Canada: Been There, Done That

Well, there’s one thing that can be said about shock media, it succeeds in its aim to offend. I sometimes think that the programmers at FOX must be fourteen-year-old males with raging hormones. At least that would account for the gleeful pleasure they take in tweaking First Amendment rights until they look like salt-water taffy. Don Imus is typical of the type. Loads of ratings when he uses racial insults, loads of ratings when there’s a tearful make-up session, and even more loads of ratings for call-ins about what should be done with the Don Imuses of the world. A lovely bloodbath of phony emotions with the appearance of meaning, and juicy ratings during sweeps week when audience is measured and the price of commercials set accordingly.

Trouble is that some people take all this manipulation seriously and there is no accountability when things get out of hand and become libelous. All that matters is ratings. So in this case, the listeners get what they want (and probably deserve) or at least what the nastiest little parts of the human species find titillating.

Unfortunately, the deer in the headlights this time is Canada, which already feels unvalued by its much larger neighbor to the south. A panel on FOX TV tried to raise ratings by sneering at the Canadian armed forces whose commander said they would need a year to rebuild after their years of service in some of the heaviest fighting areas in Afghanistan. Taking time off for pedicures, manicures, and romping on the beach, sneered one of the panel. Didn’t even know Canadians were in Afghanistan, sneered another. It may have been 3:00 am but You Tube is everywhere and the segment was rapidly made available worldwide. One of the repeatable responses from Canada called Americans morons. The timing was particularly bad for Canadian sensitivity since on that day they were repatriating the latest four Canadian war dead from Afghanistan.

Canada’s war dead land at the Air Force base in Trenton, Ontario, a hundred miles east of Toronto. They are driven in motorcade along Highway 401, called the Highway of Heroes for them. People line every overpass along the way, waving Canadian flags. Larger flags are hung over the railing above the road. Firefighters park their trucks and stand to attention with their hands over their hearts as the procession passes. Police officers salute. It is a profound moment of mourning for the country, televised for those who can not be there.

And into this stumbles FOX media, looking to raise the rabble and gain following, confirming in an instant every negative stereotype about ignorance and zenophobia in the US.

Sad, sad, sad. But in Canada they would say “ever so.” If you watch the movie, “The Great Escape,” you would think Americans (from below the border) were the principals. In reality it was Canadians, British, Europeans who flew with the RAF, and other Commonwealth, but Hollywood figured it needed Steve McQueen to interest audiences. You’d also think that US Americans were the only North Americans fighting during WWII. Again, in reality, Canada fought longer than the US (which only entered the war after Pearl Harbor), trained 307,604 aircrew for itself, the UK, Australia, NZ, and the USA, and of the 125,000 who flew in Bomber Command during WWII, 50,000 were Canadian and 9,919 were killed. That’s a terrible loss for a small country. Now, Canada did not send troops to Viet Nam or Iraq but there were still 35,000 Canadians who crossed the line to join the US forces.

The FOX panelist who claimed he hadn’t known that Canada is serving in Afghanistan reveals not only his ignorance but that of much of the US. How many people know that Canadians have served in every war—including the Civil War when 40,000 Canadians fought for the North and the country took in Confederate wounded? In the Boer War: 7,369 Canadians served, and 224 were killed. They were in the trenches in WWI: out of a population 6 million then, 644,636 served, 60,969 were killed, and 131,166 were wounded. During WWII: out of a population of 11 million, 1,086,343 served, 42,042 were killed, and 54,414 were wounded. In Korea: 5,540 served, 312 were killed, and 1,202 were wounded.

Oh yes, FOX panelists, Canada has always been there.

So far, Canada has lost 114 men to the war in Afghanistan. It is another large loss for a country of only 34 million. Compare this to the US Population of 306 million, some ten times larger. In comparable terms, Canada has lost the equivalent of over a thousand, one quarter of American losses in a war the country entered to support the US and NATO and not for ideology or national gain.

Canada has always stood with the US and Great Britain without getting much credit for it. Without knowing, and certainly without thinking, FOX has revealed both ignorance or worse deliberate oblivion.

