So the CBC undertook an investigation and determined that non-Conservative supporters "all over Canada" were misled by phoney phone calls, purportedly from Elections Canada, telling them to report to fictitious polling stations.
If true, this is a scandal of the first order that should prove immediately fatal to the Harper government.
No one is disputing that these calls were made. The talk of the House has concerned little else for the last couple of weeks. There remain several questions to be answered in the official investigation that I fervently hope begins today:
1) Who knew what, when;
2) Just how extensive was this practice, i.e., did the election turn on it;
3) and my own contribution: WHY IS THIS COMING OUT NOW?
If this had happened to me, I would have come home from the deserted 'polling station' I'd been directed to and IMMEDIATELY contacted every media outlet I could find. I would have raised holy hell. But I'm supposed to believe that however many people this happened to--the CBC says over 700 complainants have come forward--all remained silent until right about now?
Or, alternatively, these people did complain and Elections Canada did nothing?
I don't get it.
This represents a subversion of democracy, the kind of dirty trick we send overseers to other countries to prevent. It's absolutely despicable.
Try a little irony, Stephen: it's good for the political blood. You hail from a party (Reform) that supported voter recall. Like every other politician arriving in Ottawa, you promised clarity, accountability and transparency in governance. And your government is famous for its use of the argument "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". So it's only right and proper that you call a fully independent inquiry into election irregularities...and that you abide by its findings and recommendations.
I think it fair to say that, no matter what, you don't have a hope in hell of winning the next election. So, Stephen...do the right thing.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Broken Breadbin
Life is getting in the way of blogging, and not only my life. The Breadbin will be cold for an indefinite period of time. I will explain when I get back.
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Not this again...
I've written some of what I'm about to write before. I make no apologies. Piano composition used to be my stress relief valve (and still is, for values of emotional stress that defy easy articulation)...but in most cases nowadays my first impulse is to write it out of my system. And the same little irritants keep happening over and over and over until they exert enough cranial pressure that I simply must blog. Either that or explode.
Most of my little irritants are in some way connected with communication--which would be one of my Ten Commandments were it not already implied in the first two. You can't empathize or question without communication.
We are far from the only species on this planet that communicates with others of our kind. But we are the only species entrusting our communication to machines. In so doing, we are gradually losing the ability to effectively communicate at all. (He says, snarkily, using a machine to communicate his points.)
Okay, back up a little.
The Internet is the best tool we've yet evolved for mass communication. It enables me to broadcast this point of view worldwide pretty much instantaneously, and that's a good thing, potentially the best thing. But I'm writing about individual communication, which used to be all about face time and is now a lot more about Facebook.
Seriously--or perhaps that should be 'srsly'--people, many of us, particularly our young, would rather talk on a phone than see someone in person, and would much rather text than talk on a phone. This baffles me. Aside from being dramatically slower (there isn't a person alive who can text as fast as they can talk), it's utterly dehumanizing. There's nothing of "you" or "me" in a text message. Not even a disembodied voice. Just words on a screen. And many of them aren't even words. I've written before about some of the text shorthand I've run across. "Ily" is, for me, the last straw. It saves all of five keystrokes and turns "I love you"--surely the most potent three words in the English language--into gibberish. It says "I love you, but not enough to waste time seeing you, saying it to you, or even typing out the whole phrase." That's not love. That's not even like.
I am very ambivalent about technology. I appreciate it, sometimes I adore it, but often I hate what it has done to our society. I read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" back in grade five and marvelled that a man writing in 1909 could see this coming. We've gone beyond even his bleak vision, however, because Forster's Machine was essentially a videophone, and text messages have neither video nor voice.
And the speed. In an effort to make texting even half as efficient as talking, words are truncated, vowels are omitted, and an endless series of acronyms are employed, often obfuscating meaning and robbing the communication of its depth.
We've become a shallow society, content to "tweet" like birdbrains. Actually, that's probably an insult to birds: their songs are lovely, and they make a point of singing them to each other, face to bird-face.
There are books of correspondence from and between some of humanity's greatest thinkers and writers, and how many people bother to read such things anymore? They're longer than a couple of screens. I see the acronym "TL; DR" constantly. "Too Long; Didn't Read". I'd counter it with TS; DT. "Too Short; Didn't Think."
Human beings, social animals all, have constructed something called "social media" that is antisocial in the extreme. There's nothing "social" about being alone and bathed in the light of one's monitor, no matter what the Zuckerbergs of the world may believe.
And while we're butchering the English language, chopping it up and feeding it piecemeal into our texting-machines-that-are-still-quaintly-called-"phones", would it kill us to employ the grammar we were taught in second and third grade? There is a difference between you're and your; between to, too, and two; between its and it's; and between there, their and they're. Every day, despite myself, I find I'm in the virtual company of people who evidently never passed grade three. If I routinely made mistakes like these, I'd be ashamed of myself and take corrective measures immediately. But my attitude is antiquated and offensive, I'm told. Ah, well. If it can't quack using the accepted syntax of quackery, it's a stupid duck.
Most of my little irritants are in some way connected with communication--which would be one of my Ten Commandments were it not already implied in the first two. You can't empathize or question without communication.
We are far from the only species on this planet that communicates with others of our kind. But we are the only species entrusting our communication to machines. In so doing, we are gradually losing the ability to effectively communicate at all. (He says, snarkily, using a machine to communicate his points.)
Okay, back up a little.
The Internet is the best tool we've yet evolved for mass communication. It enables me to broadcast this point of view worldwide pretty much instantaneously, and that's a good thing, potentially the best thing. But I'm writing about individual communication, which used to be all about face time and is now a lot more about Facebook.
Seriously--or perhaps that should be 'srsly'--people, many of us, particularly our young, would rather talk on a phone than see someone in person, and would much rather text than talk on a phone. This baffles me. Aside from being dramatically slower (there isn't a person alive who can text as fast as they can talk), it's utterly dehumanizing. There's nothing of "you" or "me" in a text message. Not even a disembodied voice. Just words on a screen. And many of them aren't even words. I've written before about some of the text shorthand I've run across. "Ily" is, for me, the last straw. It saves all of five keystrokes and turns "I love you"--surely the most potent three words in the English language--into gibberish. It says "I love you, but not enough to waste time seeing you, saying it to you, or even typing out the whole phrase." That's not love. That's not even like.
I am very ambivalent about technology. I appreciate it, sometimes I adore it, but often I hate what it has done to our society. I read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" back in grade five and marvelled that a man writing in 1909 could see this coming. We've gone beyond even his bleak vision, however, because Forster's Machine was essentially a videophone, and text messages have neither video nor voice.
And the speed. In an effort to make texting even half as efficient as talking, words are truncated, vowels are omitted, and an endless series of acronyms are employed, often obfuscating meaning and robbing the communication of its depth.
We've become a shallow society, content to "tweet" like birdbrains. Actually, that's probably an insult to birds: their songs are lovely, and they make a point of singing them to each other, face to bird-face.
There are books of correspondence from and between some of humanity's greatest thinkers and writers, and how many people bother to read such things anymore? They're longer than a couple of screens. I see the acronym "TL; DR" constantly. "Too Long; Didn't Read". I'd counter it with TS; DT. "Too Short; Didn't Think."
Human beings, social animals all, have constructed something called "social media" that is antisocial in the extreme. There's nothing "social" about being alone and bathed in the light of one's monitor, no matter what the Zuckerbergs of the world may believe.
And while we're butchering the English language, chopping it up and feeding it piecemeal into our texting-machines-that-are-still-quaintly-called-"phones", would it kill us to employ the grammar we were taught in second and third grade? There is a difference between you're and your; between to, too, and two; between its and it's; and between there, their and they're. Every day, despite myself, I find I'm in the virtual company of people who evidently never passed grade three. If I routinely made mistakes like these, I'd be ashamed of myself and take corrective measures immediately. But my attitude is antiquated and offensive, I'm told. Ah, well. If it can't quack using the accepted syntax of quackery, it's a stupid duck.
Friday, March 02, 2012
And Ken's Your Uncle!
Happy birthday to Alexa Grace Hopf!
And I mean that literally--it really is a happy birth day. Alexa was born at 11:37 a.m. this morning, weighing in at a healthy 8 lbs. Baby, mommy Ally and daddy Jim are doing great.
And I'm an uncle.
That's an old, old, word, uncle. In fact, it ultimately derives from the Latin for 'little grandfather', and doesn't that make me feel, uh, senior.
English is, so far as I am aware, the only language to have a word like avuncular-- "of or relating to an uncle; by extension, kind, genial, benevolent, or tolerant". All four of which are words I hope little Alexa eventually associates with her uncle Ken. (In case you're wondering--I was, but I know I'm weird that way--the female equivalent of avuncular is materteral, "auntlike".
And while we're on etymology, Alexa means "noble" or "man's defender", and Grace of course means "favour" or "blessing". Knowing this Hopf family as I do, I can tell you right now that this baby is aptly named.
I'm excited...this is the first actual baby in the family. Here's to Alexa Grace. She's got a hell of a mom and dad; I look forward to assuming avuncular duties...
And I'm an uncle.
That's an old, old, word, uncle. In fact, it ultimately derives from the Latin for 'little grandfather', and doesn't that make me feel, uh, senior.
English is, so far as I am aware, the only language to have a word like avuncular-- "of or relating to an uncle; by extension, kind, genial, benevolent, or tolerant". All four of which are words I hope little Alexa eventually associates with her uncle Ken. (In case you're wondering--I was, but I know I'm weird that way--the female equivalent of avuncular is materteral, "auntlike".
And while we're on etymology, Alexa means "noble" or "man's defender", and Grace of course means "favour" or "blessing". Knowing this Hopf family as I do, I can tell you right now that this baby is aptly named.
I'm excited...this is the first actual baby in the family. Here's to Alexa Grace. She's got a hell of a mom and dad; I look forward to assuming avuncular duties...
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
If I won the lottery
I won't, first of all. In order to win the lottery, you need to buy a ticket, and I haven't done that for years. It amazes me how many people do buy tickets, and it further amazes me that most of the people I observe buying tickets can hardly afford to. Me, I already give the government well over a quarter of what I make and I don't understand the allure of handing them more of my money in the impossible hope they'll return it a millionfold.
You don't need an advanced math degree to realize the futility. Just ask yourself: given a 6/49 type lottery, would you choose to play the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6? If not, why not? They have just as good a chance of coming up as any other set of numbers.
The love of my life does very occasionally allow her dreams to override her common sense, and by very occasionally, I mean once or twice a year. So it's theoretically possible for us to suddenly come into a hell of a lot of money.
If it does happen--and I know how insane this sounds--I hope it's only a hell of a lot of money, and not a metric butt-load. I'd gladly take a million, and wouldn't pause if a million was two million. (Perhaps I should insert the fact here that all Canadian lottery winnings are tax-free, to prevent any Americans reading this from automatically dividing these figures in half.) But we have Lotto Max now. It routinely pays out fifty million.
Fifty million dollars. If that figure doesn't make you wince, it should.
What price life as you know it? Is it worth fifty million bucks to have to question almost every social interaction you have from the winning point forward? (Yeah, I know you wouldn't treat me any differently just because I'm suddenly fabulously wealthy, but Bob over there, not to mention all the seventh-grade classmates coming out of the woodwork?)
It goes without saying that we would help family and friends out. It also goes without saying that a line would have to be drawn somewhere, both in respect to dollar value and proximity of relationship, and those who find themselves on the other side of either line--WILL hate me. No amount of money is worth the hatred of loved ones...and that hatred is inevitable. Not because we'd be chintzy with our winnings, but because fifty million dollars.
Our lifestyle wouldn't change much, externally. We would have a new house built, but not a mansion: we're only two people. I'd stipulate to the builder that said house would be no bigger than three thousand square feet, and would not appear ostentatious in any way. The lot would have a view of water and the kitchen would be impressive but that's it. No amount of money would coerce me into buying a second property. To me, owning property that sits vacant ninety percent of the time makes no sense whatsoever.
We would travel--but not near as much as you'd think, on account of us being homebodies. And we'd eschew the first-class treatment as much as possible, because we're not, to put it bluntly, first-class people. I like food I can identify and pronounce and the idea of having to dress up for something as simple as a dinner fills me with dread. A butler? Pour moi? Don't make me laugh.
A housekeeper--yeah. That I'd have, and it wouldn't take fifty million bucks in my bank account, either. I know people who claim to enjoy keeping house. The clinical term for these folks is FREAKING NUTS.
I really like Spider Robinson's idea for disposing of vast sums of unneeded cash. You select for professions you think you'll have need of someday, find people enrolled in school for those professions, especially those who just miss out on the big scholarships. You offer to pay their way through school in return for a lifetime's worth of free service for you and your family/friends. Draw it all up nice and neat in a contract and repeat as needed. This is definitely something we would do.
Charities: yes. Selected very carefully, with an eye towards those that aren't in business to perpetuate themselves. I might be wrong and I know this sounds cold, but it really seems like many of them are. When seventy or eighty cents of every dollar goes to administration, overhead and such, there's something wrong. And I can't help but think if we really wanted to cure any number of diseases, we'd have done it by now. How many millions of dollars have gone into cancer research?
Probably the first thing I'd do, after I return from hiding, is hire a financial advisor to determine what "enough" money actually is for us. Because "enough" is really all I'd like to have. Anything more than "enough" is "too much".
What would you do with vast sums of cash?
You don't need an advanced math degree to realize the futility. Just ask yourself: given a 6/49 type lottery, would you choose to play the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6? If not, why not? They have just as good a chance of coming up as any other set of numbers.
The love of my life does very occasionally allow her dreams to override her common sense, and by very occasionally, I mean once or twice a year. So it's theoretically possible for us to suddenly come into a hell of a lot of money.
If it does happen--and I know how insane this sounds--I hope it's only a hell of a lot of money, and not a metric butt-load. I'd gladly take a million, and wouldn't pause if a million was two million. (Perhaps I should insert the fact here that all Canadian lottery winnings are tax-free, to prevent any Americans reading this from automatically dividing these figures in half.) But we have Lotto Max now. It routinely pays out fifty million.
Fifty million dollars. If that figure doesn't make you wince, it should.
What price life as you know it? Is it worth fifty million bucks to have to question almost every social interaction you have from the winning point forward? (Yeah, I know you wouldn't treat me any differently just because I'm suddenly fabulously wealthy, but Bob over there, not to mention all the seventh-grade classmates coming out of the woodwork?)
It goes without saying that we would help family and friends out. It also goes without saying that a line would have to be drawn somewhere, both in respect to dollar value and proximity of relationship, and those who find themselves on the other side of either line--WILL hate me. No amount of money is worth the hatred of loved ones...and that hatred is inevitable. Not because we'd be chintzy with our winnings, but because fifty million dollars.
Our lifestyle wouldn't change much, externally. We would have a new house built, but not a mansion: we're only two people. I'd stipulate to the builder that said house would be no bigger than three thousand square feet, and would not appear ostentatious in any way. The lot would have a view of water and the kitchen would be impressive but that's it. No amount of money would coerce me into buying a second property. To me, owning property that sits vacant ninety percent of the time makes no sense whatsoever.
We would travel--but not near as much as you'd think, on account of us being homebodies. And we'd eschew the first-class treatment as much as possible, because we're not, to put it bluntly, first-class people. I like food I can identify and pronounce and the idea of having to dress up for something as simple as a dinner fills me with dread. A butler? Pour moi? Don't make me laugh.
A housekeeper--yeah. That I'd have, and it wouldn't take fifty million bucks in my bank account, either. I know people who claim to enjoy keeping house. The clinical term for these folks is FREAKING NUTS.
I really like Spider Robinson's idea for disposing of vast sums of unneeded cash. You select for professions you think you'll have need of someday, find people enrolled in school for those professions, especially those who just miss out on the big scholarships. You offer to pay their way through school in return for a lifetime's worth of free service for you and your family/friends. Draw it all up nice and neat in a contract and repeat as needed. This is definitely something we would do.
Charities: yes. Selected very carefully, with an eye towards those that aren't in business to perpetuate themselves. I might be wrong and I know this sounds cold, but it really seems like many of them are. When seventy or eighty cents of every dollar goes to administration, overhead and such, there's something wrong. And I can't help but think if we really wanted to cure any number of diseases, we'd have done it by now. How many millions of dollars have gone into cancer research?
Probably the first thing I'd do, after I return from hiding, is hire a financial advisor to determine what "enough" money actually is for us. Because "enough" is really all I'd like to have. Anything more than "enough" is "too much".
What would you do with vast sums of cash?
Monday, February 20, 2012
In Burke We Trust
It has been some time since I wrote a Toronto Maple Leaf post. Actually, it's been some time since I've written any post. Now that I find myself with a day off for the first time in two weeks. I also find myself with little energy to write anything substantial. And so I'm going to spout off about the Leafs, which I can do indefinitely with little to no skullsweat.
