The night before the G-20 started last June, I happened to be in Toronto. I was at a resto on Parliament Street, and had to cross the northern edge of the G-20 security zone to get to the west side B&B I was staying at.  As it happened, (as happens on a fairly regular basis, I admit) I’d gotten fairly loaded at the resto, and of course, during dinner, the G-20 and the relative value of Stephen Harper’s billion dollar photo op had come up, as had the vast number of cops who’d been trucked in to protect the world’s stuffed shirts from people like us .

Now, if you’ve lived your life in a small town like I have, you may or may not like police, but unless you’re a complete torpedo, you’ve learned the rules of engagement with them. They’re pretty simple, actually: never get into it with anyone who has a gun. When I was younger I’d had that rule drilled into me the hard way a couple of times. I’d gotten lippy with police officers, as kids do, and they’d beaten the crap out of me.

So even though I was decently oiled up on the eve of the G-20 and had been joking about what I’d say to the pigs if I ran into them, when the car I was riding in turned right onto Carleton street and encountered a police van and a bunch of police officers blocking the road for no good reason, I wasn’t about to expose myself for a refresher course. I shut my trap and hunkered down in the back seat.

The cops I was looking at were a scary bunch: large young men with guns, too much testosterone and from what I could see, a gang panache that told you that they owned the street, could do whatever they wanted, and watch your ass, citizen. This was the stew of sanctioned aggression that got paralegal Sean Salvati arrested, stripped down, paraded past a female sergeant who had a good look at how big his weewee was or wasn’t, and tossed into jail, all of it just for lipping off at some police officers in for the G-20 jamboree.

Salvati wants redress for the humiliations he was put through. He’s suing the Toronto Police Services Board, the Federal Minister of Justice and the four Toronto police officers who drubbed him, and it seems, given the video evidence on the front page of the June 24^th Toronto Star, that he might get somewhere with his case.  People around here think he’s a goof for thinking his occupation made him special enough to get lippy, and privately I do, too. But I also hope Salvati gets what he wants in the courts, because it might prevent another riot in the future, and it might even put the thumb on the bigger goofs, who any fool can track right up to and into the chair of the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper.

What Canada had on its collective hands, from the weeks leading up to the G-20 through to the police riot after the G-20 leaders were gone, you understand, was a riot of authority. Not just the people who live in Toronto were subjected to it either. Stephen Harper, deliberately or not, let us all know what a police state would be like, so watch yerself.

That’s why everyone needs to pay attention to this late aftermath of the G-20. The court cases against the police rioters should proliferate and proceed, the statutes that permitted the police riot need to be changed, and the police need to know that they fucked up in a very dangerous way. And we—meaning everyone, including the Conservatives, need to take a hard look at the men who made this all happen. Stephen Harper’s bumboys blew a billion dollars and change to make their Fuehrer look good, without a single good thing coming out of it unless the statutes that permitted the police riot to happen get changed.

Then there’s Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who I hear ain’t going to march in the gay pride parade on July 3^rd. There’s a fairly obvious health argument to be made for why he won’t march—that any walking event that goes further than 200 meters is probably going to bring on a fatal heart attack for this sausage on legs—but I don’t think that’s why Mr. Ford is passing on the parade, and neither does anyone else. He’s passing on it because he wants to spend time at the cottage with his family (I imagine almost as many hotdogs will be consumed there as at the gay pride parade, but that’s another kind of issue.)

Okay, we don’t really believe that, either. He’s not going to march in the pride parade because he’s uncomfortable around guys in thongs, and because he knows damned well he’s going to get an extra special visual dousing of the hardware packed inside those thongs from the celebrants, who, truth be told, don’t like him any better than he likes them.

As it happens, I’m not attending the parade either, although nobody in Toronto’s gay community has noticed. It won’t be because I’ll be marching in the North Bay Pride parade. Parades, whatever else they might be, are collections of bullies and jackasses saying hooray for their side. Doesn’t matter if it’s the military or the gay community. In the old days, if you didn’t show up for the Armistice Day parades, you were unpatriotic. Today, you don’t do gay pride week, and you’re homophobic. But I’m neither of those, and I’m not going, just like I didn’t go to the November 11^th parades once I was released from Boy Scouts.

As at least a dozen gay intellectuals have quietly admitted in the past five years, gay is over. No one gives a damn if anyone is gay. Being homosexual is normal behavior now, so why the need to flaunt it? All the gay pride parade does is disrupt traffic, help pump up the profits of chain restaurants and party merchants, and give corporate demonstrators yet another op to get our names on contest forms so they can deluge us with advertising for six months. Licenses run out, and this one is obsolete.

Don’t get me wrong. I love parades. MayDay, when I was a kid, was great fun. But that’s because everyone had the right to march on behalf of whatever cause they had, even if it was just their sausage business. Maybe Toronto can reinvent its Mayday parade, and everybody will march because it’s spring, and summer’s coming, and because we’re all citizens of a very fortunate country. Those are things I can get behind: much more enthusiastically than the senile nyah, nyah side of gay pride.

Of course, unless it’s out in the 905 suburbs, Rob Ford wouldn’t march in my kind of parade either, which tells you what’s wrong with him: he just ain’t everyone’s mayor. That said, I wonder if David Miller would have marched in the gay pride parade if it had been held up in suburban Markham? He wasn’t exactly everyone’s mayor, either.

In other non-downtown Toronto news, Conrad Black has been sent back to jail for another year in Florida by U.S. Federal Court Judge Amy St. Eve. Since it’s the last place left where he can afford servants, this isn’t a complete tragedy. I note that the bankers who precipitated the 2008 economic meltdown are still running around free, and compared with what these guys did, Black seems like a guy sentenced to death for jaywalking—until he opens his mouth, that is, or Barbara Amiel does the swoon and sleeps through the verdict’s explanation.

1283 words,  June 25^th, 2011

Harper’s “strong majority” is running on gasoline provided by forty percent of the Canadian electorate.  I worry, again, that the “new media” hullabaloo, about which I can at times get excited, is a self-referential circular system in which reality bubbles appear and burst when reality sets in with a strong purpose, as it will with Harper. I hope I’m wrong about this but I do not feel gleeful at the moment. I worry that by the time Harper finishes with us it will be too late—as our attempts at halting climate change will come too late—to disarm the traps we’re getting into. A dark day for Canada. In dark days, people, like abused kids, rush to strong leaders.

7 May 11

Harper’s big majority (take a deep breath, lie back and think of England) was garnered with a 2% increase in his popular vote in the last election. The rest of us did not vote for him. The fundamentally undemocratic first-past-post electoral system brings this about: the strong get majorities because they are strong, not because they have the support of the majority.