But I really don’t blame the pimply, smart-alec cleverness FOX apparently knows attracts its audience. Very probably more people will now stay up to hear what further controversies the late show will stir up. Instead, I blame the lack of any accountability on these media. My husband once was suspended for allowing a guest on his radio program to use a swear word on the air. No one wants the FCC to become a hobnailed boot again, but there really needs to be an intelligence meter set a little above moron—particularly on the day that the Canadian war dead, none over 28, return to their homeland.

Statistics above, courtesy of George Sweanor, 419 Moose Squadron RCAF, POW Great Escape stalag, AKA Ye Olde Scribe because he is a researcher and historian. He’s building his own blog and I’ll link this one to his once it’s up.

Feeding Frenzy

Sometimes it seems too discouraging even to use the energy to comment on the world. Like most everyone else all I can do is hope that Obama’s plans for rescuing us are going to work. I don’t know if they will. We’ve never been in this position before. I just know that what we’ve tried for the past eight years has created millionaires and billionaires for whom competition and power were the issue, leaving me and other little people, for whom money was the issue, to pay for their folly. Yes, economics, like politics, is local.

It's been dismaying to watch these captains of industry circle like sharks in a feeding frenzy swimming with opportunist crooks such as Bernie Madoff, all busy tearing away pounds of our flesh. We’re told we have to sacrifice to save these corporations and yet we learn from Goldman Sachs that the failure of AIG wouldn’t even have made a ripple. It seems corporations and banks wanted the bailout to write off bad debts so they could continue their entitlements like bonuses and Las Vegas conventions undisturbed.

Like many others, I'm bitter. Bad investments? Not a problem. Manipulate the media and Congress, count on (or lobby for) a non-regulatory business climate and a compliant administration, and the party continues. I’m all for breaking up these huge banks and making them accountable to their communities. I’m all for limiting their ability to create new policies that increase charges for their miserable services. I’ve switched to the credit unions, which are community based. I’m all for the regulation that greases the wheels of our economy, restrains the worst abuses the strong can inflict on the weak, and educates all of us that—despite Ayn Rand and what I see as an adolescent theology of the virtue of selfishness—greed and self-interest are not appropriate or rewarding goals for a government representing all the people.

Going further--yes, you can say I’m angry. I am sick of the results of unregulated greed and cutting corners with ethics. Personally, I’m tired of watching the chain effect that started with unregulated loans and moved on to the devaluation of assets, retirement savings, house values, and lives. I’ve done everything I should—paid my bills and saved—yet my house has lost value along with everyone else’s and I can’t help feeling is was so that some corporate Galt could earn a bonus larger than my entire life earnings.

Bad as all that is, though, I have come to resent listening to the architects of our current mess mount personal attacks on the one person trying to do something other than hand out tax cuts to the wealthy. I have been subjected to what passes for humor from the righteous right, including cartoons of watermelons on the White House lawn as if this passes as intellectual insight. When I objected, I was told I'm a humorless liberal. In fact, I'm an independent. I have even voted for worthy Republican candidates. I bet the sender of the watermelons never voted Democratic in his life. When it comes to economic and political theory, give me something substantive and I’ll consider it carefully as I did reading William Buckley. Send me insulting drivel and I’ll not waste my time.

On the more positive side, though, I know things will get better in the long run. They always do. The Salem Witch hunts ended when the so-called victims started pointing to relatives of important people; those important people used their influence to expose the young women accusers for the neurotics they were. So it all depends on whose ox is being gored. Rush and his pals will finally go off the precipice in their chase for ratings. Power corrupts as we’re told and very few can keep their heads when they imagine millions of people listening to them when they flick on the mike switch. They will make some fatal error. People will then stand back shaking their heads and making pious confessions of their own gullibility.

Reversals are the nature of the world. In the Middle Ages, they talked of this inevitable turn around as being on Fortune’s Wheel—sort of an old version of “What goes up must come down.” I firmly believe that one day, hopefully soon, people will regain their ability to judge and not treat the political process as if it is a Super Bowl where their team wins or loses. Eventually, they will understand the world is evolving to reflect what America has become. We aren’t who we were a hundred years ago. Until then, I shall freely use my delete button.

The Discipline of Happiness

The recent death of Natasha Richardson reminds me very much of that of Princess Diana: both were famous, beautiful, pedigreed, around the same age, fulfilling public careers, and mothers to two boys; both were also lost accidentally and needlessly.

