The tipping point of "the tipping point"?

Someone push the thing over the edge already. Uh, in the broadest sense, our impatience with difficult ideas seems to me to preclude consideration of something as amorphous and enormous as "the economy." Yet media everywhere has otherwise intelligent people throwing out references to it - fixing it, adjusting it, stimulating it, - as though such sweeping generalizations about the behaviors of millions of people were as simple and matter-of-fact as putting on underwear and brushing one's teeth. "It's gonna take billions to lift Canada out of this recession," we might say, not realizing (or if we do realize it we are readily willing to allow our selves the indulgence) that we are treading in the realm of pure abstraction, where words matter only insofar as they link together with other words; Our pronouncements on "the economy" and especially a "world economy" echo the profound absurdities of medieval monks who took razors to hairs where the character traits of God were concerned.

I thought that the collapse of the global financial markets would have led more people to this basic conclusion: that even "economists" don't know what they're talking about when they talk about "the economy." Yet their status as knowledge experts endures as though most of them hadn't been in thrall to delusion (that something - tight profits - can come from nothing) and robber baron mythology (the genius millionaires, that is, to be a millionaire is to be a genius). It all collapses, they blink a few times and quickly proceed to counsel all and sundry on its causes and best course for the future. "We completely dropped the ball back there, but if you'll just hand the ball back to us we'll continue to sketch for you, in the most convoluted jargon available, the ball's rotund essence." And we readily give them back the ball.

Ours is an age of slim learning prancing around as though it were plump. Take for example the many writings of journalist Malcolm Gladwell, whose inimitable musings on the present have caused minor upheavals in North American thought. Probably most famously he grafted the notion of synaptic all or none - i.e. a nerve fires or does not fire - onto human social interactions. Tipping points abound! Human affairs are awash in these minuscule revolutions. Bernie Madoff was a luminous Wall Street wizard right up until the fraction of a second when his duplicity was outed; his reputation tipped over the edge, from atop the precipice of financial glory down into the abyss of legendary sophistry and deceit. But tipping points are far more mundane than Madoff's hilarious and sad fall. For instance, did you know that the humble prairie town Saskatoon itself sits agape atop the apex? Nothing is overlooked by these inquisitive and increasingly common tipping point hounds, they see immediate and profound change bearing down on us from every vantage. The trick is to stay atop the wave of change, by identifying changes we might anticipate and capitalize! And capitalizing on anticipated states of affairs gets at the aching kernel of this neoretropostmodernpop philosophy.

What causes smart people, who are experts in wide ranging fields of human thought, to so blithely take up Gladwell's eloquent sloganeering? Sounds like a subject for Malcolm Gladwell. Actually, he already did it with his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, where he considered the instantaneous (two seconds he says) potency of cognition. Using numerous studies from the social sciences, Gladwell offered up a theory about what we're thinking when we're not technically thinking. Though talk of the subconscious had previously suffered its own tipped point fade to obscurity, it's back with new clothes in our age of computer-modeled human thinking. You see, our brains compute elements of whatever our senses are exposed to in ways that go on to affect our more conscious thinking. What's the point of all this? Capitalizing on anticipated states of affairs. Intricate labyrinths of causes and effects; the batting of a butterfly's wings on a warm summer day in 1982 ultimately wound up causing Ted Haggard to covet the flesh-globed derriere of (at least one) male prostitute. Had we but known of that exhausted butterfly's dolorous flutter we might have blackmailed Haggard for our own profit. It's that easy, don't you see?

I don't disparage using metaphors of pieces of straw breaking camels' backs or floodgates opening, but I do disparage using such concepts as though the intellectual world could not exist without them. Put your accusational fingers down, tipping pointsters. Still allow me to follow the herd a little when I say that tipping points are teetering on the verge of their own tipping point. Soon we will awake to a day when someone will say, "My affection for cornflakes has, I'm alarmed to admit, reached its tipping point," and such vacuity will be answered, "That's stupid, shut up."

...and now - a story.

A story by Batty McDougall with inspiration from Oliver Haddo.

Two passengers shared a railway car from London to Manchester. Though these two men did not know each other personally, they were traveling in the same route. One of the passengers noted that the other had, in his lap, a small wooden box with perforations on the lid of the container. Unable to contain his curiosity any longer, the passenger leaned over and said, "Excuse my intrusion, but I cannot help notice the package resting on your lap. Can I assume that due to the holes in the recepticle, that you are traveling with some sort of small animal?"
The other passenger was somewhat nonplussed by the inquisitive nature of his fellow traveler, but felt compelled to answer. "You are correct, sir" he replied, "In this box I am carrying a mongoose."

