All posts by Wayne K. Spear
Why Do People Say Like So Much?
AT LEAST A FEW of you, dear readers, weren’t yet born thirty years ago when Frank Zappa and his daughter Moon Unit recorded “Valley Girl.” At that time I thought it was a clever piece of work, but that it must be an exaggeration, maybe even a fabrication, of San Fernando Valley speech. I’d never heard anyone talk that way in the small Canadian town where I grew up, and I expected I never would.
Democracy à la Disney
IT IS FASHIONABLE among the political left to affect dislike for Walt Disney movies, mostly on the grounds of Disney’s crude commercial tactics and their representations of peoples of colour. And yet, let’s be honest; haven’t we all thoroughly enjoyed at least one Disney movie? There is perhaps only one Disney story, variously told, and that is the story of the underdog who, against all odds, triumphs. This is the gist of every Disney movie I have seen, from Cinderella to Matilda. Only the characters and the settings change. The subject may concern a soccer team, or a princess; the setting may be early America or ‘The Orient.’ Nevertheless, we get a certain unmistakable sort of story, a recognizably ‘Disney’ story. Careful marketing dictates that it shall be thus, but marketing only discloses what seems to work, not why it works. Why do we enjoy a Disney movie? And why is the left reluctant to admit they do enjoy it?
Amanda Todd and the Importance of Clear Language
I‘VE NO OBJECTION in principle to NDP Member of Parliament Dany Morin’s motion this week to pursue a national bullying-prevention strategy. This proposal was conceived some months ago, but it is now widely mis-held to be an outcome of the suicide of fifteen year-old Amanda Todd. You are doubtless familiar with her appalling and sad and outrageous story, which has been widely reported and which has now got a great number of people talking about something called “cyberbullying.”
What the Internet Says About Us
FOR A SHORT time, the writer George Orwell worked in a book store. There he observed the depressing chasm (as he saw it) between what was praised in public versus what was actually sought and read in private.
Ye of Little Faith (or, When Will the Atheists Get to be President?)
LAST WEEK the vice-presidential candidates for the 2012 USA federal election appeared in a televised debate. The ABC news journalist and debate moderator, Martha Raddatz, posed the following question:
RADDATZ: I want to move on, and I want to return home for these last few questions. This debate is, indeed, historic. We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that. And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country ….
Commonplacing Considered
FOR THE PAST twenty years and more I’ve maintained a collection of quotations in black, made-in-Czechoslovakia, Pragotrade-branded volumes. This sort of collection is known as a “commonplace book,” and the keeping of one commonplacing. I take such care to mention the Pragotrade name because I purchased a number of these at Coles in the early 1980s and have been unable to find them for over two decades. Simple and unadorned, these dollar-something books could be had in your choice of blue, red, or black cover, the paper inside a serviceable unbleached pulp with the faint bluish lines you may recall from your grammar school “foolscap.” This was long before the market became flooded with overpriced and pretentious looking “journals,” designed to separate you from an inflated amount of your money with the implicit suggestion that nothing is too dear for your precious thoughts. I have always preferred, however, my cheap Pragotrade notebooks and the thoughts, only some cheap, of others.
In Praise of Rice
ONE OF THE most useful pieces of knowledge I’ve acquired is the proper cooking of rice. I was recently moved to Kingston and attending Queen’s University, sharing an apartment with two women who enjoyed wine and Moroccan, Thai, Persian, and Indian foods. Some years later I was living with a Chinese roommate who got me into the habit of using leftovers in the preparation of a Chinese familiarity, fried rice. The secret to a good fried rice, as I’ve already indicated, is the use of cold rice from the previous day’s meal.
A Greeting to New Friends and Comrades
THERE’S NO USE in a writer denying the pleasures derived of notoriety, but it happened this week that I was “Freshly Pressed” and that I had feelings about it which weren’t entirely comforting. In case you don’t know, to be Freshly Pressed (or FPd, as I have discovered the WordPress folks put it) is to have a post chosen by the editors of WordPress for the landing page at wordpress.com. This arbitrary distinction — as I feel it to be — brings with it a huge momentary increase in traffic, comments, email and polite approbation. In short, here comes and goes your fifteen minutes of fame.
The Courage of Malala Yousafzai and the Lessons of Mingora
THERE ARE no words of sufficient force to summarize this week’s attempted murder of fourteen year-old Malala Yousafzai, in the northwest Pakistan city of Mingora. Yet as shocking as this savagery is, there is nothing new about it either: depravity is the business of the Taliban franchise. There are however some lessons to be drawn from the years during which the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (abbreviated as TTP and known also as the Pakistani Taliban) terrorized the Swat valley and Mingora specifically.
Podcast 14: Eric J. Hobsbawm, Rob Anders, Ai Weiwei, Frozen Dead Guy, Mini Dinosaurs, and more
Looking Back at the Mau Mau Uprising
THE KENYA MAU MAU uprising, whose 60th anniversary arrives on October 7, has a legacy which reaches into some surprising places. Recall for instance Mike Huckabee’s comment of late February 2011, on The Steve Malzberg Show:
“If you think about it, [President Obama’s] perspective as growing up in Kenya, with a Kenyan father and grandfather — their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
Canada Takes a Bold Step by Adding Indian Residential Schools to the Curricula
THIS WEEK the governments of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories launched a “first of its kind” curriculum, the focus of which is Canada’s discredited Indian Residential School System. The Honourable Jackson Lafferty, Deputy Premier of the Northwest Territories, and the Honourable Eva Aariak, Premier of Nunavut, attended a Yellowknife ceremony to mark Canada’s formal commencement of a project urged sixteen years ago by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and urged again in more recent years by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or TRC.
Stephen Harper has good reason to be skeptical of the United Nations
RISING BY NECESSITY from the ash of its discredited predecessor, the United Nations on the 24th of January 1946 adopted its first resolution — a call for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, particularly of the atomic kind, and thereby for the exclusive, peaceful use of atomic energy.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 