Their deaths emphasize that it takes only a moment of time for complete reversal. One moment someone is alive and the next minute they’re not. The Greeks said that no one should be called happy until after his or her death because fortunes change rapidly. In other words, you may live happy but die miserably—and then can you be called happy?

In the Middle Ages, these changes were described as the turn of Fortune’s Wheel. The Tarot pack has a card showing the wheel turning with people rising and others falling off. If that all sounds a bit bleak—well, you had to be there. People in the Middle Ages were dealing with the Black Death that wiped out about half the population and they became a little sour on life.

In the past few generations, we haven’t endured pestilence or natural disaster or wars that depopulate towns. We’ve been spoiled. Our medical profession has been miraculously successful at combating potential threats such as AIDS and Bird Flu. We’re closing in on various forms of cancer. We’ve been prosperous enough for the food that keeps us healthy.

We have, in my opinion, become complacent about life and what we think it may owe us.

I like to quote my friend Kimi who once told me that none of us is born with a guarantee. The wisdom of those words comes back to me when I am confronted with sad losses such as Diana and Natasha. None of us is guaranteed wealth or even health for that matter. Not even long life or enough to eat. If we have those things, we have reason to celebrate because we are better off than many others in this world. If we have been given an education, so much the better. For these things we should be grateful and not just in the mumbled words spoken before a meal. We should be truly grateful for the improbable fact of our own existence and the people who care for us.

This idea was not lost on Natasha who, after her husband experienced a devastating motorcycle accident, said she realized life was vulnerable and every moment of it needed to be treasured. I take that to mean what I call living gratefully in the present, and that requires the discipline to live in the present and not be continually looking forward to some mythical future that supposedly will tip us into happiness.

Living in the present and valuing it is a good message for all of us. In fact, I think it applies not only to the possibilities of losing the people we love but just as much to how we permit ourselves to think (or not) about this life that has been loaned to us.

It's A Grind

Just received e-mail word today that my local coffee emporium, It’s A Grind, is closing, another victim of the downturn although I suspect that its location between Office Depot and Home Depot (both of which are struggling) didn’t help much in terms of traffic. This is the second store shut-down right in my neighborhood (in addition to a few eateries, but I don’t count them as that industry is notoriously unstable in the best of times).

Both the coffee shop and the other store, a gift shop, give me an immediate human face to the effects of billion-dollar greed we’ve been infected by. While the growth-at-any-cost big boys have been defrauding us at the macro level, I feel most acutely the micro-level effect of students losing their part time jobs making coffee and the loss of the shop owner who used to call me when her new candle shipment arrived. I know they are the tip of a very large iceberg that threatens to sink us, but they are the most immediate for me and thus both symbolic and poignant. What’s worse, I don’t know who’s going next.

I suppose I should feel bad for all the stores closing and the jobs losses they represent—particularly the latter. I do, but I also remember a pattern I observed as a child. There was a bicycle shop I used to go to where I grew up. It was a good shop, well stocked, and the owner could repair everything from a broken spindle to flat tires and broken brakes. He was always cheerful and he knew us and our bicycles personally—“Now you’d better stop those wheelies and skidding,” he’d tell the boys, knowing very well that they weren’t about to listen. It was the kind of place you could count on, and that was important to kids who relied on our bikes. It was also the place you could go to dream and, if lucky, choose your Christmas present.

Well, one day the owner decided to open up in a neighboring town. Immediately, things changed. He became consumed with the challenges of operating two shops, and since he couldn’t be in both places it was soon clear how much the shop had relied on his personality. The new manager of the first one didn’t provide the same level of service to us kids and we stopped hanging out. Overnight, it was no longer a place to go and dream. When the owner finally realized that perhaps he should have just focused on what he did best, which was selling and fixing bicycles and working with customers rather than trying to manage multiple stores, he closed the second store. But by then he was so saddled with debt that he nearly lost the first one as well. He was never the same afterwards.

There's a message here, I think, about providing an essential servive and doing it well. When the owner changed from being someone who sold and repaired bicycles into a business man who managed multiple sites, he gave in to an idea of progress. In other words, he got greedy and forgot the essential nature of what he did.

