Cautious (cautious!) optimism

OK, so it has become apparent from the various comments and emails from friends that I've kind of been obsessing a wee bit over the American election, and have expressed sentiments about Barack Obama that verge on the worshipful.

And what I have to say to that is ... well, ya got me. True enough.

I will however stop quite short of getting myself the Obama Cabbage Patch doll, an image of which my friend Arlene kindly sent me. And I hereby forbid anyone to get one of these for me for Christmas! My admiration for the Senator does have limits ... and besides, as you can see, the doll really bears almost no resemblance to him. In fact, if it looks like anyone at all, it's Gary Coleman. (Anyone making a Whad'you talking bout? joke in the comments will be banned from this blog.)

Incidentally, there are also Cabbage Patch dolls for Sarah Palin and John McCain:

I think the McCain doll is the most lifelike, don't you?

In other news, I'm starting to nurse some cautious optimism. (Cautious optimism! Did you hear that, Fates? CAUTIOUS! Really, hardly optimism at all! Far be it for me to tempt the wrath of the guy from high atop the thing ...). There's a lot of back-and-forthing among the various pundits of late, pointing to Obama's static numbers, and a narrowing of his lead in some polls. However, things do look much better when you look at the electoral map. While I generally tend to find the whole electoral college system kind of fukakta, I'm taking some comfort in it now. Obama needs 270 electoral votes to take the election. At the time of this posting, a tally of the states in which he has a double-digit lead in the polls gives him 254; a tally including states with a single-digit lead gives him 375. Conversely, McCain's two-digit lead states give him 118, and with the rest he has 157. Which means that, to win on Tuesday, he has to take 113 electoral votes away from states in which Obama leads. Obama on the other hand has to cinch 16 votes, which he can do if he takes Ohio, where he's currently leading by six points.

I just want to conclude by assuring the Guy High Atop The Thing that I offer these numbers as an entirely neutral curiosity and am not making predictions or suggestion that anything here means anything at all.

Wassup? ... parte the seconde

Remember that Budweiser ad where all the friends are calling each other and yelling "Wassup?" into the phone? Remember how incredibly irritating that got? Especially when it went into its predictable popular culture half-life and everyone you knew was yelling "Wassup??" at you until you started feeling vaguely homicidal?

I blame Budweiser, because the ad was based on a short film that made the festival circuits, and had it not been picked up as a beer ad it might have remained a subcultural phenomenon (with a revival after the rise of YouTube, to be certain).

Several days ago, the original cast of the original film short posted a "sequel" on YouTube. And speaking as someone who went twitchy for many years on hearing "wassup?", this is really worth a watch ....

Ozymandias in Dubai

On the radio this morning was a report that the global economic downturn and the fall in oil prices is having an effect in the Arab city of Dubai, that notoriously opulent oasis of wealth and excess in the middle of the desert. The most significant fallout would seem to be the delaying of construction of a one kilometer-tall office tower. No, that’s not a typo—one kilometer, which incidentally, is twice as tall as the World Trade Center was. I’m not sure if this report referred to the ongoing construction of the Burj Dubai skyscraper, projected to top out at 700-800 meters, or another project entirely; either way, even in its uncompleted form, the Burj Dubai has topped the CN Tower.

I suppose there’s a Tower of Babel reference to be made here, but the image that’s sticking in my mind—the one that always sticks in my mind when I see pictures of Dubai—isn’t so much a tower crashing down as one deserted and desiccated in the middle of an empty wasteland. Like many of the nations of the Middle East, Dubai survives—and flourishes—on oil money. It is touted as the fastest growing city in the world, having grown in a very short space of time from a small, dusty burg to a gleaming metropolis that features some of the most daring and innovative (and in some cases, ugly) engineering and architecture in the world. It has built, among other things, an indoor ski hill, an underwater hotel, and a man-made archipelago of islands that shape a map of the world.

There’s a line somewhere between architecture that celebrates the nobility of the human spirit and that which articulates the vulgarity of excess. I’m not certain where that line gets drawn, but I’m reasonably certain Dubai has pole-vaulted over it. In some circles, the city is celebrated as the vindication of free-range capitalism, with its exponential growth facilitated by zero percent in corporate taxes and one hundred percent foreign ownership of property allowed. Similarly, its enthusiasts point to the fact that, despite being a Muslim city, has access to every form of vice from oceans of booze to hot and cold running hookers (this, presumably, vindicating the Fukuyama argument that capitalism in its purest form pulls the teeth of tyranny).

I read a remarkable book this summer by Alan Weisman titled The World Without Us, in which he poses a hypothetical question: if every human being on earth were to disappear tomorrow, what would become of all the structures we left behind? In other words, how long would our fingerprint remain on the world once we were no longer around to maintain it? How long before the earth reabsorbed all the monuments to our existence?

The short answer is: surprisingly quickly. Weisman’s book is one of those remarkable hybrid creations—part thought experiment, part environmental disquisition, part dystopian meditation—that leaves the reader with a striking series of images. Granted, I have always been drawn to post-apocalyptic novels that imagine a world shorn of most of the human race, but Weisman takes it in another direction altogether and reminds us of the transience of human creations.

I thought of Weisman’s book this morning when hearing about Dubai on the radio, because I cannot see images of that city without seeing it as a monument to oil-based wealth—wealth that is, by extension, non-renewable after a certain point. Depending on who you listen to, at our current rate of consumption we’re good for another century or so or already looking at the prospect of massive decline in the coming years. This latter position is that of the “peak oilers,” groups arguing that we are coming to, or have already past, the point of peak oil retrieval, and that we will be seeing dramatically diminishing returns that will lead to a global energy crisis. Their detractors call this suggestion mere doom-saying, and suggest that world oil reserves are far healthier than the apocalyptos would have us believe.

I wouldn’t know about that, but … um … the oil will run out one day, right? We’re all in agreement about that? Anyway: with that in mind, I cannot look at pictures of Dubai without seeing them as they’ll appear at some stage in the future … empty, cracking, broken glass, the streets reclaimed by desert. I’m at heart an optimist, and so I have faith in people to rise to challenges—as we’re faced with right now, environmentally and otherwise—but the seeming inevitability of Dubai’s fall, its transformation one day into a broken monument of glass and steel in the midst of an empty desert puts me in mind of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a Traveler from an antique land,

Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.

Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Autumn in St. John's

The importance of being earnestly Canadian

Before I say anything else about Passchendaele, let’s establish one point of unequivocal praise: as a director, Paul Gross has got some game. I’m speaking here in terms of what the film nerds call mise en scene—basically, the composition of shots, or to literally translate, “setting in scene.” He did an extraordinary job of the film’s general look, be it the pastoral sequences on the Alberta prairies or the brutality of the crater-pitted Belgian countryside. From a purely aesthetic perspective, Passchendaele is a triumph. From a narrative and story perspective ... well, not so much.

I really, really wanted to love this film. And when I say this, I mean I wanted to love this film from the moment I heard that Paul Gross was doing a film about the travails of the Canadian Army in WWI. I love Paul Gross, and I love Canadian military history. In spite of the fact that I speak from the political left, I’m all about the Canadian military, now and historically. I’m a military history junkie, and one of my favourite books is Pierre Berton’s Vimy. I think Canadians undervalue this tradition, and we really should celebrate the fact that we have one of the best trained armed forces in the world. There’s a moment in the film, present in the trailers, that I admit makes me happy—when a Canadian officer tells Sgt. Michael Dunne (Paul Gross’ character) that “the enemy has a name for us ... they call us ‘stormtroopers’.” I admit: right then there was, for me, a moment of unbridled patriotism, something akin to the weird validation I felt yesterday morning when I heard an American foreign policy expert tell David Frum on CBC Radio that “the Canadian forces in Afghanistan have behaved magnificently.” Yes, I would imagine they have. The Canadian Armed Forces have a remarkable history, which effectively started in WWI, but progressed through Operation Torch and Juno Beach in WWII, the Korean War, and through the various peacekeeping duties assumed in Vietnam, Cyprus, the Balkans, Rwanda, and elsewhere. A military that has produced the likes of Generals Lewis Mackenzie, Romeo Dallaire, and Rick Hillier has no cause to be humble.

