INVESTMENT IN THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

Gin: an alcoholic spirit distilled from grain or malt and flavoured esp. with juniper berries.
Canadian Oxford Dictionary

“You should have killed yourself last week,” he said to the deaf man. The old man motioned with his finger. “A little more,” he said. The waiter poured on into the glass…
Ernest Hemmingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Look. Listen. The bloodbath is upon us as the markets crash and in droves the moneylenders go to the mattresses. Yes. These are dark and futile times, when gold has never seemed more important and banks never more suspect. Well, fuck gold: I have an investment opportunity that is within reach and infinitely more fun than government bonds. Oh ho. You read right, now is the time to buy in; this is a bona fida, whip sharp idea that I’m so generously sharing. But I know, like any savvy opportunist, you want details. After all, we are beyond putting our hard earned money in the hands of Wall Street. No. The thieves are out of the temples and their lending tables reduced to kindling. They are bewildered and frightened, roaming the gutters like drowned rats and puny muggers; there is no hope to be found in them. Your currency is no good there, so either put it back under your mattresses or in your socks, or funnel it into the low risk, high reward plan that I have so fortuitously stumbled upon and am willing to share in these times of need. Ah yes, just call it my small contribution to the ‘audacity of hope…’

PHASE I: Let me tell you about the 1968 Ford Country Wagon Sedan. This is the king beast of cars, a tiger in a henhouse. If the American Dream were a man who rode among us, it would be his chariot. Yes. Nothing says dream like a 23 foot long, 8 seat station wagon with a 390 cubic inch, 5.1 litre, V8 engine. Imagine 3 tons of virgin steel; that’s right, pure, unadulterated, non-recycled steel smashed from the earth and smelted in the heartland with one singular destiny: the American automobile. Ah, you said it, William Blake: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the forests of the night,/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry? What hand or eye, indeed. Well. Now more than ever, as the people cry out for stability, for hope, and for opportunity, it is time for the return of this monument to pride, this assuredness of power, this celebration of all that is good and true in the ingenious, glorious capitalist dream. I know, you are dismayed, I know the morning is already grown long and cold, and I know this all sounds like no more than a cheap ploy, a bluff, a last bitter turning of the screw, but, you see, I own this vehicle. Sure. I am not one of the silver-tongued; no, I will deliver because my word is bond and it is certifiable and guaranteed. Have faith. There are no empty promises here. This car is currently parked, waiting like a promise, ready to run the roads, speedometer tipping 120 km/h at the slightest levering of the foot, the wheel like a graceful woman in your arms, the night air rushing cool across the wind screen and the high beams penetrating every possibility. It is a dream to behold, sky blue optimism, a beacon and a symbol and it is ready to take us back to the Promised Land. This time there will be no wandering in the desert; no mumbling in our manna; no ashes and sack cloth. Nope. We are in the clear and all our troubles will recede and fade like dust on the highway.

PHASE II: Everybody loves gin. If this is not a scientific fact, then it should be (W. Churchill). Gin is a tasteful alcohol. It lacks pretensions. It is clear and smooth and blindingly powerful. Yes. Gin is much like the Ford Country Wagon Sedan—not flashy, but earthy; not glamorous, but dependable; not ostentatious, but singular—it is the ideal beverage, especially in the twisted, shattered wreck of America’s financial crisis. I recently met with someone—he prefers not to be named here for complicated legal reasons (let us call him my silent partner)—who is an expert in all things ‘ginnish’. His family operates a distillery somewhere west of Vancouver, turning high grade alcohol into a deliciously refreshing concoction that is distilled, bottled and distributed across much of our fair land. Now, due to brutally excessive and undeniably cruel taxation, this fine drink is currently restricted to the tables and bars of the upwardly mobile and terminally elite, but in times of uncertainty such as ours, my silent partner is understandably nervous. Now. I have never been motivated by personal gain—after all, I am a humanitarian of some note—and free enterprise has always lacked a certain, shall we call it benevolence, for me. But now I fear for our nation, our youth, our titans of business—all who have fallen prey to the mysterious forces of fate that are bent on destroying our wealth and incomprehensibly beating on our righteous economic systems like berserk sadists. No longer can I stand by and watch my people suffer. But besides the obvious you ask, what do gin and the Wagon have in common?

PHASE III: As I have made clear, the Wagon is a machine built for enterprise; it has a visceral essence of freedom and hope that is undeniable. America is crying out for innovation and a new entrepreneur to seize the reigns and whip the horses out of the moribund pits of despair and mirthlessness. Listen carefully, this is the nut. I have my trusty silent partner and a more than capable welder on hand and they have assured me that there is ample room to install a custom built gin still in the back of the wagon. Think about it. On one side a 70 litre gas tank, on the other, a 70 litre gin tub. Nothing could be more simple, more efficient, more beautiful. A roaming hope dispenser, arriving in a time of great need. Six seats up front for our staff—the shepherds of desire fulfilled. My silent partner. A ring master. Perhaps some girls clad in appropriate beach wear. Maybe even dancing monkeys. A bookie or two. Myself of course. Whatever the occasion demands, we will provide. No NFL tailgate party, no Frat or Sorority festival, no corporate event will go unvisited. These people are a ripe and captive audience, begging to be plucked from the vine. Breathtaking in its simplicity, our mission will cater to all those among us who are in need. My silent partner has assured me that 70 litres of high grade gin can be distilled in less than 4 meager hours—1 ½ hours to fire, 2 hours to distill—et voila, sweet, blissful sedation. The oppressive, restrictive, and as has been demonstrated time and time again, futile and unnecessary taxation, regulation, and oversight that has plagued our spirits and hopes for too long will be nothing more than a distant nightmare. And for the greener skeptics among us, have no fear. There will be no need for cups, bottles or other Earth polluting frivolities. No. We will pump gin straight into the mouths of our customers, a cool, salving, liquid benediction, sans packaging. Even greener, a simple engine conversion will enable us to run the wagon on gin tailings, the afterbirth of the distilling process. This stuff is like rocket fuel, burning with a terrifying efficiency that will put all other fuel efficient vehicles to shame. Yes. We will be kings of the interstate, ripping from Washington State to Colorado to the rust belt to the inner cities to the Hamptons. And once the idea catches on, well, we franchise and then anyone can do it for a modest fee. In these tumultuous times, the market is nearly infinite. Soon, no one will be left…unscathed.

