On embalmed corpses and suspicious dolphins

The funeral home sign said: "Dolphins sleep with one eye open." A shiver coursed through my body and I declared to no one and the universe, "what the f@#$ could that possibly mean?" I rubbed my eyes like a chubby-fisted toddler and blinked a few times, but the improbable announcement remained where it was, electric red standing out against the early morning darkness. It is -25C, everything is frozen in ice and snow, the air is so cold that car exhaust lingers in the air unnaturally, as if the noxious fumes were reluctant to be absorbed into the larger atmosphere. No one can be seen walking at this hour, everyone awake is in some sort of vehicle or other, or getting into and out of a vehicle. All is normal in the sleepy suburbs, except for the disturbing revelation that dolphins are afraid of getting jumped while dreaming, presumably about infinite shoals of slow moving fish.

Why is this the message the funeral home administrators wish to impart to a casual onlooker such as myself? It's a Christian-oriented place for the dead, or rather for living people who must deal with the dead, so I searched my brain for anything which might explain this strange coupling together of embalmed corpses and suspicious dolphins. Dolphins and porpoises have always been benevolent symbols for those lost at sea, and the persecution which characterized Christianity's early years easily leads to the rather cliched image of the dolphin as shepherd, alive for no other reason than to guide and comfort lost and forlorn humans. Perhaps the funeral home curator was intending this allusion, saying to anyone who happened to see the sign, "Child, you're bound to experience death one way or another, consider the affable dolphin and be comforted."

But what of the enigmatic detail that the ocean-going mammal in question sleeps with an eye open? Is this to say that, though the dolphin, beloved as it certainly is by human folk the world over, nevertheless has its own share of enemies, indeed, enemies so malevolent and conniving that the beleaguered dolphin has no choice but to peek out from beneath its heavy eye lids, never having a chance to enter into that salubrious REM netherworld. It's a wonder what could be so pestering that a good night's sleep is denied them. Some disgusting sea urchin, I suspect. And their days are surely ruined, without adequate sleep how can a dolphin be expected to contribute to its pod's complex hunting strategies?

But no, the dolphins are safe from urchins and other sea creatures whose foul appearances tend to signify foul personalities to us thoughtful land mammals. No one bothers them, except for us, and in any case their partial sleeps allow them to react quickly in times of danger and swim away, these aquatic cheetahs, as if it were nothing. What if rather than out of a cautious suspicion, these listless dolphins suffer from a kind of ennui, a malaise-ridden hopelessness which must characterize the dismal reality facing ocean life in our times: If there's habitat, humans will exploit it; if there's life, humans will eat it. Consequences be damned! Everything everywhere less varied, less abundant, perhaps these legendarily intelligent creatures see what's going on, in the same sense that humans "see" what's going on. With an eye open at all times they notice the evacuation of their primordial domains, and it makes them sad. They sound at each other, "It's all over, the humans are taking it all." And like people who can't help themselves from gawking at a terrible accident, dolphins sleep with one eye open so that they might see the destruction of their world.

Widespread panic and confusion = peace and understanding

At last, Israel is moving to end the violence once and for all. Just one final push is necessary, a few hundred must die then the promised land will awaken to a new era of peace and prosperity. It's very clear you see. On the one hand you have militants, operatives and terrorists, on the other you have soldiers, security forces and police. The deaths of the first group of people can be filed under "incidental casualties in the pursuit of self-defense" while those of the latter are "murderous provocations demanding swift retaliation." When you kill enough of the first group, eventually those left alive will see the error of their perspective, lay down their arms and immediately pick up hammers and shovels. "It's time to rebuild our society," the Palestinians will say, "Oh, the time that's been wasted in violence and revenge! But we've finally learned our lesson, best to accept the superiority of the other side's weapons."

