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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LAST WEEK the Conservative Party of Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Keith Ashfield, improvised some lines in an otherwise scripted event staged to cheerlead the 2013 federal budget. At the Morena family home in Fredericton, New Brunswick, he complimented eldest daughter Grace, observing that she is ‘a great cook’ who will one day ‘make a wonderful wife for somebody.’
• Podcast 35 | Week of 24.03.2013
Article of the Week: Why Canada Needs the Sasquatch, Vice Magazine.
Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3).
PRECEDENT was established this week when a self-published ebook became a New York Times bestseller. Wait for You is a “new adult” romance written under the pen name J. Lynn by Jennifer L. Armentrout.
IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD mall there are fourteen stores in which you may buy a phone. The phones today being sold are, it is true, smart phones — but I wonder how long these shops can carry on, all selling roughly the same product and within yards of one another. In any case, and for now, folks are buying quite a number of these gizmotrons.
WITHIN DAYS of the return of Dennis Rodman, the ad-hoc US Secretary for DPRK-American Goodwill, we now have for our consumption James R. Clapper’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” presented March 12 to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In his crisp overview, titled “Iran and North Korea Developing WMD-Applicable Capabilities, ” the Director of National Intelligence makes ample use of the phrase “we do not know” — and though you may be tempted to deride, this is the Hermit Kingdom we’re speaking of, after all.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 