Friends, may I call you investors? There is no downside. Wagon+still=gin. Gin=efficiency=bliss. These are desperate times and there is a yearning for something, anything to free us from the nagging, mendacious, hysterical sense of doom that is upon us. Together, we can dare to dream of a time when we are once again free from despair and uncertainty. There is hope in my enterprise and I call on you, I implore you—bring me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, and I will ease their pain. We are at risk of, even as some of us already are, awakening from the blissful slumber to a cold and merciless dawn, and this simply must not and cannot be. So. Join with me while there is still hope, and let our slumber, once more undisturbed and unaware, be-gin.

GOD SUFFER THE CHILDREN

I am a child. I last a while. You can’t conceive of the pleasure in my smile. You hold my hand, rough up my hair, it’s lots of fun to have you there. I gave to you now you give to me. I’d like to know what you’ve learned. The sky is blue and so is the sea. What is the colour when black is burned? What is the colour… You are a man, you understand. You pick me up and you lay me down again. You make the rules, you say what’s fair. It’s lots of fun to have you there…
Neil Young, I Am a Child

Look. Listen. In either a calculation of supreme arrogance or one of spineless incertitude, Stephen Harper has just announced his proposal to overhaul the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). Either way, this is a gutless move, in the ilk of a purse snatcher or perhaps a savage drunk who beats his dog for barking. Yes. The champion of family values is showing the same crooked, sneering cynicism that is smug and dangerous, cowardly and brutal, and deserving of the wholehearted contempt of the nation. Now, I am no stranger to cynicism. I like it. It, I think, is one of the higher pleasures and it is not for the faint of heart. But neither is it for the heartless. Enter Stephen Harper. In a nut, lowering the age at which a youth, no, a child—and let’s not bandy words about here, because the whiskey is running low and I am feeling raw and vicious in this night both late and cold—can be sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14, is a proposal designed to capitalize on all the base and reactionary tendencies of the dumb and brutal, the simple and the resentful, the blind and the fearful. Further, its built-in concession to the people of Quebec, the people who would, and I hope still will, flay the moral skin off the Conservative Party and pummel Harper’s veneered face come election day, is nothing short of a base campaign promise that, beyond allowing the justice system to become two-tiered, threatens the fundamental concepts of a federalist nation. But that is another issue, and the long and the short of it is that I don’t even care about those things right now. No. If Harper and his supporters continue with their worn out agenda and proposed legislative muggings, I will be only too happy to migrate to Quebec, pull up the drawbridge when I get there, and swear fealty to Gilles Duceppe and all that is holy in his party.

But the night grows longer and colder here, and the shadows are just a little darker and who knows how long the bolted door will hold—so I will get straight to it. Harper’s proposal is most deeply cynical because he has once again drawn children into his sights and like any bully, believes that a thrashing of the weak will impress upon us that he is a firm, decisive man who believes in justice and the values of the family.

So first I ask you, since when is anyone justified in drawing a line between the people who have family values and those who don’t? Since when are any of us outside of the family values community? After all, I have parents and even siblings. I have aunts and uncles and cousins. Once upon a time, I had grandparents. I have children. Am I not a man of family values? I suspect if you examine your own lives, you may ask the same. Yet, there is a group of people who have declared some ideological and moral ascendancy, a kind of ‘divine right of the religious family,’ that qualifies them to tell you and me about values and what it is to be moral. And in this case, they are telling you about the value of our children.

And this is what is most depraved about Harper and his acolytes. His proposal does not reveal justice, punishment, or even revenge. No. This is about the degeneracy of a society that has systematically devalued its children and a man that while, in his sweater by his fireplace, with his children whose names one suspects he can’t quite remember, seeks to turn on our nation’s children with a loathing that is nakedly irrational and shallow. Yes. There is a loathing of children at the root of this gambit and it has grown like a death flower, sickly and cruel, and if it is not burned to its very roots, it will poison us all insidiously and eternally.

The problem belongs to us—the adults, the rational, the sane—but see what we have done. We have strung our children between two solitudes; parsed them out between the beautiful and the dark. We have fetishized their innocence and bemoaned their cruelty. We have denigrated their intellects and capitalized on their ignorance. We have infantilized them and sexualized them. They have been idealized, commercialized, marketed, bought, sold and traded—we have made them commodities, every last one. Children have become our hope and our bane, and we have shuffled them like cards, playing each one like we are guilty sharks at the table. We have praised them on the screens and at the dinner tables for their manners and their ability to parrot us, and damned them in the classrooms and in the streets for the pain and bewilderment of puberty and experience. We have cajoled, demanded, and threatened them to be like us and barred them from themselves and their identities. We pick them up and hold them aloft for the slightest of their achievements and plunge them into cold pools of ostracism for the slightest of their flaws. We have longed to be them and we have laughed at them for the transgression of not being more like us. We have cocooned them and fed them medicine and told them that they are unaccountable, and we have beaten them and exposed them and held them accountable for all. Children have become our glory and our shame, and for that we have made them pay. In short, we have worshipped them for everything we wish to be and damned them for all that we are.

And so it is the greatest temptation to thrust from us that which reminds us of our own guilt. And no, I am no idealist nor is this a Pollyannaish dream. I am aware of the depravity and the blackness of some of our young offenders, our child criminals. I know that they have stabbed, cut, shot and beaten and more. I know this like I know the evil depths of any man’s heart. But I also know a little about the biology and physiology of a child and about the statistical probability of a child committing a heinous crime, of a child being rehabilitated, and of a child being destroyed in an adult penal system. More importantly I, and many of you, am well acquainted with the blind stumbling of the adult, of the crippling suffering of the adult intellect, of the bewilderment of the adult mind, of the doubtful and precarious existence of a fully formed adult, and the despair of the long and inevitable adult journey into the night. In this life, I know something about chance and loss and anguish. And I have had the benefit of so much more opportunity, experience and time than any child I know.

So when I hear Stephen Harper so brazenly and coolly target our children and declare that these children, the same people he would deny sex education and so much other adult information, worthy of adult justice and the adult penal system, forgive me: forgive me, if I ask for children a second chance that I suspect most of us would beg and even kill to have.

