly curved beak ain't just for photo ops. This spring one resident female eagle in Victoria acquired the nickname 'Birdzilla' as she systematically destroyed the perennial blue heron nesting site in Beacon Hill Park. How could that be, how could the noble eagle be so savage? Well folks, that's why they call that category of birds raptors. As in rape, rapacious, from the Latin word for plunderer.
But I don't think Epictetus was referring to the savagery of animals so much as to their limitations. With a few exceptions (squirells burying nuts, etc) wild animals only live on the energy provided by the last meal and are always on the lookout for the next feeding moment. Watch a seagull open his gullet to down a big mac in one gulp while another seagull tries to grab it away. Anything is fair, anything is potentially edible, doesn't matter what foul hole it's found in, just jam as much down the maw as quickly as possible. A seagull doesn't care about another seagull's little ones. Street people behave just the same. Similarly, a cat has absolutely no sympathy for the mouse, and a cat hunts whether it needs to eat or not. It has a skillset, and a set of equipment it must use and so a cat enjoys killing. Large kitties, like lions, are able to ingest large quantities of food to tide them over until the next kill, and to conserve energy until that time take long naps.
Even stone age man learned how to store and preserve food. Herders took things a step further by tending a food supply on the hoof that provided them not only with food, but clothing, tools, and ornamentation. A quantum leap took place with the invention of farming. Farmers were the first true capitalists. That is to say they kept back a portion of their crop as seed for the next year. But even a bad year or two could be survived if sufficient grain was stored for such an eventuality. You can read about it in the Hebrew texts. Then as now some people foolishly squandered, their capital while others horde it and use it to get rich during hard times...unless the foolish squanderers decided to expropriate from the evil capitalist.
Successful human societies learn how to set up a series of rules to regulate these kinds of disputes. Even more successful are the societies that discover how a nice surplus of food also results in a surplus of labour, labour not needed for the actual production of the food. Really successful archaic farming societies discovered that this excess pool of labour could be put to use in ways that made food production even more effective. Tool makers, and all sorts of trades flourished. A class of people devoted to organizing this activity arose, priests, moneychangers, accountants, Wall Street. And became a magnet to rapacious marauders. In Epictesus' day the ancient world reached a kind of pinnacle, but one problem for wealthy societies has always been that there are other societies that are not so good at producing wealth but want it anyway. So another occupation that has always been important is that of the soldier. And for that you need manly men, men willing to put their lives on the line for the greater good. In what is called the postmodern west a large and influential body of opinion has arisen to denigrate the need for the traditional manly virtues Epictetus wanted to cultivate in the Roman Empire. For that he knew it was needful for the citizen to have a love and understanding of the roots of his society, of it's values, of it's treasures of the mind. That must have been because that love was declining in his day just as it is in ours.
Ants and bees also store food and deal with marauders but no other animal but man is able to use reason to solve the problems of existence. Only humans can contemplate themselves from an outside perspective. It is said that apes, crows, and some other animals are able to use rudimentary logic to solve problems, but only humans can devise systems of logic. I'm pretty sure that this faculty is what Epictetus meant when he contrasted men with animals. That doesn't necessarily mean we're better than animals. It was a well accepted truism in the ancient world that this capacity for reason had the potential for making humans far more brutal and savage than any animal could ever be.
Just to finish off with Epictetus, I should say that while much of his pedagogic advice travels across the centuries rather well there are large portions that don't. For instance, I don't think he thought of women as sharing a man's capacity for reason, and the Stoics in general advocated using women as common property. Presumably this came from Plato's idea of the perfect state as ruled by a class of Guardians who shared all property, including women. The best Epictetus could do was mitigate some of the difficulties that might arise when disputes over women arose, as they always do.
I don't think much of feminists but my main argument against them is that as much as they they hate men they hate their own femininity even more. They most of all hate their biological role as mothers. If you want to see a modern allegory on how feminists regard the act of child bearing watch the female made movie of several years ago called "The Alien." Ahh, but all this is for another post.