The passenger was taken aback. He said "A mongoose! I would have thought that it would be a rabbit or a cat or some other variety of small animal. Not something as exotic as a mongoose..." And with that, he sat back. A small amount of time passed, and again, a spirit of curiosity over took the passenger. "I simply must know..." he inquired, "Why it is that you would be heading north with such a creature."

The man put the box down beside him on the vacant seat, crossed his legs and said "Well, you see it has something to do with a personal matter really. I will now ask you for your discretion in me relating this story to you, but I feel that you would be someone who could hold such matters in secrecy. My eldest brother..." he recounted, "...has always been a bit of a troublemaker. Being a sort of black sheep in the family, he finds himself in the grips of many vices, the largest of which is his fondness for strong spirits... Unfortunately, at this time, he is painfully suffering from the effects of dementia." The man went on, "everywhere he goes, whether in his room on the melancholy streets of Manchester, he sees snakes. So that is why I am taking him this mongoose, you see, so that he may be rid of them."

Somewhat confused, the passenger leaned once again closer to the other. "Excuse me, surely these snakes that your brother sees are imaginary?" "Indeed" his fellow traveler replied. "But this!" And here he motioned meaningfully to the box at his left, "...Is an imaginary mongoose..."

Oh Canada, the world holds its breath

Though several weeks have passed since 2008's Christmas season, children spent yet another night lying awake in their beds, this time with visions of Canada's reopened parliament dancing in their heads. Today marks the swinging open of those venerable wooden doors which secure the threshold of Canada's House of Commons, and like everyone, I'm vibrating with expectant excitement. What new vistas are to open before us? What paths will our toiling leaders guide us down? In these unprecedented and historic times, what new modes of decision making will be inaugurated, what pioneering problem-solving algorithms will be unveiled?

Just moments away from the second throne speech in just over two months, will Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government assuage the fretting, worry-besotted anxieties of the opposition parties? Of course, the opposition parties have not forgotten their historic, one-for-the-ages, coalition, their awe-inspiring agreement to overcome their deeply hewn differences on policy minutia in an effort to express their equally deep lack of confidence in Harper's budget, the one that was to deal with the economy. Ask NDP leader Jack Layton. "Excuse me Mr. Layton, but do you have confidence in this government's ability to lead Canada in these trying times?" And he will answer you, "No, I have no confidence, none whatsoever. Where Mr. Harper's plans for the future are concerned, I have no confidence."

Whatever happens, we can rest assured that the prescient warnings and advice of Canada's economists will finally reach ears tuned to listen. After years spelling out the present disaster, economists across the country are rising above the petty "I told you so's", are rolling up their sleeves, crunching the data and offering sober council free of charge, a great bargain in these dim economic times. What will be the point-by-point stimulus package held up by the economics-trained Harper? In a country of 33 million, with a gasping manufacturing sector and a robust natural resources exploitation industry, which employs countless thousand grimace-faced semi-skilled laborers, turning the great vessel of Canada's economy around should be a cinch. In my humble opinion, I hope our economists have convinced Harper of the need to cut taxes, to get their hands out of my pockets, so that I might secure more great deals down at Walmart. With bitten nails and white knuckles we wait!

Erring on the side of recklessness

The consequences of Israel's military adventure in Gaza - Operation Cast Lead - have yet to be determined but even just one week after the ceasefire last Sunday there are a few conclusions which may be drawn. And what could be more conclusive than the violent expiration, the snuffing out, of previously living, breathing, thinking human beings? Looking at things strictly from the perspective of people killed, one is struck by the disproportionality between the two sides. According to the BBC, 100 times as many Palestinians died as Israelis in the recent conflict in Gaza, 1300 Gazans to the Israelis' 13. Were these 1300 terrorists manning Gaza's rocket launchers? It turns out that no, indeed, at least as many civilians were killed, including more than 400 children. Apparently, engineering genius cannot prevent super-precise missiles from mistakenly veering into the ruddy cheeks of Palestinian tots. Kablooey! Take that terrorists.