I do recognize that a substantial proportion of my readers--nearing a hundred percent of them, in fact--do not share my love of hockey, or if they do, they declare allegiance to some other team. This is perfectly acceptable, provided they do it quietly and wash their mouths out with soap afterwards. Or they may choose to slink off into the Internet and leave me to pontificate and prognosticate in peace. It makes no matter to me.
+++++++++
Still with me?
All is not well in Leafland. The usual pattern post-lockout has been to dig a hole early, then start frantically trying to climb out of it at right about this point in the season. The climb is fruitless every year, but it does convince a subset of the Leaf fan base that "there's always next year".
This year seems to be a reversal of that pattern, in that the Leafs started like a house on fire, and as of late they're playing like crap. On the plus side, they're currently in playoff position, which is not something they've been able to say in February for what seems like decades. However, they're hanging on to that playoff position by the blades of their skates, and may well have fallen out of the top eight by the time you read this.
It's not that they're losing hockey games that concerns me as a fan: it's the way they're losing them. They were blown out 6-2 by the Vancouver Canucks the other night. No shame in losing to the Canucks, one of the elite teams in the West, but at least four of Vancouver's goals were gift-wrapped.
To be fair, the Leafs are exactly what they were projected to be this season: a bubble team that might or might not make the playoffs. Also to be fair, depending on the lineup they ice on a given night, this is the youngest team in the league. With a young team you expect inconsistency. You expect them to hit a wall about two thirds of the way through the season. None of this is a shock.
But if you're Brian Burke, GM of the Leafs, you should still be concerned. Burke claims to build all his teams "from the net out'--which should mean that at this point, three and a half years into the rebuild, the Leafs should at minimum have a solid goaltending tandem in place and a modicum of defensive awareness. Yet the Leafs rank 26th out of 30 teams in goals against per game. Yes, that's up four places from when Burke took over--but that's not good enough. Nowhere near.
It's hardwired into the DNA of every Leaf fan to make excuses. The hell of it is, every year at least a few of the excuses advanced have some merit. This year, for example, one could argue that Reimer would have much better stats were he not concussed early in the season. He hasn't been the same goalie since he returned. Gustavsson, meanwhile, is what he's always been: a maddeningly inconsistent goaltender whose athleticism can astound you almost as much as his mental lapses. Bottom line: the Leafs are unlikely to make the playoffs with either Reimer or Gustavsson as their #1, and if they do it'll be an awfully quick exit.
The defence corps(e) is prone to brainfarts at the most inopportune times. The Vancouver game on Saturday was a case in point: Canucks were constantly finding themselves unmolested in prime scoring areas. On three occasions they had enough time to compose a sonnet before depositing the biscuit in the basket. Watching this pitiful display tied my mind in knots. Does this team have a coach? I see three of them standing there behind the bench. What exactly do they say to their charges, and why does no one seem to listen?
Toronto has the speed and finesse to get get away with defensive ignorance against the Oilers and Blue Jackets of the world, but teams actually committed to winning hockey games give the Leafs fits. Again, it comes back to coaching, or the lack of it. You look at Vancouver, Detroit and Boston and the first thing you notice is the structure in their game. Players know where their teammates are at all times; passes are almost always crisp and on the tape. The puck is shot in, chased down, cycled, and brought back to the point, then fired on net with a screen in front. Defensively, there's always one player harassing the puck carrier, harrying and hurrying him to make a play, and another poised to block a shot or intercept a pass. I see glimpses of promise in Toronto's transition game, most of them having to do with blistering speed, but establishing a cycle, much less breaking the opposition's cycle, is too often beyond the Leafs' abilities. In hockey parlance, they're lacking board presence at both ends of the ice.
Cue the trade deadline and its attendant madness.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I argued when Burke took over that it would take three complete churns of the team to get from where the Leafs were at the time (nowhere) to where they want to go (a Stanley Cup). Burke has since accomplished one full churn, trading everyone away except Grabovski and establishing something approaching a respectable stable of prospects at the AHL level and below. Leaf fans are notoriously impatient: even one poor showing brings cries of BURN IT WITH FIRE, TRADE EVERYONE, CAN WILSON, CAN BURKE. It's ridiculous: this is still very much a work in progress.
Nobody is really sure what Burke is thinking--he's a master of misdirection who tends to talk a great game while playing an entirely different, and sometimes greater, game. But here's my take on what's out there, what it might cost to obtain, and whether or not it's worth it.
We'll start with RICK NASH, the captain of the sad-sack Blue Jackets. Every year there's a team like the Jackets, so bad they could double their point total and still finish out of the playoffs, except usually that team is the New York Islanders. Regardless, there is always one or maybe two players on that crappy team who would be much better playing anywhere else. Nash is arguably a prime example. He's never managed a point a game--considered (by me, at least) to be the bare minimum criterion to call yourself a true offensive star. And in seven years, he's led his team to precisely one playoff round, which was over almost before it began. But you watch his game and you wonder. He's got a big body and he knows how to use it; he knows how to score goals too, having amassed thirty or more five times. He would undoubtedly look damned good on the Leafs' first line.
The cost, however, is prohibitive. It seems as if Columbus wants half of any team bidding for Nash. The good half, it goes without saying. In the Leafs' case, you're looking at a package of Gardiner, Grabovski, Reimer and Kadri to even join the discussion. I can part with Kadri and Reimer with no concern, provided I'm getting a goalie back, but I'd be very leery of trading Gardiner. He leads the league in points by rookie defencemen and his skating is effortless, almost Coffey-esque. His nickname in the room is Silver...because after a thousand games in the NHL, players receive a silver stick. Jake Gardiner has played 52 NHL games. Does that give you some idea of the respect he's earned in a very short time?
And supposing the Leafs actually land the guy, they then have to pay him over eight years at a $7.8 million cap hit. Those are superstar numbers, extended over a term that would make Burke choke. The only way I'd acquire Nash is if I could then flip him to one of the other teams on his list for a sweet return...and even then, I'd second-guess myself unto the end of time.
If Burke is looking at stripping the Blue Jackets, he'd be marginally better off considering JEFF CARTER. His stats are comparable, his cap hit is more palatable (albeit for a longer term), and he's been linked to the Leafs forever. He'd also come considerably cheaper, since reports suggest Columbus can't get rid of the guy fast enough. The downside is that Carter is injury prone and has a reputation as, well, a bit of a jerk. I wouldn't necessarily steer clear on either score. I'd just ask myself, is he Tim Connolly brittle or just experiencing a run of bad luck? And his he a jerk like Grabovski was once or is he Avery-class? Consider this one high-risk with a potential high reward.
Before Anaheim began a very Leaf-like late season run, rumour had it RYAN GETZLAF was on the table. If so, the table has since been cleared. Getzlaf is exactly what Toronto needs and a fan can dream, but this just won't happen.
Everybody in the NHL gets linked to the Leafs at some point in their career, if they're any good. I've heard JOSH HARDING's name discussed in a few places and the Leafs could do a lot worse than to shore up the goaltending. He is a solid netminder who would not be half as expensive as the marquee names supposedly available at the position like Bernier and Schneider.
I wonder what it would take to pull DUSTIN BROWN out of Los Angeles. He's one notch below Nash in skill level, but he's durable and possesses the "pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence" that Burke craves. He wouldn't come cheap, but he could probably be had for less than Nash. I'd gladly offer up Grabovski and a couple of prospects.
Another alternative might be RYAN CLOWE in San Jose. He's another power forward with a mean streak the Leafs desperately need.
The fact is, nobody knows what Burke is going to do. I suspect he's going to do something, because his team still has weaknesses in all areas of the ice and he's shown himself to be open to improving those weaknesses. I also suspect that whatever he does will be off the map...nobody, but nobody, saw his last three trades developing.
This Leaf fan is waiting with bated breath. The team is getting better. Now it's time to take the next step and declare it a playoff team.
I do recognize that a substantial proportion of my readers--nearing a hundred percent of them, in fact--do not share my love of hockey, or if they do, they declare allegiance to some other team. This is perfectly acceptable, provided they do it quietly and wash their mouths out with soap afterwards. Or they may choose to slink off into the Internet and leave me to pontificate and prognosticate in peace. It makes no matter to me.
+++++++++
Still with me?
All is not well in Leafland. The usual pattern post-lockout has been to dig a hole early, then start frantically trying to climb out of it at right about this point in the season. The climb is fruitless every year, but it does convince a subset of the Leaf fan base that "there's always next year".
This year seems to be a reversal of that pattern, in that the Leafs started like a house on fire, and as of late they're playing like crap. On the plus side, they're currently in playoff position, which is not something they've been able to say in February for what seems like decades. However, they're hanging on to that playoff position by the blades of their skates, and may well have fallen out of the top eight by the time you read this.
It's not that they're losing hockey games that concerns me as a fan: it's the way they're losing them. They were blown out 6-2 by the Vancouver Canucks the other night. No shame in losing to the Canucks, one of the elite teams in the West, but at least four of Vancouver's goals were gift-wrapped.
To be fair, the Leafs are exactly what they were projected to be this season: a bubble team that might or might not make the playoffs. Also to be fair, depending on the lineup they ice on a given night, this is the youngest team in the league. With a young team you expect inconsistency. You expect them to hit a wall about two thirds of the way through the season. None of this is a shock.
But if you're Brian Burke, GM of the Leafs, you should still be concerned. Burke claims to build all his teams "from the net out'--which should mean that at this point, three and a half years into the rebuild, the Leafs should at minimum have a solid goaltending tandem in place and a modicum of defensive awareness. Yet the Leafs rank 26th out of 30 teams in goals against per game. Yes, that's up four places from when Burke took over--but that's not good enough. Nowhere near.
It's hardwired into the DNA of every Leaf fan to make excuses. The hell of it is, every year at least a few of the excuses advanced have some merit. This year, for example, one could argue that Reimer would have much better stats were he not concussed early in the season. He hasn't been the same goalie since he returned. Gustavsson, meanwhile, is what he's always been: a maddeningly inconsistent goaltender whose athleticism can astound you almost as much as his mental lapses. Bottom line: the Leafs are unlikely to make the playoffs with either Reimer or Gustavsson as their #1, and if they do it'll be an awfully quick exit.
The defence corps(e) is prone to brainfarts at the most inopportune times. The Vancouver game on Saturday was a case in point: Canucks were constantly finding themselves unmolested in prime scoring areas. On three occasions they had enough time to compose a sonnet before depositing the biscuit in the basket. Watching this pitiful display tied my mind in knots. Does this team have a coach? I see three of them standing there behind the bench. What exactly do they say to their charges, and why does no one seem to listen?
Toronto has the speed and finesse to get get away with defensive ignorance against the Oilers and Blue Jackets of the world, but teams actually committed to winning hockey games give the Leafs fits. Again, it comes back to coaching, or the lack of it. You look at Vancouver, Detroit and Boston and the first thing you notice is the structure in their game. Players know where their teammates are at all times; passes are almost always crisp and on the tape. The puck is shot in, chased down, cycled, and brought back to the point, then fired on net with a screen in front. Defensively, there's always one player harassing the puck carrier, harrying and hurrying him to make a play, and another poised to block a shot or intercept a pass. I see glimpses of promise in Toronto's transition game, most of them having to do with blistering speed, but establishing a cycle, much less breaking the opposition's cycle, is too often beyond the Leafs' abilities. In hockey parlance, they're lacking board presence at both ends of the ice.
Cue the trade deadline and its attendant madness.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I argued when Burke took over that it would take three complete churns of the team to get from where the Leafs were at the time (nowhere) to where they want to go (a Stanley Cup). Burke has since accomplished one full churn, trading everyone away except Grabovski and establishing something approaching a respectable stable of prospects at the AHL level and below. Leaf fans are notoriously impatient: even one poor showing brings cries of BURN IT WITH FIRE, TRADE EVERYONE, CAN WILSON, CAN BURKE. It's ridiculous: this is still very much a work in progress.
Nobody is really sure what Burke is thinking--he's a master of misdirection who tends to talk a great game while playing an entirely different, and sometimes greater, game. But here's my take on what's out there, what it might cost to obtain, and whether or not it's worth it.
We'll start with RICK NASH, the captain of the sad-sack Blue Jackets. Every year there's a team like the Jackets, so bad they could double their point total and still finish out of the playoffs, except usually that team is the New York Islanders. Regardless, there is always one or maybe two players on that crappy team who would be much better playing anywhere else. Nash is arguably a prime example. He's never managed a point a game--considered (by me, at least) to be the bare minimum criterion to call yourself a true offensive star. And in seven years, he's led his team to precisely one playoff round, which was over almost before it began. But you watch his game and you wonder. He's got a big body and he knows how to use it; he knows how to score goals too, having amassed thirty or more five times. He would undoubtedly look damned good on the Leafs' first line.
The cost, however, is prohibitive. It seems as if Columbus wants half of any team bidding for Nash. The good half, it goes without saying. In the Leafs' case, you're looking at a package of Gardiner, Grabovski, Reimer and Kadri to even join the discussion. I can part with Kadri and Reimer with no concern, provided I'm getting a goalie back, but I'd be very leery of trading Gardiner. He leads the league in points by rookie defencemen and his skating is effortless, almost Coffey-esque. His nickname in the room is Silver...because after a thousand games in the NHL, players receive a silver stick. Jake Gardiner has played 52 NHL games. Does that give you some idea of the respect he's earned in a very short time?
And supposing the Leafs actually land the guy, they then have to pay him over eight years at a $7.8 million cap hit. Those are superstar numbers, extended over a term that would make Burke choke. The only way I'd acquire Nash is if I could then flip him to one of the other teams on his list for a sweet return...and even then, I'd second-guess myself unto the end of time.
If Burke is looking at stripping the Blue Jackets, he'd be marginally better off considering JEFF CARTER. His stats are comparable, his cap hit is more palatable (albeit for a longer term), and he's been linked to the Leafs forever. He'd also come considerably cheaper, since reports suggest Columbus can't get rid of the guy fast enough. The downside is that Carter is injury prone and has a reputation as, well, a bit of a jerk. I wouldn't necessarily steer clear on either score. I'd just ask myself, is he Tim Connolly brittle or just experiencing a run of bad luck? And his he a jerk like Grabovski was once or is he Avery-class? Consider this one high-risk with a potential high reward.
Before Anaheim began a very Leaf-like late season run, rumour had it RYAN GETZLAF was on the table. If so, the table has since been cleared. Getzlaf is exactly what Toronto needs and a fan can dream, but this just won't happen.
Everybody in the NHL gets linked to the Leafs at some point in their career, if they're any good. I've heard JOSH HARDING's name discussed in a few places and the Leafs could do a lot worse than to shore up the goaltending. He is a solid netminder who would not be half as expensive as the marquee names supposedly available at the position like Bernier and Schneider.
I wonder what it would take to pull DUSTIN BROWN out of Los Angeles. He's one notch below Nash in skill level, but he's durable and possesses the "pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence" that Burke craves. He wouldn't come cheap, but he could probably be had for less than Nash. I'd gladly offer up Grabovski and a couple of prospects.
Another alternative might be RYAN CLOWE in San Jose. He's another power forward with a mean streak the Leafs desperately need.
The fact is, nobody knows what Burke is going to do. I suspect he's going to do something, because his team still has weaknesses in all areas of the ice and he's shown himself to be open to improving those weaknesses. I also suspect that whatever he does will be off the map...nobody, but nobody, saw his last three trades developing.
This Leaf fan is waiting with bated breath. The team is getting better. Now it's time to take the next step and declare it a playoff team.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Sorry for the empty Breadbin
The grocery manager has been off on vacation for (entirely too long) nine days. He's back in seven.
I hope I'm still alive to see him back.
It'd be fine if I had a me while I'm being him--but I don't...at all. I did, but every day it seems as if more and more hours have to be cut from the schedule. Add in what seems like most of the store getting relined and I may just go insane.
Blogging has been the absolute last thing on my mind. It's a pity, because I'd really like to tear Vic Toews a new one.
I'm off next Wednesday (until somebody tells me otherwise)--I hope to catch up with y'all then.
I hope I'm still alive to see him back.
It'd be fine if I had a me while I'm being him--but I don't...at all. I did, but every day it seems as if more and more hours have to be cut from the schedule. Add in what seems like most of the store getting relined and I may just go insane.
Blogging has been the absolute last thing on my mind. It's a pity, because I'd really like to tear Vic Toews a new one.
I'm off next Wednesday (until somebody tells me otherwise)--I hope to catch up with y'all then.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Tough Love
So this has gone viral over the last two days. Trust me, when I see links to an Internet video more than once, it's beyond famous; I seem to live somewhere on the fringes of the net, and nine out of ten memes never reach me. But "father shoots daughter's laptop" is pretty much everywhere online right now, along with what seems like terabytes of commentary pro and con. This guy's father of the year. Or he's more immature than his daughter and a raging psycho to boot.