Epictetus

2007-06-18T23:16:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of people I have been appalled at the decline in school standards since the sixties generation took over. Not only academic standards have taken a beating, but also standards of behaviour. Stories of schoolyard bullying are a common topic of newspaper editorials. Boorish behaviour in public is rampant. I have long felt that much of the problem is due to the devaluation of boys that has taken place through the influence of feminism. Boys are expected to become like little girls, supposedly more sensitive and caring. Bah. Boys are different from girls. Boys need structure and coherence. I have just stumble across a little book that would form a wonderful template for a boy's education in the Discourses of Epictetus. Epictetus was a Greek philosopher of the Stoic school who lived in the first century AD. Thanks to my lack of a systematic education I was not familiar with the name. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor/philosopher whose "Meditations" are still widely read, is the only Stoic I have read at all. This slim volume of Epictetus' Discourses looked quite demure lying casually on the library bookshelf and I couldn't resist it. It's one of those very inexpensive Dover editions and was ably translated by P.E. Matheson. The footnotes are brief but informative.
And a very interesting little book it is. It's not really about theory so much as the application of sound philosophical principals to a man's life. I find much of it quite admirable and rather wish it was required reading for aspiring teachers...particularly for teachers of boys.
Right from the start it's easy to see that Epictetus' sound philosophical principals are firmly rooted in Platonic idealism. "...for this alone of the faculties [Reason] we have recieved is created to comprehend even its own nature..."
"But what says Zeus? 'Epictetus, if it were possible I would have made your body and your possessions (those trifles you prize) free and untramelled. But as things are-never forget this-this body is not yours, it is but a clever mixture of clay. But since I could not make it free, I gave you a portion in our divinity, this faculty of impulse to act and not to act, of will to get and to avoid [Orexis and ekklesis are the Greek words, the footnote tells us], in a word the faculty which can turn perceptions to right use. If you pay heed to this, and put your affairs in its keeping, you will never suffer let or hindrance, you will not groan, you will blame no man, you will flatter none. What then? Does all this seem but little to you?"
The key to living a good life is to only worry about things over which we have some control. "'When will the west wind blow?' When it so chooses, good sir, or when Aeolus chooses. For god made Aeolus master of the winds, not you...We must make the best of those things that are in our power and take the rest as nature gives it. What do you mean by 'nature?' I mean, god's will."
"'What? am I to be beheaded now, and I alone?'
"Why? would you have had all beheaded, to give you consolation?"
"...I must die, but must I die groaning?"
The theme throughout is that the powers of the world may be able to harm a man's body but they cannot touch his spirit. The key is to remember that we are all the children of God, that we are of two natures, the body we share with animals, the mind and Reason we share with God. It behooves men to value the part of us we share with God above the part of us we share with the beasts. Those who prefer their kinship with beasts become savage, brutal, foul mouthed, "no better than a fox or the meanest and most miserable of creatures."
How are men to avoid this dismal fate? Certainly not from books, Epictetus tells us. Books are fine as far as they go but unless a man learns to avoid feeling sorry for himself when things go wrong he has learned nothing. Be like Socrates, who calmly accepted the verdict and drank his hemlock, saying, "if it pleases the gods, so be it." Epictetus' advice is to ask Zeus: "...send me what trial thou wilt; for I have endowments and resources, given me by thee, to bring myself honor through what befalls."
It's hard to imagine a greater contrast to how boys are taught now. In fact, I am convinced that boys need a different sort of education than girls. Boys respond to ideas of nobility and courage, in fact need them in order to become men. The generation coming to manhood now has been taught largely by feminists who dislike boys and have no sympathy with manly virtues. Walking down the street here in downtown Victoria it's hard to keep from stumbling over all the scruffy males who have never learned to have a sense of shame or honor. They have no compunctions against rummaging through a trash can for a leftover big mac or picking out butts from the gutter. According to the feminists who deprived them of a proper education we are now to feel sorry for them. They are taught to feel sorry for themselves. They are taught that the miserable state they find themselves in is due to some injustice inflicted on them by an unfair, uncaring capitalist society. But for the antipoverty groups the 'homeless' are really only tools for their agenda. The more 'homeless' there are the better.
There are lots of things to like about Epictetus, but what stands out the most is his good sense. There will be trials in life, but we have been given the resources to deal with them. He is aware of the various doubts people have about God: Concerning the gods there are some who say the Divine doesn't exist, others that it exists but is inactive and indifferent...And so on. But it's easy to tell his position on the matter. Without the assumption of men having a share in the divine none of his advice makes any sense. Speaking of the ass (the beast of burden...pick up truck of the Roman empire) he makes the assertion that it is made for our use and does not share our spark of the divine. "Are not they too God's works?" he is asked. "They are," he replies, "but not his principal works, nor parts of the Divine. But you are a principal work, a fragment of God himself, you have in yourself a part of him."
This is no cause for arrogance, but for humility and a devotion to duty:
"It is no ordinary task merely to fulfill man's promise. For what is Man? A rational animal subject to death. At once we ask, from what does the rational element distinguish us? From wild beasts. And from what else? From sheep and the like. Look to it that you do nothing like a wild beast, else you destroy the Man in you and fail to fulfil his promise. See that you do not act like sheep, or else again the Man in you perishes.
You ask how we act like sheep?
When we consult the belly, or our passions, when our actions are random or dirty or inconsiderate, are we not falling away to the state of sheep? What do we destroy? The faculty of reason. When our actions are combative, mischievous angry and rude, do we not fall away and become wild beasts? In a word, some of us are great beasts, and others are small but base-natured beasts, which give occasion to say, 'Nay, rather let me be food for a lion." All these are actions by which the calling of man is destroyed."
There are quibbles I might have with some of his ideas, but overall I am amazed at how small are the adjustments that must be made to make it intelligible to a modern reader. Not only that, his ideas are portable to different cultures and religions. How could even an Imam or a hard core atheist object to his views? Resistance would still be found among the man-hating campus feminists, but they hate everything. Are you a young man who is thinking of taking up teaching? Ignore all the edpsych garbage. Read Epictetus. Or are you the father of a newborn son? Read Epictetus and throw Doctor Spock in the garbage where he belongs. And marvel at all the things you should have been taught as you were growing up but weren't. And if you are the mother of a young son you might find it a fascinating glimpse of what it means to be a man.