Several groups say that the slaughter of innocents was, of course, directly the fault of scrupleless Hamas militants who regularly insinuated themselves amongst civilians in the hopes of deterring Israeli attacks. An organization as self-serving and inept as Hamas will no doubt continue this practice knowing now that it really makes not the slightest difference whether they're surrounded by children or not, the smart bombs will seek them out where ever they are. The irritating thing about the claim that most if not all civilian casualties were the unfortunate result of Hamas tactics, is that there is virtually no one able to confirm this. Media were excluded from entering the gated shanty town at the Israelis' discretion, and all we have to go on are IDF reports of what they did. "A school was bombed to the ground? That's because terrorists were observed shooting from its roof, take our word for it." Does anyone need to go over the conflict of interest at play in an army publicizing its own activities?

I don't believe that the IDF deliberately targeted civilians, but their predictable excuse-making hardly does justice to the seemingly haphazard destruction of so much of Gaza. Missile installations and the infamous underground tunnel system were the stated military targets, yet numerous reports are now showing a destruction more reckless and wanton. Broken pipes spew sewage out into the streets, which are also laden with the debris of countless bombed and bulldozed buildings. Entire neighborhoods have been completely raised. Destruction this thorough not only thwarts Hamas' tunnel smuggling operations, it destroys the activities of the entire Gazan population. "Any kind of private economic activity in Gaza is set back by years or decades," says UN envoy Sir John Holmes.


And it's not just outsiders to this supposed perennial conflict who are offering gloomy prognoses about the long-term consequences of the recent fiasco. Haaretz contributing editor and writer Gideon Levy has called the fighting, "the most brutal war Israel has ever fought... a quasi-war against a miserable and poorly-equipped organization relying on makeshift weapons, whose combatants barely put up a fight." Levy and the novelist A.B. Yehoshua are presently in a muted war of subtle disagreement in the paper, and have exchanged a series of criticisms and responses. Yehoshua faults Levy for his apparent habit of ignoring or merely giving lip-service to the casualties and suffering of Israelis while saving his empathy for only Palestinian casualties and sufferings. Having read the exchange, I think Yehoshua is making a logical error. He's assuming that by calling attention to the plight of one side, Levy is denigrating the plight of the other. Exhibiting empathy for one side does not mean one does not, let alone cannot, empathize with both. While it is certainly crude to speak solely of numbers, the gross inequality of death and injury surely do warrant greater attention. Of Palestinian suffering Levy says, "it must be written. It must be shouted out. It is done for both our sakes."

Israel's finely tuned sensitivity to international public opinion will mean that hard questions about what happened over the last several weeks will lead to difficult answers. Israeli human rights organizations are pushing for war crime investigations and doing so will likely only deepen the divisions within Israel about the success of the military operations and the policies on the Palestinian territories in general. Amnesty International is also pursuing investigations into the use of phosphorous weapons, which though not banned from military use, are forbidden from use against civilians. Other horrific stories are trickling out, which show an IDF less competent and exacting than their ivory tower generals would like to believe. Perhaps the IDF are like any group of youngish males (sorry, and the odd female thrown in for modernity's sake) who pretend that war is merely tactics and strategies. It's also sweaty palms and racing hearts, confused situations and regrettable decisions.

A delicate balance

When you need to get the job done, you best assemble the best team possible. As pictured here, if your aim is to dazzle, to induce an audience into a state of awe and reverence, then you need the top people for the job. What would happen if even one position was left wanting? What if you for one moment dropped your stringent standards of excellence and compromised on, say, the far left flank?

"The team is strong enough, what does it matter whether Carl can't lift his arm to the requisite 45 degrees?" you'll ask yourself, "Especially when one considers the virtuosic performance on display by Walter, whose arm is as straight as a prairie horizon, aimed to the heavens like Apollo's arrow." While it seems convenient to fill holes with cheap putty, with such compromise you can bet astounding feats of balance and grace would be impossible.

The New York Times is currently running an Annie Leibovitz-style portrait gallery of President Obama's staff. These are the people who will be leading the western world into a new era of all things good. But let's not kid our selves, Obama's team is just as likely to burrow down into the moist and fertile soil of anonymity as the previous president's "people" did. Whether we come to know their contributions or not, let's hope they are able to find balance on that precarious motorcycle otherwise known as the United States government. And don't forget your helmets!

All our songs will be silenced...

"The important distinction to make while talking about the genuine quality of art, is not so much whether it is real art or fake art, it's whether it's a good fake or a bad fake..."

