IN THE PROLOGUE to his ribald and comic tale, contained in Geoffrey Chaucer’s brilliant fourteenth-century poem Canterbury Tales, the Reeve observes of “olde men” that
Till we be rotten, can we not be ripe.
We hop away while that the world will pipe.
For in our will there sticketh aye a nail,
To have an hoary head and a green tail.
Or to phrase it another way – as indeed it is phrased elsewhere in the poem – though there be snow on the chimney, there is fire down below.
I HAD TO LAUGH – a morbid laugh, please note – when I read Robyn Doolittle’s article revealing that a Toronto city manager had tried to keep the hazardous condition of the Gardiner Expressway a secret. You see, long before then I’d walked under it and thought “the Gardiner Expressway is coming down.” You can’t miss it.
ROUGHLY THREE YEARS ago, on a visit to the office of then Senator Consiglio Di Nino, I was shown a voting card signed by the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance members who on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 created the Conservative Party of Canada. Acknowledgement of this anniversary — ten years ago, exactly — was understandably absent from a voluminous Throne Speech which noted the approach of several other anniversaries, including Confederation and both World Wars.
• Week of 13.10.2013 | “SEND IN THE CLOWNS”
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[Note: This article appears in the Fall 2013 issue of the Nipissing Review Magazine.]
THE WET APRIL snow arrives with the AFN National Chief, Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, whose plane touched down in North Bay an hour ago. He sits in the restaurant, noting the wind over Delaney Bay and joking with his wife Nancy about the weather they’d left behind, in British Columbia. The pickerel arrives, and the conversation turns to a storm of another sort, occasioned a week earlier by a letter published in the Nanaimo Daily News.
WHILE WRITING this I received an invitation to Washington. At the end of the message, this: “in case of a federal government shutdown, the event will be canceled.” All these years later, I was left thinking, could it be 1995? Only, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America is now Ted Cruz’s Contract on America, the intervening years providing sources of irony as well as of discouragement. Mostly however discouragement, as I notice that the Continuing Resolution is a continuous thing, alright, but more like an irresolution.
I‘VE KNOWN since the age of eight that I would be a writer, but biology was the subject which came in at a close second. The first book I read in college was Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, for a first-year university biology course. To many Dawkins is the leading advocate of “militant atheism,” and for this reason one may fail to notice that his campaign on behalf of science — necessarily a campaign against anti-science — is defensive in nature. But who would have thought even a decade ago that science would be in need of defence? These were my thoughts last week, as I participated in Stand Up for Science, an initiative of an agency called Evidence for Democracy.
I DON’T READ the comments placed on websites, and I’m here to tell you why. Long before there was an Internet, it was the habit of many newspapers (some of them well-respected) to publish unsigned editorials. This practice, which continues to this day, has always discouraged me. An opinion, when pushed into print, should always be signed by its author. Of course it is understood that a New York Times editorial, for instance, will have been composed by one or more of the staff publicly identified on the organization’s masthead. An argument appearing in the Op-Ed section of a major newspaper will never be quite beyond identification, yet it still seems to me unprofessional to advocate a public policy or initiative — a job which may include a call to war — and not to put one’s skin in the ring at least in this small measure.
WILLIAM MARSDEN observes today, in a Postmedia article “A touch of socialism might tame America’s killer psyche,” that
Murderous rampages have become so commonplace in America they have reached a level of banality that has earned them their own massive, militaristic and bureaucratic response system. The shooter opens fire. Police “active shooter” squads — on call 24/7 — are deployed. The shooter either commits suicide or is shot dead. The police are declared heroes. The victims are mourned and become “patriots.” Their family photos drift ghost-like across TV screens. Friends of the shooter struggle to comprehend why such a good-natured guy would do such a terrible thing. Blame inevitably falls on, as the Chicago Tribune ruled in an editorial Tuesday, “a lethal grudge and a gun.”
There is no repudiating that the mass killing of strangers in crowded public places is a template act, from beginning to end scripted and carried out along known and predictable lines. For years the question Why? has necessarily occurred, under the assumption that a coherent explanation is available.
WE ARE INFORMED by the Oxford English Dictionary that the word “ghoul” derives from an Arabic root whose meaning is to seize. More specific, the term refers to an evil spirit said in Muslim countries to prey on human corpses exhumed from graves. In this case however the seizing and the devouring of human beings are crimes of a Christian character and constitute the explicit subjects of Jeff Barnaby’s first full-length feature, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, which at eighty-eight minutes — short by today’s standard — is an economical and engaging story.
ONE DECADE AGO, the French distaste for war against Saddam Hussein inspired Freedom Fries, the conventional name for this ubiquitous side-dish having been removed from Congressional cafeteria menus at the direction of Republicans Bob Ney and Walter Jones. On US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent visit to Paris, to make the case for a limited strike against Syria, the reception was by contrast positive. Yet the forms of the arguments reveal a tension in the prevailing views of military engagements whose roots reach back to the First World War.
For me, the year has always began in September. Though it’s been years since I was a student, every fall recalls the energy and optimism of the university campus at the launch of a new semester. These days however there is a note of pessimism arriving with the frosh, in newspaper articles which take as their point of departure a CIBC World Markets’ study entitled “Degrees of Success: The Payoff to Higher Education in Canada.” Rob Carrick reviews this study in the Globe and Mail (“Why some university students are doomed to below-average earnings”) as does Gary Marr of the Financial Post. At the CBC is an article and video titled “Many students asking if higher education is worth the debt,” and Robin Levinson asks at the Toronto Star “Is there any point to an arts degree?” All of these articles have drawn numerous comments, some of them thoughtful and some less so. A large, important and complex subject, “higher education” appears to be in a state of transition if not in crisis.
FOR YEARS I’ve been restoring old fountain pens. As I’ve written elsewhere, I enjoy writing with this now anachronistic instrument — and in fact I’ve used a fountain pen for so long that they may not yet have fallen out of favour when I bought my first (a Sheaffer No-Nonsense) in the late 1970s.
IN THE YEARS leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a commonplace indictment of Saddam Hussein was that he was guilty of using chemical weapons against “his own people.” The notion that Iraqis, to say nothing of Kurds or Kuwaitis, could be considered the people of the Ba’athist regime was not lost on the dictator. The Hussein family indeed treated all of Iraq as its personal property, inclusive even of the private lives of Iraq’s citizens, and revealed itself ever eager to extend these possessions beyond its own borders.
• Week of 18.08.2013
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Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 