[Note to readers: what follows for the next two paragraphs is me indulging in a dilettante-esque recapitulation of some WWI history, a digression of the sort my students are all too familiar with. Feel free to skip it].

Or generals like Sir Arthur Currie for that matter, our Canadian supreme commander in WWI. Marginalized by his British superiors earlier in the war, he was given increasing autonomy in part as a result of Prime Minister Robert Borden’s repeated insistence that Canadian troops not be subjected to the hidebound dicta of the British command, which resulted in such catastrophes as the Battle of the Somme. But Currie was also given freer reign as it became clear that Canadian troops could accomplish what the British and French forces could not. This did not set them apart from other Commonwealth nations, mind you: Australian and New Zealand troops comported themselves comparably well, leading the British commanders to sniff that life in the colonies obviously toughened these chaps up. But in reality, Canadian forces were not so blindly bound to nineteenth-century military dogma, which entailed putting large numbers of enlisted men under lieutenants and sergeants with no room given for individual initiative. When the principal tactic of warfare was to stand in long lines and blast away at the enemy with muskets at close range, this kind of fierce discipline was what won battles (and what made the Redcoats the most formidable infantry in the eighteenth and nineteenth century). It does not however tend to work that well when confronted with accurate, quick-firing long-range rifles and machine guns; but marching wave after wave of soldiers at a brisk walk into enemy fire was what Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, did in battle after battle (leading a German general to morosely observe that the British soldiers were “lions led by donkeys”).

Given more or less a free hand at Vimy Ridge—which his British superiors did not expect his men to take—Arthur Currie encouraged individual initiative, breaking the massive blocks of soldiers employed in British-style attacks down into smaller squads of eight and four men under the command of corporals and lesser sergeants. This gave the Canadian line both more flexibility and a greater esprit de corps as the smaller squads vied with each other over the successes of the night-time raids on German emplacements in the weeks leading up to the assault on the ridge. These changes, combined with a more flexible and effective system of communication between officers and the troops in the battle and the refinement of the creeping barrage, took Vimy Ridge in mere hours and won for Canadian troops a fearsome reputation on both sides of no-man’s land.

Sorry for the history lecture—in my alternative life where I’m still an academic, I’m a military historian.

All the foregoing I say to emphasize the desire I had to love Passchendaele (and to inform those who might not otherwise know, that I’m a history geek). I was also very concerned that it was going to be very bad, as the trailers made it look like it would commit the typical sins of earnestness and clumsiness that mark so many Canadian filmic projects. Indeed, if you had somehow missed seeing the spelling of “Passchendaele” in the ads and had a general ignorance of WWI, you could be forgiven for thinking the film’s title was “Passion Dale,” for all the lingering pastoral shots of Paul Gross and Catherine Dhavernas. I worried that this film would awkwardly suture a stilted love story onto an overly sincere rah-rah-Canada war narrative. And ... well, it sort of did, but it wasn’t quite as cringe-inducing as I had feared.

For those who don’t want to know details of the film’s plot, here is where I say SPOILER ALERT.

The uncharitable would call this film a vanity project on the part of Paul Gross, but I don’t agree. I honestly believe it was a labour of love for him, and while the distinction between those two things can sometimes get blurry, I applaud his dedication to this project. The problem however is that it becomes more difficult to distance oneself when you’re writer, director, co-producer and star. Paul Gross really needed to step back a little and let some other, subtler hands work on the script. It felt as though he were trying to cram everything possible into the story.

To wit: Paul Gross is Michael Dunne, a sergeant in the CEF. At Ypres, he watches his buddies get taken out by a machine gun nest, which he then blows apart with a grenade, and in a moment that haunts him for the rest of the film—his original sin, if you like—he bayonets through the forehead (ouch) a very young German soldier who was trying to surrender . Unable to reconcile that act with the medal he is awarded, he goes AWOL, is invalided back to Canada, and rather than being tried for desertion is diagnosed with neurasthenia, or shell shock, and assigned to the recruitment office. He falls in love with Sarah, who was his nurse, whose father was killed at Vimy Ridge. Sarah’s younger brother David is in love with Cassie, the daughter of a local doctor. David is asthmatic, and has for that reason been rejected from military service. Cassie’s father effectively tells him that until he sees fit to serve in uniform, he’s not man enough to marry his daughter. Michael Dunne refuses to enlist David, even though his superior officer is willing to look the other way on the asthma.

We discover at this point that Sarah and David’s father, born in Bavaria, had died at Vimy Ridge fighting for the Germans. Apparently Sarah and Michael’s neighbours discover this at the same time as us in the audience, because there is quite suddenly an awful lot of anti-German sentiment expressed, as Sarah loses her job as a nurse and her house has its windows broken and “HUN” painted in red on the walls. We similarly discover that David’s desire to enlist stems as much from his hatred for his father’s choice and his desire to symbolically kill him as it does from satisfying Sarah’s father. Michael has meanwhile come to Sarah’s rescue, of course, spiriting her away from her house and holing her up at his small flat, where she can get clean. Oh, wait—I didn’t mention that Sarah’s addicted to morphine? Sorry: Sarah’s addicted to morphine. She and the sweet and gentle Michael Dunne naturally hook up at this point, and while they’re dallying David gets Sarah’s doctor father to write him a medical note allowing him to enlist. Sarah gets the mistaken impression that it was Michael who enlisted him, so of course Michael re-enlists so that he can protect David. Sarah discovers her mistake and volunteers as a nurse on the Western Front, very conveniently getting assigned to the very place Michael and David end up.

With me so far? The general bones of the narrative are pretty strong, if not particularly original—but then again, one does not go see a war movie, at least not one that is self-consciously “epic,” for originality. The problem, besides this seeming need to cram as much business as possible into the plot, is that much of the above feels extremely stagy and contrived, and the dialogue is at times painfully stilted and awkward. There is, also, something of a requisite tokenism in the Canadian ranks, with a French-Canadian and a native soldier featured fairly prominently. The imagery and symbolism is similarly heavy-handed, with a recurrent bird motif in the form of the kestrel , and a sort of “sins of the father” theme that builds to a rather ham-handed ending sequence. Something we hear about frequently is an occasion where the Germans ostensibly crucified a Canadian soldier against a barn door. Michael Dunne is having none of that however, repeatedly telling people that “artillery explosions can throw bodies into the most bizarre poses.” At this point, the foreshadowing bell goes off in the head, and we know someone’s getting crucified by artillery before the film is out. The question is: is it David or Michael?