I'd ask you to watch this video and decide for yourself if his actions were justified and reasonable. I'll be right here.
....
There's a reason that Children's Aid decided we weren't fit to be parents. Actually, there are more than a few reasons, but the biggest black mark on our cards came from our exposure to, and willingness to use, tough love.
Oh, this was never said aloud, of course. But I certainly remember the vibe. It came first during one of the adoption classroom sessions, The scenario we were given was this: your child is on a school field trip to Toronto. You get a call at work letting you know the child has forgotten her lunch. What do you do?
I privately found this scenario ludicrous. Why would a teacher call me for something this trivial? I wasn't stupid enough to voice that thought. But both Eva and I essentially said this wasn't a big deal. The child could scrounge amongst her friends. The teacher could buy her something small. Or she could just go without lunch: one missed meal wouldn't kill her, and it might spark her memory next time.
WRONG ANSWER. We were told the only acceptable course of action was to drop whatever we were doing and bring our daughter her lunch. We looked at each other. He's joking, right? Apparently not.
"Tough love" is passe, it seems. I don't know when it became law that parents were to be their children's best friends. Probably around the same time it was suddenly decided that no child could ever fail at anything lest he injure his precious self-esteem. Well, I'm here to tell you that parents are supposed to be parents, and the best way to nurture self-esteem is to fail at lots of things, lots of times...and then succeed through repeated, concerted effort.
As for tough love...
I didn't get near the dose Eva did. By all accounts she deserved it, too. I'll spare you the details: suffice it to say she wasn't exactly respectful or docile. Transport everybody down a generation and I can vividly picture her father pumping a few rounds through her laptop. She was paying room and board by this kid's age: it was that or move out. Did she hate it? Of course she did. Does she look back at it now and say "you know what, Mom and Dad were right?"
Yes, for the most part, she does.
An incident from my childhood: I was once confined to my bedroom for a weekend...Friday evening to Sunday supper. So as to make this reward a punishment, my room was first stripped of all its books. To really twist the screws, they even took my clock. That, I gotta say, was cruel--those two days took about three years to go by.
I was allowed to go to the bathroom, and that was it. Meals were brought to me in my room...I was not deprived of any food at all. Sometime on Saturday or Sunday, my parents went out for a few hours, first warning me of grave consequences if I tried to leave my room. Of course, I tried to leave my room as soon as the car was out of the driveway...only to find they'd taped the $%^ing door shut. RRRRRRRIP. Ever tried to re-attach tape to a door and then close it from the other side? Can't be done.
So I owned up right away when they got home, half-expecting to get another day or three tacked on to my sentence. Didn't happen. I was freed on Sunday sometime in the late afternoon.
Any parent trying that today would have their child taken away before the bedroom door was closed.
Now. Want to know what I did to get that punishment?
I was sent out to feed our dogs. The dog food was kept in the shed, and our shed had a dirt floor. I inadvertently knocked the dog food so it spilled all over. In my rush to do whatever the hell it was I wanted to do--I think it was a bike ride I was desperate to go on, for some reason--I shovelled all the food, dirt and all, back into the bag. A moment's thought would have resulted in me going in to explain my mishap to my parents--worst case scenario, we're out a bag of dog food--but what I did instead was just wrong on so many levels. I can't even explain it, looking back, what impulse accounted for that stupid, stupid action.
Of course I was found out. Of course I tried to lie about it, saying I had no idea how that dirt got into the bag.
The punishment didn't really fit the crime--I rather think I should have been made to eat a cup of that dog food/dirt--but it was effective nonetheless.
Do kids even get punished anymore?
Was this a punishment or a well-deserved kick in the ass? Maybe this kid will think about getting a job so she can get her indispensable computer back.
I'm taking some flack on Facebook, of all places, for my stance here. I'm being castigated for taking the father's words at face value, as if anybody would make this up for shits and giggles. And apparently I'm supposed to pity this child for having an "imbecile" for a father--who, by the way, shouldn't have snooped in his daughter's Facebook account (!?!?)
Maybe this is another reason I don't have kids, but if I had a kid, the computer would be right where it is here: in the living room, where I can keep an eye on it and make sure the porn is, you know, normal porn. Jokes aside, there is no way I'd allow a computer in my kid's bedroom. Not because I want to raise a monk: because computers come with webcams now, and there is no place in my kid's bedroom for a camera. Period.
And the rules would be simple. I get full and total access to everything you do online. You want to keep secrets from me, you keep a diary in your underwear drawer and I promise never to look at it. But your online life is fair game. I get to see what your public face is. When you fall in love with the 47-year-old guy from Montana who's posing as a 13-year-old boy from down the lane, I'm right there ready to put a stop to it. And if you feel the need to damage my reputation using your computer? Well, then I get the right to damage your computer.
Tough love. It works.`
I'd ask you to watch this video and decide for yourself if his actions were justified and reasonable. I'll be right here.
....
There's a reason that Children's Aid decided we weren't fit to be parents. Actually, there are more than a few reasons, but the biggest black mark on our cards came from our exposure to, and willingness to use, tough love.
Oh, this was never said aloud, of course. But I certainly remember the vibe. It came first during one of the adoption classroom sessions, The scenario we were given was this: your child is on a school field trip to Toronto. You get a call at work letting you know the child has forgotten her lunch. What do you do?
I privately found this scenario ludicrous. Why would a teacher call me for something this trivial? I wasn't stupid enough to voice that thought. But both Eva and I essentially said this wasn't a big deal. The child could scrounge amongst her friends. The teacher could buy her something small. Or she could just go without lunch: one missed meal wouldn't kill her, and it might spark her memory next time.
WRONG ANSWER. We were told the only acceptable course of action was to drop whatever we were doing and bring our daughter her lunch. We looked at each other. He's joking, right? Apparently not.
"Tough love" is passe, it seems. I don't know when it became law that parents were to be their children's best friends. Probably around the same time it was suddenly decided that no child could ever fail at anything lest he injure his precious self-esteem. Well, I'm here to tell you that parents are supposed to be parents, and the best way to nurture self-esteem is to fail at lots of things, lots of times...and then succeed through repeated, concerted effort.
As for tough love...
I didn't get near the dose Eva did. By all accounts she deserved it, too. I'll spare you the details: suffice it to say she wasn't exactly respectful or docile. Transport everybody down a generation and I can vividly picture her father pumping a few rounds through her laptop. She was paying room and board by this kid's age: it was that or move out. Did she hate it? Of course she did. Does she look back at it now and say "you know what, Mom and Dad were right?"
Yes, for the most part, she does.
An incident from my childhood: I was once confined to my bedroom for a weekend...Friday evening to Sunday supper. So as to make this reward a punishment, my room was first stripped of all its books. To really twist the screws, they even took my clock. That, I gotta say, was cruel--those two days took about three years to go by.
I was allowed to go to the bathroom, and that was it. Meals were brought to me in my room...I was not deprived of any food at all. Sometime on Saturday or Sunday, my parents went out for a few hours, first warning me of grave consequences if I tried to leave my room. Of course, I tried to leave my room as soon as the car was out of the driveway...only to find they'd taped the $%^ing door shut. RRRRRRRIP. Ever tried to re-attach tape to a door and then close it from the other side? Can't be done.
So I owned up right away when they got home, half-expecting to get another day or three tacked on to my sentence. Didn't happen. I was freed on Sunday sometime in the late afternoon.
Any parent trying that today would have their child taken away before the bedroom door was closed.
Now. Want to know what I did to get that punishment?
I was sent out to feed our dogs. The dog food was kept in the shed, and our shed had a dirt floor. I inadvertently knocked the dog food so it spilled all over. In my rush to do whatever the hell it was I wanted to do--I think it was a bike ride I was desperate to go on, for some reason--I shovelled all the food, dirt and all, back into the bag. A moment's thought would have resulted in me going in to explain my mishap to my parents--worst case scenario, we're out a bag of dog food--but what I did instead was just wrong on so many levels. I can't even explain it, looking back, what impulse accounted for that stupid, stupid action.
Of course I was found out. Of course I tried to lie about it, saying I had no idea how that dirt got into the bag.
The punishment didn't really fit the crime--I rather think I should have been made to eat a cup of that dog food/dirt--but it was effective nonetheless.
Do kids even get punished anymore?
Was this a punishment or a well-deserved kick in the ass? Maybe this kid will think about getting a job so she can get her indispensable computer back.
I'm taking some flack on Facebook, of all places, for my stance here. I'm being castigated for taking the father's words at face value, as if anybody would make this up for shits and giggles. And apparently I'm supposed to pity this child for having an "imbecile" for a father--who, by the way, shouldn't have snooped in his daughter's Facebook account (!?!?)
Maybe this is another reason I don't have kids, but if I had a kid, the computer would be right where it is here: in the living room, where I can keep an eye on it and make sure the porn is, you know, normal porn. Jokes aside, there is no way I'd allow a computer in my kid's bedroom. Not because I want to raise a monk: because computers come with webcams now, and there is no place in my kid's bedroom for a camera. Period.
And the rules would be simple. I get full and total access to everything you do online. You want to keep secrets from me, you keep a diary in your underwear drawer and I promise never to look at it. But your online life is fair game. I get to see what your public face is. When you fall in love with the 47-year-old guy from Montana who's posing as a 13-year-old boy from down the lane, I'm right there ready to put a stop to it. And if you feel the need to damage my reputation using your computer? Well, then I get the right to damage your computer.
Tough love. It works.`
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Odd thoughts on abortion
Abortion is one of those topics that finds every hot button people have and just hammers on them. All of them. At once. It's either "a woman's reproductive freedom" or it's straight up, cold-blooded murder: there doesn't seem to be any middle ground.
Or does there?
In all the commentary I've read about abortion, pro and con, not one person has ever mused if the baby has any say in the matter.
I will explain that. It requires a few assumptions.
First--big one--let's posit that there is some sort of life after death. NOTE: I am not arguing for the existence of any god here, much less any heaven/hell. Only that there is something more than threescore and ten. As I may have mentioned a time or two, this is something I implicitly believe, if for no other reason than life is too damned short.
I can accept that those of you with agnostic/atheistic bents will shut this whole argument down right here, and that's okay. I have no scientific evidence either way, just a gut feeling, and it could well be gas. But for the purposes of continued mental exercise here, can we just for right now side with the majority of humans and accept that there is something beyond this earthly existence?
Okay. Here were are, in the majority mindspace. Now, having accepted this proposition, let's consider one more: that there is some sort of life before birth. Actually, let's pull that back a bit and suggest that there is some sort of life before conception.
You rarely hear this thought advanced...or at least, I haven't heard it much. In my experience, whenever something like this comes out, the crystals and tarot cards inevitably follow. I find this beyond strange. Why is it that so many people uncritically accept the prospect of life after death, but the idea of life before birth is cuckoo?
Likely the two states--if they exist--are in fact the same state, i.e. before "birth" = after "death". Or, more poetically, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust". Again, no scientific backing here whatsoever: this just has a good beat and I'm dancing to it, okay? It's just simpler if we come from the same place we're all going. It has a certain "circle of life' resonance to it, at least for me.
The acceptance of this proposition opens up all kinds of interesting doors. For instance, maybe--just maybe--impending arrivals in this state of being may be able to select their families ahead of time. Neale Donald Walsch, in his Conversations With God series, suggests that the purpose of life is to continuously "recreate yourself in the next greatest version of the grandest vision ever you had about Who You Are." What are you here to experience? What sort of parents would help you best experience that? Having determined this, you would--I guess "beam" is as good a verb as any--your DNA, your information, and recreate yourself, in formation. And then you're born, and you live your life, and hopefully experience what you came here to experience, impacting every life you touch and making your world a better place. Or not. Maybe you're an evil bastard responsible for millions of deaths...and the world rises as one against you and says "never again".
Or maybe you're never born at all. You're perhaps aborted...or miscarried.
What happens to you then? Is there any reason, given the above assumptions, that you're not simply folded back into the ether whence you came, only to 'drop' again somewhen, somewhere?
And if that is in fact the case, what was your purpose in existing, in potential, for however long you did?
My wife miscarried more than six times. The first was particularly painful for her: little Peanut was found dead just into the second trimester. This turn of events has profoundly shaped her, and my, life. It started us down an adoption path we wouldn't otherwise have contemplated...which in turn led to a rejection that has also shaped our lives in countless ways large and small. It makes us feel a little better to imagine that Peanut had a future somewhere else, and was only stopping by to play its part--not a bit part, by any means!--in our lives.
It amazes me that people who are against abortion often seem to assume that it's a simple decision, just one of many a pregnant woman makes in the course of her day: let's see, I'll wear the red shirt today, I'll have pancakes for breakfast, and oh, yeah, gotta abort my baby. The choice to abort reverberates for years. It's a huge decision...in many ways, the biggest decision a woman will ever make.
Booya, I hear from the Peanut gallery. So Mummy agonized over killing me before she did it. That sure makes me feel less dead.
But you're assuming that dead is dead. Odd that, given how many pro-lifers declare as Christians and believe in life everlasting. Maybe all the Peanuts in all the galleries watching the show, awaiting their turn to step on stage, are free to leave the show, to go see some other show instead.
I know--it's a strange thing to contemplate. But no stranger, in my mind, than life after death--which the majority of people accept without thought.
Friday, February 03, 2012
Race To The Bottom
I'm feeling particularly glum lately. This didn't help much.
I wrote about EMD and Caterpillar exactly one month ago. While I figured the plant closure was coming, I didn't imagine it would happen so quickly. Frankly, that more than anything else alarms me. You think your job is secure? Apparently you can be forced to take a 60% pay cut, or lose your job entirely, just because somebody somewhere doesn't think billions in profits is quite enough money.
Welcome to the race to the bottom, folks.
I see it everywhere: mandated 55-hour work weeks, the loss of defined benefit pension plans, mass layoffs...where does it end?
And you know the argument that drives me batty about this? "It's unskilled labour--only worth $15/hour." Yeah? Says who? And what will Who say next, "sorry, we miscalculated, that labour is only worth minimum wage? Which, by the way, is at least 50% too high?" Not only that, but you try working in a factory, Mr. High-And-Mighty Educated Man. Even odds you wouldn't last a full shift.
I work in retail and confront this attitude daily. It is unskilled labour--only if you're doing it wrong. I could gussy up a resume that would make you think twice: "Liaise between stakeholders, management, suppliers and clients, providing superior customer service at every opportunity. Supervise a team to ensure compliance to company standards and protocols. Troubleshoot supply system glitches, resolving issues and preventing future problems. Juggle many competing priorities and unfailingly meet multiple hard deadlines. Maximize sales per labour hour, minimize shrink, and provide a stable and reliable experience for clients with diverse backgrounds and requirements." You think it's easy? It is--again, if you're doing it wrong.
The person who replaced me at my old store, I'm told, has had about enough. It hasn't even been six months. I don't blame him. I'm just glad I don't measure my self-worth in dollars and cents. That said, there are bills to pay.
It's possible to have a living wage: EMD workers had one until just now, after all. Countries such as Germany--which has no minimum wage law--nevertheless pay their factory workers quite well. But that's Europe. Different ethos there, one we used to have to some degree in Canada but which is eroding and fast. We seem to be moving towards the American model, wherein there is no God but Greed, and Dollar is His Profit.
Sometimes I wonder if the corpocracy that really runs the world won't be happy until we're all making wages similar to those paid in India and China. And here I thought it was all about raising the Third World up, not bring the First down. Naive of me...
I wrote about EMD and Caterpillar exactly one month ago. While I figured the plant closure was coming, I didn't imagine it would happen so quickly. Frankly, that more than anything else alarms me. You think your job is secure? Apparently you can be forced to take a 60% pay cut, or lose your job entirely, just because somebody somewhere doesn't think billions in profits is quite enough money.
Welcome to the race to the bottom, folks.
I see it everywhere: mandated 55-hour work weeks, the loss of defined benefit pension plans, mass layoffs...where does it end?
And you know the argument that drives me batty about this? "It's unskilled labour--only worth $15/hour." Yeah? Says who? And what will Who say next, "sorry, we miscalculated, that labour is only worth minimum wage? Which, by the way, is at least 50% too high?" Not only that, but you try working in a factory, Mr. High-And-Mighty Educated Man. Even odds you wouldn't last a full shift.
I work in retail and confront this attitude daily. It is unskilled labour--only if you're doing it wrong. I could gussy up a resume that would make you think twice: "Liaise between stakeholders, management, suppliers and clients, providing superior customer service at every opportunity. Supervise a team to ensure compliance to company standards and protocols. Troubleshoot supply system glitches, resolving issues and preventing future problems. Juggle many competing priorities and unfailingly meet multiple hard deadlines. Maximize sales per labour hour, minimize shrink, and provide a stable and reliable experience for clients with diverse backgrounds and requirements." You think it's easy? It is--again, if you're doing it wrong.