Plato's Republic, part 1

2007-06-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

The two literary works that have influenced the way you and I think as well as our parents and neighbors and ancestors for the last 2000+ years are the Bible and Plato's Republic. There is no thought or opinion that anyone in our culture can entertain that isn't enmeshed in the ideas expressed in these great books. Almost every discussion of belief that has come since has been in some way a commentary on some aspect originally outlined in them. And from the points of origin of these works, their influence has spread out and molded the whole world. Not only that, the two books work in tandem. The Bible supplies the Republic what it lacks, and vice versa. They strengthen each other, like steel in concrete, like a husband and a wife. However, while it's fair to say that a lot more people have read the Bible over the centuries than have read Plato, without Plato's theoretical framework the Biblical narratives would have been nothing but quaint stories of no interest to anyone outside of the Roman province of Judea. Conversely, without the personal and moral perspective of the Bible, Plato's metaphysical reasonings would have dried up and blown away.
So when I embark on my periodic rereading of Plato or the Bible I do so with great trepidation and devote a lot more care in pondering the meaning of each individual word than I would with any other books, even Shakespeare's. I'm reading Plato again, and I understand he was a subtle writer who had reasons for including every detail. For Instance, in his day the names of the participants in his dialogs had significance. But what? Also, anyone who writes is embedded inescapably in the controversies of his time. Today, for instance, everybody in the world has heard of Paris Hilton, but 100 years from now I doubt if that name will mean anything at all. To mention her name in a class on the cultural history of the early 21st century will be certain to put everybody to sleep. What were the controversies of Plato's time? You can read about them in Thucydides History of the Pelloponnesian Wars where the names and personalities of the generals and the rabble rousers are infinitely more difficult to keep track of than the personalities in any Tolstoy novel. Suffice it to say Plato lived in an age of societal disintegration. All previous standards of conduct had been abandoned in a fit of savagry that engulfed the entire Greek cultural sphere. Every polis was split. One party would gain power and kill whichever of their opponents they could lay hands on. These circumstances obviously motivated him to subject every commonly held belief to microscopic examination.
In reading any ancient work it's quite difficult for a member of a modern technological society to imagine a world without cars, electricity, telephones and newspapers. Sometimes I think Plato must have foreseen this eventuality because of the way he starts out the Republic. Socrates is visiting Piraeus in a scene out of a novel, filled with local color, descriptions of the various personalities and so on. He and his friend Glaucon had just finished watching a religious festival and were starting the walk back to Athens. I'm not sure of the distance, but it was something on the order of ten miles, I think.
"...we turned in the direction of the city: and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him."
You see, no horses, (too expensive- only the wealthy had horses) and no cell phone. Communications on land generally moved at a walking pace. The fastest way to send a message was by a boy who could run fast. Think about it. What a delicious way to begin one of the most important books ever written. Plato doesn't expend many more words before the conversation begins, but for some reason he feels it of some importance to tell the reader that Socrates was persuaded to stay by the prospect of watching a torchlight procession.
"With horses! I replied: that is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them from one to another during the race?" The great Socrates enjoyed a spectacle as much as anyone and he accepts an invitation to stay.
But the whole purpose of the introductory section is to set up a conversation. The participants are named and there are some others, unnamed, who will be witnessing the proceedings, as if it was a boxing match with preliminaries and a main bout between champion heavyweights. Nowhere does Plato mention himself or how he came to know about this conversation, but noteworthy to me is the fact that there was nothing out of the ordinary to his contemporary readers in the fact that he was reciting this very exacting conversation in its entirety from memory. (remember those three chambers of the mind mentioned by Spenser?) This may seem an impossible feat but one that was unexceptional before the proliferation of written material.
It began with certain pleasantries and remarks on the inevitability of old age- the usual complaints. "The pleasures of youth and love are fled away..." But the host, Cephalus, is having none of it. He recalls talking to Sophocles who felt he was freed from the slavery of his passions when he grew old, and now that Cephalus is old he agrees with the sentiment.
Socrates wants to know if it's only because he is rich that old age rests lightly on Cephalus' shoulders, Cephalus contends that he has led a just life and his conscience is good. But what is Justice? asks Socrates...and they have now set out on a long and arduous journey. With Socrates, of course, nothing is ever simple. Is justice merely a question of paying your debts and speaking the truth, he asks? But these are still the preliminaries. With Thrasymachus Socrates matches himself against a rising young middleweight.
Tired of Socrates' logic dicing, Thrasymachus finally breaks into the discussion, "...for I must have clearness and accuracy," and in due course presents his own definition of justice:"I claim that justice is nothing more than the interest of the stronger." As the modern expression goes, 'might makes right.' What follows is the best demolition of that dictum that has ever been devised, and by the end of it even Thrasymachus is convinced...that at least there is more to it than he had realized.
Even so, The Republic is just getting started. Plato's Socrates is after a much bigger fish which I hope to get to eventually on this blog. But I hurry to mention that much of Socrates' reasonings baffle me. I can't quite follow it. Moreover, I don't have any ambitions to become an expert...lacking a knowledge of the Greek language it would be impossible anyway. But there are still things I can say about his plan for reordering society. In this he was drastically wrong as have all his numerous followers. But that's for another day.
What I want to emphasize here is not so much the content of Plato's writings as the method he had for uncovering truth of reducing things to their bare essentials, of stripping away unexamined assumptions, by shining the light of human reason on every problem. To use that method it is necessary to put ones own desires and preferences aside. This is what is really meant by objective reasoning and it is objective reasoning that has made the scientific revolution possible...for better or worse. So as you engage the clutch of your BMW and feed the fuel through the fuel injectors and put it through a windy country road, that road eventually leads back to Plato.
Unlike modern scientists, Plato saw the difficulty in assigning a special privelege to knowledge gained through the senses- or our extensions of the senses. One of the popular amusements of the Greek aristocracy at the time was the newfangled study of geometry. Plato saw that geometric knowledge wasn't aquired through the senses. But then where did it come from? And so he postulated that while the light of the sun revealed knowledge to the senses, the 'light of pure reason' revealed knowledge to the mind. And from whence came this light? This humble cab driver is confident in saying that this is what the Republic is ultimately about, and it's still a lesson humanity has yet to absorb...even experts on Plato.

The three chambers of the mind.

2007-06-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

I'm listening to my iPod at work and Canto 9 of the Faerie Queene has just come on in which "Guyon and prince Arthur are bent on rescuing Alma, the soul, who is beset by the vices and passions which dwell in her body. In her mind lie three great chambers belonging to Imagination, Judgement and Memory." It reminded me of one of the first leftist mantras I heard back in the '60's as applied to education. Regurgitate was the magic word. Children shouldn't be required to 'mindlessly' remember mere facts. They should be taught to learn for themselves. At the time I was dubious about this strange idea, but thought it was plausible. Now I think of it as the first attack the educational revisionists made against true learning. Memory is important for so many things. Multiplication tables, Latin declensions, dates in history, geographical facts, were all strongly emphasized at the time I entered the school system. The nice thing about a good memory is that it's so portable. You've always got it handy. But by the time I was about ready to become part of the educational establishment myself all that had changed. We were told by the edpsych profs that learning of mere facts stifled the imagination.
More recently the magic word has been 'judgemental.' This is a very bad thing, we are told. It leads to prejudice and injustice. But I noticed early on that the ones who condemned 'judgementalism' the loudest tended to be the most judgemental people I knew. I came to realize that what it really meant was that they wanted their opinions to be immune from criticism no matter how illogical or lacking in evidence. One only has to read the Daily Cos or the Huffington Post to see what I mean. The most salient characteristic of that particular readership seems to be an overwhelming hatred of anyone who contradicts the pieties they hold dear. Not only are holders of opposing views wrong, they are infidels.
Imagination is first on Spenser's list and if you ever leaf through some of the periodicals devoted to the art establishment you will notice that these artists have virtually zero imagination. I always wonder, "Whatever gave these people the idea of taking up art?" Every single one of them seems to be doing his best to produce the most trivial banalities. The more trivial the better, and you'd better not be judgemental otherwise it proves you to be an ignorant philistine. Art is what they say it is, asshole.
Imagination, judgement and memory. Those were the components of Mind, in Spensers way of thinking. Our contemporary scientists say that there is really no such thing as Mind. There are just brain cells and neurons.