This dialogue is spoken by one, Clifford Irving. Perhaps you are familiar with him, he was recently the main character in the biographic film adaptation The Hoax, starring Richard Gere. Clifford was, unfortunately, a very mundane writer, he had tried several times throughout his early career to be published. He lucked out and had a minor hit with a biography he wrote in 1967 about a painter who had forged many famous artist's work. So impressed with this book, an ailing Howard Hughes decided it was time to tell his story. He wrote numerous letters and gave hundreds of pages of correspondence for Irving to compile into book form. It was released, and Clifford looked to be on his way to the top.
The only problem was, it was absolutely bogus. Or was it?

The idea of truth and authorship is a very sticky one. In what is, perhaps my favorite movie F for Fake Orson Welles tackles this idea head on. I shall spare you the metaphysical quagmire that "nothing is real" and instead tackle the idea of authenticity and experts. An expert is somebody who is infallible, and the artist is a finicky creature. The relationship between these two beings is symbiotic, no doubt. If an expert is proved to be wrong, he could be wrong about a lot of things. Should experts like some artist's work, he becomes more valuable. The major dividing point between these two, is that only one of them really care about the "facts."

Remember that painter I was talking about earlier, the one Clifford Irving wrote about? His name was Elmyr de Hory. In 1968, he was jailed for being an artist. He had committed masterpieces. And like Orson says in F For Fake "...the only problem was the name he put on them." Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Modigliani and others. Of his own admission, apparently he sold more than a thousand works of art to major galleries. The art world erupted. The experts called for blood, revenge, and other nasty things. But, they should have just kept their mouths shut. By raising their voices, they allowed more people to see just how much they are irrelevant.

Let's break it down then.
Artists make art. Sometimes they become masterpieces. When does a work achieve this canonicity? When the Experts say it does, of course. But the Elmyr case indicates that the experts do not always know shit from shinola. Of course, not everybody believes that Elmyr committed quite as much great art as he gleefully confesses in the biography. Many experts claim F for Fake engaged in shameless bragging and exaggeration, to make Elmyr seem cleverer than the "facts" warrant. Unfortunately, these Experts had - many of them - authenticated some of the fakes that Elmyr undoubtedly did paint. As Elmyr's co-author, Cliff, says, these Experts do not want their cover blown -- they don't want us to know how often, and how easily, they have gotten duped by Elmyr and other skilled forgers. According to Clifford, all experts operate largely on bluff. Some of the Experts, however, have counter-attacked by suggesting that this alleged "co-author," Clifford Irving, may himself have functioned even more as a co-conspirator, which wouldn't be surprising due to the book he was just about to write.

No matter, I say! The deeds of Clifford and Elmyr have enriched this world more than if they hadn't bothered at all. And don't get messed up with the "facts" about whether he forged art, or books, or that their story itself was a work of art/lies. If you can understand that a fake is as good as the real thing, then perhaps you can understand more about art than the experts ever will.

I'll leave the last word to Orson-



Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life ... we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

Blessed are the fighting peace makers

In the realm of human affairs, amidst the darkness there is always a little light. At least that's the idea that comes to mind when learning of the living, breathing lighthouse Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege. This week Dr. Mukwege received Sweden's prestigious Olof Palmes award, given out each year to a person who embodies the highest ideals of courage and generosity, peace and disarmament. The award recognizes those who, like assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palmes, exhibit an "unusual luminosity," fighting for human dignity and hope. These are the folk who pick up buckets and blankets instead of weapons.

In 1998, in the city of Bukavu located in the extreme east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mukwege opened a maternity clinic to help ease the immense suffering of pregnant women caught in the war which thrived along the border with Rwanda. At first, Mukwege and his colleagues' primary aim was to help women who regularly had babies in their villages without the slightest medical assistance. The social chaos, poverty and nonexistent medical care meant that an overwhelming number of pregnant women experienced traumatic birthing experiences, many going on to suffer from the tragic and tragically under reported disorder fistula. But soon after the clinic's opening in 1998, the hospital began to focus its attention towards women who had been raped and who had experienced other forms of sexual violence.