The person who replaced me at my old store, I'm told, has had about enough. It hasn't even been six months. I don't blame him. I'm just glad I don't measure my self-worth in dollars and cents. That said, there are bills to pay.
It's possible to have a living wage: EMD workers had one until just now, after all. Countries such as Germany--which has no minimum wage law--nevertheless pay their factory workers quite well. But that's Europe. Different ethos there, one we used to have to some degree in Canada but which is eroding and fast. We seem to be moving towards the American model, wherein there is no God but Greed, and Dollar is His Profit.
Sometimes I wonder if the corpocracy that really runs the world won't be happy until we're all making wages similar to those paid in India and China. And here I thought it was all about raising the Third World up, not bring the First down. Naive of me...
Sunday, January 29, 2012
All About Me: "Midlife Crisis" Edition
As I approach the venerable old age of 40, I constantly find myself scanning for signs of the midlife crisis that society says should be bushwacking me any day now. I'm supposedly going to wake up one morning, very soon, go buy a Ferrari and use it to pick up women twenty years my junior.
I can confidently assure any Evas who might be reading this that all is clear on the Ferrari/floozie front. I mean, I'd have to steal the Ferrari, and I can't think of one floozie who'd look at me twice even with a Ferrari, and even if I could somehow finagle a floozie into my filched Ferrari, I'd crash the thing pretty much instantaneously. Nothing says crisis quite like a floozie corpse in a wrecked Ferrari.
All joking aside, I have been through a 'midlife crisis'. Except if my crisis actually hit me at midlife, folks should be planning my funeral along about yesterday.
I didn't buy the sports car, of course...but I did spend an almost equivalent sum on meaningless trifles. Endless meals out. Probably close to a thousand dollars on arcade games. Albums bought just because I kind of liked one song. Stuff like that. And yes, there were floozies. I had affairs, plural. Not exactly my proudest years, '90-'98 or so.
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there"-- L.P. Hartley
I've lost most of the language I once spoke in that foreign country, and I've abandoned its customs. In fact, it's hard even to imagine the state of mind I lived in back then, much less that it was I who lived in it, if that makes any sense at all.
It goes without saying that everything was All About Me. What would make me happy, short-term? I foolishly figured that if I piled up enough of these short-term happinesses, I'd be happy in the long term as well. I was, of course, different from my dorm-mates: they got drunk practically every night. I didn't grasp the obvious truth that I was far more wasted than they could ever dream of getting, just not on alcohol.
I had two relationships in those years, and they were also All About Me. In hindsight, the first was actually more mature than the second, but even so there came a day in that relationship when I decided there was something lacking. A little pizzazz. Okay, Ken, stop mincing words. Sex.
There was sex, but it was perfunctory and put me very much in mind of England. Rather than invest in the relationship by means of honest communication, I spent considerable time orchestrating an affair.I would have hotly denied such an insinuation--the woman I was chatting online to meant nothing, and it was merely a coincidence that she lived all of a block away from Lynne and I. And when I went over there one night just to play Nintendo (like I was ever any good at console video games!) it was such a surprise when Judy just fell into my lap, and even more of a surprise when I--
Yeah. Such a surprise. Neither was it at all shocking that I continued to frequent Judy's place over the next six or eight months. And it shouldn't have been a surprise when Judy and I had a little argument and she threatened to tell Lynne about her existence. I came home from that confrontation with my mind reeling, trying to figure out a way to get through the next week or so with my ever-precious balls intact. One more non-surprise: I got home to hear awfully Lynne-like moans--not that I'd ever heard her moan, but I could imagine--coming from Ben's room. The anger I felt was quashed immediately by the realization that I was the worst kind of hypocrite going. The only saving grace was that it was considerably easier to confess my transgression. I slunk out of the house for a couple of hours and then came home and spilled. Lynne never did; her lack of ball-ripping was all the confession I needed. Lynne and I limped along for another few months, but the relationship was doomed and I think we both knew it.
Enter Cathy. I met her online as well, through the Usenet forum soc.penpals. We were real penpals at first, actual pen-and-paper pals, over the summer where she was at home fifteen hundred miles away and offline. I'm here to tell you that while snail mail is slow, it can work just as well as screen chat in developing affection. Maybe better. Over a season you can accomplish a lot in that direction if you're willing to write ten or fifteen pages at a time.
She bussed home from Fort Frances--a gruelling trip--and I bussed to Toronto to join her for its last leg. She had prepared a letter, which she handed to me before dropping off to sleep. She told me not to read it until we were almost home. That was difficult, but I complied.
That letter detailed every flaw I was likely to find in her, said she was more than willing to accept mine, and proposed we get serious. "If you're okay with this, poke me awake".
I did. And we "got serious", after a fashion, although again in hindsight the relationship was childish. We called each other 'Cathybear' and 'Kenbear'--the memory of which is rather sickening, now--and I saw her as a means to complete my life. In other words--just the next trinket.
That was one flaw Cathy didn't bargain on when she said she was willing to accept my flaws, and that was my continuing desire to make everything All About Me. You'd think I would have learned. I thought I had. But when Cathy was diagnosed with clinical depression, I began the process of bailing on her. The only option, really: I couldn't 'fix' clinical depression. As it progressed, it was often as if I wasn't even in the room. So I decided not to be in someone else's room. Again, this was a decision I kept hidden from myself--it said too many things about me, too many things that contradicted the virtuous, goody-two-shoes image I had of myself.
I met that 'someone else' online (where else?) I was so thoroughly convinced of my own physical unattractiveness by this time that I knew the only chance I had to attract and hold somebody was if they didn't have to look at me through the first stages. I may be ugly, but I got the words, yo.
She eventually came to spend a weekend. Chaos ensued.I had cunningly cultivated the polyamory defence: that I could love two people at once. To be fair, this was an ideal I truly held for a number of years...but I couldn't live up to it in real, messy life. All About Me had failed once again, rather spectacularly this time.
I still feel terrible about what I did to Cathy. I've tried to track her down, not with any intention of contacting her, but just to assure myself she's still alive. That may sound melodramatic, but she attempted suicide at least once while I knew her and I'm terribly afraid she's succeeded since. I don't know, and I doubt I ever will. But it remains my life's only real regret. Hurting people is not what I am about.
Neither is All About Me. I can date at least the buddings of my maturity to the exact moment I realized my life was complete as it was, and needed nothing or no one else to complete it. I learned not to look for contentment, but simply to feel it anyway. And within a week of my writing that the first time, I met the woman I was to marry. She doesn't complete my life and I don't complete hers: we are two people who have joyfully consented to share life's journey together. We're going to hit the thirteenth anniversary of our first meeting in a little less than two weeks, and I'm still amazed that before I met Eva I didn't even know what love really was. I'd thought marriage was a trap. Ha. Marriage is the security that gives you your freedom.
May I respectfully suggest, if you're going to have a midlife crisis, it's much better to get it out of the way early, while your life--let's face it--still doesn't mean much and anyone you hurt is likely more resilient. One hopes. That isn't to excuse hurting anyone, of course--when you hurt someone, you're always hurting yourself--but I think it's better to be immature at a young age...
I can confidently assure any Evas who might be reading this that all is clear on the Ferrari/floozie front. I mean, I'd have to steal the Ferrari, and I can't think of one floozie who'd look at me twice even with a Ferrari, and even if I could somehow finagle a floozie into my filched Ferrari, I'd crash the thing pretty much instantaneously. Nothing says crisis quite like a floozie corpse in a wrecked Ferrari.
All joking aside, I have been through a 'midlife crisis'. Except if my crisis actually hit me at midlife, folks should be planning my funeral along about yesterday.
I didn't buy the sports car, of course...but I did spend an almost equivalent sum on meaningless trifles. Endless meals out. Probably close to a thousand dollars on arcade games. Albums bought just because I kind of liked one song. Stuff like that. And yes, there were floozies. I had affairs, plural. Not exactly my proudest years, '90-'98 or so.
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there"-- L.P. Hartley
I've lost most of the language I once spoke in that foreign country, and I've abandoned its customs. In fact, it's hard even to imagine the state of mind I lived in back then, much less that it was I who lived in it, if that makes any sense at all.
It goes without saying that everything was All About Me. What would make me happy, short-term? I foolishly figured that if I piled up enough of these short-term happinesses, I'd be happy in the long term as well. I was, of course, different from my dorm-mates: they got drunk practically every night. I didn't grasp the obvious truth that I was far more wasted than they could ever dream of getting, just not on alcohol.
I had two relationships in those years, and they were also All About Me. In hindsight, the first was actually more mature than the second, but even so there came a day in that relationship when I decided there was something lacking. A little pizzazz. Okay, Ken, stop mincing words. Sex.
There was sex, but it was perfunctory and put me very much in mind of England. Rather than invest in the relationship by means of honest communication, I spent considerable time orchestrating an affair.I would have hotly denied such an insinuation--the woman I was chatting online to meant nothing, and it was merely a coincidence that she lived all of a block away from Lynne and I. And when I went over there one night just to play Nintendo (like I was ever any good at console video games!) it was such a surprise when Judy just fell into my lap, and even more of a surprise when I--
Yeah. Such a surprise. Neither was it at all shocking that I continued to frequent Judy's place over the next six or eight months. And it shouldn't have been a surprise when Judy and I had a little argument and she threatened to tell Lynne about her existence. I came home from that confrontation with my mind reeling, trying to figure out a way to get through the next week or so with my ever-precious balls intact. One more non-surprise: I got home to hear awfully Lynne-like moans--not that I'd ever heard her moan, but I could imagine--coming from Ben's room. The anger I felt was quashed immediately by the realization that I was the worst kind of hypocrite going. The only saving grace was that it was considerably easier to confess my transgression. I slunk out of the house for a couple of hours and then came home and spilled. Lynne never did; her lack of ball-ripping was all the confession I needed. Lynne and I limped along for another few months, but the relationship was doomed and I think we both knew it.
Enter Cathy. I met her online as well, through the Usenet forum soc.penpals. We were real penpals at first, actual pen-and-paper pals, over the summer where she was at home fifteen hundred miles away and offline. I'm here to tell you that while snail mail is slow, it can work just as well as screen chat in developing affection. Maybe better. Over a season you can accomplish a lot in that direction if you're willing to write ten or fifteen pages at a time.
She bussed home from Fort Frances--a gruelling trip--and I bussed to Toronto to join her for its last leg. She had prepared a letter, which she handed to me before dropping off to sleep. She told me not to read it until we were almost home. That was difficult, but I complied.
That letter detailed every flaw I was likely to find in her, said she was more than willing to accept mine, and proposed we get serious. "If you're okay with this, poke me awake".
I did. And we "got serious", after a fashion, although again in hindsight the relationship was childish. We called each other 'Cathybear' and 'Kenbear'--the memory of which is rather sickening, now--and I saw her as a means to complete my life. In other words--just the next trinket.
That was one flaw Cathy didn't bargain on when she said she was willing to accept my flaws, and that was my continuing desire to make everything All About Me. You'd think I would have learned. I thought I had. But when Cathy was diagnosed with clinical depression, I began the process of bailing on her. The only option, really: I couldn't 'fix' clinical depression. As it progressed, it was often as if I wasn't even in the room. So I decided not to be in someone else's room. Again, this was a decision I kept hidden from myself--it said too many things about me, too many things that contradicted the virtuous, goody-two-shoes image I had of myself.
I met that 'someone else' online (where else?) I was so thoroughly convinced of my own physical unattractiveness by this time that I knew the only chance I had to attract and hold somebody was if they didn't have to look at me through the first stages. I may be ugly, but I got the words, yo.
She eventually came to spend a weekend. Chaos ensued.I had cunningly cultivated the polyamory defence: that I could love two people at once. To be fair, this was an ideal I truly held for a number of years...but I couldn't live up to it in real, messy life. All About Me had failed once again, rather spectacularly this time.
I still feel terrible about what I did to Cathy. I've tried to track her down, not with any intention of contacting her, but just to assure myself she's still alive. That may sound melodramatic, but she attempted suicide at least once while I knew her and I'm terribly afraid she's succeeded since. I don't know, and I doubt I ever will. But it remains my life's only real regret. Hurting people is not what I am about.
Neither is All About Me. I can date at least the buddings of my maturity to the exact moment I realized my life was complete as it was, and needed nothing or no one else to complete it. I learned not to look for contentment, but simply to feel it anyway. And within a week of my writing that the first time, I met the woman I was to marry. She doesn't complete my life and I don't complete hers: we are two people who have joyfully consented to share life's journey together. We're going to hit the thirteenth anniversary of our first meeting in a little less than two weeks, and I'm still amazed that before I met Eva I didn't even know what love really was. I'd thought marriage was a trap. Ha. Marriage is the security that gives you your freedom.
May I respectfully suggest, if you're going to have a midlife crisis, it's much better to get it out of the way early, while your life--let's face it--still doesn't mean much and anyone you hurt is likely more resilient. One hopes. That isn't to excuse hurting anyone, of course--when you hurt someone, you're always hurting yourself--but I think it's better to be immature at a young age...
Sunday, January 22, 2012
License to Not Drive
I don't drive.
I've mentioned this oh-so-little, but oh-so-defining factoid about myself several times over the years, and occasionally I've alluded to the phobia I have that is the reason I don't drive. An e-friend coined 'euqunophobia' to describe it, from the Greek root for 'to pilot' as in a chariot. Prior to his making that word up out of thin air, there was no word in the English language to denote fear of driving. That ought to tell you something, since there's a one-word definition for fear of practically everything else. Apparently nobody fears driving.
Meet Nobody: me.
Outside the driver's seat of a vehicle and asked to consider the act of driving rationally, I'll tell you that yes, I certainly could drive a car. For a while. I might even get through an entire day, week, or hell, month, without hitting something and dying, probably taking others with me. But eventually my attention would waver at a critical second and that'd be that. Splat. This is a given, an absolute certainty, and I base that projection on my inability to pay attention to everything at once.
I look at all you drivers and wonder, honestly wonder how you do it. How do you shut up the little niggling voice in your brain that works out how fast you're going, how fast the vehicle coming towards you is going, and what would happen if that driver fumbled his smartphone and inadvertently jerked the wheel right into your path. What X-ray vision technique do you use to determine that there is not in fact a child about to run out into traffic from between those two parked cars?
Back in Driver's Ed.--which I did take, believe it or not--I found the only driving I was at all comfortable with was freeway driving. People look at me oddly when I confess that, since if anything is going to scare a veteran driver, it's usually the 401. Especially through Toronto, which I confess I have never attempted:
This is the busiest highway in the world. It's not at this level where I live now, or an hour west of here where I lived when I drove on it over twenty years ago. I once talked to a Californian whose knuckles went white travelling the above stretch as a passenger. "Brian", I said, "you're from California. You've been through L.A. Surely this can't be that much different."
"But it is," he said. "The trucks...on this road there are almost more trucks than cars. You don't see that in L.A. at all. It's scary to be between two tractor-trailers that might squash you like a bug."
Welcome to my imagination, I thought.
But the truth is, trucks or cars, the traffic doesn't bother me overmuch on the highway. I can convince myself it's semi-predictable; at the very least, we're all going in the same direction and I don't have to waste too much mental energy worrying about things like this.
In the city, it's another story. It's chaos. Every intersection could well be hiding a red-light runner about to T-bone me. Cars are coming towards me: any one or all of them might be driven by people with an eye and a half on a goddamn screen instead of the road, where I am. I don't know how you drivers do it...I really don't. I'd crack in short order.
If you're wondering how I can cycle with this attitude, it's easy. Bikes move considerably slower and there's usually an escape route available for any developing trouble, even if it's turning your front wheel into the curb and ditching (which I have done, more than once). And most of the streets I cycle on are not primary arteries. Traffic is minimal. Somtimes I have an entire lane to myself. Bike lanes are made of awesome.
But I have been hit as a cyclist and also as a pedestrian. That last story hasn't been detailed in this blog, so here it is: it happened early one winter's morning as I was leaving my job at King and University 7-Eleven en route to my then-girlfriend's place, my de facto home that year, a couple of blocks away. I crossed King Street and turned to cross University: took a few steps out into the intersection when a car turned right directly into me and threw me about ten feet. It was a good thing that car was barely moving and also that I was bundled up against the chill. I was barely winded. A young woman got out of the car, said "oh my God" about thirty times, repeatedly asked me if I was okay, and then... and then she offered to drive me home. Like I was going to get into a car that had just hit me. I mean, seriously.
As I said, it would only be a matter of time before I'd hit or be hit driving a car. Probably not a long time, either. I equate driving with a video game; in all the video games I've tried, I've never managed to go longer than a few minutes without crashing. The difference is, in real life you don't get five seconds off the clock and a brand new car.