High rise farming

2007-06-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

Did you see the headlines in newspapers across the continent today? "Record Snow Pack in BC Mountains causes flooding: global warming called into doubt." No? I wonder why. The mystery of the dog that didn't bark. And here in Victoria our spell of warm, sunny weather last week was short-lived. The rain came back on Monday and it's been windy...like March, only warmer.
There was an honest to goodness headline, though not on the front page, that was mildly encouraging. At the G8 meeting our own PM gave Bono the tone deaf Bonehead the cold shoulder. Why anyone pays the slightest attention to that twerp is beyond my ken.
We are having something called a pocket market in our office building today where local organically grown produce will be on sale to whatever office workers here can be persuaded to pay really high prices. It's all to save the planet don't you know. I saw an article (in Popular Science, I think) about another approach to saving the planet and feeding it at the same time. This fellow has the idea of building high rise farms in the middle of the cities. Using hydroponics and other advanced methods, he can also recycle sewage, recover water and ever so much more. This might not be such a bad idea if another brilliant idea is implemented. This is called 'rewilding,' a word that means reintroducing large predators and ungulates to fields and woodlands near where you live. Isn't that wonderful. Lions and tigers and rhinos and maybe even elephants. If you think a few white tailed deer munching on your rosebushes is ever so sweet, imagine how an elephant would look. The sheer nobility of such a sight! Hint: get out your shovel for all that great organic fertilizer. You'll need a wheelbarrow.
Of course farms and suburbs would be very much in the way for such a scheme to succeed, and the obvious answer is to put ourselves in cages. Instead of sprawling all over the place we should all live in huge highrises and put walls around our cities so we don't contaminate the planet any more than necessary with our disgusting selves. High rise farms would fit right in.
Now, when I refer to disgusting humanity what I mean is us white folks. Sure, the Indians could go back to living on the land in blissful harmony with nature just like they did before the honkies took over. Just think of how wonderful life will be for them, chipping flint, scraping hides, making porcupine quill beads to decorate their condowickiups. And we could have it all on television! Aboriginal survivor! Think of all the university theses the sociologists could write. And for those who can no longer tolerate living in the high rise cloisters of honkiedom could apply to be adopted by the neoDakotahs at a ceremony featuring certain herbs they hold sacred.
Of course, the Dakotahs might not all want to go back to the old ways. And so some strategy must be developed to keep them from ever learning how to smelt metals or bake bricks. And we can't have them learning how to prevent disease or store food otherwise they might become too numerous for the land to support. But these are minor details that could be worked out. I'm not sure exactly what should be done with black people. After all, they don't rally belong in America either, do they. As far as the Chinese and the Hindus, it's just to late for them. They'll have to be sent back in junks and dhows to where they came from, and only be allowed to fish with harpoons and such on their way back. I guess an exception could be made for the saintly David Suzuki. Perhaps he could keep his domicile on Quadra Island where the grateful natives could bring him offerings.

The Faerie Queene

2007-06-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

I was reading David Frum's Blog on NRO today about his attempt to listen to an audio book reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. Aha, famous writer, I have read Ulysses, the whole thing. Once. The trick is to read it really fast and resist the urge to nod off. When you do that you get the whole picture, which is this: it's just one big Irish joke. And the joke is on the solemn denizens of University English faculties and newspaper culture pages who don't want anybody to know they don't understand a word of it. James Joyce wasn't the only Irish writer to pull the literary world's collective leg.
His secretary, confidante and successor, took the cue and played the same game...only better. Who could be more hilarious than Samuel Beckett? "...There's this man who comes every week. ...He gives me money and takes away the pages.,' is how he begins his trilogy, apparently. "Yet I don't work for money. For what then? I don't know. The truth is I don't know much. For example my mother's death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury." There's an Irish way of joking about things that can't be joked about, apparently. The Greeks saw paradoxes and made philosophies, or wrote plays about human fate and brutality. James Joyce saw bathroom humour: "When I makes tea I make tea and when I makes water I make water. But I don't use the same pot." Apparently.
Flann O'Brien aka Myles na Gopaleen wrote a send-up of Ulysses called "The Dalkey Archive," but I like "The Third Policeman" much better, maybe because I have always been concerned about stolen bicycles. Throw in the strangest haunted house ever imagined and that illogical Irish logic and you have a book unlike any other.
"What is your attitude to the high saddle?" inquired Gilhaney.
"Questions are like the knocks of beggermen, and should not be minded," replied the Sergeant, but I do not mind telling you that the high saddle is alright if you have a brass fork."
"A high saddle is a power for the hills," said Gilhaney."
I see that audio books have been made of both Molloy and The Third Policeman and I think either of them would be great to listen to on a long car trip.
I haven't heard these editions, but I do have Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene" on a Naxos audio book which I heartily recommend to David Frum. Couched in what was probably archaic English even when it was written this is a poem meant to be absorbed through the aural apparatus. Somehow a poem takes different pathways into consciousness when it is heard. I have it on my iPod and am always delighted when a verse wedges itself between Helen Humes and David Oistrakh. Spenser fits right in. Yes, I know he was anti Catholic and an oppressor of ireland but it's still one of the greatest poems ever composed. What amazes me about this work is that while Spenser was contemporary with Shakespeare he couldn't be more different. While Shakespeare looks ahead to the psychology of the inner man, Spenser is looking backward at the great literary tradition of Chaucer and Dante, of mythic lore and the problem of knowing good from evil. At first I wasn't especially impressed with the adenoidal voice of reader John Moffatt, but the more I hear this recording the more I like it. I have always loved this poem, the last of the great medieval allegories. It's Homeric in scale with lines as pungent as any found in the Iliad. I've memorized a few verses and I like to read it out loud so I had my own preconceptions of how it should sound. But reciting a few lines is a vastly different enterprise than telling the whole thing. The beauty of a poem of this stature is that you can focus on a verse or two from anywhere in the poem and then gradually build up an understanding of the whole. Poetry isn't linear. Hearing Moffatt's magesterial sonorities I realize why poetry doesn't really flourish in a print oriented culture. Without the sound of the language ringing down the depths of one's soul there is no poetry. Spenser was the last great master of the ancient Saxon device of alliteration.
I have some more recent poets loaded onto the iPod: eecummings, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, T.S.Eliot read by the poets themselves. Actually, I quickly tired of cummings and dumped him, and I more often than not hit the skip arrow when Robert Frost comes on. The most interesting of them is T.S. Eliot and comparisons can be made between Spenser's poetry and his. Eliot knew about music and yearned for the epic scale, medieval allegory, but he had to struggle with the train wreck of 20th Century art. So he wrote "...in my beginning is my end..," "...like a patient etherized upon a table...oh, do not ask what is it, let us go and pay our visit." One can admire the sunset poetry of expiring western poetry but enjoyment isn't part of the equation. Perhaps Spenser was right to look to the myth of chivalry for poetic material. Maybe he knew already that Shakespeares's inner man was doomed.