Harper’s great desire, his life project, was to kill the Liberal Party. He’s succeeded. He lives in an epic age, in which your main job is to kill your enemy. That’s his thinking.  Now he’ll try to build an empire. But he may not know how, and will try instead to find a new enemy. Having no natural enemy left, he may in fact not know what to do. It’s useful, I think, to compare him to boy gamers. You get points for vanquishing the enemy, monsters, etc., then you go downstairs where mom has cooked supper for you. You get status and kudos from your imaginary peers, the other boys and their super toys.

So let’s assume that our prime minister—I don’t think I’m wrong about this—lives in this sort of boy-in-his-room-battling-monsters kind of reality. Layton, meanwhile, is a boy scout. He mouths truisms he doesn’t quite understand and couldn’t make good on if his mother’s life depended on it. He’s a man of platitudes and a cute face who likes himself so much as a celeb that he daily pees his pants with joy. Layton’s the jester figure to Harper’s hero-king. The two might need each other to keep this story-line going—and what I fear sometimes in my darkest moments, is that the real kids, raised on hero-meets-monster fiction and media, will willy nilly take to such a story line. This is a great catastrophe, if you ask me. Harper’s so out of touch my teeth hurt when I think of it; Layton makes my gums bleed.

The media, meanwhile, are gleeful. They got a story where they worried there wasn’t one: but now, just imagine, we have the demise of the Liberals, for the first time in history, they, the end of the natural governing party, are neither….etc. etc.. We have the rise of the NDP, for the first time in history a serious contender, as Marlon Brando would have put it, as official opposition. An orange revolution, here in commonplace Canada, imagine that! And the collapse of the BQ. How much happier can a journalist get? We have neophyte kids from Quebec who don’t speak French forming the majority of the NDP caucus, how cool is that—as a story, not as reality, remember? Media people love history because they so rarely, in fact never, make it. Meanwhile the true issues mount up: climate change, the oil sands (remember when they were tar sands?) Afghanistan, Obama—I mean Osama—and the end of the 9/11 era. Another computer game tribal killing with no relation to legal reality, without due national or international process: a wild west show. Obama reminds me of Ignatieff, which is a sad comparison to be making.

The young, who I think wish to vote and have influence, don’t quite know how to do it. They don’t get the concept: it’s not enough like shopping. What do I get in return for voting? Their networks encourage them—and us old farts—to act, and one has hope, but youth needs more guidance from people, not from social networking software. Facebook is a different animal here in North.America than in Egypt, where people talk and then text, not vice versa. I do have hope that when Harper gets going on his many projects the kids’ll wake up and smell the rats. How they will deal with them I don’t know. Some of the kids have kids themselves, though, and that’ll make a difference. I have hope, see?

11 May 11

I’ve calmed a bit and today I am more worried about Harper’s neo-con agenda bee buzzing into Canada’s cultural and political fabric. He’ll abolish public funding for political parties, thus giving the corporations the say over who’ll get elected; he’ll slash CBC funding and support his crony media outlets like Sun TV; he’ll, needless to say, slash arts funding even more; he’ll cut corporate taxes, privatize healthcare delivery, deregulate guns,  balloon up the prison system, throw money at the military, make love to the tar sands, and make Canada the laughing stock of global efforts to curb climate change or address any other environmental matter. He’s a disgrace, an embarrassment, a Bush holdover, a menace to Canadian democracy: all the things we knew before the election, and didn’t prevent.

1080 words,  May 18, 2011

“My name is Brandon Perry I am a chef and author looking to be featured in your magizine, please check out my website and please get back to me. Im notable known as the new face of Nova Scotian Cooking. I would like to talk about food sustainabilty and the enviroment, as well as imigration and how its effecting Canadian chef’s, both the positives and negitives.”

I wrote back to Perry and said, “Well, I admire your entrepreneurial spirit, but when you’re auditioning to write for a magazine, it’s a good idea not to make nine spelling and grammatical errors in a single paragraph.” (I looked again, and there were ten). Then I checked his website, and then Googled his name. He’s either a black male model out of New York City with a set of washboard abs that would make Margaret Wente go weak in the knees, a 12 year-old kid somewhere in the U.S. who uploads videos onto YouTube of himself and his friends skateboarding, or he’s an overweight 22 year old from Nova Scotia who has (at very least) a gift for self-promotion, including a website that features recipes for cooking with marijuana.

According to his own website, he is Chef Brandon Myles Perry “a 22 year old Canadian Chef, his passion is Food comes from…well he doesn’t know, but is the author of 6 books by the age of 22, holds a Culinary Art’s diploma, a certified ships cook, a certified sommolier and mixologist, and a pastry chef after just finishing up with private instruction under pastry chef Josephine Rodriguez ( Le Bernardin, Nobu, Le Cirque 2000, Solo, Fredrick’s Madison, New Leaf Cafe, The boathouse cafe…) Chef Brandon has worked at many 2 star Lodges as a sous chef while in Culinary School, after this he then worked for two years as the Executive Chef at a 4 star Inn before becoming a writer as well as a musician and graphic artist as well as a private chef. He Currently works in Nova Scotia and does International Caterings as well as private chef work, and teaches Culinary Arts independently, for a living.”

On that website is a testimonial—just one—from a former adult film star named Kay Parker, who now apparently works as a spiritual counseler.

Brandon Perry is, whatever veracity his claims may have, a blur of activity. At 22 he’s done a whole lot of things with his life, taking culinary, sommelier and barkeeping courses, working in “many” 2 star lodges, and even surviving for two years as the ExecChef of an, um, unnamed 4 star “Inn”. He’s taken online culinary courses from “Ivy League Schools” (I wasn’t aware that Harvard offered them), written six books and is now teaching “culinary arts independently.”

Wait a minute.  Six books before the age of 22?

There are, in fact, four of them available on Amazon.com. They’re self-published. The first paragraph of the foreward to one of them, Advanced knife Skills: In Theory and Practice, begins this way:  “The basic purposes of eating are beyond the imagination of man or any other creature alive on this planet, for without food any creature, man, or animal will not survive for long. With this said, one must think, believe and trust in what food and beverages can be to people on an emotional level.”  

Got that? 

Now, this all sounds to me like an ambitious kid who’s learned how to promote himself on the Internet. And there’s nothing wrong with ambition provided that it is coupled with productivity that isn’t entirely anti-social, notwithstanding the clouds of blue and black smoke it usually generates, and the sometimes awkwardly-placed, sometimes accurately placed mirrors that don’t really hide much if you take the time to peer through the camouflage. Right? 

I guess the real question is whether or not Brandon Perry can actually cook. I hope so. But whether he can cook or not, remind me to shoot Anthony Bourdain next time I see him.

