day one...

The Dems are in charge again...

First female speaker in the history of Congress and the first Muslim Congressman in US history are two major highlights of the newly opened 110th Congress. So far, so good. Fingers crossed...

the holidays are over...

The tinsel has only just been swept off the floor, the decorations put away and the tree put out, and already we're back to the kind of petty politics that made 2006 such a parade of ignorant rhetoric all across North America. Sadly, it's happening in Massachusetts once again...time warp, anyone?

the year ahead...

I've been hesitant to indulge in some sort of New Year's retrospective, "the year as I saw it" kind of thing, mainly because so much has happened to me personally, and to all of us collectively, that I may yet need the better part of 2007 to process all of 2006. I'm also just as reluctant to make any sweeping predictions about the year ahead since pretty much right across the boards we're living under the most uninspired leadership in a generation as the world continues to stumble ever deeper into the uncharted terrain of the 21st century. The travesty of justice in Iraq this past weekend is a prime example of international leadership taking the low road, and showing off the worst aspects of human kind.

Maybe my somewhat dark view of the year ahead is just a side effect of the strange pseudo-tropical winter weather we're having in pleasant valley, or some low-level post-holiday depression, but I must admit that I'm feeling just a touch cynical about 2007. Which is why I had best bite my tongue.

I did, however, come across this quotation last night which, though harsh, does kind of sum it up for me:

"We are waiting with the cruel, experienced eye of a citizenry that has lost respect for its leadership in general, yet hasn't quite worked out what to do about it and so waits for them to self-destruct."
-- John Ralston Saul, from The Collapse of Globalism

"moral anarchy" and other holiday parables...

Bill Moyers' excellent piece about "moral anarchy" in the US is a worthwhile way to pass fifteen or twenty minutes over the holiday season. It's a bit dense in places, but then again critiquing the social order of the United States isn't light stuff.

bam-bam is coming home...

Last week, while in Toronto for some work and a fair shake of holiday season merry-making, a friend mentioned an odd little story to a group of us gathered for a Christmas party. The players in this tale were a family living in a rural patch outside of Ottawa, a wayward deer they had taken in after its mother had abandoned it by the roadside, and finally the 'by the book' provincial bureaucracy that was forced to separate deer from family because they didn't have the proper permit to keep such a creature, no matter that it owed its life to their care. The whole thing looked like it was going to end badly, leaving the poor deer (domesticated to the extreme) to flounder in a zoo setting (where it wasn't really wanted), with the poor farm family left to pine for their darling deer and shake their heads sadly at Queens Park and its "urbanites-know-best" condescension toward the whole affair. A holiday season buzzkill if ever there was one.

Yesterday the PREMIER of Ontario, yes that's right, Dalton McGuinty himself, made a personal visit to the family's rural environs to announce to much media fanfare that Bam-Bam is coming home. Though it won't happen by the time the turkey is served, the homecoming should take place just shy of 2007, meaning a small glass of bubbly might be in order for this most unusual of family reunions to ring in the New Year.

A true Christmas miracle...and great (though admittedly unusual) political photo-op.

quotation for a saturday afternoon...

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand."

- Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)

if you can't shout anything nice...

best reality tv ever...

CBC got a lot of slack for its first experiment in reality tv, a failed show called The One, but yesterday it got top marks for the best thing since Survivor: The Liberal Leadership Convention.

After a nail-biting day on my couch, glued to the tv, I was handsomely rewarded with what was dubbed by many pundits as a quintessentially Canadian outcome: the "darkhorse" in the running (or underdog, to mix my mammalian metaphors) Stephane Dion, took the leadership of the Liberal party after a series of reversals, upheavals, defections and despite beginning the whole thing squarely in fourth place.

For a second there it looked as though Michael Ignatieff would up the dramatic ante by shedding a tear or two in the agonizing lead-up to the final ballot announcement. Viewers were treated to live televised close-ups of the two finalists side-by-side, a beaming Dion seemed to know it was in the bag, whereas Ignatieff did all he could to turn a wince into a passable tv smile. The whole time a video-montage of ex-Prime Ministers was being screened in the convention hall to push the announcement time to the 6pm time-slot, a prime time media trick to maximize the national viewership.