He who shouts the loudest.

2007-06-02T05:53:00.000-07:00

I've read that the ancient Spartans decided issues in their councils according to who shouted the loudest. When I first heard that I thought it was quite a ridiculous way to run things. Our way was so obviously better, what with our ideas of free speech and open debate. Honest and intelligent people can differ in there understandings. Humans aren't endowed with perfect knowledge. We only have very dim inklings of how our plans will work out. But plan we must. We must ry to foresee eventualities, we must try to calculate the effects of our actions. Even at the most personal level of who to marry, what livelihood to pursue, where to build a home we are faced with choices we must weigh and try to do what's good for ourselves and our families. How much more important and difficult it is to plan for the welfare of communities, nations, and now that our power is so much greater than in the past, the entire planet. And so we talk among ourselves. We often disagree. And our Western culture from the earliest times has been to submit ideas to the whole people and when a decision is made by them it is the job of the leader to carry out the program as well as he can. Of course the implementation of this ideal has been fitful, but even the most tyrannical of despots has had to consult and compromise his will to power and bend to the opinions of others. Otherwise, like Louis XVI he could lose his head. Even the Spartan system was a type of consultation. But in my naive youth I thought we had risen above that.
Some voices always carry more weight than others, and deservedly so. When I want my car fixed I go to a mechanic. But when different mechanics give me varying opinions on why the damn thing won't start I am still the one who has to make the call. Often enough I have rued my choice, but I always do my best to learn from my mistakes.
This is the problem with paying attention to the loudest voice: the most stridently opinionated people are also usually extremely ignorant. They don't seem able to learn from their mistakes, or even admit they've made any. It doesn't matter how often they are wrong. Nothing shakes their high opinion of themselves. But they are the ones the politicians listen to...becayuse they make the most noise. The rest of us go quietly about our lives, but the loudmouths seem to have nothing better to do than hector the people we vote into office. This is how it works out that certain groups have more influence on policies than we poor sucks who vote and work to pay for everything.
Their main technique is to make it seem like everyone who is anyone thinks the way they do. That's why they like celebrities. Celebrities like being the centre of attention and as a rule they are not deep thinkers. They like to play a part and they are good at learning their lines but that is a skill set that may or may not be coupled with a capacity for critical thinking.
Who are these People? Al Gore. Jimmy Carter. Rosie O'Donnell. David Suzuki. Jane Fonda. All of them blithely unaware of the damage to humanity their ideas can cause. Idon't know if they are intentionally vicious, like Stalin, but they might as well be. I've just been reading about Rachel Carson and all the damage her book has done. And none of her followers in the environmental movement has yet acknowledged that the banning of DDT has led to millions of deaths, mostly of children in poor countries.
These loudmouths don't have any actual arguments, they just have mantras. In connection with the epidemic of drug use that has exploded in the past few decades, the mantra is harm reduction. Not content with going to the public, via the established rules for making important public decisions, they take it upon themselves to do whatever they want. Case in point: Nanaimo city councilors recently discovered that nurses at the regional hospital have been distributing crack pipes. This is a program instituted by a bureaucracy known as the Vancouver Island Health Authority which has decided it is a law unto itself.
These are the same kinds of people who brought us needle exchanges, telling us that if addicts had clean needles they would be less likely to get all the diseases that go with drug use. Now we have a situation where you have to watch where you step there are so many discarded needles littering the streets. Has nobody noticed that the number of drug addicts on the streets has increased exponentially since this program began? It was a mistake. Most of us average Jills and Joes know it, but the so-called experts don't. Now they say we need safe injection sites. Hasn't it occured to the proponents of this plan that they are making it easier to become an addict? Hasn't it occured to them that such policies legitimize drug use? As far as I am concerned they are no better than drug pushers. Thankfully, this is one issue where the Federal Conservative government is showing some gumption. Let's hope they don't cave in at the predictably deafening Greek chorus they will have to endure. Go around them, boys. My vote counts just as much as David Suzuki's or Margaret Atwood's or whatever minor celebrity you can think of.
And think of the poor Indians. What a disaster for them the Indian Act has been, and how much worse the lawyers and the activists have made things. Since Canada has to slavishly follow every dumb policy that comes along in the USA all our lefties claim to hate, we have affermative action, race-based laws here, too. Since the lawyers cashed in on all the residential schools they are moving on to land claims. You see the activist Indian leaders believe they have a prior right to the Canadian land mass, it having escaped their attention that many of us honkies were born here, too. Well, it's time for a change of direction, that's for sure. It's time that Indians have the right to work and make enough money to buy a piece of property the same as me...and sell it if he wants to. The Indians can't do that now...on their own lands. And they want to expand that system? Where is the evidence that the communal system works for them? There isn't any. All the communally owned native reserves are disasters. Yards full of rusting cars, rotting boats, broken appliances, toys, starving dogs, dirty, uncared for children, the houses with broken windows, leaking roofs, no doors. On waterfront property that would bring millions of dollars if they could sell it. Gordie Campbell said he was going to do his best to fix this idiotic system if he was elected, but that was a few elections ago. I guess he just forgot. He's too busy having photo ops with Arnie to worry about Indian children, I guess.
The imams have been paying attention to this state of affairs. What do you know, they have concluded. Western politicians have no balls. If they can't stand up to screaming headlines, or econazis chaining themselves to trees, why think what will happen when they are threatened with decapitation. And just to make things easier, a little oil money will lubricate a lot of palms and soothe their feelings.
You know, I'm beginning to understand why the French suddenly decided to massacre its elite. Hopefully, it won't come to that. But I think a big purge has to come. For instance, I think whoever was responsible for distributing those crack pipes should be fired immediately without compensation.