697 words May 16, 2011
  

Talk about multi-tasking! I mean, I’m the kind of person who, on the best of days, tends to confuse tsunamis with tiramisu, the Italian dessert, unless one or the other is about to sweep me away. Have I noted the Eurozone crisis or the revival of the Culture Wars in the U.S.? I didn’t even know that Glenn Beck, the right-wing telepropagandist, was fired last week by his right-wing Fox network bosses who found Beck too crazy even for them. Fortunately, I ran into a YouTube video of comedian Jon Stewart doing his imitation of Beck and passing on this heartening bit of news.

Where was I? Oh yes, the Canadian election. It’s hard to pay attention. At the halfway point of the campaign, the Nanos poll numbers are more or less exactly where they were at the beginning of the campaign, although it’s kind of impossible to understand the numbers because of the weird joker in the pack, aka Bloc Quebecois, which has about 10 per cent of the votes, but only in one province, while the other four parties’ potential voters are scattered across the whole We Stand On Guard For Thee land, plus the territories and the melting Arctic in which we’ve planted our rubber ducky flag, so the meaning of the numbers is slightly skewed. Hey, are you following all this?! Wake up, Canada! (I hate it when advertisers and politicians address us collectively by the name of a country or region or town: Yo, Burnaby! Show us some love, Saskatchewan! Etc.)

What was I saying? Numbers. Sumpin’ ‘bout numbers. I’m trying to get the numbers on Tiger Woods’ golf score, so I gotta click on the leaderboard hyperlink. No, wait: Canadian election numbers. Ok, I’m back: the Conservatives have 40 per cent of the vote, Liberals 30 per cent, NDP 15-20 per cent depending on which way the wind is blowin’ on a given day, and there’s about 3 per cent wasted Green votes, which might not be wasted if we had proportional representation like they do in sensible but often broke Eurozone countries, but we don’t, so forget it. The numbers are the same as they were at the start of the 2011 campaign, and the same as they were in the last campaign, and in the one before that, and …

But then it turns out that the national numbers don’t mean anything because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, so it’s the numbers in the provinces we have to pay attention to, but the polling margin of error there is too great to know what the provincial numbers mean, and anyway, the election will be decided by the vote in Ontario, where the Good People of Toronto elected a plump right-wing mayor who looks like the plump right-wing recently-elected governor of New Jersey.

I’ll go out on a limb. The 2011 Canadian federal election will result in an exact, precise, riding-for-riding copy of the results of the last Canadian election, and the election before that and the election before… Unless it doesn’t, that is.

So, the likely case scenario is another Stephen Harper minority government, unless we have the worst case scenario, a Stephen Harper majority government. At which point, we’ll recognize that elections are unnecessary because they always produce the same results, a constitutional amendment will be passed eliminating elections, and Canada, the first post-modern country, will become the first post-electoral democracy. Uh… just kidding.

If we get another Conservative minority government, then one of two things will happen: 1) nothing; 2) the majority opposition will vote against the minority Conservative government throne speech or budget, the minority Conservative guv will fall, the Guv-General will ask the largest opposition party to try to form a guv, the Libs will say yes, Jack Layton’s NDP will grudgingly announce it will support the Liberal minority guv, but will not form a … (can we use the word “coalition” on a family-oriented website?) … will not form a C-word, the Bloc Everything but Quebec will mutter something in a language most Canadians are too lazy to understand that will amount to tacit consent, and Michael Ignatieff will become the new and less unpleasant prime minister of Canadada. Got all that? When I explain this perfectly simple, reasonable, typically Canadian scenario to my Berlin friends, their eyeballs fall into their beer steins and float.

We wouldn’t have to go through any of these Cirque du Soleil contortions if the Liberals and social democrats could count. If they could count they would discover that the Canadian centre-left amounts to about 50 per cent of the Canadian electorate, enough to form a government if the vote wasn’t split between two parties in a country without proportional representation. If it was up to me, I’d dissolve the existing centre-left parties and form a new party. I’d call it the Centre Party.

The worst case scenario is a Conservative majority government. If that happens, Stephen Harper will unveil his long-rumoured, long-awaited Secret Agenda. The Secret Agenda, as everyone knows, includes getting rid of the long gun registry, forbidding late-term abortions, and not allowing gays to be portrayed on postage stamps. This is not quite as bad as severing people’s tongues, killing the first-to-ninth-born of particular ethnic groups, or making us listen to Celine Dion. But it’s enough to alarm some Canadians. I read one reader response to the poll number online story (no, don’t get me started on the subject of “reader response”—I’m distinctly irrational on that topic) that said about the prospect of a Stephen Harper majority government, and I quote: “On the march to a fascist state”! I mean, c’mon, man! Isn’t there a tiny gap between a mildly unpleasant Conservative prime minister and fascism? A little itsy-bitsy teensy gap?!

If you want to talk about proto-fascism, you’d do better to ponder the Republican Tea Party of the US, which last week threatened to shut down the government of the entire country unless the liberal/communist Kenyan-born secret-Muslim president of the USofA agreed to get rid of abortions, health care, gays, trade unions, and education. Or listen to the deficit-cutting debates in the legislature of the Republican Tea Party-controlled state of Texas … Wait, were we talking about the Canadian election?

Oh, hold on a sec. My Facebook app on my i-Pogue is blinking furiously. Hey, guess what? It’s Jack Layton, leader of the whole NDP. He wants to “friend” me. (I never imagined that the word “friend” would be turned into an obscene-sounding verb.) Just stay where you are. Let me just click this hyperlink here… whoops, it’s an article about the opposition in Yemen that says … C-c-c-canadian something-or-other. I’ll be back in a minute, ok?

.

Berlin, April 10, 2011.

A few days ago I uncovered some notes I made as he was about to accede to power in February 2006. I headed the notes “Stephen Harper’s Character” because I thought it was his character that signaled the most important issues around him, given that he had a minority government and Canada was therefore not going to see much implimented policy from him.  I wrote—and then abandoned as too preliminary—the following:

*A decent but not especially nice man.

*unclear whether he’s self-involved and impatient of others or simply private and introspective.

*He seems unwilling to communicate on form, which is a quality you’d probably admire in a friend, but not necessarily in a political leader.

*He likes power for its own sake, and we can expect him to wield it, occasionally with arrogance and prejudice, but with just enough intoxication that he’ll get his ass in a sling.

I think I nailed him on all four, but glancingly, and without much nuance. So let’s add the nuance we now have, based on his actions over the last five years.

*In private life, Harper is a pleasant but not warm man, and in public he is utterly incompetent at projecting himself as anything other than a man with a private agenda he is itching to impose. This is curious, because what we see of that agenda, while conservative to the point of Thatcherism, remains cloudy. As much as anything (other than Liberal leader Michael Ignatief’s grimacing political and physical awkwardness) this sense that he’s harbouring a harsh private agenda is what has kept him from acquiring the political means to impose it.