THE HOG IS OUT OF THE TUNNEL or THE FAT IS IN THE FRYER (1)

We have gone from irrational exuberance not so long ago to excessive fear…
Roger Lister, Chief Credit Officer, DBRS Ltd.

But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs?...Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three…a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials…No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell, Animal Farm

Look. Listen. Exciting, surprising news in the field of paleontology. Apparently, 251 million years ago, 95% of all living species were flicked off the Earth’s shoulders like so many fleas, when the volcanoes decided it was their time to rule. With the violent series of volcanic eruptions, every large predator was dropped dead in its tracks, leaving the conditions perfect and fecund for a million year rise of…the pigs. Yes, dear reader, lystrosaurs, or pigs, had free run of the Earth and all its plant life. There was undisturbed grubbing, gobbling, and gorging, as these slobbering beasts thrust their snouts and tusks into every crevice, rooting around with greedy abandon. How did these swine survive while nearly every other large beast was doomed to a ashen death? “We can only speculate,” says Paul Wignall, professor of paleonenvironment (U. of Leeds), “but perhaps its ability to burrow and hibernate protected it from the worst periods.” (2) Of course, all this is speculative and based on reconstructions from fossils, etc. And, as for the eventual fall of the pig, no one quite knows how they let slip from their trotters what could only have been a stranglehold on the planet and all its abundance.

Now, in my knowledge and acquaintance with men of science, there is nothing that any would possibly like more, other than a blow job from a giant fighting iguana of the Triassic period or a custom built pygmy skull footstool, than the chance to study an era or event in progress, rather than being damned to backward looking deduction and the inconsistencies and guesswork that it engenders. Well. This past week, fortuitously and without prejudice, the opportunity fell from the sky, as thick as a rain of spears, and with much misery, forlorn moaning, and even a little grunting. Yes, the bailout of AIG, the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the merger of Merrill Lynch & Co. with the Bank of America, the death throes of Morgan Stanley, and the mother of the doomsday, the collapse of Fannie May and Freddie Mac, all eerily conjure up the age of the lystrosaur, and most certainly constitute a real time case study of ‘the pigs that ruled the world’.

Yes. The porcine era is upon us. It is unreeling like a stock ticker right before our eyes. The U.S. banking crisis and the squealing crescendo that accompanies it have proven beyond a doubt that we are living in the age of swine, and indeed, the fat is in the fryer and the the captive audience to the Wall Street debacle will also pick up the tab. By my calculations, as of today, with current bail-out funds totaling $705 billion, and another $700 billion promised over the next two years, the tab stands at somewhere around $1.4 trillion. That’s about $4600 per American. So it goes.

But whither the pigs—those five-chinned brutes, giddy with irrational exuberance now doomed to fear—in all of this. Well, I suspect even the king pigs may lose a chin or two, but they will still be pigs, for that is their nature. And they will survive, as they have always done, even as they did in 1929, by digging deep burrows and hunkering down, until the ash and fire subsides. Everyone else is on his own. The crisis has far reaching implications, and rightly the US government must do something. But this crisis is not a freak hazard like volcanoes in the past, a cruel trick of Nature, or a whim of fortune. No, this has been manufactured and driven by the primary victims, the investment corporations, but will be visited on all at a price that has yet to be determined.

Permit me to digress. It reminds me of something that I can’t let go; something twisted that has stuck in me like a barbed hook and has planted in me an unholy fear of all that happens in a barnyard. You see, when I was a boy of about five or six, my parents took me on a working vacation in Nova Scotia. The idea was that we would go and experience life on an idyllic farm and all its joys first hand. As it turned out, it was actually more of an indentured servitude, and by the end, we were only too happy to escape with our lives. The farmer was an oily haired, cruel, ape of a man with deeply rotted teeth from gargling gasoline. Even the rats shuddered in this man’s shadow. The instant we set foot on his property, he seized our clothing and sold it to a passing rag and bone man who wouldn’t look us in the eye and darkly muttered something about burial in a potter’s field. When the peddler tried to negotiate the purchase of our car, the farmer flew into a rage and beat him with the sharp edge of a shovel, screaming there would be plenty of time for that later, after the feast…

I will spare you the details—the whippings and weird screams in the night—it was long ago, and, my father is now nearly able to walk upright and the welts on our backs are but crosshatchings of fine scars. But there is a point here. We had endured more than enough gruel and the farmer and his family had spent the last three days supplementing our labour by slashing at us with a six foot, braided bull whip soaked in canola oil and poking us with sharp pointed sticks whenever we went near the main house. Strange and unfathomably vile things were happening here; something beyond the ken of god fearing people. So, on the third day of our slave-vacation, my father began jabbering in a state that can only be described as righteous anger and we knew it was time to leave. Deep in the night, we broke our manacles and managed to pry a board from the abandoned stable where the farmer and his wife kept us and crept out into the moonlight. My mother convinced my father that discretion was the better part of valour; to wit, beating the soles of the farmer and his wife’s feet with an axe handle, before feeding them to the animals would raise too many ugly and confusing questions in a town full of half-wits and whisky forgers. No, we would get in our chrome green Chrysler station wagon and leave that god-forsaken place without even shaking the dust off of our shoes.

But before we left, I took one last look in the barn, and there, in the flickering light of a kerosene lantern, was the farmer, and bare-chested, doing, what for me was the unspeakable: he was butchering a pig. Now, for those unfamiliar with where pork bellies come from, let me explain. It is a serious enterprise and not for the squeamish. To correctly butcher a pig, one must first stun the beast with what is known as a captive bolt pistol. Using compressed air, a bolt gun fires a heavy stainless steel rod to deliver a shallow but forceful blow to the forehead of the beast. In a pinch, a sharp blow from a hammer will do. Once stunned, the pig is hauled into the air by the hind legs to facilitate the bleeding-out process. Bleeding-out requires the pig to be ‘stuck’ in the chest and it is necessary in order to avoid the spoiling of the meat. The bleeding can take several minutes and produces copious amounts of blood. Some twitching and continued motion will occur even if the pig is dead. When the pig is bled, the butcher removes the pig’s hair, which can be done by either placing the carcass in boiling water and then scraping off the hard bristles or using a blow torch to burn off the hair. Skinning will also work. At this point, the pig is gutted, inedible parts removed, and the edible parts cut and preserved. Though I was spared seeing these final steps—my father packed me into the wagon and we burned through the gate and down the highway, the needle pushing 120 and the headlights off for the first 50 km—needless to say, in my young, fragile mind, what I had seen in the flickering light was so horrible that it has eclipsed every other memory of that place and is seared into my brain.