As it happens, it’s David. After the hard-pressed Canadian forces repel the first German assault, David goes a little nuts and starts charging after the retreating enemy, somehow making it all the way to their trenches where he finds himself about to be shot by a German officer. Before this can happen, a shell lands in the trench—throwing the duckboards up vertical, with David pinned there by barbed wire (a veritable crown of thorns). What follows could have been a very moving and powerful scene if it had been a bit less painfully symbolic—if David had been wounded in no-man’s land and Michael Dunne had run out to rescue him. Because of course Michael goes to the rescue: at first dodging bullets and mortars, and taking a wound high in the chest. As he nears David however, the German officer calls ceasefire and they all watch in awe as Michael drags himself toward David—again, a potentially powerful moment if it weren’t for the literal crucifixion, to say nothing of the fact that Michael pauses a moment, apparently spent, on his knees in the mud before David. And then of course we have the excruciatingly long sequence of Michael carrying David—still affixed to the cross—back to Canadian lines. I honestly haven't seen such self-indulgent Christ imagery since the closing sequence of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. I suppose we should be grateful the Michael and David weren’t named Peter and Christian.


Considering the symbolic logic in place, it comes as no surprise that David survives and Michael dies from his wounds: expiating his original sin of killing the young German at the film’s start, and sacrificing his life that David may live. It may have been David that was crucified, but the Christ figure comes through pretty clearly at the end.

My problem with all this is that, to paraphrase Rupert Giles, the subtext of the film quite emphatically becomes text. There’s a painful earnestness here: as if Paul Gross was concerned that we might not get it. Well, we got it. Again and again and again. Which is truly a shame, because otherwise Passchendaele is a very noble endeavour. The problem with noble endeavours however is that they often simply don’t make good art.

That being said, I will cop to my own moment of helpless sentimentality: at the very end, when Sarah, Cassie, David and Highway—the native soldier—stand before Michael Dunne’s grave, the final shot shows the lonely grave-marker suddenly surrounded by the gravestones of hundreds of Canadian soldiers. That was when the weeping started for me.

What can I say, I'm weak.

I dunno ... I just don't think I want to triple my salary if I have to pay that extra $121 to the tax man ...

Joe the Plumber just won't go away. I wonder how long it will be before he gets his own action figure.

David Frum guest-hosted The Current on CBC Radio this morning from Washington D.C. He was speaking to a conservative economist whose name I missed just as I pulled into work today, who professed himself "terrified" at the prospect of a Democratic White House and Congress. While this is unsurprising (perhaps I should direct him to my recent blog post about conservatives endorsing Obama, in case he missed the bandwagon), he also trotted out one of those arguments about Obama's tax plan that contains a certain kind of logic I've never understood.

The argument, paraphrased, goes something like this: "You've got the Joe the Plumber type of guy, who works hard, putting in his twelve-hour days so he can buy his own company ... but if he realizes that, once he does that, he'll get hit with higher taxes, is he going to bother?"

I always hear this sort of argument and think to myself "Um ... yes?" Keeping in mind of course that at this point Joe the Plumber is an entirely fictional and hypothetical figure, let's work from the numbers: the average plumber in the U.S., it was reported, earns somewhere in the neighbourhood of $40K-$60K. Under the Obama plan, he would save $1118 in taxes, and $325 under McCain's plan. His projected income, were he to purchase his company, would be around $250K -- a healthy jump, I think we'll all admit. Now, whether that is what his company would earn or what he would himself be making was never made entirely clear; but it still constitutes a fourfold increase in earnings. With McCain's planned tax cuts, he would get back an extra $8,159 -- not chump change. So what is the exhorbitantly high amount of extra taxes he would pay under Obama's plan? $121. Seriously.

Still -- let's say for the sake of argument that he would pay under Obama what he would save under McCain. Is this a serious detriment to making the transition from a $60K job to a $250K job?

All of these numbers, by the bye, come from Parade.com.


In other news, I'm starting to think that Joe Six-Pack and Joe the Plumber are starting to feel lonely, and need an expanded family of working-class cliches. How about Waitress Jane and Joe the Short-Order Cook? Or Joe Trailer Park? I welcome suggestions ...

I want to take my next vacation in Fake America

My favourite moments on The Daily Show are when you can see the absurdity or stupidity of the day's politics get to Jon Stewart, and the facade cracks a little. Sometimes, like on his brilliant appearance on Crossfire, he drops the comedian's mask deliberately; sometimes, like on election night 2004, a certain despair shows through. And then there are those times when you can tell he has been genuinely pissed off, and it adds an extra edge to his satire. Such was the occasion of this past Monday's show, where he reacts to the words of Sarah Palin and some McCain aides when they characterized some parts of America -- especially small towns -- as the "real" America. These they counterpoised to those parts of the country that are "anti" America, or, in Sarah Palin's words: "We believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call 'real' America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

Now, even in a campaign that has been marked by mendacity and polarizing language, these sort of characterizations reach a new low, and you sort of saw that on Monday night on Jon's face. As he clarifies Palin's comments: "So, if small towns are 'real' America, that would make big cities like Washington D.C. and New York City the capitals of 'fake' America -- like the epicenter of fake America, the -- oh, what's the word I'm looking for? -- the 'Ground Zero' if you will of fake America. I'll bet bin Laden feels like a real asshole now! 'What?! I bombed the wrong America?!"

See the full clip here.

As a rather amusing footnote to Palin's comments, I read in the paper this morning that the Republican National Committee has spent some $150,000 on clothing for her -- now that's a small town wardrobe! Even more amusing than this stratospheric spending is where, apparently, most of these clothes were purchased: at, according to the NY Times, "Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Barneys New York and Atelier New York."

Fake America: where your discerning small-town Real American shops for clothes while scanning for terrorists.

Corrections and outrages

Ok, so remember that time I mentioned that Barack Obama had been endorsed by former secretaries of state Kissinger, Eagleburger, Haig and Baker? Turns out I got that one exactly wrong. Oops. I still love the name Eagleburger, though.

Distressingly but utterly unsurprisingly, the endorsement I did get right -- Powell's -- has excited a response from the wingnut right dubbing him "Benedict Powell," and accusing him of endorsing Obama based solely on the consideration of race. A cartoon by Gordon Campbell (not the premier of BC, another one) recreates the famous image of Benedict Arnold, except in blackface and with the caption "Benedict Powell: Race Patriot."



Rush Limbaugh said, "Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race. OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed." (As George Zornick retorts to that, "Powell usually only endorses inexperienced, very conservative, white candidates. He even works for them!") And a pair of particularly idiotic talk-radio wingnuts maintain that Powell is endorsing Obama because "he's tired of being called an 'oreo' ... he wants to be black again ..."

Again, this is hardly surprising, but it is still infuriating. I have little doubt that Colin Powell, like most African-Americans, is heartened by the prospect of a black president. The very fact of Obama's nomination is a seismic event in the history of race in America -- and for what it's worth, there are vast numbers of white people, yours truly included, who feel the same way.

But to suggest that someone like Powell, whose entire career has been marked by thoughtful and cautious deliberation, was moved to this endorsement solely on the basis of skin colour is simply ludicrous.

On the other hand, one of the more entertaining aspects of this campaign, especially since the economic crisis has made people more inclined to look for leadership and substance rather than ad hominem attacks and trivia, has been watching the Rush Limbaughs of the world flail with increasing impotence. Four years ago, watching with increasingy disbelief as Bush's victory mounted, I wondered just what it would take for the U.S. elctorate to come to its senses. I guess we're seeing the answer to that question now.

Obama's new constituency

It is really rather painful to watch the ongoing American election knowing I cannot vote in it. Every time I see an encouraging news report that gives Obama a comfortable lead, or read a column like this one by Charles M. Blow in which he announces that it’s all over but the shouting and the Obamas can start measuring drapes in the Oval, I recall the last two U.S. elections. The margins by which Obama leads (on average) are comparable to those held by Al Gore in 2000, and let’s not forget that the exit polls in 2004 were trending toward John Kerry. Every time someone predicts a blowout for Obama I cringe, infected as I am by the congenital liberal certainty of doom.