Politicians in drag

2007-06-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

The headline in today's birdcage lining is that the MLAs (Members of the legislative assembly) gave themselves large pay hikes just before adjourning for the summer holidays. I notice a little undercurrent of resentment among the denizens of the government office where I work, taking the form of, "I wish I were getting a 30% raise," and this is pretty normal. Naturally, the opposition raised a little hell, just as they always do, and I'm sure they'll take the money and run, just as they always do. Promises to roll back pay hikes seldom survive entry into office. The problem as I see it is how do we judge a politician's worth? In any other job you get paid according to how good you are, but how do you tell how good a politician is at his job. If you think of a political unit such as BC as an economic entity valued according to its productive capacity then how does the premiere's salary compare to the head of a comparably sized corporation? The answer is that the premiere gets peanuts, even with his raise. This province has a territory of 355,000 square miles, a long seacoast, forests, farms, schools, and a diverse population. The government in power is responsible for making and enforcing the laws and administering large programs. Good plumbers make more than our premiere does.
What bothers me more than anything else in politicians is their lack of balls. Now you would think the governator would have a set of balls, especially as he claims not to have used steroids in his body building days. But when someone becomes a greenhouse gasbag he's either stupid, lying, or pandering. Pandering is that special type of lie used to pacify a noisy idiot we don't want to argue with. And I see in the same paper images of Arnie and Gordie (Campbell, our premiere, whose name means 'twisted mouth' in Gaelic) all dressed up in Indian duds, presumably with ominous drumming pounding a beat in the background. Because if you're not willing to make an ass out of yourself how can you be a real politician. As eecummings put it, "An ass is something everyone has sat upon except a man." Perhaps they were doing a weather dance. Except in the modern style we throw money down the toilet as part of the ritual.
It makes me despair of democracy sometimes. Why don't we have politicians who are leaders? Why don't they have the balls to tell the truth? Why can't they just tell all the noisy SIGs to shut their traps? Why can't they explain in plain words to the people the plain facts? I do have some hopes that Fred Thompson is the kind of a guy who both knows what's going on and has the balls to tell people the plain facts. For instance that the new kind of lightbulbs that are supposed to be so good for the environment have mercury in them, an extremely poisonous substance. Too many numbskull ideas to list. Let's hear it for Fred. Tell it like it is, baby. I can't vote for you, but you know I was rooting for Sarkozy, too.

Reading list

2007-05-31T07:12:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-18T06:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-06T07:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-03T07:19:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

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.

America

2007-04-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

The default attitude of many Canadians to the United States is a craven, sanctimonious, poorly thought out hostility. The higher one climbs in our cultural strata the more pronounced becomes this peculiar type of ignorance, but in just about any bar conversation if something about our southern neighbor comes up the usual snide and knowing remarks will be made. Their military is too big. They want to rule the world. They have an empire. This from people who have a pretty dim idea of geography and history. Canadians do have reasons to be annoyed at Americans regarding certain issues: the ongoing softwood lumber farce, for instance, where powerful lumber interests in the U.S. try to protect their business from Canadian competition. This has had the opposite affect from what they had hoped as the duties and levies imposed on Canadian producers have motivated them to increase efficiency and productivity to keep costs down. Thus Canadian mills are just that much more competitive than they were before. Other similar issues go back to the influence local American politics has on Congressional power brokering. But this is not what Canadians usually think of when they think of the perfidious Americans. Most Canadians don't even know about these disputes where the issues are complex and hard to understand. Does Canada subsidize lumber companies as the American lobby insists? It depends on what you call a subsidy, among other things, and as the arguments unfold their complexity quickly leaves the average interested citizen in a state of perplexity. The perception that we are being bullied is a strong one, but what does that mean? To me it's not so much an indication of American power as Canadian weakness. We have allowed ourselves to become a wimpy nation. Americans play hardball, they expect us to play that way, too. If we don't fight back they lose respect for us. It's also true that they have legitimate trade grievances with us. I'm thinking of all the marketing boards that hurt the Canadian consumer far more than they hurt the Americans. But we can hardly criticize American protectionism if we practise it ourselves.
But I would like to say more about the idiotic notion that Americans want to rule the world. Far from it. The United States may dominate the world in many ways but it is not an empire as many writers claim. If what they have is an empire then we'll have to think up another name for what the Romans, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the English and many others have had in recorded history. That's where the dominant power completely takes over another territory, loots it, settles it, occupies it, takes slaves and rules it. Like what the Romans did to Gaul, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, Britain, etc. If the Americans wanted to rule the world would Castro still be doddering along after a half century of being a damned nuisance to the Americans even forgetting what a curse he's been to his own people.
The vast majority of Americans not only don't want an empire, they would rather stay at home and ignore the rest of the world. They did not want to involve themselves in either world wars. But after Pearl Harbor they had to face the fact that the oceans were no longer a sufficient barrier to protect them from foreign agression. Since then they have managed to defeat a major totalitarian threat without going to all out war, and now they are fraced with another enemy that may even more dangerous. Just as in the past there are powerful currents of opinion that want to deny the obvious and so we will probably have to face another 9/11, and it could be far worse now that this hostile force senses weakness in the object of its hatred.
The stupidest of conventional wisdoms is that Americans invaded Iraq for the oil. These people can't believe George Bush when he says he wants to bring freedom to Iraqis. But there are all sorts of ways Americans could isolate themselves from the consequences of a disruption in the Middle East oil supply. The United States has the scientific resources to make the adjustment and Americans would be willing to undergo any temporary inconvenience. It's Europe that would be in trouble. That's where Americans have a responsibility as the foremost world power of our time to use its power to ensure the free movement of goods and services across the globe. In the old days it was called freedom of the seas. It has always been one of the first things a rising power has always wanted to establish. That was what the Punic wars were about in Roman times. And the first projection of military power to foreign shores made by the newly minted United States under Thomas Jefferson was to subdue the Barbary Pirates of North Africa. At that time these pirates roamed all over the eastern Atlantic taking slaves and disrupting trade. For some reason the Europeans wouldn't help themselves, even though whole villages were carried off.
It was after the Romans defeated the Carthaginians that the Mediterranean became known as a Roman Lake. It was the only time in history that the whole Mediterranean basin was brought under one law and it ushered in a golden age of prosperity and cultural cross fertilization. It may be that a Roman Governor authorized the execution of a certain Judean holy man, but without the ability to freely travel as a Roman citizen St. Paul wouldn't have been able to spread Jesus' message.
Now we are potentially on the cusp of a new golden age and if so it will be due to the Americans. Americans don't want empire but they do want to spread their message: freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of the marketplace, freedom to choose who will make the laws, freedom of speech, freedom of debate. Additionally, in the American way of thinking happiness is a good thing, a rich and rewarding life is something that everyone is entitled to provided he can take up the challenge. Empire is not an aspiration of the American people. They do not want Iraqis, Russians, Japanese, to be
American subjects. When they defeat an enemy they help him get back on his feet, as they did with Germany and Japan, as they are trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is reality folks. It's easy to figure out.
Americans have so far in my lifetime defeated Nazis and Bolsheviks, neither of whom believed in any of the above. They are now engaged in another fight. They didn't want the previous fights and they don't want this one. It seems there are aot of people in our democratic societies who don't believe there is a deadly enemy that wants nothing more than to kill them, their families, their friends, but there is. And whether or not we go into a new golden age or a new dark age depends on the outcome of this war. I know whose side I'm on.
Incidentally I have noticed one curious thing about all my American hating countrymen. Judging by the lineups at the Victoria passport office they all want to go to the States.