But where am I going with this gruesome rant? I guess the point is this. The hogs are out of the tunnel now and we are all witnessing the slaughter. Yes, the captive pistol has shot its bolt, there is blood seeping under the doors of many Wall Street banks these days, many carcasses are being boiled and scraped, and there will be more of this before the end. And the beasts are looking in at the windows, wondering when all those men became pigs and vice versa. But the explanations of what has transpired, despite the blathering about economics and the market place, don’t ring true. They may be right, but they are not honest, because I have not heard one person state it unequivocally: this mess is about greed. Banks loan money for one reason: profit. Few banks are interested in simply helping people or extending sympathy to the needy—try defaulting on a loan—that is the job of the churches and the state. There is no help for the wicked borrower who cannot make his payments on time, and no government subsidized bail-outs. No sir, you are as pitied as a stray dog with the mange, and they will take everything—your house, your car, furniture—all and sundry. They have done this on each and every mortgage that has been foreclosed, not to mention, terminally gouged the borrowers throughout. Beyond this, hedge funds and short sellers have run rough shod. Many have won and won big, even those who are currently losing. Now, in an age of deregulation and letting markets decide, many people who should have known better, are suffering for their greed, but it is ultimately the average citizen who will pay. Yes, the pigs have been at the trough and there is no feed left, but they must be bled or fed. Enter the taxpayer. To save themselves they will have to cough up the funds to keep these investment banks afloat, the markets stable, credit available and the livelihoods of thousands upon thousands possible.

I am neither an economist nor a farmer, but I can tell you this: I know a pig when I see one, and a slaughter speaks for itself. It makes me angry, just as I am sure that many others are angered. There is something unjust and seriously perverse when financial giants throw themselves on the mercy of the people they have squeezed their nickels from in the first place. But I expect that for most, this indignation will fade. When all the clamor dies down, little will be learned: after all, there will always be greed and it will remain unbridled. It is systemic and necessary to the whole capitalist system, and it is not in the immediate interests of the cadre of Wall Street lever-pullers and profiteers to change it. Yes, with respect to George Orwell, swine walk among us, and this will always be so. The pigs are dead, long live the pigs.

1. Thompson, Hunter S. Songs of the Doomed, Pocket Books, New York: 1990.
2. The Globe and Mail, Social Studies, Sept. 17, 2008.

CULT OF THE JACKAL

It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-licker—and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the Jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way.
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

Look. Listen. Politics is a blood sport, and scattered throughout the Jungle, there are many bones and red patches rotting in the sand to prove it. There are tigers, wolves, hapless goats, and jackals, all vying for a prized place at the watering hole, and before the sun sets, each one will call his shot. For some, there will be roars of victory and for others, gnashing howls of defeat. Even in our home and native land, these cries are voluble and clamorous, but these days it is the jangling chatter of the jackal that pierces the foul air of election campaigning and sets my teeth on edge as I, like all the other brutes, head down to drink…

Yes, Jack Layton, it is your turn you Dish-licker—lest ye forget, many have heard the wind call their name, but few have been spared. Of all the creatures of the Jungle, none is more despised than the jackal, and even in that vain, ambitious space behind his beady eyes and in his own jittered, throbbing, excited little heart, the jackal knows this and cackles with dewanee—the madness—and runs hither and thither making mischief wherever he goes. For too long I have tried to make sense of, to articulate and thus let go of, my hatred for this man whom a CBC pundit once described as having a "cult leader’s smile," and have failed. Now, while the sun shines and the wind blows just so, and the watering hole is a distant necessity, I dream lazily and muse on the jackal, with the hopes of making this right.

So, let’s get to the nut of this once and for all. Jack Layton is a hopelessly grinning idiot, whose mustache most likely hides an ugly hare-lip and the latent ambitions of a school boy manically stroking his first blush of facial hair with a toothbrush. He reminds me of an account I once read of Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, the “hero” of the siege of Mafeking in the Boer War. In an excellent discourse on journalism during times of war (The First Casualty), Phillip Knightely describes officers from “those upper-middle-class English backgrounds where it is difficult to draw the line between eccentricity and psychosis.” In the field, Baden-Powell was known to “dress up as a circus ring-master in white-tie and tails, wield[ing] a whip nearly thirty feet long…through a megaphone shout[ing] orders to non-existent troops about non-existent attacks on the enemy lines…and constantly invit[ing] the [Boers] to surrender.” Using such unique talents in a world of make-believe, Baden-Powell hunkered down in a false 217 day siege, from which journalists came and went freely, crafting his heroic legacy. Perhaps there is some similarity in character to this utterly ineffective yet smugly vain ‘leader’ that annoys me about old smiling Jack. He is a hero in his own mind, strutting from crisis to crisis, prognosticating and diagnosing with a baffling sense of impunity that suggests severe and dissociative psychosis. Emboldened by his 30 odd seats gained in the last election, for the past two and a half years, Jack Layton has manufactured his own siege of Mafeking in the face of a minority government in Ottawa. He is here, there and everywhere issuing demands, ultimatums and decrees, snapping at the heels of the political tigers and declaring himself ready for the job of Prime Minister. In Afghanistan, Jack will save our soldiers; in Ontario, Jack will resuscitate the manufacturing industry; in the Arctic, Jack will stop the melting; in the hospitals, Jack will stanch the bleeding, and so on. Well Jack. You are not the prime minister and despite your eagerness, your salivating, and your sermonizing, you are not even close. You are swinging above your weight and every one knows this but you, as you jabber away in what can only be described as the deeply disturbing and confidence-addled state of someone marching to a song in his own head, utterly convinced that everyone around him can hear it too. Yes Jack, I know that you have forgotten that you were ever afraid of anyone, and like Tabaqui are rushing headlong at everyone, from Stephen Harper to the blood deprived Gilles Duceppe; but they, even the half-starved and bewildered Stephane Dion, are still tigers, and you are still a jackal.