*Harper manages to be self-involved and impatient and private and introspective. He possesses considerable and even formidable calculative intelligence, but it is offset by a chronic and unattractive emotional woodenness that borders on Aspergers: you can always see what he loathes and it is uncertain whether he loves anything very much.

*He’s likeably terrible at kissing babies and at glad-handing, but he is also a vindictive micromanager who prevents his own key people from communicating anything except on form. The degree to which he’s consolidated power in the PMO is predictable and politically dangerous, and yet he has done nothing with his promise to increase the accountability and transparency of the federal government, and worse, is openly neglectful and contemptuous of portfolios he dislikes, and almost Hitleresque in his savaging of his own people he believes have not shown sufficient loyalty.

*He enjoys power a little too much for comfort, and he’s more than willing to exercise it. He wields his power arrogantly, with prejudice and (happily for those who dislike him) with occasional intoxication, as witnessed by the recent billion dollar boondoggle of the G-8/G-20 fiasco in Toronto, which accomplished nothing other than some photo-ops of him with world leaders, and to present Canada to the world as an amateur police state.

What is perhaps most disturbing of all about Stephen Harper is how little else anyone has learned about this man’s true character. We can see the iron will, sure. We can see his hardness when someone goes off message. But he’s so secretive and close-mouthed that even this is often hard to parse. Is the visible cold shoulder Peter McKay is currently getting to do with his public affair with Belinda Stronach, or was there some back-room shoot-up no one but a few taped-over mouthed insiders were witness to?

About as close to comedy as it ever gets with Harper (aside from the alleged affair wife Lauren is supposed to have had with a female security staff member) is that he has Bill Clinton’s populist aspirations without any feel for populism, which has raised a  suspicion that, when it’s 3:00 AM and he’s had a couple of drinks, he turns into Neil Diamond—except that we don’t actually know if he’s ever stayed up that late, or if he’s ever even had “a few drinks”.  I suspect that if Stephen Harper ever did either and it became public knowledge, it would do him more political good than a truckful of baby blue sweaters, and that a lot of us would be relieved.

It has also become evident that, after a half decade in power, Harper is developing a serious and surprising taste for the global stage and that he’s beginning to see himself as one of the good old boys of globalization even as the movement is being discredited by its excesses and built-in injustices. When he isn’t simply embarrassing himself and Canada with his eagerness, it’s fairly entertaining to watch him in those venues, trying desperately to look comfortable and failing utterly to get past the “who the hell is this guy” looks from other world leaders, who seem to mistake him permanently for someone’s aide who’s mistakenly wandered into the group photo ops.

And since he’s probably pretty much who and what he’s always been—Margaret Thatcher in a business suit and with smaller testicles—let’s hope no one, including the world leaders, gets used to him being in the group photos.

Let’s also hope that Canadians don’t ever get to find out what he’s really here to do to us.

The first thing I don’t understand is why he’s been charged. Let me summarize what I think happened: Assange shows up for a Swedish conference of some sort, and on the first night, runs into a starfucker and gets lucky. Then on the last night of the conference, he gets lucky again with a different woman. None of this added to his credentials as a disciple of Jesus, but it really doesn’t make him anything more than a bozo, and the world is overloaded with those.

The two women who slept with him, both of whom appear to have agreed to have sex without serious negotiation, subsequently discover that they’re not his exclusive (Swedish) love-interest. They get together, compare notes and their truncated expectations, and decide to go to the police, saying, somewhat belatedly, that they’re worried that Assange may have given them an STD. Neither woman asks the police to have him charged with anything. They just want to make sure he doesn’t have any infectious bacteria, viruses or crustaceans living adjacent to his whizzer.

It’s apparently considered a low level sexual assault to have sex in Sweden without using a condom, which is both fairly sensible given the ubiquity of STDs these days and, if it’s a no-discretion law, an explanation of the country’s low birth rate. Here’s the first place where things get fuzzy. With SF-A, Assange did use a condom, but it reportedly broke, or leaked. Leaving aside the practices that commonly cause condoms to malfunction for those more prurient-minded than I am to speculate about, shouldn’t, in such an instance, the manufacturer be charged with some part of the offense? Of course, good luck on that, since the condom was probably manufactured in China like everything else in the world, and Chinese manufacturers aren’t big on warrantee fulfillment.

There’s something else here.  Since SF-A, by her own account, had to buy Assange his train ticket to and from the scene of the crime (her apartment) because he didn’t have a charge card and had no cash, it seems logical that the woman supplied the condom as well, in which case she ought to be at least partly liable, too. It can be argued that her liability rests in being a cheapskate—not a crime anywhere, unless it’s your spouse’s birthday. As a consenting adult, she’s in dimly-lit territory if she’s complaining about Assange’s sexual performance several days after the fact, even if it damaged the condom. Or, Sweden is a very strange country if she can. Where I come from, such complaints are best kept to oneself.

With SF-B, Assange used a condom too, but then the next morning they decided to do the nasty again, and that time he went Al fresco. Whether this was because she (as noted, a guy without cash or a credit card is unlikely to be running around with a satchel filled with condoms)  had run out of them, or he’d run out of them, or simply lost faith in Chinese manufactured goods is hard to say. Since it reportedly happened in broad daylight, one would have thought she’d have simply said no. But maybe she was the sort of woman who closes her eyes and thinks of Sweden, as the saying goes, in which case I don’t trust anything she does or says, because, well, even where I live, there’s less than a half-dozen women in town under the age of 70 who still do that, and they’re all crazy.

Here it gets murky once again.  Suddenly, SF-A or SF-B—or both—retroactively decided that it would get them publicity Assange might be infected with an STD and ought to be tested before being allowed to leave the country. So they call him on his cell phone, which he’d shut down for reasons that may or may not pertain to his having boinked two women in three days in a town and situation where there was a good chance that sooner rather than later the two women were going to bump into one another. Is there another Swedish statute that makes it a felony not to call someone the day after you’ve had sex with them? Sweden is already the only country that views all prostitution as sexual assault (mostly on women) and has a prostitution law in its criminal code in which only men seeking to purchase sex can be charged. Prostitutes are completely decriminalized. Maybe that’s why Assange was busy rousting the locals rather than trading on the market.

The murkiest juncture of all now occurs.  Its ground is a pure convocation of jackasses, to be sure. Assange is a jackass  for trading on his celebrity to get laid. The two starfuckers, likewise, have a similar sort of culpability for sleeping with a not-very-attractive-or-nice guy because they wanted the celebrity of being the last woman who slept with Julian Assange before the CIA got him, and then they turned him in because he didn’t return their calls.

But into this mess of icky opportunists exploiting one another has to be added either some morally hysterical authorities in Sweden, or some opportunistic ones who saw a chance of ingratiating themselves with the hot-after-Assange governments across the Western world, not to mention the thrill of having the world media rolling around town for a few days: money poured into the local economy, television cameos for the offended authorities, the whole nine yards of news celebrity.