It has been known for years that rape has been used in the conflicts plaguing this region of Africa. Saving their bullets, marauding gangs of loosely organized militias have turned to sexual violence to destroy the peoples they aim to exploit. The goal of the rapes is both to demoralize and impregnate the woman so that their children carry the blood of the invaders. These rapists are as often as not carrying the HIV virus. The eastern DRC is rife with such insanity, and the country is referred to in some circles as a "rape mine." It's hard to imagine the ubiquity of this problem, but consider that clinics exist in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa which specialize in "vaginal rebuilding."

Enter Dr. Mukwege. At his Panzi Hospital, thousands of women are treated each year for their traumas, both physical and mental. According to the hospital's website, on average 10 women arrive at the hospital each day suffering from rape trauma, a full 30% of whom need to receive extensive surgeries to save their lives. Doctors at the hospital work 18-hour days to meet the unending needs of these poor and impoverished women. In addition to the medical treatment, Mukwege has gradually brought in psychological and spiritual counseling, and care centers for the shunned children conceived by these rapes. Also in the works is a planned village known locally as the "City of Joy" - for the rape survivors and their children.

Stephen Lewis' monumental 2005 Massey lecture Race Against Time provides an immortal litany of contemporary society's failures and delusions where Africa is concerned. No where is his eloquence more inciting and galling than his discussion of the obscene neglect of women's issues in these crises. And as Canadian companies rush to extract precious metals from the DRC's ground, as though the country were merely "a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them," the Canadian government says virtually nothing about the violence. This is intolerable. A movement has started up in Vancouver to do something about it.

Congratulations to Dr. Mukwege for being recognized for his vital and inspiring efforts. Fight on Dr. Mukwege! Blessed are the peace makers, especially the fighting peace makers!

Tintin is a ... homo...?

Yesterday I discovered that one of my favourite comic book heroes is probably gay. But then, I had my suspicions - a young man with no women of interest in his life, a small white lap-dog as his best friend, an old sailor as his constant companion, numerous young boys as acquaintances around the world, and tufted-up hair. Complete recipe for homosexuality.

I suppose what is so annoying about this statement is how it reflects the tendency to turn children's lit around to mean something "adult." That there is an accusation of homosexuality on Tintin is not really an issue; I don't mind having a gay comic hero for children, but that it is an accusation based on an ill-formed speculation, erasing not only the fact that this is a fictional character but ignoring the social norms around which the creator Herge wrote the stories, is problematic and ignorant. Tintin has no reason to be homosexual or even sexual at all - he is a journalist in a children's series. The series gives little indication of any sexuality - there is one instance where Captain Haddock, Tintin's sailor companion, finds himself engaged to an opera singer (a female one), but other than that all of the characters are apparently content in their asexual and single lifestyles.

Let's face it, children's literature is an un-ending resource for social accusations. I remember once coming across an article regarding Lucy Maud Montgomery's homosexual undertones in Anne of Green Gables on account of the close relationship between the Anne and Diana. Rather than discussing the changing nature of friendship in society as homosexuality becomes less of a taboo subject (or at least, some of us hope it is) critics instead focus on the possibility that all of the literary friendships we have enjoyed over the centuries were in fact gay unions. For some reason readers and critics take a perverse sense of joy to make well-known pieces of literature more ominous through this course of interpretation. It's like that grade in elementary school when everyone discovered how innocent words could also be euphemisms for not so innocent terms - a sense of power over those who had not yet made the discovery was often so enthusiastically implicated that double entendres were found in every statement, even when they didn't make any sense.

It's not that sexual/political/racial undertones aren't present or even prominent in children's lit. What I'm saying is that children's lit is not merely a vehicle for social euphemisms. Not everyone is Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Not every book is Animal Farm. Lewis Carroll maybe was not a pedophile and the Alice books might actually have been written to provide for Victorian children a bizarre and escapist world far from the suffocating rules and imposed morality which surrounded them. I know we all shiver at the thought, but Alice in Wonderland might have had nothing to do about drugs. It is of course interesting and rewarding to find the author's hidden message, but it is pretentious to create one, particularly when it is out of the author's social context.