It turns out I'm not alone in my non-driving state, although there aren't many males my age who don't drive, and many of the females I know who don't drive do have their driver's licenses. We non-drivers tend to keep pretty quiet about it. I can't speak for others, but for me there's a sense of shame. Driving is a basic human skill, or so it seems. Teenagers can't wait to do it. Everyone seems to take having and driving a car for granted.
And it really places limits on your life. There are many jobs I could do, and very well, but for the lack of a license. It's critically important that I live on a bus route; even better if I'm within walking distance of work, as I now am. I'm supremely lucky to be married to a woman who does not mind doing all the driving. I could get groceries from work to hom without her, but it would not be easy and I'd probably have to shop day by day, which would drive up costs dramatically.
The rationalizations I have used to assuage my shame at failing this most simple test of civilized behaviour have gradually, over many years, become statements I take pride in. I'm not polluting the environment. Whether walking or cycling, I'm out in the fresh air getting exercise. I've saving a metric buttload of money. And let's face it, even if I could drive, I'd choose to walk or cycle most of the time anyway. Walking is pleasant, provided you're dressed for the weather. I was reflecting on this yesterday as I was assaulted with a -20 windchill, in other words, a normal January day for this area. The air was a beer commercial: cold, clean, and crisp. Somebody down the way had a fire going. Ah. Memories of campfires past flitted through my mind. The neighbourhood was still mostly asleep, and I could easily imagine myself to be all alone. Just me and my music and an easy kilometer's walk.
Tomorrow it will rain...but a little water never hurt anybody. The walk gives me a chance to plan my day going in and decompress from it coming home, all without having to worry about tons of steel crunching, glass breaking, blood spraying... You know what? This not driving isn't so bad.
I've mentioned this oh-so-little, but oh-so-defining factoid about myself several times over the years, and occasionally I've alluded to the phobia I have that is the reason I don't drive. An e-friend coined 'euqunophobia' to describe it, from the Greek root for 'to pilot' as in a chariot. Prior to his making that word up out of thin air, there was no word in the English language to denote fear of driving. That ought to tell you something, since there's a one-word definition for fear of practically everything else. Apparently nobody fears driving.
Meet Nobody: me.
Outside the driver's seat of a vehicle and asked to consider the act of driving rationally, I'll tell you that yes, I certainly could drive a car. For a while. I might even get through an entire day, week, or hell, month, without hitting something and dying, probably taking others with me. But eventually my attention would waver at a critical second and that'd be that. Splat. This is a given, an absolute certainty, and I base that projection on my inability to pay attention to everything at once.
I look at all you drivers and wonder, honestly wonder how you do it. How do you shut up the little niggling voice in your brain that works out how fast you're going, how fast the vehicle coming towards you is going, and what would happen if that driver fumbled his smartphone and inadvertently jerked the wheel right into your path. What X-ray vision technique do you use to determine that there is not in fact a child about to run out into traffic from between those two parked cars?
Back in Driver's Ed.--which I did take, believe it or not--I found the only driving I was at all comfortable with was freeway driving. People look at me oddly when I confess that, since if anything is going to scare a veteran driver, it's usually the 401. Especially through Toronto, which I confess I have never attempted:
This is the busiest highway in the world. It's not at this level where I live now, or an hour west of here where I lived when I drove on it over twenty years ago. I once talked to a Californian whose knuckles went white travelling the above stretch as a passenger. "Brian", I said, "you're from California. You've been through L.A. Surely this can't be that much different."
"But it is," he said. "The trucks...on this road there are almost more trucks than cars. You don't see that in L.A. at all. It's scary to be between two tractor-trailers that might squash you like a bug."
Welcome to my imagination, I thought.
But the truth is, trucks or cars, the traffic doesn't bother me overmuch on the highway. I can convince myself it's semi-predictable; at the very least, we're all going in the same direction and I don't have to waste too much mental energy worrying about things like this.
In the city, it's another story. It's chaos. Every intersection could well be hiding a red-light runner about to T-bone me. Cars are coming towards me: any one or all of them might be driven by people with an eye and a half on a goddamn screen instead of the road, where I am. I don't know how you drivers do it...I really don't. I'd crack in short order.
If you're wondering how I can cycle with this attitude, it's easy. Bikes move considerably slower and there's usually an escape route available for any developing trouble, even if it's turning your front wheel into the curb and ditching (which I have done, more than once). And most of the streets I cycle on are not primary arteries. Traffic is minimal. Somtimes I have an entire lane to myself. Bike lanes are made of awesome.
But I have been hit as a cyclist and also as a pedestrian. That last story hasn't been detailed in this blog, so here it is: it happened early one winter's morning as I was leaving my job at King and University 7-Eleven en route to my then-girlfriend's place, my de facto home that year, a couple of blocks away. I crossed King Street and turned to cross University: took a few steps out into the intersection when a car turned right directly into me and threw me about ten feet. It was a good thing that car was barely moving and also that I was bundled up against the chill. I was barely winded. A young woman got out of the car, said "oh my God" about thirty times, repeatedly asked me if I was okay, and then... and then she offered to drive me home. Like I was going to get into a car that had just hit me. I mean, seriously.
As I said, it would only be a matter of time before I'd hit or be hit driving a car. Probably not a long time, either. I equate driving with a video game; in all the video games I've tried, I've never managed to go longer than a few minutes without crashing. The difference is, in real life you don't get five seconds off the clock and a brand new car.
It turns out I'm not alone in my non-driving state, although there aren't many males my age who don't drive, and many of the females I know who don't drive do have their driver's licenses. We non-drivers tend to keep pretty quiet about it. I can't speak for others, but for me there's a sense of shame. Driving is a basic human skill, or so it seems. Teenagers can't wait to do it. Everyone seems to take having and driving a car for granted.
And it really places limits on your life. There are many jobs I could do, and very well, but for the lack of a license. It's critically important that I live on a bus route; even better if I'm within walking distance of work, as I now am. I'm supremely lucky to be married to a woman who does not mind doing all the driving. I could get groceries from work to hom without her, but it would not be easy and I'd probably have to shop day by day, which would drive up costs dramatically.
The rationalizations I have used to assuage my shame at failing this most simple test of civilized behaviour have gradually, over many years, become statements I take pride in. I'm not polluting the environment. Whether walking or cycling, I'm out in the fresh air getting exercise. I've saving a metric buttload of money. And let's face it, even if I could drive, I'd choose to walk or cycle most of the time anyway. Walking is pleasant, provided you're dressed for the weather. I was reflecting on this yesterday as I was assaulted with a -20 windchill, in other words, a normal January day for this area. The air was a beer commercial: cold, clean, and crisp. Somebody down the way had a fire going. Ah. Memories of campfires past flitted through my mind. The neighbourhood was still mostly asleep, and I could easily imagine myself to be all alone. Just me and my music and an easy kilometer's walk.
Tomorrow it will rain...but a little water never hurt anybody. The walk gives me a chance to plan my day going in and decompress from it coming home, all without having to worry about tons of steel crunching, glass breaking, blood spraying... You know what? This not driving isn't so bad.
Friday, January 20, 2012
You know who I hate?
Nobody.
I mean that. There's not a soul on this planet I hate. Not even the really evil ones. Probably because I don't really believe in evil.
I mean that, too: I don't believe in evil. Not as a force, certainly not with a "d" put in front of it to personalize it.
Notwithstanding the whole question of God, which I really don't want to get into insofar as I only have the one lifetime to write, I have a few fundamental problems with a devil-figure. First, a devil is a nice handy device for the abdication of personal responsibility: in other words, "the devil made me do it." Granted, a person of any real faith is unlikely to blame His Infernal Majesty for her every least peccadillo, but still, the temptation, you might say, is there. That is the devil's function, after all, at least if you're alive. The living he tempts; the dead he torments. Eternally.
And here I find I must bring God into the picture anyway. I've railed before against the Christian concept of a God Who judges. Any God that claims to love unconditionally, and yet places conditions on Its love, is not a God but a deeply unfunny joke, and should be treated as such. And if the violation of the conditions placed on Its "unconditional" love results in your being handed over for eternal torment--well, then there is both evil and a devil after all...and that God is both.
Judgment is not a divine trait, but a profoundly human one. Most of us are incapable of truly unconditional love: we invent conditions for our beloved to meet, and then are sad and angry when those conditions go unmet. Those of you who feel you do not do this, imagine how you would react if your life partner were to betray you in some way. That your partner has not--would not, you're certain--does not eliminate the condition you've placed on your love. The most common condition, of course, is simple: if you want me to continue loving you, you may not love another.
This is not an indictment. We're all trying to live the best we can, and most of us have convinced ourselves that there must needs be certain requirements, certain boundaries, else we'll go mad. It certainly seems like a reasonable assumption to make. And yet it's right there in the Christ story as an example: here's a guy who was betrayed, tortured and killed...and who refused--out loud, no less--to blame his betrayers, torturers and killers. That's unconditional, I'd say.
There are those who believe that Yeshua bar Yosef of Nazareth never actually existed. Don't count me among their number. I would suggest, however, that parts of his story have been mythologized, and almost all of his story is widely misunderstood. That latter is easy to prove given how people today on completely opposite sides of any issue believe Jesus would side with them. Then again, perhaps that only illustrates the disturbing tendency we have to turn "What Would Jesus Do?" into "What Would I Do If I Were Jesus?"
At any rate, I do not and can not accept a God that allows a devil to exist.
As for evil? I'd suggest that's a judgement, and not one that tends to help matters overmuch.
Evil a judgement? Are you insane? Are you seriously suggesting there's something wrong with ME for calling a child rapist evil?
No, I'm not. But child rapists make a case for the raping of children all the time. That's because they're mentally ill. In some cases they're also physically and culturally ill...the benighted tribesmen in Uganda have been told over and over again that having sex with a virgin will cure their AIDS. There aren't many virgins left, and there is a whole lot of AIDS to cure. Ergo, child-rape.
I'd humbly suggest that everything we call 'evil' is perpetrated by someone who is not a monster, not a villain, but simply sick. That sickness may be a passing state--we've all knowingly done something bad, almost always out of a misguided, narrow, self-centered perspective--or it may be something akin to one's natural state. In the latter case, the 'evil' is the result of one of two things: either a culturally reinforced illness (example: the Taliban's treatment of women)...or an actual mental defect called sociopathy.
The latter case is, so far as I know, incurable as of yet, and so it's necessary to separate the sociopaths and psychopaths from the rest of us, for our (and their) safety. The former, much more common case...well, what do you do with someone who is sick? Do you punish them for being sick? That seems silly to me. You heal them, as best you can. How do you heal "evil"? Education is helpful. A giant dose of empathy, repeated as necessary, will go a long, long way. The Bible puts it more simply: Love thine enemies.
Why would you want to love your enemies? Enlightened self-interest, That is to say, the surest way to perpetuate "evil" is to treat every "evildoer" you meet like pond scum....
I mean that. There's not a soul on this planet I hate. Not even the really evil ones. Probably because I don't really believe in evil.
I mean that, too: I don't believe in evil. Not as a force, certainly not with a "d" put in front of it to personalize it.
Notwithstanding the whole question of God, which I really don't want to get into insofar as I only have the one lifetime to write, I have a few fundamental problems with a devil-figure. First, a devil is a nice handy device for the abdication of personal responsibility: in other words, "the devil made me do it." Granted, a person of any real faith is unlikely to blame His Infernal Majesty for her every least peccadillo, but still, the temptation, you might say, is there. That is the devil's function, after all, at least if you're alive. The living he tempts; the dead he torments. Eternally.
And here I find I must bring God into the picture anyway. I've railed before against the Christian concept of a God Who judges. Any God that claims to love unconditionally, and yet places conditions on Its love, is not a God but a deeply unfunny joke, and should be treated as such. And if the violation of the conditions placed on Its "unconditional" love results in your being handed over for eternal torment--well, then there is both evil and a devil after all...and that God is both.
Judgment is not a divine trait, but a profoundly human one. Most of us are incapable of truly unconditional love: we invent conditions for our beloved to meet, and then are sad and angry when those conditions go unmet. Those of you who feel you do not do this, imagine how you would react if your life partner were to betray you in some way. That your partner has not--would not, you're certain--does not eliminate the condition you've placed on your love. The most common condition, of course, is simple: if you want me to continue loving you, you may not love another.
This is not an indictment. We're all trying to live the best we can, and most of us have convinced ourselves that there must needs be certain requirements, certain boundaries, else we'll go mad. It certainly seems like a reasonable assumption to make. And yet it's right there in the Christ story as an example: here's a guy who was betrayed, tortured and killed...and who refused--out loud, no less--to blame his betrayers, torturers and killers. That's unconditional, I'd say.
There are those who believe that Yeshua bar Yosef of Nazareth never actually existed. Don't count me among their number. I would suggest, however, that parts of his story have been mythologized, and almost all of his story is widely misunderstood. That latter is easy to prove given how people today on completely opposite sides of any issue believe Jesus would side with them. Then again, perhaps that only illustrates the disturbing tendency we have to turn "What Would Jesus Do?" into "What Would I Do If I Were Jesus?"
At any rate, I do not and can not accept a God that allows a devil to exist.
As for evil? I'd suggest that's a judgement, and not one that tends to help matters overmuch.
Evil a judgement? Are you insane? Are you seriously suggesting there's something wrong with ME for calling a child rapist evil?
No, I'm not. But child rapists make a case for the raping of children all the time. That's because they're mentally ill. In some cases they're also physically and culturally ill...the benighted tribesmen in Uganda have been told over and over again that having sex with a virgin will cure their AIDS. There aren't many virgins left, and there is a whole lot of AIDS to cure. Ergo, child-rape.
I'd humbly suggest that everything we call 'evil' is perpetrated by someone who is not a monster, not a villain, but simply sick. That sickness may be a passing state--we've all knowingly done something bad, almost always out of a misguided, narrow, self-centered perspective--or it may be something akin to one's natural state. In the latter case, the 'evil' is the result of one of two things: either a culturally reinforced illness (example: the Taliban's treatment of women)...or an actual mental defect called sociopathy.
The latter case is, so far as I know, incurable as of yet, and so it's necessary to separate the sociopaths and psychopaths from the rest of us, for our (and their) safety. The former, much more common case...well, what do you do with someone who is sick? Do you punish them for being sick? That seems silly to me. You heal them, as best you can. How do you heal "evil"? Education is helpful. A giant dose of empathy, repeated as necessary, will go a long, long way. The Bible puts it more simply: Love thine enemies.
Why would you want to love your enemies? Enlightened self-interest, That is to say, the surest way to perpetuate "evil" is to treat every "evildoer" you meet like pond scum....
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Imagine you are a U.S. Marine.
Item: U.S. Marines appearing to urinate on Taliban corpses."
This is "inhumane", It's "entirely inappropriate for members of the U.S. military". It's "deplorable", "shocking", and "an indignity against the Afghan people."
Have we forgotten these are two forces at war?
Let me explain something here. If you are part of a fighting force, and you have been trained for years to hate "the enemy" enough to kill him on sight--especially since if you don't, he's apt to kill you first--a wee-wee little thing like pissing on his corpse doesn't really amount to such of a much. Not after you've, you know, killed the guy. Do you really believe you can, ahem, piss him off any further by pissing on him? Tell you what, folks: when I go, everybody feel free to pee on me. Somehow I don't think I'll care. Or notice, for that matter. I'm dead.
Are you, a soldier trained to hate and kill, supposed to stop hating as if by magic after you've killed? I think urinating on a corpse is a perfectly legitimate way to express hatred and disdain. Which is what we're supposed to feel, right? These aren't human beings, they're Taliban animals.
Newsflash: you're an animal. I'm an animal. Human beings are animals. Why are we surprised that human beings act like animals?
The sad thing is that this hatred cuts both ways. I've little doubt a few Marines have been posthumously pissed on. Or maybe the Taliban play games with heads. That's a pretty common thing, throughout history, playing games with heads.
The Taliban aren't born evil: they're made that way through careful cultivation. They believe every bit as strongly in their way of life as we do in ours, and that's a point I think often gets lost. Perhaps they believe more strongly, in fact: they seem to have little compunction about dying for their cause. Does that make them better human beings than us? I'd argue not. If I'm going to judge a human being--something I try very hard not to do, not knowing the lifetime that led to the action I'm judging--I'd suggest the only sane criterion to use is: how does this human being treat other beings? The Taliban do not treat their young, or particularly their women, with anything resembling respect. But this too is part of an engrained culture that goes back centuries.
I sometimes wonder if the Marines who kill Taliban--and apparently desecrate their corpses--ever imagine what their lives would be like if they were born in Afghanistan instead of America. It's a variant of the "good little Nazi" thought experiment I've conducted with people for many years. I ask people to imagine themselves as young adults in Hitler's Germany. What would they do? Most people say without hesitation that they'd be good, moral, upstanding young adults and would seek to thwart Hitler by various means. I've had several people tell me they'd do anything in their power to kill the man.