On the brighter side of things however, an ongoing source of both hope and amusement has been in seeing conservatives south of the border attacking the McCain campaign or, in some cases, going so far as to endorse Obama.

What conservatives, you ask, are endorsing Obama? Well, none other that the inveterate pro-Iraq War hawk Christopher Hitchens, who writes in Slate that the debates “showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical.” Further, “the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience.” Say what you will about Christopher Hitchens (and I could say a lot), but he does have a way with words.

But it doesn’t end there … Christopher Buckley, scion of William F. Buckley, has also endorsed Obama in a column titled “Sorry Dad, I’m voting Obama.” In it, he says of McCain that his “once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises.” For his pains, Christopher (gotta say, I like the way the Christopher bloc is shaping up here) was turfed from The National Review, a periodical founded by Buckley Sr.

And most recently? Our old friend Colin Powell, formerly Bush’s secretary of state, and the most vocal moderate in Bush’s cabinet—which, to quote John Stewart, also made him “the blackest moderate, the whitest moderate, the tallest moderate, the shortest moderate …” You get the idea. Yes, just yesterday Powell went on Meet the Press and stated that the recent negative campaigning by McCain tipped the balance for him, as he “thought that was over the top,” and “was beyond just good political fighting back and forth.” He further called Obama a "transformational" figure, and that while Powell has a great amount of respect for McCain, it is time for a generational change.

Powell, incidentally, joins other former republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger (seriously), Alexander Haig (who served under Reagan), James Baker (Bush Sr.’s administration) and Lawrence Eagleburger (who also served briefly under Bush Sr.) in endorsing Obama.

(Can I just say that I love the name Eagleburger? It sounds like a lunch special in the Capitol Building cafeteria, something you would order with a side of freedom fries).

Looking back over this list—to say nothing of the condemnations of McCain’s campaign by such staunch conservatives as Kathleen Parker and David Frum—I've got to say, if you’re John McCain you really have to be wondering “just how far from the pack have I strayed?”

Thoughts on voting and why Jack Layton should have let me run his campaign

Another election come and gone, and the shift in the political landscape is both so slight and so expected that one might feel that not voting was forgivable. And indeed it would have been, except for one small problem: not voting is unforgivable.

I polled my second-year class last Thursday, and about half of my students admitted to not voting. (To be fair, only one person in my fourth-year class didn’t vote, so either my senior students are more politically conscientious or more dishonest. I choose to believe the former). This pathetic turnout does not, alas, come as a surprise, as the apathy of voters in the 18-25 range is an oft-repeated statistic around election time. And as Rick Mercer pointed out in a recent rant, it is exactly this apathy that gives government carte blanche to ignore the concerns of young Canadians—and that if they should ever get their shit together and represent at the ballot box, they’d be a force to be reckoned with.

Of course, many see this seeming antipathy to voting as evidence of a more pervasive apathy and narcissism on the part of the Facebook generation. This perception is not however borne out in reality: 15-24 year olds, according to Statistics Canada, are the most likely of all age groups to be volunteering their time; fifty-five percent volunteer an average of 139 hours a year, and four out of five in that age group follow the news on a regular basis. Indeed, as Patrick White notes in last weekend’s Globe and Mail, the very digital culture often decried as the source of apathy in fact facilitates and aids this activism.

This energy does not however translate into voting, apparently. Why? The most obvious answer lies in a comparison between our recent election and the upcoming American one. Barack Obama has mobilized the youth vote in a way many (and I grudgingly include myself with this cynical lot) once thought unlikely, if not actually impossible. Young voters in the U.S. have responded with extraordinary enthusiasm to a charismatic and eloquent candidate, and to an exceptionally deft use of internet and wireless technology—their lingua franca—as a key campaign tool. The Obama campaign has consistently caught his opponents flat-footed in this specific area, and have changed the nature of campaigning as a result.

In terms of having a candidate who energizes the electorate, this can and has happened here. Drop a Trudeau into the mix and see what happens (figuratively speaking—as likeable and attractive as Justin is, I have yet to see evidence of his father’s intellect, charisma and audacity).

It would also, of course, help to speak to the youth vote to get those voters interested—which is why I would have liked to have been Jack Layton’s campaign manager in either of our last two elections.

Jack (I’d say to him), listen here: you can talk all you want about running for prime minister, but honestly, no one takes that seriously. You’re not going to be PM. But as the saying goes, you’re not going to win, so you can’t lose. And seriously: repeating the same-old NDP talking points isn’t going to win over anyone not already inside your camp.

What you can do is mobilize the most traditionally apathetic group of voters in a way that will have Harper and Dion running scared. And you can do that by making the central plank of your campaign platform about post-secondary education and the funding for it. To wit, a three-point plan:

1. Amnesty on all extant student loans.
2. Nation-wide tuition freezes, and tuition rollbacks on the most expensive universities and colleges.
3. The re-introduction of national grants for exceptional and low-income students.

Unveil this three-point plan—hell, just unveil the first point!—and you will see young Canadians respond like never before.

Of course, the other parties will attack this plan as a stunt ... which, admittedly, it sort of is. HOWEVER—and this is a big however—there are very real reasons why this plan is a good idea. I’m no economist, but it strikes me that there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of twenty- and thirty-somethings paying hundreds of dollars a month in student loans. Pop quiz: what would be a better economic stimulus, relieving young people of a proportionally massive financial burden that prevents them from investing or buying houses, or a tax break for higher-income Canadians?

Furthermore, you can frame this plan not as a handout but as investment in the knowledge economy. Remind Messrs. Harper and Dion that the greatest period of economic expansion and prosperity in North America exactly coincided with the greatest expansion of and enrolment in post-secondary institutions. Say as well that greater funding for universities and colleges will allow them to raise academic standards because they won’t be as obsessed with student retention. Speaking as an English professor, I can attest to the fine line we walk between maintaining academic rigor and not scaring off students by being too rigorous. Our funding is tied to enrolment: we are thus, both implicitly and explicitly, enjoined from flunking out too many students or driving them into other programs by being too demanding. By giving universities and colleges more breathing room to reduce class sizes, hire new faculty and raise academic standards, we improve the quality of our graduates—which only benefits the country and the economy.

Keep in mind here that I am no neutral observer, but an academic and thus deeply invested in the health and vigour of this country’s universities and colleges. That being said however, I’d stake a lot on the bet that this strategy would result in the best NDP showing at the federal level ever. You might even become the official Opposition. Meanwhile, however much the other parties might honk about gimmicks and stunts, they would have no choice but to respond—and then they’re playing by your script, forced to court the voters you’ve energized.

Of course, I’m not Jack Layton’s campaign manager, and am unlikely ever to be. But to anyone in the 18-25 age range reading this—both those who voted and those who did not—I challenge you all to make this a critical issue in the next election. Because, hey ... it’s a minority government again. An election could happen any day now.

Some thoughts on Joe the Plumber and Horatio Alger

I switched on the presidential debate about five minutes in last night, and was almost immediately bewildered by the repeated invocation of "Joe the Plumber" as the epitome, apparently, of working-class America. My three main thoughts, in the order that I had them, were "Who the fuck is Joe the Plumber?" "Is he Joe Six-Pack's brother-in-law, or something?" and, "Why is every working-class American cliche named 'Joe'?"

I have since learned that Joe the Plumber is a real person -- Joe Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio -- who asked a question of Obama about his tax plan. The nub of the matter, and what McCain tried to hammer Obama about, was that Joe wants to buy the business he works for, but that if he succeeds in doing so he will then likely be earning over $250,000 a year -- which is the point at which Obama's proposed tax hike kicks in. Joe is thus ambivalent , because while he is currently in the bracket that will see his taxes go down under Obama's plan, he has his eye on a future success that will see him (again, under Obama's plan) being taxed more.