2007-04-20T07:03:00.000-07:00

A newspaper headline this morning in the local rag reads, "Kids drive home their environmental point." The text of the article tells us that grade four and five students at a local elementary school put on a little skit or something in support of the idea that people should not idle their vehicles while waiting to pick up and drop off at the premises. It's not a bad idea to shut down a motor while waiting anyplace. Who wants to breathe the fumes? Their teacher made the connection to the global warming hysteria. No, she didn't call it hysteria. for her it's an established fact. It was her opinion. And instead of helping her students explore both sides of the controversy and try to understand the issues involved she preferred to use them as little puppets to promote her own ill-informed judgement. This kind of behaviour by the teacher seems to me a testimonial to not only her competence but to her sense of morality. Are children nothing more to her than props for her own ego?
Our courts don't seem to understand why children should not be used by teachers for propaganda purposes either. A few years ago the teachers union used their students to propagandize the union demands. The parents who brought a lawsuit against the union lost.
"This is a tribute," says the teacher, "to the students from the school, who came to the board last month and told us how important it was to make the school properties idle-free zones..." Right. It began during conversation during a lull in skate board practice when some of the guys started talking about how important it was to combat global warming and pretty soon they had a study group set up and... whaddya know. We all know this is not what happened, so the teacher is lying. It was a class project organized and prepared by the teaching staff. No contrary views were allowed. The class had to toe the line. So this whole exercise had nothing to do with a spontaneous demonstration before the city council; it was a case of the teachers using their students as remote controlled puppets to promote their own opinions. There is an advantage in doing it this way. As adults making a presentation they might be challenged on their logic or their facts. But you can't make mincemeat of a ten- year-old's arguement without looking like a cad.
"We are on the forefront of this," she said, because "We are the first school district on Vancouver Island to use biodiesel..." One presumes this is what she said to the reporter not to the council. The reporter was probably already vetted to make sure he didn't ask any awkward questions. One such question would have to do with the affect of biofuel use on the price of food. There are already indications that it has raised the price of cornmeal in Mexico, and may raise the price of meat in Canada. This is elementary supply and demand. If the owners of SUV's are able to offer a higher price for the corncrop than poor Mexican peasants, guess who loses out. Somehow I doubt if any of these considerations were raised in the classroom.
And since when does a skit or a demonstration, ie stupid looking people dressed up in funny looking outfits, contribute to rational discussion? This is in itself a form of dishonesty, stupidity or both. Whenever I see a parade of such idiots, and we have a lot of them in Victoria (both parades and idiots), It makes me think the world of modern civilization is not dangerous
enough...otherwise these nitwits would have been long ago eliminated from the gene pool. So it really bothers me to see teachers teaching their students how to be idiots.
The effect of all this imbecility is to dumb down public discourse to the level of imbecility. It's absolutely impossible to find anything said by a politician on some of these issues. Plain speech is verboten. But why? Why can't we have a politcian run for office that comes right out and challenges all the BS? I thought Harper might have that ability but I'm quickly losing hope.
Of all the idiotic displays of public stupidity it would be hard to beat that British cleric who paraded down the geographical unit formerly known as the Island of the Mighty wrapped in chains and bearing a sign on his chest that read, "I am so sorry." When the Iranians saw that I'm sure that was when they realized they had nothing to lose by taking a few British Marines hostage. You know that song with the verse that says, "Britons never ever ever will be slaves" is so 19th Century.
But of course this is straying from my theme. One that includes my ongoing theme of "As above, so below," is that seemingly minor details like an elementary school presentation orchestrated and masteminded by a bunch of adult control freaks can connect up to a much bigger picture. In another newspaper, one with national pretensions, we are informed that the cost of Kyoto is recession. Innocuous word, recession. Well, I've been through a few recessions and have personal experience of such. They are not pleasant, although there are always people in the know who do very well during recessions. I was never one of those. The most recent one was pretty much the result of stupid policies by a socialist provincial government that drove away investment money. The econazis who are closely allied to our local NDP are infinitely more dangerous.
I don't use the expression econazi lightly, but I think of them as much more closely akin to the Bolsheviks. I don't mean this in the sense of them having well though out Marxist doctrines. Far from it. They don't have much at all in the way of doctrines, except that they think that humanity is invariably evil and is a contaminent on the face of the earth. By contrast, the Bolshies at least had a theoretical allegiance to improving the lot of the working class. What they most have in common is arrogance. They think they know better than anybody else what's good for us all. And it's very good to look at where that arrogance led when the Bolsehviks took over Russia. One of their bright ideas was that if all the serfs on the farms took the land away from the owners and divided it up among themselves then more food would be grown more efficiently and everyone would be happy. This process was called collectivization. It resulted in death by starvation of millions of Russians and Ukrainians. Are these lessons taught in the classrooms of our local schools? I don't know for sure but I seriously doubt it.
And yet this terrible, terrible experience of the Russian peasantry should be learned and understood by every single one of us. Personally, I think the econazis are potentially far worse. And I say this even though I know that most of the rank and file enviroactivists are sincere and caring individuals who only want the best. That was also true of most rank and file Bolsheviks but that didn't help them when Stalin launched his reign of paranoia. Once the beast is loose it's very hard to stop it.
Remember the Crosby, Stills and Nash song, "Teach your children well"? It was kind of a nice song. Unfortunately many teachers confuse teaching with indoctrination and now that we are confronted with some potentially lethal dangers to our way of life these youngsters are very poorly prepared to confront them.