With all due respect: I doubt it.
Oh, sure, there were a fair number of people living in Hitler's Germany who resisted him by various means. And you, fine, upstanding adult that you are, no doubt imagine you'd be one of them. But those resistors were vastly outnumbered by people who believed in the essential justness of the Final Solution, and sought to advance it in any way they could. Don't forget: Hitler was a persuader, in an environment where people were very eager to be persuaded.
And those aggressive people, in turn, were vastly outnumbered by ho-hum types just trying to live their lives. It's amazing what you can live cheek-by-jowl with if all you're interested in is keeping your head down and staying out of trouble. Statistically, I think it more likely that people would either Sig Heil all over the place--or just ignore it and work their office job, come home and play with the kids, and sleep easy at night.
What's worse? I have no answer for that. I do believe, however, that killing someone, for whatever reason, is considerably worse than urinating on their corpse.
Imagine you are a U.S. Marine. You've just shot a few towelheads before they could shoot you. You're feeling full of, again pardon me, piss and vinegar: in the prime of your life. All's right with your world: enemy vanquished, threat eliminated. And you did it. Now tell me again how it would never even cross your mind to piss on that corpse.
This is "inhumane", It's "entirely inappropriate for members of the U.S. military". It's "deplorable", "shocking", and "an indignity against the Afghan people."
Have we forgotten these are two forces at war?
Let me explain something here. If you are part of a fighting force, and you have been trained for years to hate "the enemy" enough to kill him on sight--especially since if you don't, he's apt to kill you first--a wee-wee little thing like pissing on his corpse doesn't really amount to such of a much. Not after you've, you know, killed the guy. Do you really believe you can, ahem, piss him off any further by pissing on him? Tell you what, folks: when I go, everybody feel free to pee on me. Somehow I don't think I'll care. Or notice, for that matter. I'm dead.
Are you, a soldier trained to hate and kill, supposed to stop hating as if by magic after you've killed? I think urinating on a corpse is a perfectly legitimate way to express hatred and disdain. Which is what we're supposed to feel, right? These aren't human beings, they're Taliban animals.
Newsflash: you're an animal. I'm an animal. Human beings are animals. Why are we surprised that human beings act like animals?
The sad thing is that this hatred cuts both ways. I've little doubt a few Marines have been posthumously pissed on. Or maybe the Taliban play games with heads. That's a pretty common thing, throughout history, playing games with heads.
The Taliban aren't born evil: they're made that way through careful cultivation. They believe every bit as strongly in their way of life as we do in ours, and that's a point I think often gets lost. Perhaps they believe more strongly, in fact: they seem to have little compunction about dying for their cause. Does that make them better human beings than us? I'd argue not. If I'm going to judge a human being--something I try very hard not to do, not knowing the lifetime that led to the action I'm judging--I'd suggest the only sane criterion to use is: how does this human being treat other beings? The Taliban do not treat their young, or particularly their women, with anything resembling respect. But this too is part of an engrained culture that goes back centuries.
I sometimes wonder if the Marines who kill Taliban--and apparently desecrate their corpses--ever imagine what their lives would be like if they were born in Afghanistan instead of America. It's a variant of the "good little Nazi" thought experiment I've conducted with people for many years. I ask people to imagine themselves as young adults in Hitler's Germany. What would they do? Most people say without hesitation that they'd be good, moral, upstanding young adults and would seek to thwart Hitler by various means. I've had several people tell me they'd do anything in their power to kill the man.
With all due respect: I doubt it.
Oh, sure, there were a fair number of people living in Hitler's Germany who resisted him by various means. And you, fine, upstanding adult that you are, no doubt imagine you'd be one of them. But those resistors were vastly outnumbered by people who believed in the essential justness of the Final Solution, and sought to advance it in any way they could. Don't forget: Hitler was a persuader, in an environment where people were very eager to be persuaded.
And those aggressive people, in turn, were vastly outnumbered by ho-hum types just trying to live their lives. It's amazing what you can live cheek-by-jowl with if all you're interested in is keeping your head down and staying out of trouble. Statistically, I think it more likely that people would either Sig Heil all over the place--or just ignore it and work their office job, come home and play with the kids, and sleep easy at night.
What's worse? I have no answer for that. I do believe, however, that killing someone, for whatever reason, is considerably worse than urinating on their corpse.
Imagine you are a U.S. Marine. You've just shot a few towelheads before they could shoot you. You're feeling full of, again pardon me, piss and vinegar: in the prime of your life. All's right with your world: enemy vanquished, threat eliminated. And you did it. Now tell me again how it would never even cross your mind to piss on that corpse.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
U.S. Politicomedy, Part I: Spreading Santorum
As much as I'd like to resist writing about American politics...I can't. I just can't. Not this year. I'm going to throw up my hands right now and warn you, Dear Reader, that there are going to be several upcoming posts on this topic. If American politics isn't your bag, feel free to tune out. I gotta tell you, though, you're missing a comedy that betters anything seen on television in recent years.
Just look at these Republican candidates vying to unseat Obama. We have a man who, as a Mormon, presumably believes at least some (and probably more than half) of this. We have another man who has, to put it mildly, a wee little Google problem -- which, contrary to his heated denials, is entirely of his own making. And then we have Ron Paul, the darling of the youth set, the man the lamestream media chooses to ignore...possibly because he's a raving racist. Or maybe because even the best of his ideas (and he does have some good ones) are fundamentally at odds with the view America has of itself.
And that's not even mentioning the failed Republican candidates, the ones who have dropped out. Believe me, to fail in this field takes talent.
Where to start, where to start. Eenie, meeny, miney, Santorum.
I'll give Rick Santorum credit: he's consistent. He's consistently against abortion, he's consistently against climate change, and he's viciously against homosexuals. He is on record as equating male homosexual sex as "man on dog" and he believes children are better off with a father in prison than they are with lesbian parents. He considers homosexuality to be a serious moral problem. (At times, he has suggested he has no problem with homosexuality, only with homosexual acts--a distinction I, and I suspect most gay people, fail to grasp.)
He also does not believe that people have a right to privacy, even within marriage, despite the Supreme Court's having enshrined this right in 1965. It's probably redundant to note that the case cited in the above link concerned the right to use contraceptives. Santorum has said that contraception is "a license to do things in the sexual realm that are counter to how things are supposed to be." I wonder when he's going to take his principled stand to its logical conclusion: STAMP OUT MENSTRUATION! END THE SLAUGHTER OF TRILLIONS! Or maybe women who are unfortunate enough to have miscarriages should be imprisoned. What say you, Rick?
Dan Savage is--well, I can't exactly call him my hero, but he's certainly a man I respect a great deal and tend to agree with. His "It Gets Better" campaign has spread far and wide, has undoubtedly saved lives, and has given the gift of hope to countless people--not just gay people--who have been bullied. In the wake of a 2003 interview in which Santorum equated consensual homosexual sex with child-rape and bestiality,Savage mobilized his readership--which numbers in the millions--to determine an appropriate definition for "santorum". The winning entry is now forever linked with Santorum's name in every Google search. Santorum the candidate considers santorum the neologism to be disgusting. And it is. But it's not as disgusting as the former Senator's stance on homosexuals. Not even close.
(Dan has since redefined "rick": "to remove with one's tongue", taking the r from 'remove' and the ick' from 'lick'. This, he says, makes "rick santorum" the most disgusting two-word sentence in the English language..."after 'vote Republican'".)
Ick indeed.
You know, if Santorum hadn't been so repeatedly, passionately hateful--and used several very public platforms to spread his hatred--he wouldn't have this Google problem. But hey! I'm not against hatred...only against hateful acts.
Rick Santorum placed second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire. He could conceivably win South Carolin and a few other states, Will he be able to grasp that brass nomination ring? Not a chance in hell. It's coated in santorum.
Just look at these Republican candidates vying to unseat Obama. We have a man who, as a Mormon, presumably believes at least some (and probably more than half) of this. We have another man who has, to put it mildly, a wee little Google problem -- which, contrary to his heated denials, is entirely of his own making. And then we have Ron Paul, the darling of the youth set, the man the lamestream media chooses to ignore...possibly because he's a raving racist. Or maybe because even the best of his ideas (and he does have some good ones) are fundamentally at odds with the view America has of itself.
And that's not even mentioning the failed Republican candidates, the ones who have dropped out. Believe me, to fail in this field takes talent.
Where to start, where to start. Eenie, meeny, miney, Santorum.
I'll give Rick Santorum credit: he's consistent. He's consistently against abortion, he's consistently against climate change, and he's viciously against homosexuals. He is on record as equating male homosexual sex as "man on dog" and he believes children are better off with a father in prison than they are with lesbian parents. He considers homosexuality to be a serious moral problem. (At times, he has suggested he has no problem with homosexuality, only with homosexual acts--a distinction I, and I suspect most gay people, fail to grasp.)
He also does not believe that people have a right to privacy, even within marriage, despite the Supreme Court's having enshrined this right in 1965. It's probably redundant to note that the case cited in the above link concerned the right to use contraceptives. Santorum has said that contraception is "a license to do things in the sexual realm that are counter to how things are supposed to be." I wonder when he's going to take his principled stand to its logical conclusion: STAMP OUT MENSTRUATION! END THE SLAUGHTER OF TRILLIONS! Or maybe women who are unfortunate enough to have miscarriages should be imprisoned. What say you, Rick?
Dan Savage is--well, I can't exactly call him my hero, but he's certainly a man I respect a great deal and tend to agree with. His "It Gets Better" campaign has spread far and wide, has undoubtedly saved lives, and has given the gift of hope to countless people--not just gay people--who have been bullied. In the wake of a 2003 interview in which Santorum equated consensual homosexual sex with child-rape and bestiality,Savage mobilized his readership--which numbers in the millions--to determine an appropriate definition for "santorum". The winning entry is now forever linked with Santorum's name in every Google search. Santorum the candidate considers santorum the neologism to be disgusting. And it is. But it's not as disgusting as the former Senator's stance on homosexuals. Not even close.
(Dan has since redefined "rick": "to remove with one's tongue", taking the r from 'remove' and the ick' from 'lick'. This, he says, makes "rick santorum" the most disgusting two-word sentence in the English language..."after 'vote Republican'".)
Ick indeed.
You know, if Santorum hadn't been so repeatedly, passionately hateful--and used several very public platforms to spread his hatred--he wouldn't have this Google problem. But hey! I'm not against hatred...only against hateful acts.
Rick Santorum placed second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire. He could conceivably win South Carolin and a few other states, Will he be able to grasp that brass nomination ring? Not a chance in hell. It's coated in santorum.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Ici on parle...
There's a certain sense of--call it schadenfreude, I suppose--that this lifelong Maple Leafs fan gets when observing the mess in Montreal.
Yes, this from the man who believes schadenfreude--joy at another's pain--vies with jealousy (pain at another's joy) to be the most self-destructive emotion possible. Guilty as charged...all part of being a sports fan, I guess.
That's the downside of fandom. A sports fan--the word is, of course, short for 'fanatic' (which in turn comes from the Latin for 'insanely but divinely inspired')--feels a totally irrational depression when his team loses, a just as irrational joy when her team wins, and a completely indefensible hatred for the opposition. There's something primitive and tribal about being a fan, and I don't mean primitive as in rustic. I mean primitive as in barbaric.
Letting my inner barbarian loose for three hours at a time can be tremendously satisfying. I try to temper him by widening my scope: yes, I am a Leafs fan, but I can recognize and appreciate good hockey no matter who plays it. (Though I hate to admit when a Philadelphia Flyer does anything laudable at all.) I try very hard not to view 'my' team through blue and white glasses, and to maintain something of an even keel through thick and thin.
But Eva can attest that I fail at that last with regularity: I'll snap the TV off in disgust when the Leafs are playing like crap, only to snap it back on in five or ten minutes. When the Red Wings scored last night and a contingent of their fans roared, I let loose with a volley of expletives--"get the eff out of our building" was the mildest of them. Somewhere inside there's my normal, mild-mannered self observing this behaviour with alarm. Fans of any team are welcome in any building, he says, reasonably. Shut up, says Mr. Barbarian. The Air Canada Center is the most expensive place in the NHL to watch a game and it should bloody well be reserved for Leaf fans. Rich Red Wing fans can either go to whatever their building is called these days...or they can blow me.
(Of course, at least half of the Air Canada Center is actually reserved for suited types who are neck-deep in their cellphones to the point they don't even notice, or care, that there's a hockey game going on. Those people piss off the barbarian and the meek man both.)
What's unfolding in Montreal is interesting and a little disquieting,
For non-hockey fans, the Canadiens--called les Habitants, or Habs for short--are the creme de la creme, historically, of the NHL. They've won almost twice as many Stanley Cups as the next-best team (which just happens to be the Toronto Maple Leafs). Their fans are beyond rabid: hockey in Quebec is a sacrament. Many of the Habs fans I know love to lord it over fans of other teams (probably justified says mild-mannered me; buncha snoots oughta have their knocks blocked off says the barbarian).
They've fallen on hard times--for them, at least. Next year will mark their twentieth year without a Cup win (and we won't mention here that the Leafs haven't won since 1967). That said, they've had considerably more playoff success than many other teams over their drought.
After something of a surprise playoff appearance for the Habs last season, they were expected to show, at a minimum, the same compete level this year. Hasn't happened. The Canadiens, as of this writing, rank 24th in a 30 team league, eight spots out of the playoffs and nine slots behind the Maple Leafs (ha-ha). Like many teams not living up to expectations, they've fired their coach, respected hockey journeyman Jacques Martin. He was replaced by Randy Cunneyworth, formerly an assistant coach of the Atlanta Thrashers.
Randy Cunneyworth is an anglophone. This is the culture he finds himself in.
There was a protest last night at the Habs-Lightning tilt (won, incidentally, by Montreal). There were several grievances aired besides the fact that the head coach of les Glorieux does not parle la belle langue. Among them: there's too much English music played at the Bell Centre (sorry: la centre Bell); the announcements are made in both languages (quelle horreur!), and the team has too few francophone players.
It should be noted here that the last unilingual anglophone coach of the Habs won a Cup with them in 1970-71...but was fired nonetheless because he couldn't speak French. The Habs have won sixteen of their 24 Cups guided by anglophone coaches. It seems patently obvious here that this controversy isn't about winning.
I feel bad for Cunneyworth. This is a team, remember, that has fired a head coach for not speaking French, even though the team won a championship. They've come right out and named Cunneyworth the "interim" coach...and his promises to learn French are clearly not good enough. Learn French? Les pures laines don't LEARN French, they are French, and to hell with you English types! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
This is a reminder that people can be fanatical about things much more serious than sports teams. And that fanatics, having only a single track for their mind to run on, are wearisome by definition. Also, on occasion, dangerous. Quebec rejected the Bloc Quebecois last election and found themselves high and dry as the Harper majority took hold. I predicted then that nothing good would come of that, and I'll hold myself to that prediction. I think nationalism is starting to stir again in Quebec. For the sake of my country, I hope I am wrong.
Yes, this from the man who believes schadenfreude--joy at another's pain--vies with jealousy (pain at another's joy) to be the most self-destructive emotion possible. Guilty as charged...all part of being a sports fan, I guess.
That's the downside of fandom. A sports fan--the word is, of course, short for 'fanatic' (which in turn comes from the Latin for 'insanely but divinely inspired')--feels a totally irrational depression when his team loses, a just as irrational joy when her team wins, and a completely indefensible hatred for the opposition. There's something primitive and tribal about being a fan, and I don't mean primitive as in rustic. I mean primitive as in barbaric.
Letting my inner barbarian loose for three hours at a time can be tremendously satisfying. I try to temper him by widening my scope: yes, I am a Leafs fan, but I can recognize and appreciate good hockey no matter who plays it. (Though I hate to admit when a Philadelphia Flyer does anything laudable at all.) I try very hard not to view 'my' team through blue and white glasses, and to maintain something of an even keel through thick and thin.
But Eva can attest that I fail at that last with regularity: I'll snap the TV off in disgust when the Leafs are playing like crap, only to snap it back on in five or ten minutes. When the Red Wings scored last night and a contingent of their fans roared, I let loose with a volley of expletives--"get the eff out of our building" was the mildest of them. Somewhere inside there's my normal, mild-mannered self observing this behaviour with alarm. Fans of any team are welcome in any building, he says, reasonably. Shut up, says Mr. Barbarian. The Air Canada Center is the most expensive place in the NHL to watch a game and it should bloody well be reserved for Leaf fans. Rich Red Wing fans can either go to whatever their building is called these days...or they can blow me.