It is a shame really, because some of the ideas in the NDP platform do not strike me as being all that bad or improbable. “Green collar” jobs for example, are necessary. Social equality, reasserting our sovereignty in the Arctic, restoring (Conservative cut) funding to the arts, and emphasizing the need for more family doctors and a more efficient health care system? Fine by me. But for all your fanciful names and clever rhetoric, these ideas are just as likely to come from the Liberals or even the Green Party, and these parties are more relevant to Canadians than you are. The Liberals and the Greens propose painful but demonstrably effective strategies for dealing with climate change; you dash and dart, from unions to environmentalists, fawning and bowing, never quite sure whose dish has the most scrapings. Our troops are in Afghanistan, and many understand the mission and have not forgotten the reasons why; but you, with a folly and madness in your eyes, run at the mouth about negotiating with the Taliban. Ugh.

Notwithstanding this, the NDP has been on the right side of many issues, at least in word, and in the past, I have wanted the NDP to succeed, only to be disappointed. And NDP leaders in the past, both provincial and federal, have given me the impression that despite their idealism, they understood the hunt and their places in it. There was a sense that they had a role to play, and if they played it just right, at the right moments, they could set the pace. But not you Jack. You have the madness, you are biting everything and everyone in your way, and you believe you are something that you are not—the head of the pack.

Check the polls, Jack. No one likes a loser, especially one that makes mischief safe in the knowledge that he will never, ever have the clout to lead. And that I think is why, I, who have voted for your party in the past, will be shifting my allegiance this time around—how and to whom, I am still not sure—mark my words, I will take my chances with the tigers, wolves, or maybe even the porcupines, but I won’t be going down to the watering hole with a Dish-licker trailing rags and bits of leather. That would be just plain embarrassing.

FEAR IN BEAR COUNTRY

“I want to eat his children...Come on you scared coward.”
Mike Tyson

Look. Listen. Iron Mike said these things on the eve of his 2002 title challenge of Lennox Lewis in Memphis, Tennessee. I am not frightened of him now, nor was I then; apparently neither was Lewis because, in a one sided affair, he mercilessly bloodied both Tyson’s eyes and sent him to the canvas in eight rounds. These were scary words, just as Mike is such a scary man on so many violent and depraved levels that only military psy-op personnel could begin or want to understand his twisted mind. But at the time, I had no fear of Mike because he was not speaking to me and I would not be in the ring that night. Even if I were Lennox Lewis, I would have had no fear either; after all Mike Tyson was a wrecked, sluggard of a pugilist past his prime and Lewis was the heavyweight champion of the world. These are facts.

So today, days after the anniversary of 9/11, the day that fear came to town and pissed on everyone’s front steps; the day that we woke up and discovered we were in the valley of the shadow and surrounded by every evil known to man; the day that we stopped dabbling with fear and began mainlining it straight into our elusive souls, I am pondering what I have been told, everywhere and by everyone, including that babbling morning host on my local sports radio (is nothing sacred?) that the fear is there, undiminished, unresolved, and more relentlessly cruel and determined than ever. Our own Minister of Public Safety, Stockwell Day, emerged from the Diefenbunker to breathe Ottawa’s polluted air of nertu and criminal lies long enough to declare that Canada was in a state of high danger and still a potential target for Al Qaeda, sternly reminding us that they had threatened us four times. Four. Lest we forget, eh?

We have been and will be reminded every day of our lives that danger is at the door and no one, not even our own children, can be trusted. Say it with me: Terrorists hate Canada…Lightning is your enemy…Junkies with bus passes and titanium daggers will soon roam your suburban neighborhoods in broad daylight…Food is danger…Muslims aren’t like you and me…Words can break your bones… Black bears are swimming across small harbours to maul and maim unsuspecting fishermen with absolutely no just cause…Your computer is unprotected against viruses…Children are weird and dangerous…You could die at any time…Mike Tyson will eat your children… So on and so on.

Well, I can only tell you that in these swollen days of thwarted hope and fragile dreams, fear is not what it seems. In the dark hours of this long night, it may seem we are as saddled with fears as the Toronto Maple Leafs are with losing. Yes, it has been a long slide from the jubilance and confidence of victory—Bill Barilko is gone and the brutal shadow of Harold Ballard’s grotesquely, crippled reign has never been exorcized. So, for the Maple Leafs, this nation and many others, the return against the current will be littered with many bodies of the infirm of mind and soul, and both those piloting the ship and those left in its wake will be a grim bunch of sailors indeed. But a return is possible, friend. The contagion of fear is not unassailable. The mouth pieces of darkness may jabber and moan, but you can scorn them like a midnight bride howling in the wastelands outside Atlantic City during football season, because fear is not what the grinding bastards would have you believe it is. Ultimately the wise choose and the dumb cower. So choose. Choose your fears wisely.

Let me make this clear, there are some things worth fearing, like frostbite and hypothermia in sub-zero temperatures; Revenue Canada; electrocution; tasers; broken glass; guns in most people’s hands; loan sharks and tooth decay. But these are simple dangers, and for all but a miserable, doomed few, relatively simple to escape. But the fears that are foisted on us at every possible moment, the audacious fears that slink like recreant, feral vermin through the daily news and the blathering of people nostalgic for the cold war, these are illusions, captivating like bearded ladies, but empty as drunken promises and they should be treated as such. No. There are worse, more frightening menaces than even Mike Tyson and they are far closer to you than you are to the squared circle. The people and the enterprises we should fear are the same people who will eat and are eating our children. These are people who want to beat you like a cheap rug each and every day of your life. They are vicious and relentless, and to them, the rules of the game are irrelevant: it is not enough for them to take your money at the table; they want you to get up and leave it there in a pathetic, slobbering panic. See, we are living in the age of a branded fear that has become so ubiquitous that it seems innocuous; the omnipotence it is given makes it very nearly transparent and it overlays our lives like a suffocating film of bubble wrap. We are encased and convinced of the fragility of ourselves and our world to the point of a cowering, rabid dread of everything and everyone outside our doors—of even ourselves—and this is the way these people want it. Don’t ask who these shameless fear mongers are, by their foul clouds of inglorious feats you shall know them, for you cannot escape the corpse-like stink that emanates from every grasping move they make. They are the cheap, insurance peddlers and no-men whose goal is to reduce morality to risk-management strategy. They are the blind opponents of change and the virtueless champions of family values, the charlatans of vigilance. These people have no souls and their minds are wired to make every single individual tremble before the altar of loss. They will make you feel like a loser each and every time they remind you what you stand to lose if you dare open your mouth. They are the anti-choice, the anti-question, the anti-hero, and worst of all, the anti-love. There is about as much love in them as in a rapist, and they will push their own grandmothers down the stairs in the name of expediency and power. This is a viral nation, a globalized ulcer and it is not interested in your future, your community, your neighbors or your friends, the outcast, the vulnerable, or the free. And most of all, they want you to fear and hate yourself beyond all love. Power is their fix and fear is the most effective lever in their tool kit of extortion. This is the crux; in their world, there can be nothing, no power that is worth having without fear. Yes, these are the child-eaters.