Whatever triggered them, some very large wheels began to roll, and the result has been a riot of misguided righteousness that has everyone distracted from the contents of the classified documents WikiLeaks has been uploading, and focused on the not-very-interesting question of whether or not Julian Assange is a pervert and sex criminal.

Unless I’m missing something really important, all this has a fairly sensible solution, and has had since a few hours after the two women compared notes: administer a blood test to Assange. If he’s clean, fine him some nominal sum and kick his ass out of the country. If he actually did infect his bed-partners with something, and if there’s evidence that he knew he had it, throw the book at him according to Sweden’s laws. Meanwhile, it looks as if Assange’s own people are throwing him under the bus for making himself the focus of WikiLeaks, although it’s pretty clear he wasn’t doing it in order to make himself rich. But famous? Maybe. Assange got caught up in the celebrity that seems to turn most people into bozos, and he turned out to be no better than, um, Bill Clinton.

Any way this falls out, let’s get on with the really important issues over Assange. They’re about whether the documents WikiLeaks is still uploading ought to be on the public record, and who or what is being compromised by them.

This morning, the Ephron frenzy was the source of a lot of amusement at the Tim Horton’s outlet I hang out in. My buddy Larry Chadwick, who didn’t know who Ephron was but had a kind of half-assed bead on Mallick as “the Toronto broad who thinks that women should wear pearls even in the bathtub” said he thought her ankle-licking urge was retch-inducing, and then launched into an “who the hell is Nora Ephron-and-her-neck rant” that had most of the previously-bemused customers lying on the floor laughing.  Including me, despite its standard-for-him anti-female chauvinism portion, which I’ve long thought are surprisingly astute and moderate for a guy who drives an F-150 with a rifle rack in the back window. Larry thinks that city women these days are as contemptuous and ignorant about men as a group of Army generals would have been about women 50 years ago. (I happen to think he’s onto something, but that’s a topic for another day.)

His rant got me thinking about two things.  I’d heard Gian Ghomeshi’s fawning interview with Ephron on CBC—something I could never admit to the Tim Hortons’ crowd—and thought Ephron sounded like a self-centred motor-mouth who seemed to believe that the entire universe operated by one-liner homilies constructed to allow New Yorkers with household incomes over $200 grand a year to communicate with one another and order groceries on the phone from working class people from Brooklyn and South Korea. But the truth was that there wasn’t a single person in my North Bay Tim Horton’s this morning who’d had Ephron’s baseball bat/flying dishes-free experience with divorce, and not a single person in the whole damned city other than me who even knew she’d had an acrimonious divorce from Watergate primo Carl Bernstein—and no one at all who gave a shit.

The interview bothered me a little, because Ghomeshi treated Nora Ephron’s personal life as so infra dig that it didn’t even have to be mentioned. It was an interview with a woman who doesn’t know how small her world really is, done by an interviewer who seemed to have no inkling either.

The other thing is this. Shouldn’t the Toronto arts and celebrity-chasing media be tracking down Johanna Skibsrud, who just won the Giller Prize for a book called, wait a minute, ah, yeah, The Sentimentalists. She’s 30, from Nova Scotia, and she might have something relevant to tell people like us about the way we live. Ephron’s Upper East Side eye-view sure as hell doesn’t.

One more thing.  If you’re a journalist or a junk-yard dog, aren’t you supposed to bite people’s ankle’s, not lick them?

The ash cloud was a traveller’s nightmare, of course.  As the British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who weighed in with a short poem published in The Guardian, put it, “the grounded planes mean ruined plans / Holidays on hold, sore absences at weddings, funerals … wingless commerce.”

Apart from producing the ultimate Holiday From Hell, the cloud was spooky. Over Europe, it was invisible. It was an unseen object poised between intimations of Armageddon (an ominous “what next?” feeling) and the sort of surrealism you might run into in a Rene Magritte painting. Poet laureate Duffy wasn’t the only one inspired to poesy. The headline of a Sunday newspaper I glanced at last weekend while strolling through the marketplace square in the German town of Erfurt, declared, “The sky is free,” meaning free of noisy, polluting airplanes. And one did notice, with a sort of aural double-take, that something was strangely absent. The ambiant, sporadic roar of jet engines that we all simply become inured to in urban life had temporarily fallen silent.

On Iceland itself, the ash cloud was neither invisible nor poetic. The spewing ash from the almost unpronounceable Eyjafjallajokull volcano (its first eruption since 1821) was not only visible as a giant cloud, but the heat melted glacial ice, causing flash floods, visibility was reduced to a few meters as ashes clogged the air, and the sulphuric smell of rotting eggs choked the atmosphere. It was one more mess to add to the island’s already messy collapsed economy.

Back on the European mainland, the ash cloud, poetic or just a pain in the butt for people trapped in airports, was mostly an object of economic contention. Although European Union air traffic officials had grounded planes because the volcanic ash clogs jet engines and endangers flight safety, the airlines themselves were insistent that commerce comes first. The aviation companies claimed that the danger was minimal, that they were losing hundreds of millions of euros a day, and that they might be driven out of business or have to demand government compensation for their mounting losses. As far as the airlines were concerned, they were perfectly happy to flood the ash-clogged skies with their big machines. If a few planes crashed, well, hey, stuff happens. (No, they didn’t actually say that, but you read it between the balance sheet lines.)

The airline pilots association was, understandably, somewhat less enthused about the proposed policy to restore profits. In the end, airplane manufacturers came to a dubious rescue by assuring everyone that maybe the ashes wouldn’t cause the planes to crash. Whatever. The flight ban was lifted.

The lesson (about business and morality) was reasonably clear.  The EU public officials may have been a bit over-cautious, but if the safety decision had been left in the hands of private enterprise, flying travellers would have been putting their lives in the hands of corporate accountants. The other minor lesson, although no one is going to do anything about it, is that there are simply too many airplanes doing too much flying, all in the name of business. The “budget” airlines that fly people short distances within Europe are a completely unnecessary menace and source of pollution. The one thing Europe has is a great train system that efficiently and with minimal ecological disruption gets people from place to place. Filling the sky with giant Sports Utility Vehicles for short hops is solely a commercial proposition. Okay, okay, this is an argument I’m not going to win, even among the iPod-listening, cellphone-chatting, texting-and-travelling public.

One of the things that media coverage of the volcanic ash cloud blotted out almost completely was reflection on the April 10 air crash at Smolensk, Russia that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, including a large contingent of the country’s military and governmental elite. Kaczynski and his party were on their way to a memorial ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet slaughter of 22,000 Polish military officers in the nearby forest of Katyn in 1940, at the outset of World War II.

