Vote: (n) the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Ambrose Beirce, The Devil's Dictionary
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Bertrand Russell
Look. Listen. It is long in the night and the fire is low, in the hearth and in my heart. Yes. I got beaten like a blind dog in predicting the decline of Stephen Harper and his automatons. What can i say? I was not expecting anything but a minority government for the Conservatives, but I didn't think the Bastards would get 17 more seats. Well, well. Vote splitting and panic voters in the rest of Canada aside, the Quebecois and the Newfoundlanders saved us from ourselves once again, and for that there is something to be thankful for. The rest of the feckless who could have spared this country from another year or two of the cold, dumb leadership of a man who lest we forget, wanted to join the coalition of the willing (and this simply is the single and only point necessary to bar Harper from any kind of governance, never mind that of our country), but they didn't...well, the people get the government they deserve, but I resent having it foisted on me. Yes, I know my grapes are sour, and to the victor go the spoils, but I am in no mood to apologize or roll on this one. The fruits of folly sometime fall late, and the spoils of this election are already rotten on the vine. One or two years down the road we will look back on this as a wasted opportunity. The slow crawl of environmental evils looming on the horizon will not be dealt with, the economy will get worse, foreign affairs will continue to wither, and general democracy will not be served or furthered. So it goes, I guess. There is something to be learned from this botched operation, but tonight is not the time. No. No matter how Harper spins it, most Canadians have typically sat on their hands again and the Conservative victory is simply one of resounding default. It reminds me of all those hopeless years of betting on the Kansas City Chiefs, only to have Marty Schottenheimer screw me on the point spread time and again with his inevitably conservative play calling. There is something pathetic about an electorate that never really goes for broke when it all comes down, but after all, this campaign was largely wasted from the start and full of sound and fury signifying nothing. But now I am rambling, and to be honest have no stomach for this rotten, shrunken corpse of an election.
There is plenty of blame to go around, though I could care less about it now. We have had an election for no reason, and we are saddled with many MPs who exist for no reason but to consume the dead corpse of politics in this country. So Stockwell Day can take his sentimental watch and shove it up his ass, Stephane Dion can get back to practising his English and Jack Layton can keep running madly from promise to promise. When the real reckoning comes it will be ugly and brutal, a real whipping for many who deserve nothing less.
But when I look at the map of Canada and see the blue sea of Alberta and Saskatchewan and the aping ridings in BC, I cannot help but feel depressed and disgusted. One day the tar sands will run into dry desert, pine beetles will bore into the eyeballs of the backward and blind, and Alberta and BC will once again be more than just intellectual wastelands. Ugh. I want a one way ticket to Quebec and I want it now. I will leave this place without even shaking the dust of my shoes and make a beeline straight across the northern US until I reach Vermont and head back North. One day soon the West will have seen the last of me, and I will not stop moving fast, hard and bitterly until I arrive in a place where people take politics seriously.
When I drag myself out of this low, analysis will come, and I feel it stirring viciously in my belly. But for now, you will have to excuse me, because I am going to draw the shade, bolt the door, crank up some serious rhythm and blues and drink Irish whiskey until my eyeballs bleed. Out.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
MR. HARPER'S ANGST
The great philosophical question used to be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Today, the real question is: ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime
…and as he looked and saw her well known pleasant smile, he felt death come again. This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall…So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.
Ernest Hemmingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Look. Listen. Many things have gone wrong these days passed and many deserve their fate, while others are still suckling the optimism of bewilderment, not yet sure that the raw and intemperate days of doom are indeed theirs. Perhaps I fall into both categories, first for betting that the Dallas Cowboys would cover a 5.5 point spread in Sunday’s game against the Arizona Cardinals, and second for putting good money on the 4-1 Carolina Panthers to cover the 1.5 point spread against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Carolina left me shaking my head, but I will admit that putting my money on a team with a career low life corner back (Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones) and a mentally ill wide receiver (Terrell Owens) who, in last week’s post-game press conference, very nearly simultaneously broke into tears and hallelujahs as he declared himself God’s instrument of football, was a terminally dumb maneuver that cost me an otherwise flawless bet. In either case, my losses are cheap and insignificant in the face of the other losers out on the heath, howling in the winter winds. But for others, recent days have been days of a greater nothingness, and while I am playing for fun, they are in it for keeps, and one suspects that there will be much less cracking of bones and much more licking of wounds and gnashing of teeth around some fires in the long days to come.