It's the precision of the Israelis' cutting-edge weapons you see. Their young F-16 pilots can fire their rockets with absolute faith that only a very specific and deserving target will be affected, much like a pair of tweezers zeroing in on a single wayward nose hair. Mostly militants and terrorists will be killed, that you can guarantee. More importantly though, the main reason for the ongoing bombardment of Gaza is to cripple Hamas' rocket-launching capabilities, which have been on display in recent weeks since breaking a ceasefire. Hamas has been lobbing rockets over the last few weeks, goading their diminutive gigantic neighbor to act, and lo and behold, Israel's super-tough, seen-everything, world-weary old men have surmised the situation and called for war. Once Israel destroys these rocket launchers, the angry young men who press their buttons will accept their defeat and move on to other pursuits. And Israel will accomplish this quickly, the IDF holds itself to an inimitable standard. As one Israeli commentator puts it, "If the fighting is awe-inspiring and quick, we are in the presence of genius. If it results in a fiasco, we stand before idiocy, if not criminality."

Since when did monumental violence and the adjectival phrase "awe-inspiring" go together? I've heard of awe-inspiring sunsets and Zeppelin albums, but where did the idea of "shocking and awing" people into submission come from? Is this a new idea? Does it stem from the blitzkrieg offensives of WWII? It seems more fantasy than anything else, indeed, the pioneering ferocity of Germany eventually culminated in the relentless bombardment of its own towns and cities. In any case, whatever is shocking and awe-inspiring about experiencing extreme violence, it seems to last only so long. Inevitably, there are a few "bad guys" who, overcoming their awe, survive to go on to help raise a fresh new crop of bitter and angry young men. Israel's genius attack on Hamas will just as likely fan the flames of hatred and dogma, already in abundance in Palestine, as it will somehow amaze these hopeless young Palestinians into cowering in a corner. Violent males beget violent males; it's a perpetual motion machine.

Dude, where's my gun?

It was revealed yesterday by the CBC that our soldiers over in Afghanistan are firing up more than their weapons. "But what else could they be firing?" you no doubt ask, and I'll tell you, they're firing up Jamaican torpedoes... you know, blasting fat cannons of the blessed herb, setting alight the bountiful Afghan marijuana crops, provided of course it has been rolled up into a counter-Taliban blunt. It's an alarming though not unforeseen problem, and the Canadian military is not alone when it comes to soldiers blitzing their minds before their enemies. According to the wonderfully comic "pre-employment urinalysis" it turns out that a fair number of would-be warriors use drugs of varying illegality and social stigma before joining the military, so perhaps it's not surprising that in the land of opium and heroin, those predisposed to drug use are disposing of the vast quantities available to them. More alarming are reports that our freedom-keepers are in league with the underground drug and crime scene. According to the CBC, there were nearly 200 investigations into Canadian Forces personnel involved in either drug use or trafficking.

What to make of this? I'm sure many people, especially those with a natural sympathy for the struggles and hardships faced by our soldiers, will be quick to explain this abysmal criminality by pointing to the terrible conditions they face. It's not their fault when they are forced to work in an environment hostile to their very existence, never knowing when some bomb will blow up their convoy or a routine search ends in a gun battle. It's understandable that some soldiers would lose their minds in drugs. But how do we account for the report that Canadian soldiers are contributing to the dark underground organizations who are actually responsible for trafficking the drugs Afghanistan is so famous for? Is this also simply a matter of inevitable choices under constrained conditions? When Canada soothes its conscience with the thought that our soldiers are, by some mysterious string of cause and effect, nobly protecting "our way of life," it turns out that at least a few of them are also making a profit selling smack. You're welcome Afghanistan, we'll fight your bearded medievalists on the condition that we also help to build strong criminal networks who will oppress and waste your country after we're gone.

Or maybe my under-informed hyperbole is off the mark again, which is likely. So perhaps it's not a contradiction that our professional soldiers are getting high while keeping the Taliban at bay. Perhaps some of marijuana's legendary calming properties are at work. Rather than imagine the worse, perhaps our stoned warriors use the drugs to better experience the beauty of Afghans' ancient culture, their food, clothing and music. Clearing out destroyed buildings and rehabilitating neglected infrastructure, they sing folk songs with the toothless opium addicts, who occasionally let them pull from their precious earthenware pipes. Enveloped in smoke with a double-double in hand they help the women tend to the children, making sure that they're clean and safe. "Whoa man, like, we're from Canada eh, and like, we're here to offer, like, humanitarian assistance and stuff." And stoned out of their minds a world away, Canada's soldiers are directly keeping us safe here in Canada as well. (I know, I know, walk a mile in another's shoes, or in this case at least, check out how cool another's gun feels when inebriated.)