But I am hopelessly unable to get up in the morning without some good news, no? Well this is it: of so many things, you don’t have to be afraid. The terrorists are not winning. Lightning will not strike you. Children are still good and pure at heart, even if you don’t quite understand them. Junkies don’t hate you and they can’t afford titanium knives. We have been eating food for a long, long time; it can continue. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. Muslims are just like you and I. Your computer is not that important; they have people who can fix it.

And that crazed, morbid black bear that attacked the fisherman in Port Renfrew? Well, fisherman Ed Stirling cut its throat with a 37 cm razor honed, Swedish filleting knife. This bear was seized with a deep, primal madness that I doubt even it could understand, and everything it got, it had coming. It was fearsome, but Stirling was brave and resourceful, and saw, knew and did what he had to. He “pleaded with another to stop annoying the bear with his ‘tiny’ knife.”
“I was saying where is his head?” Yes. Cut of the head and the body will die. (Thompson) Don’t worry, this bear had it coming. It swam across an estuary, past a free pile of sacrificial fish and guts and vaulted straight at an innocent bystander. Well, it called its shot and missed. Stirling called his and won. There is a moral here somewhere. He did not surrender to the fear. Like the bear and the fisherman, we are all going to die someday, and there is nothing that will stop it when the time finally comes. But no one has to go down like a scared coward.

WAITING FOR HAMMURABI

If a slave has said to his master, “Your are not my master,” he shall be brought to account as his slave, and his master shall cut off his ear…
If a surgeon has operated with the bronze lancet on a patrician for a serious injury, and has caused his death…his hands shall be cut off…
If a man has accused another of laying a nertu [death spell?] upon him, but has not proved it, he shall be put to death…
The Code of Hammurabi

Look. Listen. A sun god handed these and other laws to the reverently obedient Hammurabi sometime around 1750 B.C. I did not make this up. It is depicted in a bas-relief at the top of the pillar on which he carved his code. Who am I to disagree with laws carved in stone: the cornerstone of the Old Testament and our legal codes today? So look well ye politicians, look well. Especially you, Stephen Harper, even as you take time out from fitting up your new iron glove that you so lovingly caress in the dark recesses of Parliament, in a stupor of gleeful anticipation that the whiff of the power of a majority government excites in the deepest, coldest cells of your cynical blood. No, no. Seeing you in your sweater at fireside has not fooled me, nor has the trumped up charge of nertu that you and your party lay at the feet of your enemies. A time of swift justice will come for you all, and it will not be pretty—many will pray and beg for a severing of ears and hands—before it is finished.

But these are idle dreams and justice delayed is not justice achieved. So let us examine these so called death spells, if only to shake loose from the shackles of blind ignorance and trepidation. Exhibit A: parliament is dysfunctional and must be dissolved. I’m sure that in his heart of hearts, that cruel place where, as for so many small but treacherous flesh eating mammals of the stoat genus, true joy only comes with a bloody, biting victory, this seems true. Harper must, in the chain mail gloves he habitually wears except when in public, with the naked, violent sense that he is right, fondle the notion that only a majority government under his command can be functional. After all, there is something vicious and small, and deeply dangerous in any man who panders to the religious right, and this is the hallmark of the morally smug and blindly intolerant holders of all the keys. That after all, is what this accusation of nertu betrays: the fervent need to hold all power.

This is the only truth in an agenda that the startlingly ghoulish Gilles Duceppe rightly characterizes as secretive, right wing and fundamentally against the values of the Quebecois and all Canadian people. And for this, we should listen to this man, in spite of, or maybe precisely because of his separatist handicap. For many reasons that I will not get into here, Quebec is the strongest, most accurate moral compass that this country has left. If you don’t believe it, remember that the Montreal Canadiens live there. In the past 100 years, they have shut the gates to every evil doer from Toronto to L.A. and will most surely do so again with the certainty of pure ethics that are rarely found but in the likes of Jean Beliveau or Bob Gainey.

Yes, yes. If Quebec is the moral guardian of Canada, the Bloc and Duceppe are its shield bearers. Even if, as yet to be substantiated rumours suggest, the freshly removed appendix of PQ leader Pauline Marois was recently delivered in a black van and a shroud of dry ice to the back of Duceppe’s campaign bus late in the night. Next to the liver, the appendix is a rich and rare source of iron that Marois must have been only too glad to pass along in Duceppe’s hour of need. And these vampirical tendencies are necessary in times of grave darkness; these are trying times for the squires of good, and we must forgive them their idiosyncrasies. But this is sick musing, and not appropriate to this voire-dire, so I will try to show some restraint by returning to the prosecution’s arguments.