In the scale of things, I am not going to grieve one fewer Macy’s or Zales or Circuit City. Once a business goes corporate it seems to lose its soul. It becomes an opportunity base for a professional cadre of managers whose credo seems to be the bigger I can make the company, the bigger my bonus, then the bigger the rising tide for investors. Well, we’ve seen where that gets us: The company stops focusing on products that people want to buy (cars, for example) and becomes consumed with its stock and investors. When the company shudders, the managers move on until the next carpet-bagger comes along with promises to restore Wall Street confidence. As a consumer, I couldn't care less about Wall Street: I want a car that gives good mileage and doesn't break down. I want someone to focus on me as the bicycle shop did.

My hope is that we’ve learned something from the economic mess around us but my sense of reality is that as long as people are all right personally they will find it convenient to pursue business as usual and just write off the small guys as collateral damage. That’s too bad, because I’m going to miss my local shops.

What Would They Think of Us?

Sid and I watched the John Adams video from PBS the other day. Paul Giamatti plays the title role as a man of undoubted passion and deep political philosophy but with dubious social skills and absolutely no tact. His self-awareness stops at the boundary of his own reputation, about which he is sensitive to the point of paranoia, even though he seems to understand the limitations of his own personality. “I am not a tactful man,” he admits frequently but without any obvious plan for changing it.

I was struck by several things in this presentation. As with any historical drama, there is always the potential for historical creep—what I call the artistic problem of whether to take historical figures out of their time and judge them by contemporary standards. I had this same problem in writing about Aonio Paleario, a 16th Century Italian academic who was a major character in my novel Every Purpose Under Heaven. I solved my challenge by having it both ways. I have him defend himself in a debate with a modern man who is his equal. The result became a conversation across time, the kind of exchange I would love to have with some of my ancestors, whose folly has visited itself on my life these generations later.

My own curiosity thus leads me to wonder what such a conversation might look like if we were indeed able to go back and somehow talk with the political leaders from three hundred years ago. My take is that once they got over the culture shock of what our technology has produced, I doubt that they would find us very different.

For example, I think they would recognize our sometimes vulgar political infighting. While we may be a bit more restrained than the member of the Continental Congress who called Adams, among other things, a hermaphrodite, currently there is a cartoon circulating on the internet showing open-mouthed public figures (all Democrats) along with Hitler and Bin Laden etc. under the heading of “assholes of the world.” The person who sent it out (Republican) thinks it very amusing. Personal attack appears always to have been part of the American political tradition. There must be something very satisfying about name-calling rather than debating, something in the tradition of the loudest and most offensive voice wins.

Chances are these men from three hundred years ago would also see the endurance of one type of American personality. Many of those who made the treacherous journey to the New World were restless, rebellious, volcanic, and non-conformist—I think here of Tom Payne, who came from Lewes, just a hop-step from where I grew up in England. I doubt these men would have accepted authority if given the chance to resist—and I suspect this type is out living today in a shack in the wilds of Montana armed with enough guns to start WWIII. The American frontier ended only a hundred years or so ago, and once outer space is ready for colonization, I predict that these restless Americans will be among the first to go.

On the other hand, I believe the founders would be shocked at the ignorance and lack of education among many modern Americans despite its availability. Before universal education, only wealthy families could afford tutors for their sons who went to the private universities (Adams went to Harvard); women, even in wealthy families, often went begging (as my grandfather told my mother, he wasn’t going to pay for her education because that was just giving something to another man).

The underlying principle of public education was political, to create educated voters, but the benefits to someone like me who was provided with basic education and state-subsidized higher education are beyond calculation. Our gratitude for this blessing should be everywhere apparent, and yet all too often a strain of American anti-intellectualism clouds over the wonder of knowing who we are and where we come from. I personally find little to admire in the current habit of labeling anything the government supports as “socialism” (i.e. very bad, just like using the term communist back in the fifties) when it is clear that the person using the term has not taken the time eitherto understand its meaning or to recognize that public education is one benefit of government. Parents arguing for lower (i.e. more state funded) tuition might stop to consider that it might be more socialized education they are calling for.

Socialized benefits are all around us and we take them for granted. I think the original thinkers would point out our hypocrisy because the political thought behind the various documents that American’s cling to was the product of 18th Century enlightenment philosophies—which are the most self-aware I know of. So I think our sometimes pride in our own ignorance would appall our ancestors.