(Check out this video on Afghanistan's insane drug problem from The Guardian.)

How many journalists were murdered in 2008?

The end of the year is upon us and with it countless lists and summaries which attempt to encapsulate the most news-worthy entertainment and political stories of the past 12 months. Like most people, I tend to enjoy these "best of..." lists where I learn just how unfamiliar I am with all things cool and attention warranting. Occasionally I've seen a film or heard a record of note but most often, I learn a great deal about interesting stuff I had otherwise never heard of. In the political sphere, we'll see various scandals and falls from grace helpfully rated and put in bite-sized information portions. But notwithstanding the potentially monumental election of Barack Obama and the unmasking of the financial industry, is there anything else worth knowing about the year that was, 2008? More pointedly, is there anything worth our time other than the, like, brilliant Batman movie and the, like, genius of Lil' Wayne?

I would here like to make the case that there was. My grimace-obsessed nature has sought out that which speaks to my own gloomy view of things, and happily I have discovered a list which must rank among the gloomiest. Both Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have compiled lists of murdered and imprisoned journalists and what do you know, 2008 has been another terrible year for those who write stories a tiny few ever get around to reading. The usual suspects are all there: Iraq, Mexico and Russia continue to lead the way, but numerous countries in the southern hemisphere are also competing for the top prize.

Journalists had best be careful where they spend their time nosing around these days. It seems very little stops idiots with guns from abducting or murdering anyone they suspect who might conspire against their interests. To tell the truth is to court the bullets of the bullying barbarians who control these hapless cultures. The pattern is simple, peel the slightest layer back from the taboos which cocoon these cultures from the truths of their malaise and you will suffer for it, golly gosh, you'll get beaten to death and shot after the fact just for the nihilistic symbolism of it. Journalists dropped like flies on a windowsill in 2008, but will their numbers be enough to keep the crown from young upstart, 2009?

Note: Canadian journalists are not immune to the madness of men and boys with guns; CBC reporter Melissa Fung was held for a month in Afghanistan this past fall, and little is known about the ongoing kidnapping of Amanda Lindhout in Somalia (She should have known better, its been hell there for years. Bravery does not shield one from barbarity, ask Daniel Pearl).

.Michael.Pollan.Connects.the.Dots.

Just making sense on Bill Moyers: Part 1 and Part 2

The immaculate world of financial markets

Oh the imaginary world of children! Don't you love when children deny having done something when it is plainly obvious that they did it? Facts are nothing to them, the force of their inner worlds easily and regularly spills out, allowing them to see and feel what they want, life is a perfect hybrid of the real and imagined. This is especially apparent when caught in a lie. The classic example is the child who claims innocence at having eaten her birthday cake before it was time, all the while her face is covered with evidence to the contrary. With children these contradictions, lies, strike us as amusing, good for a laugh. Yet in the business world similar deceit is much less charming, and though countless captains of finance are indeed found with icing on their faces and fingers, no amount of scolding could ever match the severity of their mistakes.

The financial world, the one that has little to do with anything other than numbers in accounts, has shown itself to be a pretend thing, pretend deals leading to pretend money. The enormous scale of this pretend world cannot be fully grasped and we are likely years from learning the true costs of these fantasy games. There are too many players to count. Last Thursday, "money manager" extraordinaire Bernard Madoff was arrested for pretending to invest billions of dollars, his prestigious and venerable reputation attracting investors ranging from foreign banks to lowly elementary schools. Where'd the money go? Who knows, "money heaven" according to one commentator. Anyway, he's simply one among the herd. These guys are a dime a dozen.

The New York Times has a series on their website they're calling "The Reckoning," which is a good guide for those brave enough to enter the fabulous fantasy worlds built by our financial leaders. There one will find a record of the gleeful parade of money managers (be warned, their titles are as numbered and varied as the ancient gods of the Hindus and Greeks) who have together foisted their imaginary world on the rest of us. The litany of the failures brought about through "sheer stupidity and cavalier, greed-fueled carelessness" with one rating agency after another racing to give "a thumbs-up to worthless paper," truly does reflect the power of the human imagination.