Yes. Stephen Harper has watched his ‘brilliant tactics’ fail as the economy slides and Canadians peel off in the polls like blisters in the sun. He and he alone—for this is a man who prides himself on his iron grasp and penultimate control of his party and (as he once imagined) this country—bears the blame. What must have seemed like such a clever opportunity to finally grasp the ring of majority power that he so cravenly desired has turned into a nightmare of existential proportion. Yes indeed Mr. Harper, after tomorrow, you may have so much less of something that it can and will only seem like nothing to you, as you chew on the cinders of another minority government and the secret knowledge that you are your ilk are not really wanted around here. Let’s be clear. Since the day he called this doomed election, Harper has lost credibility by bending his own fixed election rules; cutting off his feet in Quebec; pissing off artists; presiding over cautious estimates for the cost of the war in Afghanistan that have ballooned to somewhere at or above $18 billion; watching the economy falter while telling people to buy stocks and not to worry; and even losing much of the senior citizen vote. And it gets worse: the numbers in the polls have fallen substantially to as little as a 5 point lead over the Liberals, and if any of the citizens backing the Jackal or Elizabeth May get nervous come voting time, this could shrink considerably more.
How did what seemed like something, so catastrophically become so much nothing? Well, Mr. Harper, though claiming to be a historian of hockey (which I doubt, but more of that later), also admits to not being interested in studying history or philosophy, which explains a lot. See. An interest in history and the leaders of the past, along with the fundamental curiosity and the desire to understand that is rooted in philosophy would have been of great help to Mr. Harper, for he would have the ability to step down from his economist’s, moralizing throne and understand that he is attempting to govern people, not numbers or sheep, and these people have interests beyond the scope of what he has determined to be important. And this is his undoing. Undoubtedly he has crafted a plan, but it is inflexible and resolutely determined: there can be no change with Mr. Harper, because, as any conservative at heart, he does not believe in change. Now, putting aside history and philosophy for a moment, even if he were simply a student of Canada’s game, possibly he would see the folly of his ways through basic, analogous thought: to wit, hockey, like politics, is a game of fluidity. When played at its most beautiful and highest levels, it is one of the most unpredictable, fast changing, and artistic of sports. For the set pieces of football, soccer, and basketball, and the rigidity of the baseball diamond are largely absent from hockey. Positional play and strategy are second to the speed and creativity of the 12 players on the ice—and this demands the ability to change, just as real, breathing constituents at the heart of any election demand change.
But I suspect that Mr. Harper has other things on his mind beside hockey. He is the emperor in a dying campaign—one which, on those heady late summer days, seemed so promising—perhaps still unable to hear the winds of death or the majority of people in Canada whispering his fate. And oh! how the idea of anything less than a majority government must freeze and gall his thin blood as he broods over what must be a gnawing and bitter, deeply personal question: Why is there nothing, rather than something?
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime
…and as he looked and saw her well known pleasant smile, he felt death come again. This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall…So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.
Ernest Hemmingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Look. Listen. Many things have gone wrong these days passed and many deserve their fate, while others are still suckling the optimism of bewilderment, not yet sure that the raw and intemperate days of doom are indeed theirs. Perhaps I fall into both categories, first for betting that the Dallas Cowboys would cover a 5.5 point spread in Sunday’s game against the Arizona Cardinals, and second for putting good money on the 4-1 Carolina Panthers to cover the 1.5 point spread against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Carolina left me shaking my head, but I will admit that putting my money on a team with a career low life corner back (Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones) and a mentally ill wide receiver (Terrell Owens) who, in last week’s post-game press conference, very nearly simultaneously broke into tears and hallelujahs as he declared himself God’s instrument of football, was a terminally dumb maneuver that cost me an otherwise flawless bet. In either case, my losses are cheap and insignificant in the face of the other losers out on the heath, howling in the winter winds. But for others, recent days have been days of a greater nothingness, and while I am playing for fun, they are in it for keeps, and one suspects that there will be much less cracking of bones and much more licking of wounds and gnashing of teeth around some fires in the long days to come.