Everybody agrees that Dion has his work cut out for him. He seems to be a genuinely good man, and has a lot more on-the-ground experience than many of the other candidates, most notably in cabinet as both intergovernmental affairs minister and minister of the environment in previous Liberal governments. Above all this, he looks like everybody's favorite nephew or kind and brainy uncle (depending on which side of the generational divide you happen to find yourself on), so if not a second coming of Trudeau, at least he's not another "you-must-love-me" apologist like the well-meaning Paul Martin, and certainly not a cold intellectual in the mold of our current PM who, I gather, has no idea how to deal with the new head of the formerly headless Liberal party. Now it gets interesting...

they know who they are...

...if only they'd let us know too. Mr. Harper, you've done it again. What have you done? You'll know when it happens.

And here's Rex Murphy with a few thoughts of his own.

municipal politics in pleasant valley...

Pleasant Valley just elected a mayor who has never held any public office whatsoever, wants to crack down on the homeless and has promised not to raise taxes for the next four years while maintaining all services at current levels.

I should mention that he's from the private sector, and has pledged to run the city like a business using "21st century management practices." This isn't going to be pretty...

centrist soup?

In the wake of the Democratic sweep, Maisonneuve Magazine's 'Media Scout' weighs in today with some cautionary words to temper the mood of uncritical optimism that are worth sharing here:

Despite the general sense of optimism, there are some voices of concern and dissent. The Post and the Citizen both run articles about a new pack of “Blue Dog Democrats”: anti-abortion, anti-gun control Christian conservatives flying the Democratic flag and vowing to steer the party toward the centre of the American political spectrum. The Post also prints a Washington Post comment piece by Charles Krauthammer, who argues the shift in power is less significant than it may seem because of the specific people who won and lost. “The Republicans have shed the last vestiges of their centrist past,” he writes of the defeat of many Northeastern and Midwestern moderates. Add that to the new breed of right-leaning Democrats, and it seems the entire political field has shifted to the right. So perhaps that sea change is really more of a skimming off of moderate voices. And while the resulting concoction may inspire optimism because of the relative weight of its partisan divisions, deeper questions remain about the toxicity of the new political soup.

hello democrats and goodbye rummy...

It's official: the Democrats have won BOTH houses of Congress, answering a collective global prayer. The now infamous "checks and balances" once lauded as a model to be emulated by democracies the world over, may actually amount to something more than rhetoric. It's about time.

The Guardian/UK added its voice to this global glee at the new face of American politics in an editorial published in yesterday's edition. As they put it: "Thank you, America"!

Oh, and goodbye and good riddance to Donald Rumsfeld, who kept his job at least 3 years longer than he should have. May History judge him according to his worth.

the big 'Cs' out of step...

What a RELIEF to watch the blue trickle turn to tide last night; the election results were a test to the Republican lie that their status quo held the confidence of the nation. Mounting evidence of mismanagement across the US government, including most stunningly the War in Iraq as well as major domestic scandals, translated into a decisive loss of the House of Representatives and very likely the loss of the Senate for the "Grand Old Party." Maybe, just maybe, the system works.

Meanwhile back home our lesser 'blues' under Stephen Harper should watch their back if a newly released CBC/Environics poll is a portent of elections to come.

Pinch me.

promises made, blah blah blah...

See Rick Mercer's excellent blog for his take (with video evidence!) on income trusts. Priceless...

middling power corrupts middlingly...

Transparency International has just released its 2006 "Corruption Perception Index" and after a pretty rough ride (think Sponsorship Scandal and the subsequent Accountability Act as countermeasure) Canada manages to rank a reasonable 14th of a possible 163 (Haiti finished last, just below Iraq and Myanmar/Burma).

It's a pretty interesting little snapshot of the state of world governments, although the results are just the wrong side of objective according to certain "experts." Still, it puts things into perspective. No surprise that Northern Europe ranks decisively in the top 'least corrupt' spots, and as The Economist points out, Italy proves that corruption and poverty don't always correlate (the essential thrust of the analysis of this table) by ranking a dismal 45 (even the US manages a top 20 finish, in, well, 20th place).

dispatches from the southern front...