There is so much that is staggering about the ferocious absurdity of our financial leaders' failures that it borders on redundant to make the following point. But the offense that I personally feel (I know not why) at the great success of these thieves and charlatans forces me to type a few sentences of scorn of my own. While these men (for these people are overwhelmingly those with gonads located outside their torsos) are being uncovered as willfully driving "the economy" deep into the ground, they continue to enjoy wide acclaim and prestige as our leaders in a time of crisis, indeed they are being called on to interpret and explain the mess they have made. It's like a quack doctor who, though his treatment has shown itself plainly worthless and detrimental, is nevertheless asked to advise on how to fix the problems he caused.

Somehow this is the basic operating procedure in the financial community. They lay their turds then provide counsel as to the best method for cleaning it up. Don't believe my rhetoric? Take Robert Rubin for example. An extremely accomplished "economic advisor" and once treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin helped plow the now infamous Citigroup into the ground; its current losses sit at a cool 65 billion with 75,000 jobs lost. Wonder of wonders, the great man continues to be a considerable voice of influence and is a keystone member of President Obama's "transition team." It must be nice to shit roses.

All this would be hilarious if it were in a novel, but given the consequences of this absurd economic fantasy are real in the extreme, with millions of people directly affected, it's also sad and a cause for anger. It may be the end of Wall Street, but it looks like those most responsible will simply put on a new suit, and weilding their jargon, acronyms and knowing (Could they be oblivious?!) condescension foist on us the fantasy that it's business as usual. How can there be accountability when the accountants and the accountable are one and the same?

Change the old-fashioned way

When not writing earth-shaking oratory of change and progress, Obama's chief speechwriter Jon Favreau (left) enjoys posing for witty and hilarious photos among friends. Yes you can Jon, yes you most certainly can my boy! Onward and upward!

Choose your method

Spending time on extinction

“Pssssss…(static)…We’re gonna…(static)…yield to some oncoming traffic here…(static)…ah, if you look off our starboard bow you’ll see a pod of, ah, killer whales (static)…”

Excitement took my feet and ran me outside onto the chilly deck of the Victoria-bound clipper ferry from a recent trip to Seattle. Sure enough, the anonymous voice with the captainly tone had been right and before my weary travelling eyes breached a dozen killer whales, many of them juveniles, their slippery black and white bodies bursting through a landscape of wind-swept white capped waves.

The moment was, for lack of a better word, bitter-sweet. Orcas are clearly majestic creatures. They have a strikingly imposing beauty and grace that can drown out the fake shutter sounds of digital cameras and the “I wonder who would win in a fight: an orca or shark?” comments commonly heard on the numerous whale watching vessels that track their every movement. In our typically mechanical nine-to-five lives full of all things modern and neurotic, seeing wild creatures like these orcas can ‘rattle the cage’ of daily routine and create a welcoming sense of awe and focus.

But recent reports on the Southern Resident Killer Whales (likely the ones I was witnessing) show that they are “just hanging on by the skin of their teeth”. With seven deaths this year alone, 2008 has so far proven to be the worst in a decade, and experts are ringing bells warning that if drastic action is not taken soon, the Southern Residents are likely headed for extinction. This year the whales (actually closely related to dolphins) have lost so much blubber that they’ve developed a distinctive ‘peanut head’, and are spending much more of their time spread out, hunting for their staple food of Chinook salmon. Not only that, but they are wintering further south in California, likely in hopes of finding greater numbers of salmon. Essentially, the Southern Residents are starving to death.

Of the seven dead this year, the most concerning are the two breeding-age females. Females are central to killer whale pods. The pods themselves are held together by a matriarchy where males stay with their mothers throughout their entire lives. One of the dead females included the mother of Luna, the lovable and tragic orca persona who was separated from his pod group in Nootka Sound and instead adopted the local fisherpeople (and their dogs!) as his family members, only to be struck by a tugboat propeller in 2006 (documented in the upcoming documentary Saving Luna).

Unthinking killers

This public image of killer whales as something less of a killer, more of a lover, is one that today is often taken for granted. And rightly so. Orcas truly are inquisitive and even crafty beings. But they weren’t always looked at with such respect.