Yes. Stephen Harper has watched his ‘brilliant tactics’ fail as the economy slides and Canadians peel off in the polls like blisters in the sun. He and he alone—for this is a man who prides himself on his iron grasp and penultimate control of his party and (as he once imagined) this country—bears the blame. What must have seemed like such a clever opportunity to finally grasp the ring of majority power that he so cravenly desired has turned into a nightmare of existential proportion. Yes indeed Mr. Harper, after tomorrow, you may have so much less of something that it can and will only seem like nothing to you, as you chew on the cinders of another minority government and the secret knowledge that you are your ilk are not really wanted around here. Let’s be clear. Since the day he called this doomed election, Harper has lost credibility by bending his own fixed election rules; cutting off his feet in Quebec; pissing off artists; presiding over cautious estimates for the cost of the war in Afghanistan that have ballooned to somewhere at or above $18 billion; watching the economy falter while telling people to buy stocks and not to worry; and even losing much of the senior citizen vote. And it gets worse: the numbers in the polls have fallen substantially to as little as a 5 point lead over the Liberals, and if any of the citizens backing the Jackal or Elizabeth May get nervous come voting time, this could shrink considerably more.
How did what seemed like something, so catastrophically become so much nothing? Well, Mr. Harper, though claiming to be a historian of hockey (which I doubt, but more of that later), also admits to not being interested in studying history or philosophy, which explains a lot. See. An interest in history and the leaders of the past, along with the fundamental curiosity and the desire to understand that is rooted in philosophy would have been of great help to Mr. Harper, for he would have the ability to step down from his economist’s, moralizing throne and understand that he is attempting to govern people, not numbers or sheep, and these people have interests beyond the scope of what he has determined to be important. And this is his undoing. Undoubtedly he has crafted a plan, but it is inflexible and resolutely determined: there can be no change with Mr. Harper, because, as any conservative at heart, he does not believe in change. Now, putting aside history and philosophy for a moment, even if he were simply a student of Canada’s game, possibly he would see the folly of his ways through basic, analogous thought: to wit, hockey, like politics, is a game of fluidity. When played at its most beautiful and highest levels, it is one of the most unpredictable, fast changing, and artistic of sports. For the set pieces of football, soccer, and basketball, and the rigidity of the baseball diamond are largely absent from hockey. Positional play and strategy are second to the speed and creativity of the 12 players on the ice—and this demands the ability to change, just as real, breathing constituents at the heart of any election demand change.
But I suspect that Mr. Harper has other things on his mind beside hockey. He is the emperor in a dying campaign—one which, on those heady late summer days, seemed so promising—perhaps still unable to hear the winds of death or the majority of people in Canada whispering his fate. And oh! how the idea of anything less than a majority government must freeze and gall his thin blood as he broods over what must be a gnawing and bitter, deeply personal question: Why is there nothing, rather than something?
Sunday, October 5, 2008
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A LITERARY EDUCATION or THE NIGHT OF THE SNAKE
In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell recounts a curious pehenomenon of animal behavior. Newly hatched chickens, bits of eggshells still clinging to their tails, will dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead; yet they remain unaffected by other birds. Furthermore, a wooden model of a hawk, drawn forward along a wire above their coop, will send them scurrying (if the model is pulled backward, however, there is no response). “Whence,” Campbell asks, “this abrupt seizure by an image to which there is no counterpart in the chicken’s world? Living gulls and ducks, herons and pigeons, leave it cold; but the work of art strikes some very deep chord!”
Wilfred L. Guerin, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature
Serpent (snake, worm): Symbol of energy and pure force (cf. libido); evil, corruption, sensuality; destruction; mystery; wisdom; the unconscious.