Election time is upon us again, or at least our neighbours to the south. The US has had a pretty tough time getting this fundamental piece of democracy right in recent years, so people of all political stripes are feeling rather anxious about how the vote will go on November 7 when the country is poised to hand at least part of Congress back to the Democrats. In the most recent US elections hopes ran high that the Democrats would either retain or regain power, but a lot of "voting irregularities" and subsequent conspiracy theories of outright election-stealing by the Republicans kind of killed the mood of optimism in more moderate and progressive camps.

A good friend forwarded to me an excerpt from an essay in the NY Times Books section on this very topic by UK Guardian's American editor Michael Kinsley, in which he unpacks the thorny issue of the recent US Presidential election. I've posted the excerpt below (though the whole essay is well worth the read):

The great flaw in American democracy is not electoral irregularities, purposeful or accidental. It's not money (which, even under current law, cannot in the end actually buy votes). It's not even the inexplicable failure of all other Americans to vote my way or of politicians to enact my own agenda. It's not the broken promises and the outright lying, although we're getting close. The biggest flaw in our democracy is the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty.

Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don't believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can't prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse.

income (dis) trust...

In a surprise move this week Canada’s “new” government managed to drain over $24 billion from the Toronto Stock Exchange all in the name of creating a more stable long-term economic sector in Canada. It also bears mentioning that they stand to recoup billions in lost tax revenue; over the next five years they can easily expect to pad the national treasury to the tune of at least $5 billion. Yes, the issue of income trusts.

I have to ask myself, why do they need bigger surpluses? So they can make other "surprise announcements" of further cuts to federal spending in order to further increase the sacred surplus? How much surplus is too much surplus? Under the Harper government we may never know the answer. Cut is the new spend.

My essential point is that Canadians aren't exactly getting more for their tax dollar these days, and a Conservative promise is clearly not something anybody can or should take to the bank, so I ask again: WHAT is the point?

I'm not an economist (clearly!), and it's hard to decipher the contradictory analysis coming from various quarters of the famously self-contradictory schools of Economics (some say it's good, some say it's bad, some say it's too soon to tell...), but I do know that this is another surprise decision taken by a MINORITY government that struts about like it is the first and last word on all that is good for Canadians. Any critics are just activists, socialists or, worse than all of this, LIBERALS (that would be Canada’s “old” government).

If angering investors is the point, then fine. Let's all throw good money after bad decisions. Bear in mind that investors aren’t just corporate fat cats, but Jane and Joe Canadian, who invested because they were told it was a responsible thing to do, you know that whole ‘security-that-comes-from-having-a-nest-egg’ thing. And of course that includes anyone with a pension plan or RRSPs. I know many people who took direct and significant hits because of this “surprise announcement”.

Memo to Stephen Harper: They all vote.

maybe this isn't the answer...

Scientists have discovered that a substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol significantly increases the lifespan of mice on a high-fat diet, and also staves off diabetes and liver disease. A miracle cure! All we have to do is drink a bit of red wine and then we can get away with all kinds of dietary faux-pas, right? Now I've advocated drinking at least 3 bottles per sitting for years, so I anxiously read on to see what kind of health-related lottery I'd stumbled into, a certain jackpot winner no doubt. My joy kept climbing as I continued down the page, until that is I came across the hard truth of the matter:

"The mice were fed a hefty dose of resveratrol, 24 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Red wine has about 1.5 to 3 milligrams of resveratrol per liter, so a 150-pound person would need to drink from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of red wine a day to get such a dose. Whatever good the resveratrol might do would be negated by the sheer amount of alcohol."

Now I'm up for a glass or two, but I draw the line, ABSOLUTELY, at 4 bottles. 1500-3000 bottles, eek...

the art of disappearing...

This was sent to me by a dear friend just a moment ago, and I think it's worth sharing:

The Art of Disappearing
by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

i'll write about something new next time, promise...

As a further (and final!) posting about the New Jersey court ruling made earlier this week, I offer the NY Times editorial from the Saturday edition, that comments on the Republican response to the court's decision.