While First Nations culture has for centuries revered killer whales as spiritual guardians of the sea, Western society has decided on culling them and put them in captivity, only to do party tricks in the cramped confines of aquarium entertainment complexes everywhere. From the time of the first live orca capture in 1964 until the end of the subsequent ‘orca gold rush’ in 1976, a total of 47 Southern Resident orcas had been ripped away from their families and sent to places like Vancouver Aquarium and Victoria’s oxymoronic SeaLand (which is it?! Sea or Land?!). At least a dozen others were killed in the process of capture which included bombing them from the air in order to herd them into nets.

As a barometer of the public ire for these great beasts it is instructive to note that an entire one quarter of these whales had gun shot wounds at the time of their capture, a testimony to the ignorance that spearheaded such a surefooted campaign to kill en masse. Killer whales were generally feared and loathed as competitors for the valuable B.C. salmon that once teemed in the waters up and down the coast, so in 1961 the Canadian Department of Fisheries mounted a machine gun near the sportsfishing mecca of Campbell River, to mow down any fearsome creature that might surface for air (luckily nary a shot was fired).

Paradoxically, this insane cowboy era of killing and corralling orcas led to a rapid and dramatic shift in public attitude towards the species and spurred almost all the scientific research we have to date. By the time of the last orca kidnapping in 1976, over a thousand demonstrators had showed up to protest the final capture near Olympia, Washington, and the group of floatplanes and speedboats led by the cavalier collecters of SeaWorld were sent home empty-handed. After only a decade or so of seeing killer whales in captivity both the general public and the scientific community were quickly dawning on the grave injustice of keeping such sentient animals confined.

Today killer whales are championed as a sort of centerpiece on the mantle of West Coast consciousness. Their images are splashed across hockey jerseys, travel brochures, beer bottles, and book publishing logos. Whale watching along the coast is big business and in B.C. it brings in millions of sought after tourist dollars to the provincial economy.

Considering this, it seems rather surprising that more racket isn’t being made over the losses of Southern Residents, especially with the recent broad-based environmental movement that brought nearly 3000 citizens to the B.C. Legislature to protest the continued decimation of ancient old-growth forests across Vancouver Island and the lower mainland.

So far citizen action has centred on lawsuits like the one recently spearheaded by Ecojustice that sues the federal government over its refusal to protect critical habitat of endangered species under the protection of the Species at Risk Act. Also of note is the current campaign to force the provincial government to likewise protect critical habitat. Though B.C. is the province with the most biodiversity in Canada it has over 1600 threatened species and no endangered species act (Alberta is the only other laggard without such a law. You can lay your John/Jane Hancock here on this online petition to help).

Reasons, reasons, reasons

Which brings us to the reasons for the orcas’ decline. The problems facing the Southern Residents are complex and many.

An obvious start is the lack of salmon. Many populations of Chinook salmon (the Southern Resident’s primary prey) are threatened with extinction or are now extinct. Overall, 2008 was the worst harvest in the history of West Coast salmon fishing. Virtually all Chinook fisheries were closed from California to Oregon, and Washington and B.C. were not much better, including the main feeding populations of the Fraser River, the Columbia River and Puget Sound, as well as the Sacramento River and Klamath River further south.

The reasons for Chinook population crashes are primarily overfishing and poor management practices that allow too many large open ocean operations to fish further out to sea where they increase their bycatch of the threatened Chinook. Other factors include destruction of inland habitat through urbanization, farming, foresting and mining; damming of rivers and diversion of water for irrigation; and perhaps not surprisingly, global climate change is affecting the temperature of the Pacific Ocean which has many complex consequences on the webs of life that inhabitat it.

Orca extinction threat number 2: toxic pollution. North Americans use around 85,000 different chemicals today and that number is increasing each year by more than a thousand new pollutants introduced into our industrial vocabulary. Pick a letter, the killer whales have ‘em. Toxins like PCB, DDT, and PBDE make our orcas the most toxic marine mammals in the world. In fact, in 2000 the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans considered incinerating the body of a dead orca in an Alberta toxic waste facility because its carcass exceeded ocean dumping standards for toxic waste. All these chemicals are said to affect whale fertility, increase mortality by weakening their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to disease and infection.