Look. Listen. I know it is untimely for another diatribe on politics, and, in particular, woefully late for a post-mortem of the US vice-presidential debate, already so thankfully distant in that rear view mirror of the mind. I know also that some of you may have gained the impression from our last conversation that I had turned over a new leaf—a kind of optimism and generosity seemed to infuse my writing (I think) like a fragrant dream on a midsummer day. Well that too is behind me and although I am at this moment listening to Bob Dylan live at Budokan at extreme volume, that is as far as my magnanimity extends. But it is not my fault. No. I tried. Even as the debate whimpered up from the South on Thursday evening, I tried to avert my eyes and ears and lay low for a change. There seemed nothing worth seeing. So. Turn a page. Think laterally. I walked out on the Canadian election debate, and didn’t even bother cranking up the US one. I skipped the morning paper these past two days. Alas, it has all been for nought, for a scant 48 (mostly drunken) hours later, I am drawn back to these people with a craven, degenerate fascination that I wish upon no one. Yes. It truly is a cross, and one, that on nights like these, with Palin reruns bleating away on my monitor, seems, despite its hollowness to the core, awfully heavy to bear.
But enough of this. I was not raised to be a milk sop and pity is something I can do without. So to the matter at hand: the buffoons, shady real estate dealers, Washington hair stylists, and the train wreck of Election ’08, that has so rapidly and badly listed into a kind of anti-gravitas previously reserved for beauty pageants and Las Vegas magic shows. These people are beyond stealing my thunder; no, they have absolutely sucked the electricity from the air and created a monumental vacuum that is astounding in its crystalline consistency and utter transparency. Now. Jean Baudrillard—if I had a religion, he would be its messiah—spoke often and eloquently of the transparency of evil, but please don’t tar his memory with my brush. I borrow his term only: the musings that follow will be mine and mine alone, so apologies.
There is a transparency of the evil today in that we see it each and every minute but look straight through it. We look through it, just as much as we look through the screens of our TVs and computers and into that kind of vacuous banality of the Sarah Palins of the world. It has become almost farcical in its blatancy and ubiquity, so much so that we laugh or shrug, but this is a crucial misjudgment, for it is still there, no less dangerous and that much less distant. No. There are no more Richard Nixons. Gone are the days of Nero, Hitler or Stalin. We have inherited an evil that apes, grins, and seems hopelessly deficient of presence. And this has made us a continent of fools, adrift and defeated, disarmed as it were, for satire and irony have lost any and all potency, and we too grin and ape and shrug, our resistance bereft of potency. It is all too clear to be seen anymore; the rules of the game have eased and become shiftless, and almost all that we should aggressively target and violently dismantle is shrouded in near invisibility. Now, it may be so easy to skewer someone like Sarah Palin, with her folksy charm, asinine eighth grade smirk and giggle, and her absolutely indigestible gimcrack politics, but that is the danger. Make no mistake, people like her and her minders are dangerous, and when the evil is diluted with such triviality and rank inanity, a trend that began with George W. Bush, the question becomes not how to fight tooth and nail against the dark forces that will damn us all, but instead, how to gently maneuver the village idiot away from the well. But it is exactly this kind of lulling transparency that makes our current situation as dire and frightening as at any other time in history, because for evil to triumph it is no longer necessary to beat people into submission or even craftily deceive them, but instead, the tedium of boredom and simple stupefaction will do.
Now I need to confess, while I was playing Jonah on Thursday—or maybe Peter, waiting for the cock to crow, stifling the red, angry demons in my ears—fleeing my fate as it were, something happened when I stumbled out from the local bar. For a variety of reasons, some no doubt questionable, I ended up in a basement apartment off Commercial Drive, smoking high grade weed with a friendly enough skateboarder. One thing led to another, and by the time we had Zappa (WakaJawaka) playing loud enough that conversation was rendered both unnecessary and moot, clearly the next logical step was to coax a 7 foot Boa constrictor out from under its heat lamp. Yes. I was assured that it had feasted heartily days before and so would be sedate and reasonable—or as reasonable as Boa constrictors get. My new found friend, let’s call him Adam—he was after all, hanging out with a serpent—prodded the Boa with a staff, or maybe it was a didgeridoo; in any case, the thing came uncoiling up the stick, tongue-a-flicker, its eyes beady and full of a kind of latent hostility that would have been disconcerting under other circumstances, but seemed vaguely natural and right on this particular night. After all, when the mood is fey and you are gripped by that dumb animal desire to dam the racing of your mind and the queasiness of your heart, a few stiff belts of Irish whisky and the motto whatever will be will be, are two things that I have found comforting, and if not entirely successful, at least worthwhile on some brute, honest level.