For years, the Soviets had denied causing the massacre, and only in recent times had Poland and Russia patched up the historical dispute with Russian recognition of responsibility for the atrocity. A couple of days earlier, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, had met at Katyn to acknowledge the belated agreement on what had happened. The decision to hold a larger ceremony to memorialize an historic tragedy produced only an additional contemporary tragedy, or as one New York Times headline had it, “Where history’s march is a funeral procession.”

In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, it quickly became clear that it was one of the stupidest air crashes imaginable. The weather was foul and foggy; the air traffic controllers had warned off the Polish plane and recommended they land elsewhere. But either somebody decided to risk it, or there was a failure of communication, or… who knows? The plane clipped the tops of trees near the Smolensk landing field and the tragedy of 96 lost lives was added to the ashes at Katyn.

Most media attention to the crash was focused on the late President Kaczynski and the national outpouring of grief that surrounded his controversial burial at Wawel Castle in Cracow, Poland, the burial site of Polish kings and heroes. A lot of people thought that Kaczynski’s accomplishments hardly merited internment among Poland’s major historical figures. Even former Polish president and former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, 65, acknowledged the burial anomaly, remarking that since it was a decision of the Catholic Church, he would have to accept it.

Although Kaczynski was widely praised in death as “our president,” in life, the rightwing leader had a less than 30 per cent approval rating among Poles and was considered unlikely to win reelection this year (the election has now been moved up to mid-year). Both Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslav, a former prime minister of Poland, were known for politics that were economically conservative, strongly nationalistic, and blatantly homophobic. When he was mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczynski had attracted notoriety for shutting down gay pride parades.

Most Poles I’ve talked to in the wake of the crash emphasize that their grief is directed to the large number of prominent fellow-and-sister citizens who perished, and not to any particular elected official. As Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk put it, “From death’s perspective… there are no presidents or flight attendants… There is just the person, always dear.”

As it happened, I knew, however faintly, one of those who died in the Katyn crash. She was 80-year-old Anna Walentynowicz, the heroine, in 1980, of the Solidarity trade union strike at the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, that presaged the end of communism in Poland a decade later. She, along with Walesa and others, was among the leaders of the most significant workers’ revolt against a “workers’ state” in a half-century. I interviewed the then 50-year-old former welder and crane operator in Gdansk in spring 1981, just months after the trade union strike that would eventually transform Polish society.

“Pani Anna,” as she was known to everyone in the shipyards, was a soft-spoken, small, middle-aged woman in a floral print dress. When I asked her, since I was attempting to construct a journalistic account of the historic events in Gdansk, she gave me a minute-by-minute account of her experiences during the first day of a strike that would flash the famous “Solidarnosc” logo around the world. What one couldn’t discern simply from her appearance was that Walentynowicz was a veteran political activist. She’d begun as a Communist Party member, stormily quit when the communists so obviously failed to live up to their ideals, and became part of the workers’ opposition, one committed to the creation of a genuine workers’ council–type society.

Walentynowicz was unlike many of the people associated with Solidarity. She was not a rightwing anti-communist, a strident nationalist, or a religious activist, all of whom could be found in the divergent Solidarity coalition. One of those conservative figures, by the way, was future president Lech Kaczynski,  then an advisor to strike leader Walesa and eventually a Solidarity member of the Polish parliament as a result of the first free elections in 1989. By contrast, Walentynowicz broke with Walesa as the labour leader who became the first modern Polish president drifted to the right.

For a journalist, meeting her was a brief but memorable brush with history. Certainly, the circumstances of that encounter were headier and more hopeful than Poland’s trudge into post-communist capitalism turned out to be. Yes, you mourn real people when the plane goes down, but you also mourn dreams, and want to be sure that neither the dreams nor the people are forgotten.

There was scant time to remember before the volcanic ash cloud arrived. It prevented international leaders, including U.S. President Obama, from attending the Polish burial services. And now that the planes are back up, our distracted attentions will no doubt be directed elsewhere. For now, though, a pause to consider the mortal course of ashes to ashes.

Berlin, April 22, 2010.

It’s the sort of winter that leads Germans to turn up the central heating and contemplate the state of the German soul. Rumination about the German Geist has been an Olympic-class intellectual sport here for better than two centuries. Sometimes those ponderings produce a Faust; a Beethoven string quartet; a  Brecht, Thomas Mann, or Gunter Grass; even a Fassbinder film series of Alfred Doblin’s Weimar-era novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. At other times, that thinking about the authentic German soul or spirit gives us a Herder, Neitzsche, Heidegger, or much darker phenomena — and not just in the form of thoughts.

I think it’s fair to say that Germany is very far removed — more than a half century in time, but the distance is much more than temporal — from its fascist past. Yes, one finds in the press the occasional and almost inevitably exaggerated neo-Nazi story from Germany, but in reality I suspect it’s easier to turn up contemporary fascists in Britain, Italy, France, Austria or Belgium than it is to find them in the former Third Reich of Hitler. Of course, there are neo-Nazis in the country, but the other day when they attempted to march in Dresden to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II firebombing of the city, some 10,000 counter-protesters showed up in the snow and turned the right-wingers away at the train station. March cancelled. Germany may be one of the few modern nations to have actually learned something from history.

Fascism is gone, but the ghost of fascism remains, at least for a generation old enough to still have some living memory, however faint, of it. For such people, now in their fifties or older, the enigma of how it was possible for Nazism to occur, particularly in Germany, is a permanent question. It’s been a thematic of postwar German writing from Nobel laureate Gunter Grass’s now classic Tin Drum (the 50th anniversary of its publication was marked last year) to such recent works as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.

In the winter of German discontent with icy sidewalks, I’ve stumbled upon a lengthy biography of an early-20th century, now mostly-forgotten, German poet and cult leader that tells us more about the troubled stirrings of national souls than most volumes of conventional political analysis and history. The book is Robert Norton’s Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Cornell, 2002), a work that’s received only limited attention, largely in academic precincts, but that deserves, for a variety of reasons, a wider readership.

Norton’s bio is a first-rate piece of scholarship and an engrossing read, especially on long winter nights, German or otherwise. It’s among the best literary biographies of the past decade. Second, this first full-length account of Stefan George (1868-1933; the surname is pronounced “gay-org-uh”) fills in important gaps in the history of 20th century poetry, as well as in German cultural history. Most important, it examines once widespread notions about “secret Germany,” a dangerously Romantic idea that energized all sorts of phenomena in early 20th century, from nudist and nature movements, to cultlike homoerotic and mystical circles, to national longings for a strong Leader (or Fuhrer). In addition to appreciating the general virtues of Norton’s book, I have an accidental personal interest in it.