Joe the Plumber, thanks to John McCain's adoption of his quandary in last night's debate, has suddenly become a national figure; even before last night, he was interviewed on Fox News, in which he said "[Obama] said he wants to distribute wealth. And I mean, I'm not trying to make statements here, but, I mean, that's kind of a socialist viewpoint. You know, I work for that. You know, it's my discretion who I want to give my money to, it's not the government decide that I make a little too much and so I need to share it with other people. I just -- that's not the American Dream."

Ah, the American Dream ... the reason I'm kind of fascinated with Joe the Plumber is that he's a living embodiment of the contradiction inherent in the American Dream. First of all, kudos to Joe for having worked so hard to be in a position to be one of the few who can genuinely claim to represent the substance of that dream, the rags-to-riches narrative that Horatio Alger used in his two hundred and seventy dime novels about penniless but spunky young men who rose to be captains of industry. The problem is, Joe the Plumber is the exception to the rule, and Obama phrased it rather well in last night's debate when he pointed out "five years ago, when you were in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then."

One of the great problems at the heart of the American Dream is that it makes lower-incomes reluctant to tax millionaires, because they cling to the hope that they might one day be millionaires. Joe the Plumber's dilemma exemplifies this equivocation: do you want to be more heavily taxed, proportionally, when you have less money or when you have more? I suppose the Republican (and Conservative) answer is "none of the above", but with two wars, crumbling infrastructure and a $700B bailout in the works, that seems less and less feasible. That raging socialist Oliver Wendell Holmes himself once said “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”*

Of course, Obama didn't do himself any favours when he said to Joe "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they've got a chance to success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." Ouch -- and a bell went off at Fox News and McCain campaign headquarters (I know, tomato, toh-mah-toh), if the number of times McCain used the phrase "spread the wealth around" during the debate is any indication. I know that in a certain part of the conservative mind "spreading the wealth around" = "communism," but can we not perhaps agree that this equation is both simplistic and disingenuous? That government's principal function, be it big or small, is to redistribute wealth (i..e. taxes) for roads, bridges, running water, the civil service, and education? To say nothing of that little government agency called the Department of Defense?

I don't know anyone who likes paying taxes or who sends in their forms in April with a cheerful smile, and I certainly remember feeling blindsided when I looked at how much was taken off my first real paycheck. And this is all perhaps an academic argument for me, as I'm unlikely to ever be in the quarter-million dollar salary range (or to be taxed by the IRS rather than Revenue Canada, for that matter), but if I was looking to make that kind of money ten or twenty years down the road and I could choose whether to pay proportionally more tax now or then, that would be a no-brainer for me.

___________________________________________

*Thomas Friedman had an excellent column on taxes and patriotism recently. Read it here.

Deja vu all over again ... and again and again ...

Let's take stock: we have a minority Conservative government, a hobbled Liberal party with a weak leader likely on his way out, and a populace disaffected by small-minded, nasty campaigning.

What was it Marx said about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce? Obviously, he was never very familiar with Canadian politics, or he'd have said something to the effect of farce being all around us. I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my bones ...

Nothing like election results to spoil the idealistic high of election day.

Twelve things I want out of this election

1. I want a government that features those with an interest in and talent for governing in control, with the ideologues relegated to the opposition or back-benches. Don't get me wrong: ideologues have their place in government. They are invaluable in presenting the minority or unpopular opinion, in acting as government's conscience and in keeping government honest; but they also tend to be the ones who, when in power, rule with the arrogance that says they know better than everyone else. We saw this with two catastrophic Ontario governments in a row from opposite ends of the political spectrum -- Bob Rae's NDP and Mike Harris' Conservatives -- and we see it in so many of Stephen Harper's statements. I want a government, in other words, that governs by thoughtful consensus and not by fiat.
   
   
2. I want a government that will stop thinking in terms of "taxpayers" and reintroduce the concept of "citizens."
   
   
3. I want a government that recognizes who is in charge. In her first Massey lecture this past Sunday in St. John's, Margaret Atwood reminded us that that government are public servants, and they are there to work for us. I want a government that will not only remember this, or deign to acknowledge it on occasion, but will make it their most basic philosophical principle.
   
   
4. I want a government that recognizes that a society's health and vibrancy is directly reflected in the health and vibrancy of its art and culture.
   
   
5. I want a government and an opposition that will talk to each other and the Canadian people as adults with fully functioning intellects, whose fears and concerns deserve careful and meaningful consideration and discussion rather than petulant grousing, partisan blinders and ad hominem attacks.
   
   
6. I want a government and an opposition that knows the difference between genuine issues on one hand, and trivia, gossip, gaffes and blunders on the other -- and which treats them accordingly.
   
   
7. I want a government that raises the bar for Canadians, and challenges us to rise to the occasion.
   
   
8. I want a government that listens to the words and voices of Canadians instead of polling numbers.
   
   
9. I want a government whose social agenda is in inverse proportion to individuals' and groups' wealth and influence -- a government whose first task is to help the least of us.
   
   
10. I want a government that will offer creative solutions to our most intractable problems. As someone left of center, I am in principle in favour of larger government, but I must acknowledge that too often the expedient solution, from welfare to education to corporate collapse, is to simply throw money at a problem ... which inevitably leads to graft, to waste, and to the justifiable rage on the part of Canadians at such profligacy. I want to see, in other words, solutions to problems that involve more that writing a cheque. I want to see, in other words, brains at work in my goverment.
    
    
11. I want a government with a vision of government that is more than an ad hoc series of loosely related and opportunistic policies. I want political discourse to be about more than taxes and partisanship.
    
    
12. I want a government whose leaders will sit down and remember what optimism and hope and desire to help the nation got them into public service to begin with -- and if none of those elements were there to begin with, to get the hell out of politics.

Because, seriously -- why on earth would be we willing to accept anything less from those we entrust with the leadership of our country?

Zach's turn -- happy birthday!

Yup, in an effort to streamline the birthday party thing, my brother and sister-in-law have clustered their children's birthday's at the end of July. A mere year ago, Zachary came into the world, and spent much of his first year with a deeply suspicious and slightly bewildered expression on his face. As you can see from the pictures below, he's lost that bewilderment and is now jumping into the world with both feet. Look at those eyes!

Happy birthday, Zachary!

Supervillain round-up, part the firste

OK, so I'm a little late on this post, having let a week and a half go by since seeing The Dark Knight without posting my review. Suffice to say, I was blown away (and apparently inspired to rhyme cheesily and inadvertently). If you haven't seen it yet, everything you've heard hyped is true, especially about Heath Ledger's sublimely chilling performance.

Do I need to offer a spoilers warning?

More on Heath in a moment, because I first need to cite the all-around strong cast: Maggie Gyllenhal as Rachel Dawes is a welcome change from Katie Holmes (would that we could have had Maggie in Batman Begins!); she plays the role with just enough snark and steel, and a very subtle pathos as well. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, the elder statesmen of the film, bring gravitas to what would otherwise be merely functional characters. Gary Oldman, unlike in Begins, is given some nice moments on screen.

It's perhaps a bit of a cruel irony that, having gotten the exposition out of the way in Batman Begins, Batman (or rather, "the Batman"), tends to be the least interesting character present. And with more dialogue than in the previous film, Christian Bale's hard-boiled rasp when in the cowl gets really irritating after a while. That being said, I still think Bale's the best Batman we've had yet -- if for no other reason that his moments as Bruce Wayne are so well drawn.