Ah. But where I am I going with this? What of Sarah Palin and transparency, whiskey and snakes? Well, well, I will tell you this: my understanding of and belief in the archetype, the primeval symbol, the root cipher was restored in this night. And these things, the archetypes, are important and fundamental to our understanding and ability to see many things with clarity, both good and evil. You know, I saw in that snake, coiled around my forearm, sliding across my bicep and contracting like mercilessness, something of the brutality of power and the real, vivid evil mythologized and sunk deep into our unconscious. This moment of recognition restored me to my senses in many ways. I was sober and clear-headed again. I felt the snake’s underbelly, rippled, satiated and striated with raw power. It was what I needed—the diamond of its head moving against my shoulder, dull but charged like a fist—to grasp what was eluding me, what was getting me down. I had to look into those blind, adamantine eyes, to understand that in the sideshow of politics, in the leering pantomime, I had lost touch with evil, with the image of evil, with the myth of evil. I had begun to look straight through it. And it all came to me, that I had been doing a little too much laughing, and moaning, and shrugging but now it was time to take stock and reinvest in words that I had once said but misplaced, something like this I think: there are some people that, when you get them down, you should just kick the shit out of… Dear reader, when all is said and done, that, I think, is the moral of this and most archetypal snake stories and one still worth remembering.
Wilfred L. Guerin, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature
Serpent (snake, worm): Symbol of energy and pure force (cf. libido); evil, corruption, sensuality; destruction; mystery; wisdom; the unconscious.
Look. Listen. I know it is untimely for another diatribe on politics, and, in particular, woefully late for a post-mortem of the US vice-presidential debate, already so thankfully distant in that rear view mirror of the mind. I know also that some of you may have gained the impression from our last conversation that I had turned over a new leaf—a kind of optimism and generosity seemed to infuse my writing (I think) like a fragrant dream on a midsummer day. Well that too is behind me and although I am at this moment listening to Bob Dylan live at Budokan at extreme volume, that is as far as my magnanimity extends. But it is not my fault. No. I tried. Even as the debate whimpered up from the South on Thursday evening, I tried to avert my eyes and ears and lay low for a change. There seemed nothing worth seeing. So. Turn a page. Think laterally. I walked out on the Canadian election debate, and didn’t even bother cranking up the US one. I skipped the morning paper these past two days. Alas, it has all been for nought, for a scant 48 (mostly drunken) hours later, I am drawn back to these people with a craven, degenerate fascination that I wish upon no one. Yes. It truly is a cross, and one, that on nights like these, with Palin reruns bleating away on my monitor, seems, despite its hollowness to the core, awfully heavy to bear.
But enough of this. I was not raised to be a milk sop and pity is something I can do without. So to the matter at hand: the buffoons, shady real estate dealers, Washington hair stylists, and the train wreck of Election ’08, that has so rapidly and badly listed into a kind of anti-gravitas previously reserved for beauty pageants and Las Vegas magic shows. These people are beyond stealing my thunder; no, they have absolutely sucked the electricity from the air and created a monumental vacuum that is astounding in its crystalline consistency and utter transparency. Now. Jean Baudrillard—if I had a religion, he would be its messiah—spoke often and eloquently of the transparency of evil, but please don’t tar his memory with my brush. I borrow his term only: the musings that follow will be mine and mine alone, so apologies.