When I was a young writer in San Francisco in the 1960s, I frequently heard stories from my teachers Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Robert Duncan about one of their professors at the University of California Berkeley, when they were all students there just after the end of World War II. Their most memorable teacher, Blaser told me, was the medieval historian, Ernst Kantorowicz, author of Frederick II and The King’s Two Bodies, books to which we younger writers were soon introduced.

Kantorowicz, of Jewish descent, had spoken out against the Nazis and fled Germany in the late 1930s. Once in the U.S., he taught at Berkeley, where he resisted the McCarthyite “loyalty oaths” of the 1950s, and later at Princeton. In his youth, however, he’d been a rightwing German nationalist and a member of the fabled George circle. Kantorowicz’s 1928 study of the 13th century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick was one of the books produced by academic members of the George group that celebrated powerful German leaders.

Another San Francisco writer I knew, Lew Ellingham, who was knowledgeable about German culture and the George group, later partially applied the notion to his and Kevin Killian’s biography of Jack Spicer, Poet, Be Like God (1998). Norton’s biography of George provides a sharply focused portrait of what I’d only known, up to then, as a blurry myth of a distant Germanic brew of poetry and perversity.

As Norton recounts it, “George began his career in the early 1890s as a lyric poet in the French Symbolist mode and he was soon regarded as one of the best poets of his time.” Mallarme accepted the young George into his salon as “one of us.” But George’s ambitions would eventually extend beyond the merely literary.

“Over the next four decades,” Norton says, “George attracted a following, first among the small number of his associates and then among ever larger segments of the populace, that sought to put his ideas into practice in the world. For George had devised not just a way of writing poetry but also, as time went on, a way of living. He considered the group of friends he gathered around him, who habitually addressed him as ‘Master,’ to be the embodiment and defenders of the ‘true’ but ‘secret’ Germany, as opposed to the ‘false’ and all too manifest reality of contemporary bourgeois society.”

The group was “initially an informal coterie of like-minded poets who congregated to discuss and recite their works.” However, “George and his circle gradually assumed an enormously influential position in the culture at large. During the last 15 years of his life George was the closest thing Germany had to a prophet: a poetic visionary who, through his very remoteness, seemed to personify the vague longings of his countrymen for some form of redemption.”

To give some idea of George’s fame, Norton cites a 1929 newspaper photograph gallery, with the caption, “contemporary figures who have become legends”: the gallery included Woodrow Wilson, France’s Clemenceau, Gandhi, Lenin, and Stefan George. “Just before he died in 1933,” Norton reports, “after the new government had taken over in Germany — a regime many thought he had foreseen and whose coming he had, inadvertently or not, helped to prepare — several of its otherwise cocksure henchmen prostrated themselves before him in the attempt to win his blessing and cooperation…” And, in turn, George wasn’t averse to being regarded as the prophet of The New Reich (the title of his final volume of poems).

It’s hard to tell from Norton’s renditions of George’s poetry if it’s any good or not, though many readers and critics of his era claimed George’s poems to be masterpieces of German writing. Norton doesn’t assume any literary pretensions and simply offers workmanlike translations, to give readers an idea of what George was writing about. Unlike his younger contemporary, Rilke, whose work in English translation is remarkably accessible (if nonetheless difficult in terms of content), George’s verse remains opaque, though the titles of his books, Year of the Soul, The Seventh Ring and The Star of the Covenant among others, give some hint of the secret handshake contents.

What’s clearer is the personality (and persona) of the poet, an austere mixture of purities and autocratic power that could be alternately attractive and terrifying. It was just the sort of combination that gives rise to cult leaders. Still, George had a good eye for both talented writers and beautiful boys. When the 20-something George met and began a demonic pursuit of a talented and attractive 17-year-old Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a Vienna café in 1891, the object of the infatuation found it all pretty terrifying. Neither the friendship nor the literary relationship were consummated, though a turn-of-the-century version of telephone tag went on for years.

George was more successful with others. His primary disciple, the photogenic Friedrich Gundolf, turned up as an 18-year-old, and remained devoted to George to his death. Gundolf became a precocious professor at the University of Heidelberg, and published a celebrated study of leadership, The Mantle of Caesar, as well as books about Goethe, Shakespeare and the history of German poetry.  However, when he married, George excommunicated him permanently from the magical circle.

Other prominent followers had similarly stormy emotional and erotic relations with their master. In addition to Gundolf and Kantorowicz, members of George’s circle included such once well-known figures as historian Friedrich Wolter, cultural critic Max Kommerell, and later, the aristocratic brothers Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg, now remembered for their failed attempt to assassinate Hitler and their summary execution.

Norton is particularly good on tracing George’s  restless parapatetic wanderings between Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg and eventually rural Switzerland. He makes excellent and unprecedented use of the available correspondence and other documents to detail the tangled and obsequious relations that various followers had with the Master. His scene setting brings to life George’s growing influence, beginning with the poet’s first breakthrough salon reading  at the apartment of painter Sabine Lepsius in Berlin in 1897 (the young Rainer Rilke was in the audience; so was the sociologist Georg Simmel, another admirer).

In the pre-World War I decades, a publishing apparatus developed around George. There was a magazine, Pages for Art, a Yearbook of the Spiritual Movement, and a loyal publisher in Berlin who brought out George’s volumes of poetry and the scholarly works of his disciples, a series of so-called Geist-books uniformly marked by the circle’s insignia, a stylized swastika, the symbol that would later become notorious in Nazi hands. The group’s activities ranged from ritualized readings and dress-up parties (George, as many people noted, bore a resemblance to images of Dante, and he occasionally played that role at costumed gatherings) to the debates of fairly nutty sub-groups, such as Munich’s Cosmic Circle, which was a stew of apocalyptic prophecy, anti-semitism, and blood-and-soil mysticism.

George’s biographer is sensibly unsqueamish about the poet’s erotic pursuit of teenage boys, one of whom, Max Kronberger, who died at 16, a scant two years after George first met him, was posthumously elevated to the position of a god, the object of devotion for George’s sect. Although the organizational propaganda of the circle tended to later suggest that all the boy-chasing was “Platonic,” Norton is fairly convincing that the homoerotic aspects of George’s group amounted to more than simply high-minded pederastic conversation.

The core of the book, finally, is the cultural and political ideology of a once shadowy, but eventually quite prominent movement. It was, as Norton says, “elitist, hierarchically minded, antidemocratic, and deeply suspicious of all forms of rationalism.” In sum, George and company embodied “the beliefs and values shared by anti-modern intellectuals,” disturbingly striated with violent, apocalpytic calls for absolute destruction of the impure, debased present. It was a view that displayed nothing but contempt for the bumbling but social democratic Weimar experiment of 1920s Germany.