The cases of nertu of which Harper has accused his opponents are wide and varied. For rendering the government dysfunctional, trying to rape and pillage the Alberta economy, attempting to create a socialist regime that would cast us forever into a sugar cane and beet trade with the likes of Cuba, appointing activist judges, and taxing Canadians into shallow and hastily scratched out graves, the opposition parties, particularly the Liberals, are castigated daily. I suppose these death spells take on a dark and menacing tone when they loom large in the minds of half-wits and hydrophobic dogs, but they only have a place in a ‘certain slant of light’ (E. Dickinson) that shines from a full moon over the Prime Minister’s backyard. For the rest of us, a full moon is a harvest moon, and Canada has much to harvest, but only if we do not fall for falsehoods in the next month of campaigning. However, we cannot do this alone, and this is why we must all press, pray, and cajole Quebec to do what I fear no other province (despite Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams' best efforts) can do: withhold a majority government from Harper at all costs and with extreme prejudice. Ergo, the Bloc. They must take the vast majority of the 75 seats in Quebec, and that, and that alone will compensate for the apparent political illiteracy that thus far is dooming the Liberal Party and keep the howling wolves of conservative values at the gates of the majority government that they so cravenly desire.**

Now. I know that some black and dirty water has gone under the bridge between Quebec and the rest of the nation, but that was then and this is now. Is it disingenuous to ask only that the Quebecois do what no other province can and hold Stephen Harper and his knights of the Orange Order in check? I don’t think so. I have always had a fondness for my French Canadian brethren, and wished bitterly that the likes of Joseph Papineau, the North West Company, Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel had prevailed. Don’t let this cheap Prince deny us accountability and become our master, this quack surgeon bleed us further, or his false and insulting claims of nertu run amok. Make this one thing so, and I promise you, some MPs will make better use of their ears, and iron gloves will be mothballed for at least the near future. Until Hammurabi or the sun god make a triumphant return, I fear that is the most that anyone can ask.


**Wolves are noble creatures. I hesitate to denigrate them by such base comparisons, but their brutal tendencies are so often emulated, it would be remiss and perilous to overlook the analogy.

HOW LONG DOUG WILLIAMS, HOW LONG?

The truck driver hates anyone that carries a tennis racket/He drinks all the senator’s coffee & proceeds to put him in a headlock…
Bob Dylan, Tarantula

Look. Listen. So John McCain had to wait until the NFL finished its season opening game on Thursday night to accept a nomination for leadership in a party that, despite all the bullshit to the contrary, had to hold its collective noses to accept him at all. The New York Football Giants wrapped up a 16-7 win over Washington, which, could have so beautifully played into the latest Republican notion that urban elites are running amok in the land of rural, heartland, real family values, except that Washington D.C. is as urban as it gets after all, and the game just wasn’t enough of a beat down to prove much of anything. So it goes. In any case, that didn’t stop McCain from spouting vague platitudes about fighting for change to the “do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd.” “Fight with me. Fight with me. Fight with me.” Well. As far as the Redskins go, he got it right; they have been doing nothing on the gridiron—not since Doug Williams walked onto the field for Super Bowl XXII and coolly commandeered them to a 42-10 victory and the Promised Land. No one wanted to admit it then, but in the wake of the shocking victory, one reporter summed up the palpable white doubt that was most certainly rippling through America, asking Williams, “How long have you been a black quarterback?”

Well, well. Giddy times indeed. Since then, no other black quarterback has reached such dizzying heights, but most certainly there’s one waiting in Washington, and as sure as John McCain needs a staff of seven just to help him crawl to the bathroom every morning, despite all the lip service, good Republicans and their ilk just can’t quite imagine a person of colour in that big chair in the White House any more than NFL fans could imagine a black quarterback winning the Super Bowl. As I remember, Williams won that game throwing bombs and pinpoint passes to relentlessly hammer on the Broncos, including a second quarter barrage (9 of 11 for 228 yards and four TDs=35 second-quarter points). Well, Barack Obama has had his second quarter, but now that the half time show and the third quarter are over, he would be wise to manage the game. There is time to bring the hammer down, change the game plan and hit the holes in the Republican line with some vicious cut blocks and downhill running. Pound the ball inside man! Never mind that it's ugly, slow and mindless, it will be the only way to win this time. Oh yes, about the smartest thing I’ve heard all year was Obama lamenting (in San Francisco no less) the state of his rural nation, and taking dead level and accurate aim on those bewildered masses whose remedy for all things evil in America and the rest of the world is to simply swear on the family Bible with a can of piss water in one hand and grand daddy’s rifle in the other.

But there’s the rub: while this is no time for the high road, and a naked bootleg like that one may play to well to those that read their news in the morning, one suspects that among the voters who live their daily lives in such a deep fog of stupidity that they are still undecided, it is decidedly not option one, two or even six in the smart player’s play book. After all, it appears that no one likes a smart feller, especially a black one who doesn’t have a gun in the closet, beer on every shelf in the refrigerator and a god who hates fags. No, no. One way or another, Obama has to get himself invited to dinner with the slack-jawed daughter of the non-urban American, sit down at the picnic table they call a dinner table, on the concrete slab in the backyard that they call a dining room, under the patio lanterns they call a chandelier and convince them that although he may be eddicated, not white, and from one of those cities so dangerously close to Sodom or Gomorrah, more importantly, he’s not going to take the apple of their eye out later get drunk, fall asleep at the wheel, crash the family truck and date rape her within an inch of her life while she’s unconscious and bleeding in the passenger seat. That is after all what’s been happening to the US for the last 8 years and all the guns, bibles, booze, and restricted abortions sure as hell didn’t stop it.

Weirdly, these kinds of ideas will be a hard sell. People are already so busy fawning over Sarah Palin and a picture of her with a semi-automatic and a moose. Now, I’m not sure if the moose was in a cave making a video about jihad when she shot it, but that would have been a lot cooler and probably a lot more useful in the defense of America. But I’m not a hunter or an Alaskan, so maybe I have missed the point. Besides that, about 40-60% of Americans, depending on the stupid, er, undecideds, still indulge McCain and his self-styled maverick politics and the endlessly noble POW story. Let’s just be clear here, I mean no disrespect to POWs or veterans or anyone else who has had to go fight a war, and especially endure the god awful shit that Vietnam vets took from the right and the left, but a la Wesley Clark, I don’t really see how seven years of getting whipped on by communists deep in the jungle of a country that most Americans would just as soon forget even existed is grounds to be declared a maverick or a president.