But I do think that one of the things that most impressed me about The Dark Knight was Aaron Eckhart's performance as Harvey Dent, later transformed into the villain Two-Face. The more I think about it, the more impressed I am, largely because Dent is presented in the film as a pretty one-dimensional character, and possesses some of the most stilted dialogue--as well as having some of the cheesiest things said about him (yeah, he's the white knight, as opposed to ... what was that other type of knight, again?)--in what is otherwise a pretty solid script. What's impressive is that Eckhart overcomes the poor hand he's been dealt in the script, and brings to Harvey Dent a depth and sympathy that few actors could accomplish with those raw materials. All of which makes his transformation to Two-Face the more poignant.

If I have a broad criticism for the film, it's that it tries to cram too much in. Dent's descent into insanity and subsequent criminal career as an agent of violent chance should have been the substance of the next film. As it was, having spent nearly two hours dealing with the gleeful machinations of the Joker, the film feels as though it does a somewhat uncomfortable shift and we get a hurried half-hour dispatching the Harvet Dent story. It felt tacked on: though done well for all that and containing some of the best moments of the film (this was where Gary Oldman's aforementioned acting moments appeared), it was a waste of such a subtly realized character.

But back to the best part of the film: with Heath Ledger, we get a raw, terrifying Joker, all the more frightening for his complete unpredictability, but also for the fact that as capricious as he is, he always has a plan. He's like Richard III, without the superego. Ledger's performance is also oddly restrained: whatever the temptation in playing such a character to chew the scenery (I'm looking at you, Jack), he's at his most frightening when he's quietest. I think the moment that sums it up best for me is just a brief instant when, upon seeing the batmobile for the first time as it causes some carnage to his henchmen, the Joker's head swivels to follow its path ... and he utters a interested "Hmm." In that moment, we see his mind take this new element in stride, curious but not shaken; it's a very subtle counterpoint to Jack Nicholson's oft-quoted "Where does he get such wonderful toys?"

That being said, I think that comparing the Christopher Nolan Batman with the Tim Burton Batman (we'll conveniently forget Joel Schummacher's attempts, shall we?) is a bit of a fallacy. It's like trying to compare apples and Vespa scooters. Both are great artistic accomplishments, and both changed the nature of the superhero film. And both have iconic moments: the shot of Heath Ledger's Joker dressed as a nurse walking through a hospital parking lot as the hospital explodes behind him will one day find itself on the cover of a film studies textbook.


BUT .... from the sublime to the ridiculous:

In what has to rank in the top five idiotic op-ed pieces I've ever encountered, Andrew Klavan writes in The Wall Street Journal "What Bush and Batman Have in Common." Seriously:

"The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past."

I'm honestly at a bit of a loss as to how to approach this, other than to repeat, Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? First of all, I'm not entirely certain what film Mr. Klavan was watching, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the same one I was. What is brilliant about Nolan's treatment here is, in part, a return to the central paradox of the Batman mythology: that he and the Joker are two sides of the same coin, that the Batman's vigilantism has less to do with altruism than his own borderline psychosis -- he fights the way he does as a means of confronting his own demons, and as a result is always already ambivalent about their methods and effects. Secondly, the "need" for vigilantism in The Dark Knight has less to do with an extraordinary enemy than with the fact that the system itself is corrupt and broken. The Batman is an acceptable ally to Chief Gordon and Harvey Dent because they know they simply cannot trust any of their own people.

Thirdly, while the Joker is undoubtedly a terrorist, he is no ideologue -- except insofar as anarchy and chaos are the basis of an ideology. Part of his glee lies in forcing people into situations where they make choices that dehumanize them. One of the great pivot-points of the story is the Joker's version of the Prisoner's Dilemma: two ferries dead in the water, wired with explosives, each of them with a detonator that will blow the other ship up. If neither ferry blows the other up by a certain point, the Joker will destroy them both. On one ferry, normal civillians; on the other, hardened criminals being transported. The point of the episode is that both ships choose humanity, much to the Joker's puzzlement and disappointment. Which choice do you think the Bush Administration have made, given their systematic dehumanization of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib? (For the record, the orange jumpsuits worn by the prisoners made my mind jump to Gitmo while watching).

Sigh. Here's a few more choice tidbits:

"The Dark Knight, then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's 300, The Dark Knight is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans."

"Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth?"

"Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course."

"And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror."


I think my favourite moment is when he cites 300 as an exemplar of "the values and necessities" needed to fight terrorism. I hope Bush reads this and realizes he's only got a few more months in which he can kick the Iranian ambassador into a well.

I read this column incredulously, wondering what the hell has happened to The Wall Street Journal that this kind of tripe gets printed? And then I remembered: Rupert Murdoch bought it.
Speaking of people who need to be kicked into a well.

The President that might have been

Watch this. Please.



This is exactly the kind if call to arms that Roosevelt issued when he said "There is nothing to fear but fear itself," and when Kennedy said "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." It heartens me that Stephane Dion seems to be working in the same vein.

When did we become so afraid of vision? Of big answers to big problems?

Happy Birthday, Morgan!

My wee niece Morgan turns 3 today, which seems impossible to me ... I'm pretty sure it was just yesterday that she was a tiny little loaf wrapped up in a hospital sheet. And look at her now!

Happy birthday, Miss Morgan! I'm so sorry I can't be there to celebrate #3 with you ....

Things I considered posting these last two and a half months

Oops, there went a week without a post. Did I worry you, my last three or four readers? Well, I won't make extravagant promises about returning to the old frequency with which I posted once upon a time, but I'll try to maintain a minimum of one post a week. Hopefully that will get me back into the blogging habit.

At any rate, my online silence didn't come about for lack of postings. Quite frequently topics presented themselves to me, but as a result of busyness, ennui, or simple laziness -- all coupled with the blog-killing tendencies of Facebook (damn you, Facebook!) -- these posting ideas receded into the horizon of my thoughts, finally becoming old news-enough that it felt odd to waste electrons on them.

So here's the Coles Notes, then -- all the stuff in a nutshell that was on my mind since the beginning of April. There's more than this, actually ... these are just the greatest hits, as it were.


1. Puffins, Icebergs, and my Mom.

My lovely mother visited me for a week in mid-May and was treated, much to my chagrin, to some of the most frigid May weather I've ever experienced here. She was also treated, much to her delight, to the biggest crop of icebergs in recent memory. Everywhere we drove, as long as we could see the ocean, we could see icebergs. To cap it all off, we drove down to Ferryland one day (the weather had mercifully warmed somewhat), and walked the trail past a massive grounded berg; and then drove to Bay Bulls and took the O'Brien's boat tour to get up close and personal with the ice ... and see puffins. Which, I must add, are the most comical of animals, even edging out penguins and ducks. Watching them try to take off from the water and end up skipping like stones while trying to get their speed up counts as one of the most hilarious experiences of my life.



2. My Father, the (Not-so-Ancient) Mariner

While my mother was visiting the Rock and bundling up against the cold, my father was in St. Maarten in the Caribbean preparing to sail with some friends to New York City. A friend of my parents, a member of the same yacht club as them, has been tooling around the Caribbean with his wife on their 36-foot sailboat for a few years. Unfortunately, the wife's health has deteriorated, precluding further shipboard life ... leaving the husband with the task of bringing the boat home. Enter my dad and two other sailor friends, who agreed to help. For somewhere in the neighbourhood of four weeks they sailed north, with a stop in Bermuda, braving everything from Coleridge-esque doldrums ("Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, / 'Twas sad as sad could be, / And we did speak only the break / The silence of the sea") to a few genuine Atlantic gales. Said my father when all was done, he was happy he was able to do this ... and now, he'll never do it again.


