Monthly Archives: April 2013

World

The Bangladesh Factory Fires Could, and Must, Be Prevented

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Triangle Fire

IT WAS ONLY eight days after the March 25, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Rose Schneiderman was in no mood for playing nice. Addressing her (mostly) middle-class audience of Women’s Trade Union League supporters, she said:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

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Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 39

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• Week of 21.04.2013 — Boston Marathon Attack | Storm Thorgerson | Rita MacNeil | Neskantaga First Nation | Icelanders | US Gun Legislation Fails | Beothuk | Pervez Musharraf | Cod

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Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

Personal Essay

The Key Concept

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HANS KÜNG, in his book Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View, records the satirical line about the late-Renaissance pope Julius II — the Warrior Pope — in which the commissioner of Michelangelo’s infamous Sistine Chapel ceiling inserts the keys to his treasure vault into the locks barring entrance to heaven’s gate and is thereby denied.

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Interviews

An Interview with Shelagh Rogers

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Shelagh Rogers

ON SATURDAY, April 13, 2013, I chatted with Shelagh Rogers about the work of truth and reconciliation, books, and her years at the CBC. An excerpt of this discussion appears in The Roundtable episode 38. Here, for your enjoyment, is the entire interview.

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Podcasts

Margaret Thatcher, Pablo Neruda, Cher, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Shelagh Rogers, Nutella, Crisps, Bed Bugs

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• Podcast 38 | Week of 14.04.2013

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Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

Obituary

Margaret Thatcher was the enemy of the tepid, mushy middle

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Margaret-Thatcher

AMONG THE GOOD Riddances this past week were exhibitions of ill grace from British citizens not yet born in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher captured the office of Prime Minister. It happens that 1979 is a year I recall vividly — from the retreat of Pol Pot to the televised campaign ads of former California governor, Ronald Reagan, boasting (ironically, as it would turn out) his reduction of the public debt, to the Iranian hostage crisis. To remember the flavour of those days is to begin the accounting of Thatcher’s political successes.

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History, Wayne's Picks

Jackie Robinson and the Business of Black Baseball

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Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey

IMAGINE IT, if you can. The date is November 1945, and you are about to be discharged from an institution whose blood-soaked campaign against global Aryan dominance and industrialized race murder has absorbed the last three years of your young life. However, you did not (as it is said in war’s loathsome and euphemistic lexicon) see action in the theatre of Europe. The battle you have fought has been against racial segregation and mastery, upheld by the very people who demand that you give your life in the service of “your” country.

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Politics

When it comes to provincial politics, we hate the players…and the game

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Canada and politics

OVER A LUNCH with the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, I had a conversation last week in North Bay about Idle No More and social media. A thread which ran throughout our discussion was anger — in particular the anger of native people, much of which is directed toward the federal government of Canada.

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Podcasts

Roger Ebert, The Cell Phone Turns 40, How Canadian Mining Companies Kill, Nazi sun guns, Juicy Couture, Conspiracy Theories, How Much Gold is there in the World?

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• Podcast 37 | Week of 07.04.2013

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Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

Personal Essay

Furniture, of the Mental and Physical Varieties

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turk_secondhandstore

IT MAY BE that you are aware of a weekly program of mine called “The Roundtable.” The table to which this title refers, and at which the show is recorded, was purchased in 1992 at a Kingston, Ontario antique store called Turk’s. Over the decades many have sat and drank and discussed and argued over this late 19th century furnishing. But even these twenty years are as nothing measured against the life which had similarly transpired (or perhaps dissimilarly: I shall likely never know) over this same table before I arrived to Princess Street one Spring afternoon, the requisite ninety dollars in my pocket.

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