The Tintin comics are products of their time - Herge created books over the span of nearly half a century. The progression of the adventures saw significant shifts in the politics surrounding of each era, from colonialism (as seen in the popularly banned Tintin in the Congo), scientific exploration (Voyage to the Moon), and international relations (The Blue Lotus). The books also witnessed a progression of Herge's Euro-centric and relatively racist view of non-Europeans to a self-mockery - as was evident in the Blue Lotus (which, although among the earlier Tintin comics chronologically, was actually written much later). The Tintin stories are a complex mixture of reality and fiction: real-life society and politics, accurate forms of technology (Herge was extremely careful to portray all weapons, vehicles, machines of any type as life-like as possible and true to their era - few mistakes can be found in any of his technological representations, from guns to airplanes, making his cartoons delightful for the realist and sometimes dull for the more recreational reader) are fused with slap-stick comedy, spiritual mysticism, and action packed fight-scenes and escapes worthy of James Bond, Indiana Jones, or Houdini.

Tintin is a comic that caters to all ages. It was, after all, originally marketed as reading material for readers from age 7 to 77. But these books are more or less for children and, as adults, we forget that children often have little or no interest in romantic unions or sex. So Tintin might be a gay spy, subversive in all manners of his work, but that's probably not what Herge was intending when he created the ageless, nation-less, androgynous, reporter of indistinct employment. He was creating instead a "universal" character who sought adventure, to help people, and to fight evil around the world. My eloquent sister stated, upon reading about Tintin's apparent homosexuality, "Tintin is not gay. He's sexless.... He is Tintin."

Time to amplify moderate voices

So much is written on the present crisis in Gaza that I'll not pretend to offer any previously unknown insight. It would appear I'm not alone in having nothing new to offer, as most of what's available in English could have been said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a few generations now (here's a useful history of the issue from The Economist). In terms of weaponry and organization the Israelis have always been vastly more advanced while the Palestinians have never wanted for that special mixture of fearlessness and hopelessness which lends itself to shocking and destructive self-sacrifice. With mindsets so notably and carefully attuned to particular readings of the past, it's not likely that the present crisis will do much to alter the entrenched positions on either side. Humans everywhere continue to suffer from that primitive delusion that the pain and suffering of those similar to them is somehow more significant and worthy of attention, not to mention vengeance, than the pain and suffering of those outside their herd.

It's been asked before but bears repeating, how is it that two groups of people who have experienced (and experience) such injustice and hardship fail to find a common ground of empathy and understanding? What will bring about such a revision? For one thing, the current crisis highlights that elusive and rare personality trait which, though appearing in a small minority on either side, lends itself to empathy, compassion and understanding; the knowledge that the sufferings of others are just as vivid and significant as your own. Thankfully, there are indeed both Israelis and, if not Palestinians then more broadly Arabs and Muslims of other ethnic and geographic varieties, who are swimming against their respective currents and who offer more than your standard "us vs. them" bullshit.

The photo above shows ultra-orthodox Jews in Jerusalem in a march of protest against the violence. Their "empathy" may very well stem from the injunctions of their God, but it still works. A more secular initiative has also sprung up in Israel and a petition, which compares the situation to South Africa's apartheid regime, to stop the shit-kicking is being organized here. Many editorials are also echoing a reasonable and humane perspective, though often with highly qualified arguments which support Israel's invasion. An editorial in Haaretz today stated that "The government must give a cease-fire a chance, to avoid getting dragged down militarily, and also morally, not only in the eyes of the world but in our own eyes." Enough death surely brings us to these moments, when the weight of the corpses takes on that intangible quality, the one that follows you home after work and reminds you about shattered children as you lay awake in your bed.

Moderate voices also exist on the other side, though these have been harder to find (might have something to do with lack of English-media capability and my own mediocrity as a superficial googler). A group of students from Iran condemned Hamas for their barbaric employment of civilians, including women and children, as human shields. Also in Iran, a newspaper sharply criticized Hamas during the conflict's initial days but was promptly shut down by authorities. Arab women in Israel have also organized to condemn the violence outright. Let's not forget, Palestinians (a minority is not nothing) themselves have regularly tried to buck Hamas from control of Gaza.

Western media is surely capacious enough to include more than boilerplate regurgitations of tried and true hatreds, what Kiran Desai has called "endlessly retreivable hatreds." Whether they be eloquent PR people for the Israeli government cooly laying down "the facts" which led to the "inevitable intervention," or hysterical old women weeping over the coffins of their dead family members, I've had enough of the opinions of those who feel themselves caught in some ineluctable historical process. There needs to be more time and space given over to people whose voices have broken the cycle of their fathers' hatreds. Moderation, justice, compassion and understanding are not simply shallow nouns and adjectives, they are powerful concepts which our news media should do more to air.

And for what?...

So, I'll make this post short and sweet.

