The good old days

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.