A FEW DAYS ago I took advantage of the soon-to-depart walkabout weather and visited, as I do from time to time, Ottawa’s Parliament Hill. There, one may find the Famous Five monument, an exact copy of which exists in Calgary (I’ve been to that as well).
AT SOME point, without the help either of the nudge or the wink, I’ll wager you have grasped through one commonplace observation the cynical and fraudulent character of the more crude manifestations of American nationalism. Well, are you in? Good. The observation to which I refer is the Chinese manufacture of so many American flags.
THIS PAST week news arrived of a forthcoming Mel Gibson project, a Warner Brothers “biopic” concerning the life of Judah Maccabee. The announcement provoked the inevitable outrage, an example of which is Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who stated the proposed film is akin to “having a white supremacist portray Martin Luther King Jr.” The analogy however is founded, even if understandably and legitimately enough, not upon logic but rather emotion. Considered on logical grounds alone, Gibson’s fitness to portray sympathetically the life of a guerilla war hero and anti-secular reactionary religious fundamentalist is beyond question.
RARE IS the day that I do not find a piece of bad writing in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Post, or Globe and Mail. This statement, I am confident, could be applied with justice to any newspaper of your choosing. The badness is delivered in many varieties, and in fairness I must observe that some errors are a product of working conditions, deadlines and the under-resourcing of bureaus and so on. Most bad writing however has as its root a more troubling fact: its creators do not know what words mean.
THERE IS an enormous store of narrative concerning the working habits of authors, much of it interesting and in my case consumed with amusement but skepticism also.
REVISIONIST CLAIMS of a website dedicated to the British fascist and politician Sir Oswald Mosley bring to mind the expression “damned with faint praise.” This, for example, cited from the historian A. J. P. Taylor: “He was never anti-Semitic — only opposed to a Second World War for the sake of Jews elsewhere. He was never unpatriotic — only indifferent to German conquests in eastern Europe … A superb political thinker, the best of our age.”
WHEN I was in high school, I had the good and (even in those days) atypical experience of passing through the classroom of a teacher who held fast to the discipline of the formal debate. Looking back, I regret that I hadn’t had more of it, and I wonder to what degree today’s students are similarly deprived by a culture which mechanically genuflects before the shrine of debate while refusing to nourish the conditions which make it possible.
THE DISCERNMENT of the Almighty’s will in weather is a practice of such antiquity that one may consider it a founding art, and until the early 16th century our species’ principal mode of meteorology. Much of the Old Testament is dedicated to the routine business of parsing natural disaster, for the exclusive purpose of teasing out its esoteric grammar of retribution. At the professional apex of this undertaking one finds the prophets. The Book of Amos for instance may be termed weather-centric, organized as it is around cataclysm and opening with the following pronouncement: “The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tekoa — what he saw concerning Israel two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam son of Jehoash was king of Israel.”
IN RECENT days, critics of the so-called anti-corruption activist and Lokpal Bill agitator, Anna Hazare, have contested the notion that a Gandhi-like leader today walks among us. A National Post article, “Gandhian lookalike good for the messiah business, bad for democracy,” summarizes the efforts to refute the analogy. The question arises however: is Hazare really that different from the man with whom he so eagerly connects himself?
I WAS INFORMED of the death earlier this morning of Federal New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton, by Twitter. There, in an uninterrupted chain of entries numbering in the dozens (and perhaps into the hundreds: I gave up counting) were expressions of sorrow. Never have I seen such universalism of sentiment, such spontaneous participation in a mood which appears to have touched everyone, really everyone, down to a person.
Photo: Rupert’s Land Indian Industrial School / later St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, 1901. Library and Archives Canada PA-182251.
WITH VERY few exceptions, the men and women who created and sustained Canada’s Indian Residential School System believed that the policy of “aggressive assimilation”* was benevolent and forward-looking. The absorption of the Indian into Canadian society, necessary to possess land and resources and to build a nation-state, was the desired outcome of policies and the final solution of the Indian Problem envisioned by Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott. The policy of assimilation neither began nor ended with the Indian Residential School System. The program of assimilation continues to this day, for the simple reason that nation-building, from sea to shining sea, continues.
LOOK OUT the window of my Elgin and Albert Streets office, one block south of Parliament Hill in Canada’s Capital, and you will see before you a building in part reduced to rubble. The reason is that this Government of Canada edifice contains asbestos, or as it is now more commonly known, chrysotile. Across the city and the nation, this poisonous stuff is being extirpated. And, at the same time, the current Prime Minister of Canada is actively abroad promoting its sale, in what are euphemistically termed developing countries. If that in itself is of insufficient force to turn your stomach, please do yourself the favour of reading on, for there’s more.
“Martha and Mary Magdalene”
IF MICHELANGELO Merisi da Caravaggio, known today simply as Caravaggio, were our contemporary, he would be often in the news. Violent, captious, cruel, and reckless, he was notorious even by the standards of late 16th-Century Rome. A good source on the Italian capital circa 1600 is John L. Varriano’s “Caravaggio: the art of realism,” which catalogues “a level of sadism that would be shocking in any age.” But to give you an idea of the sort of man Caravaggio was, I can think of nothing better than to cite his flirtation with the Knights of Malta, who soon having deemed the painter “foul and rotten” expelled him from their ranks.
LET US BEGIN by acknowledging the obvious, that the 2011 movie Crazy, Stupid, Love is light and pleasant, adult fare but hardly a work of depth or of high seriousness. Its architecture is thoroughly of a Shakespearean cast, in which a main plot is complemented by and interweaved with two sub-plots. A moment arrives when the characters and their dramatic trajectories, hitherto discrete, collide one with another to calamitous effect. Things fall to pieces, and from this seeming state of irreparable chaos order is reinstated. This narrative arc, from social order to disorder and back to order once again, with no lasting harm done, is the essence of Comedy.
Continue reading Crazy, Stupid, Love and the Comedy of Middle Aged Failure
ONE MIGHT hope a journalist working for a media outlet under the “Christian Science Monitor” brand would gloss the Knight’s Templar, but in this case the hope would be misplaced:
[Anders Behring Breivik’s] manifesto says he is among 12 “knights” fighting within a dozen regions in Europe and the US, but not India. It’s not known yet whether this group, which he calls the Knights Templar Europe, actually exists.
Continue reading Anders Behring Breivik: when an enemy of your enemy is your enemy
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 