Despite my fellow K,D colleagues persistence for trying to show you a point of view, allow me to be the poison in the human machine. Granted, I have an opinion on the following story, but unfortunately I don't wish to share it. I would rather let you draw your own conclusions. This marsh of human in/sanity comes all the way from the Ukraine. It involves three nineteen year old males who did something ghastly and got away with it for longer than they should have. Surely you have heard of the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs? If you haven't, I am not surprised. As Erasmus has pointed out earlier, there are a great many travesties that go unheard of in this world.

What interests me about this macabre subject is not the details, but the sloth like media interest in such an event. Outside of the Ukraine, this story was nonexistent up until Boingboing.net decided to run a small article about it. Even when it was first posted, the contributor of the article was unsure that young men could do something so monstrous. Up until this was posted, the first worldwide ruminations of this deed where witnessed, not by the Associated Press or the BBC, but by a group of nihilistic Internet troglodytes on Encyclopedia Dramatica who, after having being desensitized by web gore, proceeded to forward the link to many other troll-like browsers. The only reaction that they had, was to treat it with ridicule and indifference. How unfortunate it is, that the media has only had one of those reactions...

Alright, I promise my posts will be a smidge less horrifying from now on.

Being Green (and having it easy)

The colour is clear enough – a mixture of blue and yellow, combined in different quantities to create a varying hue that can either belong to the warm or cooler shades, and can be dark or light in nature. But it is the symbolism of green, the use of its name that attracts us. What I mean to say is that green is now the new red – you say it and people understand you mean “clean,” or “energy efficient.” In the same way that red moved from “revolutionary” to “commie bastard” after the Russian Revolution, green has moved from its previously complex, and often contradictory array of mixed meanings including “luck,” “inexperience,” “growth,” “sickness,” and “jealousy” to symbolize love for the planet earth. Green, after all, is the same colour of nature: fresh budding leaves, pastoral mounds of grass, with mossy valleys cradling burbling brooks.

The problem with green is not necessarily the use of the colour to symbolize conservation, but the increasing loss of the terms “environmentalism” and “ecologically friendly.” Green was a prominent colour in this movement from its very beginning, but this change in rhetoric indicates a number of things which lead us to question the direction of the environmental movement, or “Green Politics,” of the early twenty-first century. One is that the use of green in reference to ecological preservation caters specifically to those who are reluctant to do so. The rhetoric of the “Green” movement avoids association with two of the main killers of the public’s interest in the environmental movement: eco-terrorists and, worse yet, tree-hugging hippies. It’s like referring to gay and lesbian activists as “Rainbows” – remove the part we feel uncomfortable with, that whole weird sex thing, make the movement visually appealing and the “normal” public will support it. (I wonder if feminism has something like that – perhaps if feminists were referred to as “Yellow” (a nice non-gendered colour in North America) then we could forget about the derogatory images we have concocted in the media of bra-burning hairy man-hating women and see them for what they really are. Most likely we’d just support the colour.)

Green is a euphemism and one easily associated with other meanings - money, freshness, organics - making it attractive to a wide array of people. It has become a code word used by marketing powers to indicate to capitalist individuals that they can indeed dabble in the mysticism and lore of liberalism and leftist politics while still feeling good about their choice of car, bank, washing detergent, camera, etc. The environmentalist has now become, without any extra hassle, the average North American: aware of the planet but in no way connected to the hemp-clad long-haired mother-earth lovers chaining themselves to trees far removed from society in the dense rain-soaked west coast forests.

Times have indeed progressed. Growing up in a logging town it was an oddity in the early 1990s to bring Tupperware lunches to school. My mother, a student of environmental studies, installed recycling bins at my elementary school, saved wrapping paper, and brought cloth shopping bags to the grocery store, much to the annoyance of the cashiers. She was seen as a little strange, particularly in an era of prosperity which did not call for reducing, re-using, or recycling. Thanks to the progression of the “Green” movement, however, I can smugly refer to her sensible actions as “before their time,” and thus far removed from the present capitalism-induced pseudo-concern for the well-being of planet earth (which, despite being the actual focus of environmental movements, now seems to have been lost in the sea of Green Politics).

Factiousness and self-degradation aside, the term “Green” indicates not a love or concern for the planet; it is a business venture, much like nutrition. Calling a car “Green” is like calling Wonder Bread nutritious. This is an advertising scheme purely for profit, and one which makes the consumer feel just a tad bit more like a healthy and helpful citizen without the cost of any true effort.