There is a transparency of the evil today in that we see it each and every minute but look straight through it. We look through it, just as much as we look through the screens of our TVs and computers and into that kind of vacuous banality of the Sarah Palins of the world. It has become almost farcical in its blatancy and ubiquity, so much so that we laugh or shrug, but this is a crucial misjudgment, for it is still there, no less dangerous and that much less distant. No. There are no more Richard Nixons. Gone are the days of Nero, Hitler or Stalin. We have inherited an evil that apes, grins, and seems hopelessly deficient of presence. And this has made us a continent of fools, adrift and defeated, disarmed as it were, for satire and irony have lost any and all potency, and we too grin and ape and shrug, our resistance bereft of potency. It is all too clear to be seen anymore; the rules of the game have eased and become shiftless, and almost all that we should aggressively target and violently dismantle is shrouded in near invisibility. Now, it may be so easy to skewer someone like Sarah Palin, with her folksy charm, asinine eighth grade smirk and giggle, and her absolutely indigestible gimcrack politics, but that is the danger. Make no mistake, people like her and her minders are dangerous, and when the evil is diluted with such triviality and rank inanity, a trend that began with George W. Bush, the question becomes not how to fight tooth and nail against the dark forces that will damn us all, but instead, how to gently maneuver the village idiot away from the well. But it is exactly this kind of lulling transparency that makes our current situation as dire and frightening as at any other time in history, because for evil to triumph it is no longer necessary to beat people into submission or even craftily deceive them, but instead, the tedium of boredom and simple stupefaction will do.
Now I need to confess, while I was playing Jonah on Thursday—or maybe Peter, waiting for the cock to crow, stifling the red, angry demons in my ears—fleeing my fate as it were, something happened when I stumbled out from the local bar. For a variety of reasons, some no doubt questionable, I ended up in a basement apartment off Commercial Drive, smoking high grade weed with a friendly enough skateboarder. One thing led to another, and by the time we had Zappa (WakaJawaka) playing loud enough that conversation was rendered both unnecessary and moot, clearly the next logical step was to coax a 7 foot Boa constrictor out from under its heat lamp. Yes. I was assured that it had feasted heartily days before and so would be sedate and reasonable—or as reasonable as Boa constrictors get. My new found friend, let’s call him Adam—he was after all, hanging out with a serpent—prodded the Boa with a staff, or maybe it was a didgeridoo; in any case, the thing came uncoiling up the stick, tongue-a-flicker, its eyes beady and full of a kind of latent hostility that would have been disconcerting under other circumstances, but seemed vaguely natural and right on this particular night. After all, when the mood is fey and you are gripped by that dumb animal desire to dam the racing of your mind and the queasiness of your heart, a few stiff belts of Irish whisky and the motto whatever will be will be, are two things that I have found comforting, and if not entirely successful, at least worthwhile on some brute, honest level.
Ah. But where I am I going with this? What of Sarah Palin and transparency, whiskey and snakes? Well, well, I will tell you this: my understanding of and belief in the archetype, the primeval symbol, the root cipher was restored in this night. And these things, the archetypes, are important and fundamental to our understanding and ability to see many things with clarity, both good and evil. You know, I saw in that snake, coiled around my forearm, sliding across my bicep and contracting like mercilessness, something of the brutality of power and the real, vivid evil mythologized and sunk deep into our unconscious. This moment of recognition restored me to my senses in many ways. I was sober and clear-headed again. I felt the snake’s underbelly, rippled, satiated and striated with raw power. It was what I needed—the diamond of its head moving against my shoulder, dull but charged like a fist—to grasp what was eluding me, what was getting me down. I had to look into those blind, adamantine eyes, to understand that in the sideshow of politics, in the leering pantomime, I had lost touch with evil, with the image of evil, with the myth of evil. I had begun to look straight through it. And it all came to me, that I had been doing a little too much laughing, and moaning, and shrugging but now it was time to take stock and reinvest in words that I had once said but misplaced, something like this I think: there are some people that, when you get them down, you should just kick the shit out of… Dear reader, when all is said and done, that, I think, is the moral of this and most archetypal snake stories and one still worth remembering.
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