Which brings up another white (or brown?) elephant in the room: human sewage. Recent analysis of blow spout saliva shows that the Southern Resident killer whales harbour more than a dozen types of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria likely transmitted from human waste. One massive source of waste in the area is the over 20 million gallons of raw sewage pumped out into the ocean each day by the city of Victoria (that’s more than 34 billion litres of sewage each year!) as well as the enormous amounts of sewage released by Metro Vancouver each day. Environmental groups recently lost their second lawsuit against Metro Vancouver for its release of toxic effluent into the paths of an estimated billion juvenile salmon in the Fraser river. All this wasn't enough to make you slightly ill, there's another 400 million gallons flushed into Puget Sound every day.

And finally, daunting challenge number 3: vessel traffic. The area that makes up the Pacific Northwest is among the busiest waterways in the world. Commercial freighter traffic moving goods in and out of the metropolises of Vancouver and Seattle make the area a natural gateway to China and the Pacific economies. Combine this with record cruise ships seasons in Victoria, Vancouver and Seattle and that’s a lot of vessel noise, not to mention waste. The Conservative government further deregulated the cruise industry in 2007, an industry that was already distinguished as one of the worst environmental polluters on record.

All this noise becomes a real problem for the orcas because, like other whales and dolphins, they rely on echolocation to communicate, socialize, navigate and hunt. Ship noise, especially naval sonar like that used by the Canadian Department of National Defence in the Straight of Georgia, is a severe physical and social threat to many whale species including orcas and can even kill them (often the high intensity of the naval sonar creates bubbles in their organ tissues leading to internal bleeding in the brain and ears). Environmentalists have accused the DND of attempting to rewrite vital passages in the scientific assessment of the Killer Whale Recovery strategy that identified key habitat to the orcas.

With so many hazards in their midst it's astounding there are still 83 Southern Residents left and that there is any hope at all of recovering from their recent decline. Though their numbers dipped as low as 68 during the bonanza of captures that occurred throughout much of the 1960's and 70's, the Southern Residents rebounded, presumably in part because juveniles captives were preferred to their larger guardians. Still, if there is some chance of nursing our ecosystem and its inhabitants back to health it lies in a greater force of organized action by people who are affected by the stories of the orca and understand their own place within that narrative.

Today's environmental movement often finds itself forced to appeal to the economic value of environmental stewardship. We look to economists like Nicholas Stern to tell us that delaying action on global climate change will hit us harder in the pocketbook than acting now, or that by turning wetlands and marshes into suburbs and industrial parks we lose natural aquifers that purify water that would otherwise cost us millions to purify ourselves. This emphasis on the utility of conservation is, I think, clearly powerful, but all too often we lose focus of the notion that nature should be not only preserved but cherished simply because its beauty defies words and straightforward explanations. It has profound value all on its own. And if all that seems a little too slippery for you, let's lay down the law together:

“…wildlife, in all its forms, has value in and of itself and is valued by Canadians for aesthetic, cultural, spiritual, recreational, educational, historical, economic, medical, ecological and scientific reasons..." - Canada's Species at Risk Act


Follow-up links:

If you are interested in helping the historic lawsuit headed by Ecojustice to protect our orcas you can donate to the 'Honour an Orca' campaign.

For more info on cruise ship and freighter pollution, as well as issues involving navy sonar, you can find it at the Georgia Straight Alliance here and here and here.

After a long time apart, orcas form a ritualistic circle and touch noses.

Canada's sleeping parliament; or the little country that won't

In art and argument, a general distinction can be made between form and content. Form refers to the techniques and methods, the skeleton and hanging rack upon which the content, the nitty gritty particularities and split-hair details get hung, dressed, painted or built. Too much emphasis on either can result in a wobbly unnatural thing. The scholastic logicians of the medieval period refused to accept any view if it failed to adhere to the strict templates of formal argument passed down through generations. That way meaning was achieved via a tidy, Lego-like process. It was simple, if your words failed to follow a well-known pattern you spoke nonsense. The dadaists in the first part of the last century reflect the opposite extreme. They frantically undermined any and all conventions - forms -, and idealized instead the pure freedom of human expression, the incoherence and nonsense that we human beings (Can a chicken fail to understand another in its brood?) appear uniquely capable of achieving. For the dadaists, attempting to make sense was a sure sign of supreme self-delusion and deceit.

