It appears (to me at least) that the Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, is learning about the world and its localized histories in public and in real-time. On the first of June, he admitted as much to Canadian Press journalist Bruce Cheadle, saying he was “hazy on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
THE TRAILER FOR Matt Harlock’s and Paul Thomas’s 2009 documentary film “The Bill Hicks Story” begins with a quotation attributed by Charles Walker to George Orwell in a 2000 book called My Few Wise Words of Wisdom: In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
In his essay, “Why I Write,” George Orwell identifies the following: 1. Sheer Egoism (“desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc”), 2. Aesthetic enthusiasm (“perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their arrangement”) 3. Historical impulse (“desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity”), and 4. Political purpose (“desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after”). Knowing that I would be writing this essay, I tried to improve upon this list, but to no success. There is only one conceivable addition, approaching the matter as a male heterosexual writer: 5. To bed women. Continue reading