George’s “Secret Germany,” Norton says, “provided a surrogate ideology that looked back to a heroic European past for political and cultural models,” a past that was largely the product of romantic imagination. Norton underscores the point that this “’Secret Germany’ was not Nazi Germany,” adding, “but the two cannot be separated either.” He provides sufficient evidence that the elderly poet didn’t at all mind being thought of as the prophet of the fascist regime.

I think the real point of understanding George and his times is to understand what was so attractive about fascism. That is, although there’s a temptation to caricature its goose-stepping protocols, there had to be something about the promise of Nazism to explain how enticing it was. Norton’s study of the times also suggests how many of the movements and tendencies of the era were double-edged, both potentially progressive and deeply reactionary.

The images of order and heroics, knights in shining armour, were appealing in the circumstances of turbulent capitalism and political instability that marked post-World War I Germany. The youth, nature and nudity movements of the early 20th century bespoke an interest in environmental preservation against the destruction of technology and the market; the devotion to the body counterposed itself to unfeeling machines. Even the elements of homoerotic romance (and there’s a surprising amount of it attached to fascism) suggested a kind of bonding that rejected the instrumental relationships of bourgeois society. The modes of poetry and mysticism seemed a more authentic route to sublime truth that mere rationality. Finally, there’s the temptation of gnosticism or secret knowledge. That all of this has some pertinence to a post-modern present hardly needs to be spelled out.

Norton’s Secret Germany emphasizes the darker consequences of the phenomena it investigates. Those consequences explain why contemporary, pragmatic Germany is less inclined to seek its mystical soul. Norton gives the last word to the  German-Jewish cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, who wrote about Stefan George in 1933, the year of Hitler’s ascension to power and the poet’s death, that “if ever God has punished a prophet by fulfilling his prophecy, then that is the case with George.” Norton adds, “Only time would tell how right Benjamin had been.”

Berlin, February 18, 2010.

This admittedly odd reaction was conditioned by an encounter I had recently. During the Christmas holidays, at one of those excruciating afternoon parties where professional people renew their networks while the hosts gain a small measure of non-denominational industrial and social prestige by feeding their guests Christmas leftovers,  I ran into a documentary film-maker who mentioned quite casually when someone within earshot asked her how she was doing that she’d been sitting on her hands for six months, more or less unable to take on serious work or further her career because she had a contract to do a documentary about the Canadian response to “a disaster” and thus had to be able to drop everything and go into action at a moment’s notice.  I was so startled by what she’d contracted to do that I asked, unfiltered, how it felt to be sitting around hoping something horrible was going to happen to other people so she could advance her career. She gave me a “don’t you get it?” look, and moved off to talk to someone else without answering the question.

The moral vacuity of her contract bothered me a lot, and I kept coming back to it in the week or so before that contract was triggered by the earthquake in Haiti, which we’ve now recognized has resulted in upwards of 100,000 dead people and incalculable damage to the island’s infrastructure, physical and social. Even after two weeks of disaster pornography I still can’t think about Haiti without remembering that documentary film-maker, and without wondering how we could have built an  apparatus into our culture that is parasitic to mass human misery. It has made me unpleasantly aware of the barely concealed glee with which the mass media is covering the event: smiling newsladies wearing too much makeup speculating from the comfort of a downtown Toronto television studio on whether there are 50,000 corpses under the rubble, or 200,000; endless clips of local Haitians being asked how they feel, and before they can answer, how they’re coping with their feelings of helplessness at not knowing the fate of their loved ones. Then there’s the predictable ramping up for donations by the NGOs already set up to live off the misery of Haiti and a hundred other countries across the planet in a more or less permanent state of crisis. And after that there the politicians, who we already know—or should—don’t give a crap about places like Haiti, trying to convince us that they’re personally bereaved as they announce aid packages and emergency relief programs or the deaths of their own nationals.

The extremity of the earthquake, a 7.0 Richter scale doozy centred more or less right under the country’s most densely populated area around Port-au-Prince, seems to have liberated virtually everyone from introspection, hindsight and context. The media riot going on at Haiti’s airports right now is likely as big a hindrance to the distribution of food and water as the post-quake logistics that inevitably pertain—News crews from Des Moines or North Hatley, Quebec stopping aid trucks to ask the drivers about their feelings, have they personally lost a relative, etc., then virtually cordoning off those who need the aid with the same moronic questions—all of which must be answered because they are, everyone understands, fund-raising questions, designed less to inform than to trigger sympathy and the unlimbering of Visa cards.

The Haitian police and military, meanwhile, try to maintain crowd control and arrest looters. They succeed at this best in the presence of camera crews because even the looters don’t want to make the place look bad, and the police even shoot a few of the bolder looters for the news gatherers, carefully not noticing that these news crews are also, in their way, looters.

Everyone appears to have forgotten that Haiti was an unsolvable morass before the quake, its political institutions termited hollow by corruption, its infrastructure already overburdened and rotted by overpopulation and profiteering, its cultural institutions a corrupted mess of voodoo, UN pieties, Bush economics and the refusal of the Catholic Church to vacate its 19^th century values. They’ve forgotten because now Haiti is an unsolvable morass with fresh rubble and corpses, and that’s exciting. No one is asking why all those people were living in those ill-constructed shitholes surrounded by garbage they can’t get rid of and babies they can’t take care of. Everyone, from the Haitians to Stephen Harper has been freed, temporarily, from having to face such questions by the urgent demands of the moment.  So we air-lift food and medical supplies, feel morally comfortable, and we film our documentaries about how well or badly we respond to the physical misery of others, and we let the Pope and his antediluvian exhortations to the faithful that it is somehow God’s will that they go on having children they can’t feed or care for go unremarked upon.

Haiti’s problem is that there are too many people on the island, and that they are reproducing at too great a speed to get out from under the chaos and poverty overpopulation creates. This has been obvious to everyone for at least 50 years, but we’ve kept on pumping the foreign aid and aid workers into the pit while the island’s population has doubled to nearly ten million. Lately, Canada has been sending in police trainers as if better policing is the solution to extreme crowding and poverty, and to the corruption and despair those things bring. It isn’t. Controlling the growth of the island’s population is. Better policing will mainly serve to make the tourists feel safer while they tan, and aid workers more secure while they apply band-aids to a country that has literally been ripping itself apart limb from limb for decades with its own suicidal value system.

Given our culture’s fixation on individual and reproductive rights, it is currently considered uncivilized—in normal circumstances—to suggest that a condition for giving foreign aid ought to be the existence in the receiving country of effective and aggressive birth control programs. To be talking about it while Haiti is still digging out the bodies of earthquake victims from the rubble, will seem downright heartless to those of us caught up in the ecstasy of this rescue.  But such a condition it is the only thing that isn’t ultimately dithering with the deck chairs on the Titanic while the iceberg grinds away, deep inside  the engine room.

1100 words  January 29, 2010