3. The Endless Democratic Primary

Yeah, I'm not saying any more than that. I'm just happy we're on to the next stage.


4. My First Time as External Examiner

Back in, oh, April I think, I got an email from Kristen saying that Tim Blackmore -- a friend, and professor of Media Studies at Western in the faculty she works in -- had been casually asking her about when I might be visiting London this summer. I had just booked a flight for late June, but she couldn't remember the dates exactly, so she suggested I email him directly. This I did, telling him when I'd be in town. And received this response, in I think minutes (those who know Tim will recognize his markedly calm and retiring manner): "AHA AHA!!! I want to borrow you, son, for a verrrrry important, important I say, defense! (Some Foghorn rolled in last night)."

The long and short of it was, Tim needed someone as an external on a Masters thesis he had advised, and given that there is no money available for Masters' externals for travel &c, the fact that I would be conveniently in town anyway rocketed me to the top of the list (hey, it's an honour just being nominated).

I was, needless to say, quite delighted to be asked -- it was my first external examination, the thesis looked cool, and I was happy to do a favour for someone I hold in high estimation both professionally and otherwise. The thesis in question, "Augmented Ability, Integrated Identity: Understanding Sapienism, Adaptive Technology, and the Construction of Disability," was written by a quite remarkable student named Jeffrey Preston, whose muscular dystrophy has confined him to a wheelchair since a young age. Did I say confined? I mean he has been liberated by his wheelchair, a technological device that gives him a freedom of mobility he would not otherwise have. His thesis very thoughtfully reconsiders the cultural values and stereotypes attached to disability, and focuses on the way in which dystopian narratives of technology actually contribute to the negative perception of such devices as wheelchairs. Suffice it to say, it was a remarkable piece of work for someone that early in his academic career.


5. Rachael Ray: Terrorist

This one's my favourite.

You are probably familiar with that annoyingly saccharine Food Network personality Rachael Ray; what you might not know is that she's a terrorist sympathizer. In addition to her other (too many) appearances on television, Ray has been schilling for Dunkin' Donuts. In an ad for some iced coffee product or other, she is wearing a patterned scarf. Conservative pundette and blogger Michelle Malkin -- who now has the dubious distinction of being slightly more insane than Anne Coulter -- posted on her blog that the scarf in question is in fact a "keffiyeh" of the sort routinely worn by Arab men (Yasser Arafat would be the most obvious example here). OK ... I can see the resemblence ... but Malkin, making with the insane, goes further to note that this is an example of "jihadi chic" and "hate couture," and that she hopes Ray's fashion choice "was spurred more by ignorance than ideology."

Seriously? Seriously. Malkin later defended her comments by claiming that western designers have deliberately marketed such scarves as statements of solidarity with Palestinians. Even if this is true -- and I deem it highly suspect -- the easy conflation of Arab=terrorist, or sympathy with Palestine=support of Hamas is rhetoric of the worst, and laziest, kind. As one person commenting on this idiocy mildly observed, "what about all the Arab men who wear the keffiyeh who aren't terrorists?" Let me dig that particular ration out of my notes .... (Incidentally, once of my students wore a nearly identical scarf to class this week. I congratulated her on bringing America one step closer to destruction).

What makes matters worse is that, in an act of cowardice that makes the Lion in The Wizard of Oz look like John Wayne, Dunkin' Donuts pulled the ad. I wish we had one in St. John's so I could boycott it.

When irony fails

So this morning I was contemplating a return to blogging here after my rather unintentional hiatus, rolling around a tongue-and-cheek entry about the controversy over the recent The New Yorker cover, in which Barack Obama is depicted in Islamic regalia and his wife Michelle in circa-1968 Blank Panther gear. I was considering writing a mock-serious constitutional discussion saying that conservatives afraid that Obama's secretly a radical Muslim shouldn't worry, because while he'll certainly convert the executive branch to Wahabism, he'll have difficulty getting around the separation of powers to do the same to the legislative branch ... and indeed that the sheer difficulty of getting the senate to confirm his jihadist cabinet and Supreme Court nominees would effectively bog down his administration for pretty much the entirety of his first term.


Or something to that effect. Anyway, I was kicking this around in my head as I walked back from the student center with my lunch, only to sit down at my computer to see this: in an online poll conducted by WorldNetDaily, 59% of respondents said the image "isn't too far from the dangerous truth about the Obama family."


America, meet satire. Satire, meet America.


Of course, given that WorldNetDaily is an online forum that stands slightly to the right of Genghis Khan, this should not come as a surprise. What bothers me is that a lot of people on the left, including the Obama campaign -- which called the cover "tasteless and offensive" -- are taking offense at what is very obviously a satirical answer to the right-wing attacks on Obama's patriotism (why doesn't he wear a flag pin??), his wife (do we really want a militant black First Lady??), and of course the ongoing harping on his middle name and repeated suggestion that he's secretly a Muslim ... right down to their adorable little fist bump, labelled on Fox News as a "terrorist fist jab." Um ... what?


Part of my annoyance here is fueled by my increasingy frustration with what seems to be Obama's gradual shrinking from the kind of principled stands he started with. He's wearing the lapel pin now ... honestly, the presence or lack of which should never have been a story, never mind a major issue, but once it did he was going to get grief over it either way -- if he didn't wear it, he wasn't patriotic, and if he did, he was a flip-flopper. So why not leave it off? But no ... I swear to god, if he dresses up in camo and goes hunting a la John Kerry, I'm pitching myself off signal hill. (Incidentally, scrutinize the picture of John McCain here: do you see a flag pin? I guess he hates America, too).


I won't catalogue any of the other ways in which Obama has started pandering, reversing positions, and otherwise lurching to the right -- lord knows, you can pick all that up from conservative pundits gleefully fitting the senator out for a pair of flip-flops.

No, I'm just disappointed that his campaign felt compelled to respond to The New Yorker with the language of offense when this was a golden opportunity to rise above the fray like he has at times in the past: to point out that this is satire, and to further note the simplistic thought that underwrites the assumptions being satirized -- that Michelle Obama's ostensible lack of "pride" in America translates into black militancy, that a reluctance to be a jingoistic flag-waver translates into a hatred of country, that being Muslim translates into extremism. I would dearly love to hear Obama stand up and say, "I am not offended that people think I may be Muslim. But I am offended, as all Americans should be, by the suggestion that being Muslim necessarily makes you a potential terrorist. It's the equivalent of seeing every rural Midwesterner as a potential Timothy McVeigh."

Because, really, that's what The New Yorker is saying -- it's pointing to the absurdity and indeed stupidity of that mode of thought.

I suppose Jonathan Swift is lucky he's not writing today. Half the readers of "A Modest Proposal" would try to get him arrested, and the other half would be eagerly flicking on the Food Network in hopes of picking up some recipes.

Art therapy

I've started painting. I'd toyed for some time with the idea of dabbling with paint and canvas, not in any serious capacity, but as a hobby. The original idea was to try my hand at abstract stuff, not ever having had any talent for drawing; I figured it would be a good stress reducer -- it was about time I found a new hobby -- and that I might actually end up with a painting or two that might look good on my walls.

I've been at it for nearly two months now, and I've been surprised at how much I enjoy it. There is something deeply satisfying about sitting at my dining room table in the evenings with the stereo or TV on, and experimenting with different images and techniques (you only realize just how talented the impressionists were when you try to replicate what they did with colour), and having finished products that aren't half bad. They're not half good either, but I have produced a few things I've been happy to put on my walls.