(Of course, at least half of the Air Canada Center is actually reserved for suited types who are neck-deep in their cellphones to the point they don't even notice, or care, that there's a hockey game going on. Those people piss off the barbarian and the meek man both.)
What's unfolding in Montreal is interesting and a little disquieting,
For non-hockey fans, the Canadiens--called les Habitants, or Habs for short--are the creme de la creme, historically, of the NHL. They've won almost twice as many Stanley Cups as the next-best team (which just happens to be the Toronto Maple Leafs). Their fans are beyond rabid: hockey in Quebec is a sacrament. Many of the Habs fans I know love to lord it over fans of other teams (probably justified says mild-mannered me; buncha snoots oughta have their knocks blocked off says the barbarian).
They've fallen on hard times--for them, at least. Next year will mark their twentieth year without a Cup win (and we won't mention here that the Leafs haven't won since 1967). That said, they've had considerably more playoff success than many other teams over their drought.
After something of a surprise playoff appearance for the Habs last season, they were expected to show, at a minimum, the same compete level this year. Hasn't happened. The Canadiens, as of this writing, rank 24th in a 30 team league, eight spots out of the playoffs and nine slots behind the Maple Leafs (ha-ha). Like many teams not living up to expectations, they've fired their coach, respected hockey journeyman Jacques Martin. He was replaced by Randy Cunneyworth, formerly an assistant coach of the Atlanta Thrashers.
Randy Cunneyworth is an anglophone. This is the culture he finds himself in.
There was a protest last night at the Habs-Lightning tilt (won, incidentally, by Montreal). There were several grievances aired besides the fact that the head coach of les Glorieux does not parle la belle langue. Among them: there's too much English music played at the Bell Centre (sorry: la centre Bell); the announcements are made in both languages (quelle horreur!), and the team has too few francophone players.
It should be noted here that the last unilingual anglophone coach of the Habs won a Cup with them in 1970-71...but was fired nonetheless because he couldn't speak French. The Habs have won sixteen of their 24 Cups guided by anglophone coaches. It seems patently obvious here that this controversy isn't about winning.
I feel bad for Cunneyworth. This is a team, remember, that has fired a head coach for not speaking French, even though the team won a championship. They've come right out and named Cunneyworth the "interim" coach...and his promises to learn French are clearly not good enough. Learn French? Les pures laines don't LEARN French, they are French, and to hell with you English types! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
This is a reminder that people can be fanatical about things much more serious than sports teams. And that fanatics, having only a single track for their mind to run on, are wearisome by definition. Also, on occasion, dangerous. Quebec rejected the Bloc Quebecois last election and found themselves high and dry as the Harper majority took hold. I predicted then that nothing good would come of that, and I'll hold myself to that prediction. I think nationalism is starting to stir again in Quebec. For the sake of my country, I hope I am wrong.
Friday, January 06, 2012
A Ken By Any Other Name...
We human beings sure do go by a few names through our lifespan, don't we?
Take me. I was born Boy Baby B. My twin, Monty, died two days later, the two of us having decided to make quite the early appearance. Christened Kenneth Cecil Joseph Breadner, I toddled through my toddlerhood looking very much like a Kenneth. Or a Winston. Don't all babies resemble Winston Churchill?
My first nickname, "Macaw", is still with me today. My father--whose name is also Kenneth Breadner, and let me tell you the confusion that can cause--bestowed "Macaw" on me at two years of age because, I'm told, "all I ever did was squawk and shit." Despite the ignoble derivation, I have no problem whatsoever being called Macaw...to the point where Eva is Lady Macaw.
I was Kenny throughout my childhood. This wasn't much of an issue with my peers--the best they could do to taunt me was to chant "Kenny-penny", which didn't bother me overmuch. It was, as I say, an issue when I was with my dad, because half the world would call him Kenny and me Ken, the other half would call him Ken and me Kenny, and both of us would respond to either. (Dad has the surface dignity of a Ken and at times even a Kenneth, but his heart is forever and ever practical-joker Kenny.)
It could get confusing. My aunt Dawna hit upon calling us Big Kenny and Little Kenny...and slowly, over time, that soured "Kenny" for me. I read somewhere that the -y suffix to a name denoted "little" as it was. Calling me "little Kenny" made me feel doubly small. Of course, by grade four I'd developed a whole new set of nicknames that made "Kenny", little or otherwise, seem positively benign. These dark sobriquets included "spazz", "geek", "nerd", "quad"--short for quadriplegic, I guess--and a host of others that did very little for my self-image or self-esteem.
Faggot was one of those. Over the years I've had even close relatives question my sexuality in hushed tones I wasn't meant to hear. Myself, I've never had to question it too much. I've had a couple of gay experiences--like a lot of straight guys--but I have never once looked at a man and thought wow, I gotta have that.
Of course, kids on the playground don't have such a narrow definition of faggot. Anything that's different will get you branded a faggot, and that goes double if the difference is stereotypically feminine in any way. I hated violence with a passion, which only gave a certain breed of person a passionate desire to inflict violence upon me. Most of that went unreported to my parents and especially my teachers. I laugh ruefully whenever I hear adults counselling kids to either stand up to their bullies or turn them in. Most of the put-upon kids in the world have neither the physical ability nor the self-confidence to "stand up" to a grasshopper, and as for reporting the bullying? Please. Back then, that was a good way to make it worse. And today, all it does is get the bully suspended or expelled from school--which is a reward, not a punishment. (How many bullies do you know who enjoy school?)
Besides, expulsion frees up Mr. Bully to lie in wait for you. If you're stupid enough to rat on the guy, you get what you deserve.
Somewhere, beneath layers and layers of calluses I've painstakingly assembled, all those derogatory nicknames still resonate and always will. Including faggot, incidentally. Being repeatedly called any number of homophobic slurs can give someone all the makings of a gay activist, without the gayness. Several people close to me are gay, and that's the biggest reason I make a point of writing about gay rights from time to time...but there's also the remembrance of being called a gaylord queerboy cocksucking ass-bandit, and how that hurt, and how it was meant to hurt. It'd be nice to live in a world where none of those words had any intrinsic hurtfulness attached to them, a world where being gay was no more remarkable than, say, having red hair. We're a long, long way from such a world.
Anyway...
By high school I insisted everyone who wasn't a relative call me Ken. Most complied, although a few smartasses called me Kenneth instead...which I would counter by adding an '-eth' to their names, until they got the point. Kenny? "Nobody calls me Kenny, so you must be nobody." That point usually took longer to sink in, for some reason.
I tried, mightily. to suppress that first middle name. Cecil is not a common name nowadays, and as I said already, anything uncommon is ammunition, nothing more or less. It didn't help much to know the name ultimately derives from the Latin for 'blind'. I'm not blind, but I can certainly act that way. I'm proud of Cecil now, of course. My grandfather wore that name with distinction and there's no reason I can't too.
Pop culture yields any number of silly name-fads. For years after A Fish Called Wanda came out, I was "K-k-k-ken". Don't get me started on South Park. I've often wondered if the Johns of the world go through similar things. In the late fifties, was every John a "Johnny B. Goode"? Do kids actually equate your name with a toilet?
My latest nickname took hold back at Price Chopper, and was, in hindsight, inevitable. It started as "Kenny G." and a friend named Craig morphed it into "G-Baby". At first I hated it. Baby? That's worse than little Kenny! I'm freakin' forty in February, why would I want the word 'baby' near my name? But as the nickname spread like a fungus, I grew to tolerate it, even appreciate it. Mostly because it was the first nickname I'd sprouted since 'Macaw' in which I sensed not even the barest hint of malice or condescension. I started calling Craig "C-note" back. All in good fun.
One day the receiver in my new store called me "Kenny G." I groaned out loud, but inside was pretty pleased. It means I'm accepted. It's nice to have a nickname that means I'm accepted. Even if that nickname is "G-Baby".
Take me. I was born Boy Baby B. My twin, Monty, died two days later, the two of us having decided to make quite the early appearance. Christened Kenneth Cecil Joseph Breadner, I toddled through my toddlerhood looking very much like a Kenneth. Or a Winston. Don't all babies resemble Winston Churchill?
My first nickname, "Macaw", is still with me today. My father--whose name is also Kenneth Breadner, and let me tell you the confusion that can cause--bestowed "Macaw" on me at two years of age because, I'm told, "all I ever did was squawk and shit." Despite the ignoble derivation, I have no problem whatsoever being called Macaw...to the point where Eva is Lady Macaw.
I was Kenny throughout my childhood. This wasn't much of an issue with my peers--the best they could do to taunt me was to chant "Kenny-penny", which didn't bother me overmuch. It was, as I say, an issue when I was with my dad, because half the world would call him Kenny and me Ken, the other half would call him Ken and me Kenny, and both of us would respond to either. (Dad has the surface dignity of a Ken and at times even a Kenneth, but his heart is forever and ever practical-joker Kenny.)
It could get confusing. My aunt Dawna hit upon calling us Big Kenny and Little Kenny...and slowly, over time, that soured "Kenny" for me. I read somewhere that the -y suffix to a name denoted "little" as it was. Calling me "little Kenny" made me feel doubly small. Of course, by grade four I'd developed a whole new set of nicknames that made "Kenny", little or otherwise, seem positively benign. These dark sobriquets included "spazz", "geek", "nerd", "quad"--short for quadriplegic, I guess--and a host of others that did very little for my self-image or self-esteem.
Faggot was one of those. Over the years I've had even close relatives question my sexuality in hushed tones I wasn't meant to hear. Myself, I've never had to question it too much. I've had a couple of gay experiences--like a lot of straight guys--but I have never once looked at a man and thought wow, I gotta have that.
Of course, kids on the playground don't have such a narrow definition of faggot. Anything that's different will get you branded a faggot, and that goes double if the difference is stereotypically feminine in any way. I hated violence with a passion, which only gave a certain breed of person a passionate desire to inflict violence upon me. Most of that went unreported to my parents and especially my teachers. I laugh ruefully whenever I hear adults counselling kids to either stand up to their bullies or turn them in. Most of the put-upon kids in the world have neither the physical ability nor the self-confidence to "stand up" to a grasshopper, and as for reporting the bullying? Please. Back then, that was a good way to make it worse. And today, all it does is get the bully suspended or expelled from school--which is a reward, not a punishment. (How many bullies do you know who enjoy school?)
Besides, expulsion frees up Mr. Bully to lie in wait for you. If you're stupid enough to rat on the guy, you get what you deserve.
Somewhere, beneath layers and layers of calluses I've painstakingly assembled, all those derogatory nicknames still resonate and always will. Including faggot, incidentally. Being repeatedly called any number of homophobic slurs can give someone all the makings of a gay activist, without the gayness. Several people close to me are gay, and that's the biggest reason I make a point of writing about gay rights from time to time...but there's also the remembrance of being called a gaylord queerboy cocksucking ass-bandit, and how that hurt, and how it was meant to hurt. It'd be nice to live in a world where none of those words had any intrinsic hurtfulness attached to them, a world where being gay was no more remarkable than, say, having red hair. We're a long, long way from such a world.
Anyway...
By high school I insisted everyone who wasn't a relative call me Ken. Most complied, although a few smartasses called me Kenneth instead...which I would counter by adding an '-eth' to their names, until they got the point. Kenny? "Nobody calls me Kenny, so you must be nobody." That point usually took longer to sink in, for some reason.
I tried, mightily. to suppress that first middle name. Cecil is not a common name nowadays, and as I said already, anything uncommon is ammunition, nothing more or less. It didn't help much to know the name ultimately derives from the Latin for 'blind'. I'm not blind, but I can certainly act that way. I'm proud of Cecil now, of course. My grandfather wore that name with distinction and there's no reason I can't too.
Pop culture yields any number of silly name-fads. For years after A Fish Called Wanda came out, I was "K-k-k-ken". Don't get me started on South Park. I've often wondered if the Johns of the world go through similar things. In the late fifties, was every John a "Johnny B. Goode"? Do kids actually equate your name with a toilet?
My latest nickname took hold back at Price Chopper, and was, in hindsight, inevitable. It started as "Kenny G." and a friend named Craig morphed it into "G-Baby". At first I hated it. Baby? That's worse than little Kenny! I'm freakin' forty in February, why would I want the word 'baby' near my name? But as the nickname spread like a fungus, I grew to tolerate it, even appreciate it. Mostly because it was the first nickname I'd sprouted since 'Macaw' in which I sensed not even the barest hint of malice or condescension. I started calling Craig "C-note" back. All in good fun.
One day the receiver in my new store called me "Kenny G." I groaned out loud, but inside was pretty pleased. It means I'm accepted. It's nice to have a nickname that means I'm accepted. Even if that nickname is "G-Baby".
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Giving Unions Their Dues
Look back to the early days of the Breadbin, back when dinosaurs walked the earth and we were all eight years younger, and you'll see its baker has changed his mind about a few things.
I'm still recognizably the same person in many ways. Some of my opinions have only hardened as the years have passed, as if in cement. For instance, my attitude re: love and beauty hasn't changed and I doubt it ever will.
My opinion about humanity (I love individual people, but as they coalesce into groups they tend to lose likability) also remains the same. And that monkey's still on my back.
But I've done a slow one-eighty on many matters political over the years. I once was a fairly faithful Conservative supporter; I voted for Jack in the last election and have contemplated becoming a card-carrying NDP member.
This is supposedly bass-ackwards. There's a famous quote, often misattributed to Winston Churchill (as many famous quotes are), to the effect that "if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." I reject that utterly. Liberals have brains and conservatives have hearts. Likewise, liberals can be coldhearted and conservatives can be stupid.
I have decided, by slow degrees over many years, that one of the ways conservatives are stupid is their anti-union stance.
I used to be dead-set against unions. The following anecdotes might give you some idea of why.
My old girlfriend moved to Toronto after she graduated. She was having a hard time making ends meet: we were just coming out of recession and jobs were hard to come by. She called me one night ecstatic that she had landed a job as a cashier at a grocery store. Starting wage was $18 an hour. This was 1994, and I don't make that much now.
Three nights later I got another call. This time Cathy was in tears. Seems she had gone in for her first shift and checked the schedule only to find it was also her only shift that week. Three hours. She asked how she could get more hours and people laughed at her. It turned out that hours were granted by seniority, and any open shift was first offered to the highest person in the hierarchy. If she refused, it was offered at each successive rung down the ladder. The odds of it getting to Cathy at the very bottom of that ladder were essentially nil. Cathy maintained that nobody told her of this policy, and that she had been 'guaranteed' twenty hours a week.
Now, she may have misheard. But I doubt it. People as poor as she was then have an obsessive need to check the figures for any money coming in, and she'd done the math seven ways to Sunday. She told me about it, too, on that first call. I distinctly remember feeling rather envious; I was making ten bucks an hour at the time, doing similar work--except I worked straight nights at Drunk Central Station, a.k.a. 7-11 at University and King.
Then there's what happened to Eva. She ran West Coast operations for a market research company. One year while Eva was on vacation, a malcontent decided to get the place unionized. Nobody said a word to her upon her return; two days later, she looked at the blackboard in her call center and noticed something was wrong. (She has an uncanny ability to do this: to this day, she can look at a screen of code at a glance and spot an error.) The union papers--which by law had to be made public--were mostly hidden beneath a sheaf of other paperwork. Her two best workers quit in protest. ƒƒIt was a good thing her company was in the process of scouting new locations to move that office--and could prove it. Otherwise they would have been forced to remain open, at substantially increased costs.
Dirty, underhanded tricks. I have a friend who briefly ran a unionized store in Brampton, Ontario. He stepped down and relocated of his own accord when he found that his staff was more interested in finding the most trivial things they could to grieve. He spent most of his time trying to placate a union that had no interest in being placated--which left not enough time for the little things, like trying to manage the $%^*ing store.
So, yeah, my attitudes about unions were less than charitable. I've delivered all the talking points in stentorian tones: you knew what the job was when you took it; jobs in the real world have contracts, too, but out here they stipulate your responsibilities instead of dwelling on your rights; striking workers should be fired because there are thousands who would do that work at that pay; if your job pays you fifteen bucks an hour, maybe that's because that's all your skill set is worth.
But then gradually, over time, I began to notice things. Things like how real wages adjusted for inflation have been stagnant for over thirty years, and are actually starting to fall for some. Things like how the richest among us, as I write this on January the third, have already made more than the average worker will this year. And, of course, how jobs are increasingly being sold to the lowest bidder, be that bidder in India or Indonesia, while the parent company rakes in billions in profits. Dirty, underhanded tricks, in other words.
Whenever I've brought this sort of thing up, people have accused me of being Robin Hood. Supposedly I'm out to impoverish the rich and make it so a convenience store clerk and a doctor get equal salaries.
Whatever. THIS is why I think unions still have a vital place.