The final paragraph is worth quoting here:

Mr. Bush and his faithful acolytes seem perfectly willing to stoke fears that create division and sorrow in a country that doesn’t need any more of either. The president has just a little more than two years left in office. You’d think that for once he’d want to consider devoting his time to making things better instead of worse.

Amen to that.

i hate to say "i told you so"...

If you read my entry from yesterday I invite you to peruse this article from today's NY Times. A preview: the headline reads "G.O.P. Moves Fast to Reignite Issue of Gay Marriage".

Here we go again...

pink states?

Yesterday New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled that gay civil unions (the actual term 'marriage' has not been ruled on) will grant all the rights and benefits of heterosexual civil unions to "committed same-sex couples". See the New York Times for the complete story.

What is particularly amazing about this ruling is that both Democrat and Republican justices voted in favour of granting equal rights to gay couples, and in a nuanced decision demonstrated that sober and just lawmaking has not totally vanished from the legalistic wasteland of the US court system.

Our own legislators on Parliament Hill would do well to study this ruling if only to see what is possible when an honest appraisal is made on a "rights question" and conclusions are drawn in the best possible spirit of the law.

The sad truth, as I think most of us have come to realize, is that detractors of same-sex unions (or "marriage" if the more loaded term is to be dropped into the mix), aren't really exclusively concerned with saving marriage. In fact, between 2002 and 2003 there was a marked reduction in the total number of marriages in Canada and this was before any same-sex couples had rights to the altar ceremony. Only after same-sex marriages started to become legalized in certain provinces did the total number of marriages start to climb again, seeing a 6000 marriage increase between 2003 and 2005. Of course about half of those were same-sex couples, but as in so many other areas (think interior decorating, personal grooming, and luxury coffee sipping), the gays led the way back to the good life and did their part to ensure marriage didn't die off in Canada. We just don't get the credit we deserve sometimes...

No, it's become pretty clear that the ultimate goal of the more radical members of the anti-gay-marriage camp is to eliminate all elements of homosexuality in their narrowly conceived 'ideal' society. The recently leaked "Defense of Religions Act," albeit in partial draft form, attests to this in its alleged defense of individuals who advocate the death of homosexuals on religious grounds. And honestly...that's just not nice.

It's a truism that gay marriage has become the most potent 'wedge issue' to be deployed by what is typically referred to as the 'far right' since abortion became a high-profile question of social morality. I'm not so naive as to believe that all the courts in the world could end the brimstone and hellfire braying of the ideologically blinded elements in our increasingly impoverished political discourse. No, with the old script in hand I can already turn the page and read the next few lines: "the activist judges are at it again, sticking their nose in something that doesn't concern them one bit; the liberal media conspires once again with the fringe left; a perverse and corrupting force will poison the minds of our children; the end of society is upon us; etc."

I wonder who these people, those who fight tooth-and-nail to keep homosexuals and many other minorities outside of their cherished institutions, hope to save and to what end? If children are better raised by parents who participate in the major institutions of society, and individuals only find greater meaning for their lives through a genuine civic franchise as full and unqualified members of society, and if violent acts are most often committed by groups that have been systematically disenfranchised, then why in whatever God's name you believe in would you actively seek to segregate social institutions, create different and unequal categories of citizenship, and violently disenfranchise whole segments of society in the supposed service of the greater good? Whose greater good, if not society's?

We've become very complacent about our own political and social state of affairs after years of mindlessly bashing the big bad Americans and clucking our tongues in the self-congratulatory chorus of "I am Canadian". Well, guess what, next to New Jersey we're starting to look pretty backwater.

currently reading...

Deborah Campbell's This Heated Place is a superb snapshot of the state of affairs in the most hotly contested state on Earth, Israel. A fine and sensitive look at a perplexing and hyper-consequential set of realities through the eyes of an outsider trying to make sense of a place not known for rational exchanges. If not a "must read" then at least a "should read".

and the inevitable editorial cartoon...(thx jk!)

he was such a nice boy, i don't know where we went wrong...

You would think a Foreign Affairs Minister, accustomed to delicate international situations and subtle yet loaded communication, would bring home a little of that travel-won experience and comport himself with a bit of tact and, dare we ask, class. You would think, but apparently...

hope springs eternal...