Virginia Tech

2007-04-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

I don't really want to comment on emerging news stories in this blog because I believe many of the problems facing us are the result of more subterranean forces. News events are surface outbreaks of lesser understood deeper tectonics. But I'll make an exception in the case of the Virginia Tech rampage.
There have been so many incidents of seemingly random murders, both large scale and small committed by unbalanced individuals, either serially or in a bunch that have occurred in my life that I don't often pay much attention. They happen. Some crazy runs amok and ordinary people are snuffed out for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But here's to the power of the web and the blogosphere to put faces to the names. It's no longer just a matter of numbers. Fifteen killed here, eight killed there, shooter turns gun on self, shooter perishes in a hail of bullets. I couldn't help but feel sick looking at the photos of all the young, vibrant, everything to live for faces for whom life, plans, dreams, and a future came to a sudden end. Who knows what we have lost? Aside from their intrinsic value as human beings endowed with a soul, what might they have accomplished? What might they have contributed to the wealth of human attainment?
Already the letters to the editor in our local paper are dripping with scorn about America's supposed infatuation with the gun. More gun laws are needed they say. I guess they haven't noticed that Virginia Tech did have a total firearms ban on campus. It makes me wonder how the trial and the charges would have gone if the killer had survived. Might I suggest that he would have been out on bail by now. In fact, after all the legal maneuvering and posturing on the media the only thing he would be charged with would be violating the rule about guns on campus. As it is, even in death he is getting far more attention than his victims while the gun control lobby is jubilant at another propaganda opportunity. I don't own a gun and I don't have any desire to own a gun, but the fact remains that if you take guns away from people who obey the rules of society then you turn them into so many sheep in the fold ready for any bloodthirsty animal come along and rip them to shreds. That's what predators do. They have a blood lust. I know about all that and I know from personal experience as a cab driver that they exist. Still, I was never tempted to carry a weapon because I know that if you have a weapon you have to be willing to kill with it. Otherwise the weapon will be taken away and used against you. Since I know I don't have it in me to kill somebody I know it would just put me in more danger. That's without taking into account the vindictiveness of the courts.
As for the often criticized American constitutional right to bear arms its main purpose was not to enshrine people's right to defend themselves against criminals and madmen, though it does that too. The American frontier was a dangerous place when the constitution was drawn up. It's purpose was to ensure that Americans would have the right in perpetuity to protect themselves from an unscrupulous and bloodthirsty government. The framers of that constitution have been proven correct. As somebody once said, the first thing a government does when it wants to kill its citizens is to take away their guns. I emphasize: VASTLY MORE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS THAN BY ALL THE BERSERK NUTCASES COMBINED. Think of the holocaust. Think of the Bolshevik collectivization program in the Ukraine. Think of Mao's great leap forward. Think of Pol Pot. Is it purely coincidental that leftists who have historically been in sympathy with such regimes are also the ones who want to impose gun control? It's a powerful lobby and very influential in the media. The letters to the editor that appear in all the local papers don't just get there by accident. Where do these lobby groups get their money? That's something I've always wanted to know.
Looking at the picture of the murder gave me an entirely different feeling. As a Catholic I was always taught that no matter how evil a person is I should love him and save my hatred for his sin. But I couldn't help hoping the evil creature in the picture is roasting in Hell.
While the gun contol lobby seizes on the opportunity to push its agenda an opportunity to learn from the experience is lost. I don't know enough yet about his mental stuation to comment on his logic, but I do know one thing. Just because somebody is crazy it doesn't mean they are stupid. If he had known that there was a good chance that someone with a gun would interrupt his rampage he might have given up his plans.
As I said, I have never been tempted to own a gun. But I am not against the idea in principle. As a cab driver my first line of defense has been the power door lock and an iron rule not to let anyone into the cab without getting a good look. The second line of defense, on the rare occassions when I make a misjudgment, is to use my wits. It worked for twenty five years so it wasn't a bad system. Employees of gas bars, convenience stores and so on are especially vulnerable because they don't have gate control. Any crook can walk in at any time secure in the knowledge that the person behind the counter is at his mercy. They might as well put a sign on the door saying, "Rob me." The police endlessly advise us not to resist. And if you do the criminal might sue you. In other words, if the crook doesn't rob you in the traditional way he might get the judge to collect for him. In Canada we seem to be further advanced along the road to emasculization than the U.S.so you will never see a sign on the door saying, "Protected by Smith and Wesson" here. Too bad. There was one time a crackhead threatened me with a needle. I told him that if he jabbed me with his needle I would break his arm. He abruptly exited the tax.
How all this applies in the case of the Virginia Tech atrocity is that as an increasingly domesticated populace we have lost the will to resist forces of evil. Since the abandonment of our Christian underpinnings we have even repudiated the idea that there is such a thing as evil. But there is, and we have just seen one of his many faces. Being a peaceful person is not the same as being a pacifist. Good men have not only a right but a responsibility to kill an evil person.