This brief and cheesy summary of vastly complex categories leads me to my main point which is that the Canadian government is filled with closeted medievalists. The suspension of parliament last week was carried out by protocols far removed from the wills of thinking people. At one time these protocols might have been very close to thinking people. It's likely that smart people worked out their tedious details with earnest concentration and with the best intentions. Indeed, the protocols for proroguing parliament have the effect of conferring these same good intentions onto Stephen Harper's Conservatives and Governor General Michaelle Jean. "They're simply following parliamentary procedures," one could say, maybe even claiming, "They had no choice." And maybe Harper, and even more so Jean, really did have no choice. If a vote of confidence were held and the opposition parties' marvelously ephemeral coalition carried out their plan to vote against Harper's government, then it is reasonable that he would seek to close parliament's doors so to stave off this probable failure.

That's the cunning trick of such entrenched procedures, and arguments for that matter. They convey an impression of reason and certainty, I mean if it wasn't best to do things this way, why are things done this way? We are safe within the logic of constitutions and protocols, no one has a choice and no one is responsible. All this may be true but it leaves us with a closed parliament, and this pisses me off. Our politicians will be paid for this 7-week vacation, and while no doubt they will be working hard for their debut in 2009, what makes this preparation any different from rehearsals for the theater? All sides will return to offer some burlesque romp about "protecting hard-working Canadians' jobs and pensions," with each believing their own portrayal of empathy and competence will convince an audience. And as Canada bends even lower to gape more closely at its own naval, our leaders bow for an intermission. Best leave things for another time our leaders tell us. Problems plague the world (nothing new) and our politicians dash off to change their costumes. But really, they had no choice right?

Missing women, missing questions

This morning I went for a walk with my dad's dogs, a gangly Golden Retriever named Buster, after Buster Keaton, and a three-legged mutt named Roxy, like Alexander's wife. It was early in the morning, dawn was still a ways off and it was pleasantly quiet, the only thing to disturb the suburban tranquility was the droning sound of garages opening and closing to let their cars out. As the dogs took me on their familiar route, smelling what needed to be smelled, peeing on what needed to be peed on, we came across a tightly bundled old woman, shoveling the side walks which had received a few centimeters of snow during the night.

"What beautiful dogs," she said, and stopped laboring to look at them and perhaps coax one of them closer to scratch a furry forehead. "I love animals, they have no malicious intentions." Ha! my mind exclaimed silently, and my eyes burst forth from their sockets, anxious to spy this diminutive aged philosopher more closely before the apparition (for what could she be but a figment of some kind?) disappeared completely. Morning walks in a boomtown during a booming recession usually don't include matter-of-fact commentary about the essential nature of, at least mammals, and there was something in her radiant old face which suggested to me that she could probably empathize with a moth or spider if not as easily, then with at least as much homely conviction once the truth of their innocence had occurred to her.

"People need to do more for each other," was what she said next, and at this point I felt compelled to fell a tree and fashion out of it an old-fashioned desk and chair at which I planned to sit and takes notes. But I had to rush to work so our meeting was brief; like heart beats, one could have counted the deep inhalations of both dogs who accepted the temporary pause in their morning grounds keeping without drama, preferring instead to whiff at whispering odors buried under the small covering of snow. An awkward but friendly hug with the old woman, who needed to finish shoveling "before the children come out," and we were off again, the dogs calmly but with great diligence and workmanlike efficiency smelling as much of the earth as their leashes would allow.


As I gradually awoke thinking about the old woman's proverbial observations, my head filled with images from the extraordinary and epic novel 2666 by Roberto Bolano, which is about many things but most generally the brutal unsolved murders of hundreds of women in an industrial border town in Mexico. I thought about the hundreds of dead or disappeared women here in Canada whose fates are equally as mysterious as the characters in Bolano's monumental fiction. Innumerable women have "gone missing" in recent years, the great majority of them are native. These silent sisters have been quietly erased from their communities and the world with barely a murmur of protest by the majority of Canadians. As the horrors of the subhuman Robert Pickton became known a few years ago, there was a general acknowledgment that more women than one could count had disappeared, but really weren't they in situations where such barbarity should be expected? Most of us have dealt with these missing women, if the knowledge of their missingness occurs to us at all, with a sad shrug and a vague sense that it's just the way it is. Men, at least a tiny (hopefully) portion of them, have always been violent with women, treated them worse than dogs, why should our day and age be any different?