It's happening.

can you clarify that statement?

Iggy set off a firestorm in recent days over his controversial comments on war crimes on both sides of the recent Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon. If he has a proven habit of putting his foot in it at just the wrong time, well, there was another politician with a similar need to show off his supreme sense of bad taste and poor timing, yes our great leader, Stephen Harper, also got into the action. Oy vey.

When the Conservatives aren't defending Canadians against the corrupting force of minority rights they take a bit of time out to make unfounded and inflammatory remarks about an entire party, who just happen to be the Official Opposition, by wading into one of the most difficult issues in international politics, namely the relationship between Israel and the rest of the Middle East.

Both sides have engaged in spin and re-spin, a few of the other Liberal leadership hopefuls have weighed in (Bob Rae's wife and family are Jewish -- I guess nobody briefed the PM on that one), and the whole issue has, in a further twist, become a chance for Ignatieff to clarify his position on the war in Iraq. Umm...

We now have a hubris-filled minority government, strutting about the halls of power as though granted a clear mandate, which by its very definition a "minority government" does not have. And in the other corner are the Liberals, a party in transition to something more coherent (we hope), but still plagued by many of the old gaffes that led to their fall in the first place.

While this whole affair begins to spend itself, and the initial shock cools, the Harper Conservatives continue to press their irresponsible and insulting domestic agenda designed to sell out Canada's environment, natural resources, minority rights and equality-based social safety net.

I remember a little over a year ago when politics in Ottawa was more soap opera than substance, a drama full of betrayals, courtships and nail-biting votes won or lost on the strength of one little "yea" or "nay". Those days are passed. The stakes are VERY high now, and sadly I'm not sure there are many players left who understand the meaning of "peace, order and good government" or the real responsibility to LEAD, something utterly needed if Canada is to keep from slipping into the oblivion of the ranks of unimpressive middle-powers by becoming a handmaid to reactionary foreign policy while ignoring the mess in our own back yard.

I'm waiting for the miracle to come...

note the minimal height difference...

Yes, I haven't written for a LONG TIME in this little blog 'o mine. But I have a good excuse...(refer to image for photo evidence).

I will resume in a bloggerly way in the weeks to come, promise...

don't worry, be canada...

So we didn't make it to the podium, but Canada ranked in the top 10 (just barely) on the recently released "World Map of Happiness." The site features an interactive map of the world, complete with floating 'ranking' info, and a full breakdown of the data used by the researchers at the University of Leicester who put together this rather marvellous piece of socio-cartography. Of course the Northern Europeans top the list, although Denmark, land of mad and semi-suicidal literary monarchs (..."to be or not to be happy"??) is the happiest place on earth. Go figure...

what literary and political journalism requires... (thank you jk)

"It was while working with her (Barbara Epstein, editor of NY Review of Books, died June 16, 2006)) that I learned the most valuable lessons of our friendship. I began to see more clearly how literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; how it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; how it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless." Pankaj Mishra

Thank you to JK, who forwarded this quotation to me.

collective sigh...

It seems I never tire of neglecting this space only to sporadically return long enough to apologize for my absence. Well...here we go again. It's been a busy month, with the start of a new job, a trip to Toronto (sorry if I missed you, it was mostly business), and other personal miscellany. And then there are the more grave matters of world geo-political combustibles, another case of the border-skirmish blues (whites and reds optional), and off we go again, cameras in tow into the crucible of G-d (or God or Allah or whatever).

Cue 'collective sigh'.

I am not competent to weigh in on the specifics of this latest episode in the "never ending conflict," but on a purely human level it cannot do other than deeply trouble me, as I believe it does us all.

I'm not one to go in for organized religion (or any of its dogmatic accessories), but I will offer the only thing I can, a hope for hope in the form of a simple prayer for peace (unsure as I am how to pray in the 21st century).

I don't know what else to write for the time being, and maybe there is little more to say tonight. This is my small offering in place of big ideas. I'd like it to count for more than another exhalation in the collective sigh, because the last thing I want to do is resign myself to the world as it presently is. We are all much better than this.