I've also discovered a few things:
(1) people are reaaaaaaaaaaally hard to paint
(2) I quite enjoy, and am actually fairly good at, painting fish
(3) abstract expressionism is harder than you'd think
(4) living in Newfoundland stimulates the impulse to paint landscapes
(5) I have a bias toward compositions that juxtapose unlike elements
(6) buying painting supplies can become addictive

Anyway, here are a few of the pieces I'm happy with.

Ad ahistoricum

This little gem from the most Reverend John Hagee, evangelist, on Glenn Beck's show:

Anti-Semitism is an oxymoron. An anti-Semite is someone who is driven by hate ... a Christian is someone who's driven by love. Therefore, there's no such thing as a Christian anti-Semite.

Just a little reminder of how history has a way of messing up our tidy little syllogisms.

Buckley and Fraser, R.I.P.

Sorry for yet another protracted absence from the humble blog ... I looked at the calendar today and thought that perhaps I should have at least one February post, if for no other reason than to make sure there are no gaps in the monthly archive to the right.

Today I pay tribute to two writers, the first who died just recently and the other whose eulogy I've been meaning to write since the beginning of January.

Those of you familiar with my politics might be a bit surprised that I find myself compelled to say a few words about William F. Buckley Jr., who died yesterday at the age of 82. Indeed, I am a little surprised myself -- as the writer, thinker and pundit largely credited with being "the ground zero of the conservative" movement in the second half of the twentieth century, and who can be partially credited with (among other things) the cultural groundswell that paved the way for Reagan's presidency and, ultimately, George W. Bush's, it perhaps goes without saying that I vehemently disagree with pretty much anything he ever said or wrote. Besides being one of the most inveterate opponents of New Deal politics ever fielded by the right wing, he had a tendency at times toward rather breathtaking equanimity in the face of violence and tyranny -- such as in his unequivocal celebration of Spain's dictator Franco or Chile's Pinochet, as well as his enthusiasm for Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s (something he never relinquished over the course of his life). Or take, for example, this 1957 editorial in which he asserts the necessity of white minorities in the South to assert their dominance, violently if necessary:

The central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race …Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.*

Given these positions held by Buckley during his life, why do I feel compelled to pay tribute to him? Because however infuriated I might be made by his politics, I have to give credit to a thinker and writer who, for the most part, was unfailingly eloquent, intelligent and forceful in his rhetoric (the above egregious example notwithstanding). To be fair, I doubt I would be so inclined to speak of him in this way were there more figures of his ilk still around today; but when the likes of William Kristol is held up (by the New York Times, no less) as a bastion of intellectual, scholarly conservatism, and pundits like Anne Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh hold the public discourse hostage to deliberate misdirection, buffoonery and one-note screeds, I find myself becoming nostalgic for the Buckleys and Wills and Safires of bygone days. I have known a significant number of highly intelligent and thoughtful conservatives in my life, and I know that my own liberalism has only benefited from discussions and arguments with them ... far more than agreement-fests with like-minded leftists. To paraphrase The Simpsons, in those cases my neck gets sore from nodding so much.

The only person on the public stage who comes close these days is Christopher Hitchens, but even he has been in a long slow slide into, well, insanity with his continued bloody-minded defense of the Iraq debacle. However, at least his writing (a) is extremely polished and readable, and (b) articulates a clear argument that (usually) gets the facts right ... even if it interprets them in what I see as a totally baffling manner. Conversely, when reading Kristol's columns in the NY Times, I grow weary both of his inane prose and his consistent wrongness. Here is someone who has been the premier cheerleader for the neoconservative movement and has been wrong on pretty much ever single prediction or assessment, be it on Iraq, Afghanistan, U.S. politics, or for that matter the historical record (for a good run-down of Kristol's gaffes, go here). And this is what qualifies as the "intellectual" wing of conservatism? Please.

R.I.P., William F. Buckley. I disagree with everything you ever said or wrote, but at least you said and wrote it well, and on accasion it gave me food for thought. Also, you once threatened to punch Noam Chomsky in the face -- a sentiment that, however much I admire the Chomster, I have occasionally felt myself.


Also mourned in today's post is the amazing George McDonald Fraser, the brilliant mind behind the character of Harry Flashman -- cad, bounder, coward, womanizer, and historical protagonist extraordinaire (Flashman, that is, not Fraser). Between 1969 with the publication of Flashman and his death on January 2 of this year, Fraser wrote twelve novels following the scandalous career of his eponymous hero (about whom I have blogged previously here), as well as numerous other books, both fiction and non-. The Flashman novels are historical fiction as practised by a master: interpolating a brilliantly conceived fictional observer into scrupulously and vividly recreated historical contexts -- fiction that teaches you about history even as you can't put it down. Fraser genuinely realized Horace's definition of literature as that which "delights and instructs." And I'm not certain whether it is disrespectful or a hearfelt testament to say that I a most devastated here at the realization that I will never now be able to read those adventures of Flashman hinted at in the extant but now lost forever ... and that when I reach Flashman on the March, the most recent of the narratives, there will be no more forthcoming.

Flashy, we'll miss ye. George McDonald Fraser, R.I.P.

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*Quoted by Paul Krugman in The Conscience of a Liberal.

News items from the Rock

The Fog Devils are moving to Quebec, so St. John's has lost its hockey team. AGAIN.

A motorist spotted Premier Danny Williams talking on his cell phone while driving, which is illegal in Newfoundland, and reported him to the police. Danny copped to the charge, offering to pay whatever fine is levied. Equal and opposite outcries of "Obey the law, Danny!" and "Stop picking on Danny!" can be heard across the province. I personally want an investigation into why our millionaire premier, who presumably spends a significant amount of time on the phone, has not been introduced to bluetooth technology.

Temperature in St. John's went from -15 on Tuesday to +3 and rainy yesterday with a new dump of snow in between. It was back down to -5 this morning, which meant that my street was effectively a slushy ice rink with an incline.

Dear stupid studio execs:

Your refusal to recognize the absolutely fundamental role played by writers in the creation of ... well, everything, is as idiotic as it is baffling. They are the plankton in the entertainment food chain, but do not deserve to be treated like the tiny organisms to your whales. I hope you can't make the payments on your Escalades because of the budgetary shortfall.

More importantly, your bloody-mindedness is making a mockery of the money I'm spending on digital cable. So pay the writers what they want or I'm sending my cat's last dozen hairballs in the mail to you.

Meanwhile, across the hall from my office ...

I'm beginning to suspect a conspiracy of various forces to keep me away from my office. A benevolent conspiracy, to be sure, but still ...

I believe the term for the irrational belief that there is a conspiracy to do you good is "pro-noia."

Lazy Sunday

Falling back into bad habits

OK, so I fell off the wagon blog-wise over the holidays this year. It was inevitable, though, given the huge volume of nothing I was managing to do while back in Ontario ... inactivity of that scale and scope really takes concentration.


So to sum up my holidays: Christmas? Excellent. Santa? Generous. Weather? Cold. Fireplace? Warm. Booze? Plentiful. Food? Yummy. TV? Lots. Family? Lovely. Niece? Adorably hilarious. Nephew? Laughing. Girlfriend? Beautiful. New Year's Resolutions? Yeah, right.


That's about it. I'm currently dotting my t's and crossing my i's for my first few classes and so will cut the first post of 2008 short, but not without posting this brilliant photo of Morgan posing with my brother's new Guitar Hero hardware.



Morgan, we who are about to rock salute you.


Happy new year, everyone!