It should be different because we want it to be different. It should be unacceptable that women can go missing and nothing be known or discovered about them. The truth of their dismal lives should kick our tongue-twisting, media-savvy/anxious politicians to race back to parliament as fast as they can. They should pull the muscles in their legs due to the speed with which they scramble to pass legislation which protects these women, which demands more from our police forces and judicial systems. Something towards this end has been demanded of Canada by the UN in recent weeks. As party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women Canada has dedicated itself to such vigilance in any case, so in a way it's all about the timeless and ubiquitous problem of putting words into action. Last month, a UN monitoring body requested (available here) Canada look into 511 missing aboriginal women and report back in one year's time. Similar committees and studies have trickled in over the years, as a patient and dogged few have not let the issue die. It remains to be seen whether Canada and its politicians are able to remove its collective head from its collective arse.

Bolano's story is a fictional story about a true tragedy in the miserable city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. For the last several decades the remains of hundreds of women have turned up outside the city and only in the rarest cases has anyone been brought to anything approximating "justice." His novel is a landmark piece of modern literature which reflects the vital truth that words have moral implications. While Canada may not have a Roberto Bolano in its mist to pester our consciences through the power of his vivid tragedy, we need to wake up to our own complacent barbarity as best we can.

The Best World Possible

It was once said that this world, the one we are apparently residing in, the theater of our triumphs and follies, was the best of all possible worlds. In this view it was some far off, glimmering general aggregate which was the measure of the world's being good or evil. The particular sufferings of individual human beings, let alone other living creatures, were only relevant to the extent that they added up to a whole. And in the best possible world theory, when you add it all up, things aren't that bad. If this sounds like the blithering blather of a well-dressed, wig-wearing, buckled-shoe dandy of a philosopher that's because it is, or was.

In the olden golden times, philosophers thought this was a serious question, that is, Is this the best of all possible worlds? Assuming the world was created, could it have been created any different? Did the particular arrangement which we see all around us, and which appears to be natural, have been made different? Perhaps animals could have gone without a central nervous system which would have saved them from feeling pain, or pleasure for that matter. And as pleasure is never as good as we expected and pain always worse than we had imagined, perhaps no sensations whatsoever would have been better than our present situation. Natural evils, cold, damp, hunger are other examples. Children, old people and all in between continue to die for lack of shelter and food. If the world was created, why was it created to inflict its inhabitants with these painful, distressing absurdities?

Then we arrive at the evils committed by humans against one another. The idiot murderers in Mumbai last week offer strikingly clear examples. How is it that a world each of us is born into whether we would like it or not supplies us with the conditions and freedoms that we may slaughter each other? If the world was created, surely our ability to inflict harm and death could have been withheld. Imagine it: God, stroking his manly beard, his brow furrowed in concentration, looks at his to-do list. The moon and the tides? Check. Sunsets and sunrises? Check. Abundant living creatures big and small? Check. Humanity's ability to commit atrocities? Check, and double check. Here he underlined it to emphasize his point, I guess. Our murderous barbaric side has traditionally been accounted for by God's imbuing in us a will to choose our own paths. That way both our good and bad deeds are our own responsibility, and our freely choosing to act in certain ways means that it is up to us to become a saint or a devil.

But in our present age, when a seemingly limitless supply of people are willing to massacre to fulfill the narrow aims of their narrow perspectives, who can credibly say that things couldn't be any different? Today in the secular West, the old question about the best possible worlds strikes us as quaintly obsolete, a charming fable out of a forgotten book. But just because we've moved on to other things, like Britney Spears and Nintendo Wiis, doesn't mean that thinkers in other cultures have abandoned the problem. The geniuses who believe that by committing mass atrocities they will bring about the will of God certainly haven't forgotten it.

Talk of how things "should be" has for too long been mired in an apologist's shame over the past injustices, indeed massacres, which the supposedly enlightened West has perpetrated on others. It is an important insight to acknowledge that while you live one way, others may live a very different way. But this admission of difference and relative values and belief systems should not over shadow the true commonalities we all share on this small planet. So without hesitating I declare: Our world is not the best it could be! It could be different! And to the rampaging ape-men who get a chill of excitement when they feel a gun in their hands I join John Oliver in saying fuck the fucking fuckers!