Here's an Electro-Motive Diesel plant in London, Ontario. EMD is a subsidiary of Caterpillar, a company that had record-setting profits for 2011 and whose CEO pocketed a cool $10.4 million. (The previous CEO received $22.5 million upon his retirement.)
So what does Caterpillar do? They demand the EMD skilled labourers take a more than 50% cut in pay and benefits. Seems fair, doesn't it? *snicker*
There's obviously more to this story: Caterpillar has every intention of shutting this plant down and relocating to the United States, where at least one Republican candidate hit upon the bright idea of solving unemployment by abolishing the minimum wage.
If Caterpillar was struggling financially, I'd at least understand this a little better. But their profit quadrupled last quarter and the chief executive foresees a bright 2012. Maybe in Muncie, Indiana. Certainly not in London, Ontario.
Sadly, I see this scenario being repeated all over the place...maybe not to this degree, but the new motto everywhere is "do more with less". Actually, it's not a new motto: what with automation, one employee can now do what used to be the work of three. Or five. Or ten. Yet that one employee is still paid the same--or less, when inflation is factored in. Seems fair, doesn't it? *snicker*
At some point something's gotta give.
Much as I hate it, this economy is based on consumption. If you want to stimulate it, the best and perhaps only way to do it is to raise wages, so that people can afford to buy things. Because let's face it: if you put money in an average worker's pocket, she'll turn around and spend it. If you put money in a corporation's pocket...
Does that mean that the minimum wage should be fifty bucks an hour? Of course not. It would be helpful, though, if it didn't yield an income below the poverty line. Because until we get around to the sensible Scandinavian subsidization of higher education, there's no reasonable alternative to minimum wage employment for many.
And wages--all of them, not just the minimum--should be legally tied to inflation. I would also enact a law prohibiting profitable companies from closing up shop just so they can double profits that just quadrupled. Enough is bloody well enough. People are not chess pieces, and people's livelihoods are not a game.
Understand: I'm not suggesting every place, or even most places, should go out and get themselves unionized. I think a union is, at its best, a layer of tape. When your boss says 'C'mon, everybody, we're going to get on that big slide over there and race to the bottom!", you can firmly affix that tape to your ass and say "not so fast". If you don't see a slide on your workplace's horizon, you don't necessarily need that tape. But if you're already in the playground...
I'm still recognizably the same person in many ways. Some of my opinions have only hardened as the years have passed, as if in cement. For instance, my attitude re: love and beauty hasn't changed and I doubt it ever will.
My opinion about humanity (I love individual people, but as they coalesce into groups they tend to lose likability) also remains the same. And that monkey's still on my back.
But I've done a slow one-eighty on many matters political over the years. I once was a fairly faithful Conservative supporter; I voted for Jack in the last election and have contemplated becoming a card-carrying NDP member.
This is supposedly bass-ackwards. There's a famous quote, often misattributed to Winston Churchill (as many famous quotes are), to the effect that "if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." I reject that utterly. Liberals have brains and conservatives have hearts. Likewise, liberals can be coldhearted and conservatives can be stupid.
I have decided, by slow degrees over many years, that one of the ways conservatives are stupid is their anti-union stance.
I used to be dead-set against unions. The following anecdotes might give you some idea of why.
My old girlfriend moved to Toronto after she graduated. She was having a hard time making ends meet: we were just coming out of recession and jobs were hard to come by. She called me one night ecstatic that she had landed a job as a cashier at a grocery store. Starting wage was $18 an hour. This was 1994, and I don't make that much now.
Three nights later I got another call. This time Cathy was in tears. Seems she had gone in for her first shift and checked the schedule only to find it was also her only shift that week. Three hours. She asked how she could get more hours and people laughed at her. It turned out that hours were granted by seniority, and any open shift was first offered to the highest person in the hierarchy. If she refused, it was offered at each successive rung down the ladder. The odds of it getting to Cathy at the very bottom of that ladder were essentially nil. Cathy maintained that nobody told her of this policy, and that she had been 'guaranteed' twenty hours a week.
Now, she may have misheard. But I doubt it. People as poor as she was then have an obsessive need to check the figures for any money coming in, and she'd done the math seven ways to Sunday. She told me about it, too, on that first call. I distinctly remember feeling rather envious; I was making ten bucks an hour at the time, doing similar work--except I worked straight nights at Drunk Central Station, a.k.a. 7-11 at University and King.
Then there's what happened to Eva. She ran West Coast operations for a market research company. One year while Eva was on vacation, a malcontent decided to get the place unionized. Nobody said a word to her upon her return; two days later, she looked at the blackboard in her call center and noticed something was wrong. (She has an uncanny ability to do this: to this day, she can look at a screen of code at a glance and spot an error.) The union papers--which by law had to be made public--were mostly hidden beneath a sheaf of other paperwork. Her two best workers quit in protest. ƒƒIt was a good thing her company was in the process of scouting new locations to move that office--and could prove it. Otherwise they would have been forced to remain open, at substantially increased costs.
Dirty, underhanded tricks. I have a friend who briefly ran a unionized store in Brampton, Ontario. He stepped down and relocated of his own accord when he found that his staff was more interested in finding the most trivial things they could to grieve. He spent most of his time trying to placate a union that had no interest in being placated--which left not enough time for the little things, like trying to manage the $%^*ing store.
So, yeah, my attitudes about unions were less than charitable. I've delivered all the talking points in stentorian tones: you knew what the job was when you took it; jobs in the real world have contracts, too, but out here they stipulate your responsibilities instead of dwelling on your rights; striking workers should be fired because there are thousands who would do that work at that pay; if your job pays you fifteen bucks an hour, maybe that's because that's all your skill set is worth.
But then gradually, over time, I began to notice things. Things like how real wages adjusted for inflation have been stagnant for over thirty years, and are actually starting to fall for some. Things like how the richest among us, as I write this on January the third, have already made more than the average worker will this year. And, of course, how jobs are increasingly being sold to the lowest bidder, be that bidder in India or Indonesia, while the parent company rakes in billions in profits. Dirty, underhanded tricks, in other words.
Whenever I've brought this sort of thing up, people have accused me of being Robin Hood. Supposedly I'm out to impoverish the rich and make it so a convenience store clerk and a doctor get equal salaries.
Whatever. THIS is why I think unions still have a vital place.
Here's an Electro-Motive Diesel plant in London, Ontario. EMD is a subsidiary of Caterpillar, a company that had record-setting profits for 2011 and whose CEO pocketed a cool $10.4 million. (The previous CEO received $22.5 million upon his retirement.)
So what does Caterpillar do? They demand the EMD skilled labourers take a more than 50% cut in pay and benefits. Seems fair, doesn't it? *snicker*
There's obviously more to this story: Caterpillar has every intention of shutting this plant down and relocating to the United States, where at least one Republican candidate hit upon the bright idea of solving unemployment by abolishing the minimum wage.
If Caterpillar was struggling financially, I'd at least understand this a little better. But their profit quadrupled last quarter and the chief executive foresees a bright 2012. Maybe in Muncie, Indiana. Certainly not in London, Ontario.
Sadly, I see this scenario being repeated all over the place...maybe not to this degree, but the new motto everywhere is "do more with less". Actually, it's not a new motto: what with automation, one employee can now do what used to be the work of three. Or five. Or ten. Yet that one employee is still paid the same--or less, when inflation is factored in. Seems fair, doesn't it? *snicker*
At some point something's gotta give.
Much as I hate it, this economy is based on consumption. If you want to stimulate it, the best and perhaps only way to do it is to raise wages, so that people can afford to buy things. Because let's face it: if you put money in an average worker's pocket, she'll turn around and spend it. If you put money in a corporation's pocket...
Does that mean that the minimum wage should be fifty bucks an hour? Of course not. It would be helpful, though, if it didn't yield an income below the poverty line. Because until we get around to the sensible Scandinavian subsidization of higher education, there's no reasonable alternative to minimum wage employment for many.
And wages--all of them, not just the minimum--should be legally tied to inflation. I would also enact a law prohibiting profitable companies from closing up shop just so they can double profits that just quadrupled. Enough is bloody well enough. People are not chess pieces, and people's livelihoods are not a game.
Understand: I'm not suggesting every place, or even most places, should go out and get themselves unionized. I think a union is, at its best, a layer of tape. When your boss says 'C'mon, everybody, we're going to get on that big slide over there and race to the bottom!", you can firmly affix that tape to your ass and say "not so fast". If you don't see a slide on your workplace's horizon, you don't necessarily need that tape. But if you're already in the playground...
Sunday, January 01, 2012
I don't do resolutions...
...for several reasons. Firstly, I distrust the very word. If you're going to call it a re-solution, that implies the original "solution"...wasn't.
Secondly, there is nothing implicit in January the first that makes either a solution or a resolution any more likely to stick. Any day can be a new beginning; any moment can.
Thirdly, there's nothing in my life right now that requires immediate change...or if there is, I'm not willing to change it. Because, let's face it, discipline and sacrifice are not among my strong suits. I'd rather live happily, even if it means I die a little younger; the prospect of an old age subsisting on single servings of tofu and Brussels sprouts does not appeal. I've tried several times now to live according to the maxim that food is fuel and is not supposed to taste good...and if that's life, I'd rather be dead. Give me a dingle when they invent healthy food that tastes like food.
Likewise with exercise. Time and time again I've read and heard that exercise, if you do it long enough, becomes fun. I'm here to insist that this is not the case. Exercise, if you do it long enough, becomes first tiring and then debilitating.
What are some other popular resolutions? The U.S. government has a sitelisting ten of the most popular. Let's see. "Drink less alcohol"...not applicable. "Get a better education/job"--I operate on the 'good enough' paradigm. It's not for everybody and it doesn't make me any better (or worse) a person than you. But the way I feel, if my job pays the bills and I like the people I work for and with, that's all I can ask for. (The education goes without saying: I learn many new things every day.)
"Manage debt"--we're working at it. "Manage stress"--we're working at that, too. "Reduce/Reuse/Recycle"--I could, admittedly, be more diligent about this. I'm pretty good with the blue box, although I don't put all the plastic I could in it, and the green bin for composting is a pain in the ass. But I guess I could use this one, in a pinch.
"Take a Trip"...yeah, sure. when we can afford it. "Volunteer"--by all means. But again, why make that decision on the first of January? It just seems so...arbitrary. Not like something you want to do: more like something you must. That robs the act--any act--of its meaning, as far as I'm concerned.
But it just so happens that there is something I haven't been doing near enough of lately. And in not doing it, I'm letting people down...never a good feeling, that.
Blogging.
Nobody seems to be blogging much anymore. Everybody's largely abandoned it for the Twitterverse, the same way people nowadays prefer to send a text rather than an email. The few times I've had a thought pithy enough to be contained in a single tweet, I've gone ahead and tweeted it...after first putting it in my Facebook status and, like as not, expanding on it in a blog. I find Twitter needlessly constricting, and when it isn't constricting, it's redundant.
But I haven't blogged much. This isn't for a lack of material and seldom for a lack of time. It's laziness, pure and simple. Laziness I can counter. So I will.
I resolve to blog more often this year.
I'm off to a good start already...two posts today!
Secondly, there is nothing implicit in January the first that makes either a solution or a resolution any more likely to stick. Any day can be a new beginning; any moment can.
Thirdly, there's nothing in my life right now that requires immediate change...or if there is, I'm not willing to change it. Because, let's face it, discipline and sacrifice are not among my strong suits. I'd rather live happily, even if it means I die a little younger; the prospect of an old age subsisting on single servings of tofu and Brussels sprouts does not appeal. I've tried several times now to live according to the maxim that food is fuel and is not supposed to taste good...and if that's life, I'd rather be dead. Give me a dingle when they invent healthy food that tastes like food.
Likewise with exercise. Time and time again I've read and heard that exercise, if you do it long enough, becomes fun. I'm here to insist that this is not the case. Exercise, if you do it long enough, becomes first tiring and then debilitating.
What are some other popular resolutions? The U.S. government has a sitelisting ten of the most popular. Let's see. "Drink less alcohol"...not applicable. "Get a better education/job"--I operate on the 'good enough' paradigm. It's not for everybody and it doesn't make me any better (or worse) a person than you. But the way I feel, if my job pays the bills and I like the people I work for and with, that's all I can ask for. (The education goes without saying: I learn many new things every day.)
"Manage debt"--we're working at it. "Manage stress"--we're working at that, too. "Reduce/Reuse/Recycle"--I could, admittedly, be more diligent about this. I'm pretty good with the blue box, although I don't put all the plastic I could in it, and the green bin for composting is a pain in the ass. But I guess I could use this one, in a pinch.
"Take a Trip"...yeah, sure. when we can afford it. "Volunteer"--by all means. But again, why make that decision on the first of January? It just seems so...arbitrary. Not like something you want to do: more like something you must. That robs the act--any act--of its meaning, as far as I'm concerned.
But it just so happens that there is something I haven't been doing near enough of lately. And in not doing it, I'm letting people down...never a good feeling, that.
Blogging.
Nobody seems to be blogging much anymore. Everybody's largely abandoned it for the Twitterverse, the same way people nowadays prefer to send a text rather than an email. The few times I've had a thought pithy enough to be contained in a single tweet, I've gone ahead and tweeted it...after first putting it in my Facebook status and, like as not, expanding on it in a blog. I find Twitter needlessly constricting, and when it isn't constricting, it's redundant.
But I haven't blogged much. This isn't for a lack of material and seldom for a lack of time. It's laziness, pure and simple. Laziness I can counter. So I will.
I resolve to blog more often this year.
I'm off to a good start already...two posts today!
Here we are
...uh, where's here, exactly?
Doubtless there are more than a few people nursing headaches this morning, asking themselves this very question and wishing that they could escape back into the nothingness of sleep whence they came. Not me. Not us.
I haven't seen the New Year in for many years. I hate to be whatever the New Year's equivalent of a pre-spirit Ebenezer Scrooge might be, but I'll bah-humbug the New Year every year until I'm dead. I've earned that right over many a hogwild Hogmanay, none worse than the first.
Really, people. Do you have to get drunk because tomorrow you write the date with a slightly different set of pencil-strokes? Really?
Never mind, it's another of the many ways I'm not human, and that's okay. I slept in until six this morning, having gone to bed soon after the Leafs lost another to close out the year. I haven't seen a new year in for many years. I have faith it will be there in the morning, and so far my faith has been justified.
After so many years of mayhem--they all blur into each other--I've decided that yes, there is something to celebrate on New Year's Eve. That we made it through another year. That I don't have to dodge nachos and cheese being hurled at my head. That it's unlikely anybody's going to barf in front of me this year.
Eva and I had a lovely day yesterday. We haven't done a twofer at the movies for quite a while. We saw David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and Bird's MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, Both were very well done, but neither completely lived up to my expectations.
GIRL was, in many ways, superior to the Swedish production. You'd expect it to be, given that it had what, ten times the budget. But I found Mara's Salander too sociable, not silent enough. Rapace, as far as I'm concerned, nailed Larsson's creation.
And I confess, I have trouble shutting off my brain whenever there's an action sequence. Some movies fall into Rambo Syndrome, i.e. let's shoot roughly 3.6 million bullets at the hero and if we're feeling particularly realistic that day, one of them might graze his buffed shoulder and add character. Some movies suffer from that odd idiosyncrasy of bad guys having to explain themselves, frittering away countless opportunities to blow away the hero and prevail. Just once I'd like to see a smart villain in a Hollywood production.
And then there are the car chase scenes, the ones where traffic is either magically nonexistent or at least compliant enough to get out of the way. GIRL has a short chase scene, motorcycle chasing car. Motorbike wins, in a most unconvincing fashion. The car driving psycho need only slam on his brakes and turn the chaser into people pate...but he doesn't. Sigh.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE is chock-full of gross improbabilities--but if I mention even one of them I'll spoil something. Give that movie its due; it has some of the most eye-dropping stunts I've ever seen and a pace that almost never lets up. As popcorn movies go, seeing this one is a no-brainer.
Back in '91-92 I saw pretty much everything Hollywood put out. I couldn't do that today even if I wanted to, because I'm not made of money. I shudder to think how families can afford it...a night out for you and your wife and two kids could easily run you a hundred bucks or more.
Once the movies let out, we headed home and commenced to stuffing ourselves with all manner of junk food. This is the one night of the year where we say the waist is a terrible thing to mind and just go nuts. Sausage rolls. Mozzarella sticks. Oriental hors d'oeuvres (which in our happy home is pronounced "hoovers doovers" and om-nom-nommed with authority). Chips and dip and crackers and cheese and a bucket of pop and all this ensures the first movement of the new year will register on the Richter scale, but who cares.
And now it's 2012. There's a sharp cold front about to hit us in five or six hours, with snowsquall warnings posted for Monday. Winter has come, riding in on the wind like a hoary old harridan, and we're all here.
May your year be what you make it.
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