Nevertheless, people appeared to vote for the current White House cabin boy because he was the candidate they imagined that they would most like to have over for a BBQ and some beer—never mind the fact that as the jackass at the party he’d be the one to dive head first into the shallow end of the pool, bleed all over the dry ice and beer, and probably piss in your mother’s linen closet, before passing out with his pants around his knees, puking into a lampshade that he thought was a bucket. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what he has done these past eight years. But no one likes to feel stupid at the backyard picnic table, and a “fancy, dancey, prancey” (see Joseph Bruno) crasher like Barack Obama is viewed with a deep, mean-eyed suspicion, cause he just won’t deliver any good ole boy action on a Saturday night. Imagine, he has the sheer effrontery and balls to raise campaign money and pay for a campaign with grassroots support, demand change to a system that has brought nothing but systemic abuse of the taxpayers, poor and middle class alike, and a futile, not to mention an economy draining war that appears to have even failed to get anyone one drop more of the oil it was so cynically waged for in the first place.

But none of this appears important to that crucial demographic of voters who have yet to decide. So, don’t hold your breath Democrats. Just because Doug Williams did it in 1987 doesn’t mean that your man will ever be allowed near something as sacred as the presidency any time soon. Unless those undecideds and Conservatives wake up and have the decency to get up every morning from now until Nov and repeat ‘you are the problem,’ until their ears bleed, it seems likely that a man that in 2004 George Bush clubbed down like a senile goat and a creep who is so far North she wouldn’t hesitate to deny access to abortion to victims of rape and incest will once again pull up a chair at America’s backyard blowout and well, you know the rest—you just sat through eight years of it.

I MISS THE OLYMPICS ALREADY

Your business is to fix his attention on the stream…[of immediate sense experiences]. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters


Look. Listen. Something makes me suspect, that while 1942 was, despite the slow turning of the tide, a year of fear, complication, and confusion that would make cryptic crossword clue writers blush if they weren’t so busy trying to rip the bottom out of the German Wolf-pack, which was, at a jolly good pace, sinking nearly 100 merchant ships a month to the tune of 3 million plus tons in the first six months of the year, Clive Staples Lewis, were he alive today, would look longingly back to the days when wrestling with the devil and His slightly incompetent degenerates was the greatest of his worries. Ah yes, to sit in the Oxford study and wag his chin with Tolkien over a briar pipe or two and the latest updates on the wireless of Satan’s Teutonic maneuvers.

Nevertheless, that was then and this is now, and the good professor can do little to circumvent the handicap of his death to comment on these transparently evil times, leaving us instead to ponder the letters of good old uncle Screwtape and his pronouncements on human nature. And so as far as life goes, the question of what is real is, alarmingly and unfortunately, now, depending on who’s pontificating, more or less important than ever. To wit the Chinese Olympics were not really real.

Let me keep this short and painless, the Chinese—inventors of all things grand, gunpowder, fireworks, and Confucius, and no things bad, water torture, those small, choking hazard parts in Kmart toys, and American Chinese food—masterfully reinvented reality with only a little help from those mandarins of fair play at the IOC, in what consensus appears to be was the greatest show on earth since P.T. Barnum and another bunch of juiced up freaks without a cause rolled into the nearest backwater and set up shop. Yes, a fake singer, opening ceremonies replete with digital arts, and pristine free speech protest zones all unfolded with the meticulous precision that we thought only a crazed ex-Navy Seal and a bunch of Hollywood union busters could concoct when regular actors had the temerity to think that TV existed for them. Real indeed.

Now, for that poor, ugly misfit with the crooked teeth and the perfect voice, have no fear: there’s nothing that a little re-educational labour camp won’t fix. And fireworks are never that great anyway unless someone’s drunken father blows off his hand and at least part of his face. And anyone who expected that protest had any place at this, the most non-political of events, the Olympics, really had no business anywhere near a newspaper, much less a piece of complicated electronic machinery like a television. So let’s concede that the Chinese Olympics were a masterful success, and the East is now truly the West, only better, because we all fixed our eyes on the stream, and damn near fell all over ourselves trying to wade into it like a wide-eyed bunch of deadheads rushing into the Ganges, proclaiming it to the be the greatest event ever, at least since Gerry jammed out that one long noodle somewhere in the bowels of Giant Stadium, while cops surreptitiously kneecapped the stragglers in the parking lot and greybeards in clam diggers and those stupid velcro tiga sandals over wool socks molested teenage girls behind the porta potties. But I digress. The point that is sorely missing is that the Chinese have masterfully snatched our ideas about what is real from us and held it up for the world to see.

This Olympic presentation had nothing to do with Western perception or reality. After all, any state that can spend $40 billion, bulldoze the homes of tens of thousands, co-opt 300,000 volunteer spies and induce people to cut their lawns with nail scissors is hardly concerned about what we think. No, no. These Olympics were firmly for the benefit of the 1/6th of the world’s population living in China. It was a tour-de-force proclaiming to every Chinese citizen that the state is alive and well and if the IOC and America and all those other do-gooders can’t change that, well…stay the fuck out of Tiananmen Square and don’t bother coming to the party unless you’ve learned the official chants and practiced the state approved cheerleading moves.

As for arriving in the West, after all, when everything’s said and done, China will still be filled with Chinese people, and no matter how stunning the display, if you turn it over and inspect the bottom, you’ll find that ubiquitous tag, made in China. And this does not bode well for China’s arrival. For, anyone who thinks that the British, French, American or any other westerner on the street will actually welcome the Chinese into the little club, has a serious reality impairment. Let’s face it. The shadow of the British Empire, though wafer thin and tattered, is still cast over the greater part of the white world, and as a result, somewhere deep in our hearts, the Chinese are not ‘true white men’, and therefore not to be trusted. But I suspect the Party knows this, and quite rightly doesn’t care. They don’t need to be admitted into the club, after all. China hasn’t arrived because it was already here. We are the ones who need to arrive.

The truth is that, regardless of our platitudes about democracy and rights and fair play and reality, we are as dirty as the other pigs at the trough, and the trough is already owned and stocked by a bunch of savvy reality producers who don’t care if you’re white, black, or yellow, as long as you keep eating. There’s always room for one more. And so the state power in China knows what we should know, if we could see past the stream of sensory images: it doesn’t really matter what we think. Real life has always been either something that happens for us and not anyone else, or something we fervently wish would happen to someone else and not us. Either way, the gross reality of the Chinese Olympics is that if we don’t start asking ourselves what is real, we may soon discover that the fix is in for more than just the Olympics and in the end all that we thought golden has actually always been nothing more than tin.