It really begs the question – what is with this fascination with colours? They are indeed the most basic symbols (that is, for people who have the optical ability to gather all hues), but they are by no means pure in meaning. Colours have been around for a long time and humans have done their best to label them and, lest we forget, label each other with them. The thing about “Green” is that it is a trend. This concern for the “Green” movement is not that it will die like all other trends but that we will be distracted by the colourful shades and flashy movements, continue to be righteous with our consumption and remain ignorant to the issues the movement is apparently making us aware of: the preservation of our resources, saving water, buying locally, walking and using communal transport. And just as trends die colours remain to be colours – they have no meaning, they are simply broken fractures of white light, mixtures of paint on a palate. And finally, symbols lose their meanings over time, particularly when the meaning was never truly there in the first place.

I've just got to get my thoughts down...

On a cell phone that is. Tippity, tappity, type type type. A sure sign of our living at the extreme edge of modernity is reflected in our rather sudden ability to communicate with anyone anywhere at anytime (or "A3" for all you acronym aficionodos.) Though it's been not even a decade, and with hardly a burp of uncertainty, we've plunged ourselves into a world of immediate communication truly unimagined in even the dorkiest science-fiction. The convenience of cellular technologies can hardly be disputed; even the most curmudgeony critic of cell-phone use will probably not hesitate to place them in the hands of his own children when the time comes, you know, for safety and stuff. After years of reluctance and doubt, and watching the gradual decay of payphone accessibility and maintenance, my own backward-looking tendencies finally gave way and I too am tapped into the virus that is cellphone culture.

But even still I remain far behind the times. It turns out that these phones can do a lot more than merely relay my voice into the air and back again, so much so that the term "phone" is grossly misleading. While most of the world lags behind, in Asia, led by Japan, where the cell phone gods gaze down from their fabled Olympus, so-called third generation mobile phones (smaller, faster, larger storage, superior porn-browsing capability... how about embedded radiation sensors!) are thriving. You know that fourth generation aren't far behind, and dare I suggest look out for fifth and sixth, yes perhaps even seventh generation phones in the fabulous future!? These little beauts can encompass a person's entire world, which says either that our worlds are small or our tiny technologies are in fact incomprehensibly expansive. How did we get by without cell phones? Best not to think about it, indeed, most people aren't (including me, lest my tone suggest otherwise).

As with so many other consumer-aimed technologies, the Japanese have also pioneered a completely unforeseen use for their cell phones: They're writing, er, texting, novels with them. In a fascinating article in the New Yorker, you can read about the enormously popular cellphone novel, which not only compete with your garden variety books, but were bestsellers in 2008. According to the author, in Japan, "it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent." Pretty awesome thought, and apparently more than a few people have little trouble using only their thumbs to write, in some cases, 300+ page books! I use all ten digits and can hardly muster a couple paragraphs. The article points out that the majority of these books are written by young women for young women, and usually tell about their constrained family lives and love troubles. Numerous sites provide forums for people to write what amounts to serial novels, with authors submitting their pieces whenever it's most convenient for them.

The rest of the world may lag behind Japan, but perhaps the gap is closing. Sites which provide cell phone novel formats have recently sprouted up in the English-speaking world. Will the next great novel come from the furious thumbs of an avid texter? No, probably not, at least not for a while. A brief perusal of a few pieces on offer and I feel justified in my condescending old-timey scowl. One novelist/texter tells his readers that, "I wanted to write a novel that I would enjoy reading myself." Gee, sounds great. Then again, I feel a filmy glaze starting to form over my eyes and something tells me any doubt about texting novels will be met with sheer indifference. The texting medium is normal for people my age, let alone the youngsters for whom cell phones are an obvious and natural fact of life. That's all for now, CUL8R.

(Obama Blackberry update: "They're going to pry it out of my hands."

Historic yawns and sighs

I wonder if Francis Fukuyama realized how historically ridiculous he was being when he argued that history had ended, that liberal democracy had effectively won out over other political ideologies. He claimed that while there would be differences among nations based on regional and traditional particularities, in the future we will see essentially only variations on a theme: the global acceptance of capitalist markets and liberal principles. He made a strong case which developed from other theories of a similar kind so it's not as though Fukuyama was pulling something out of the blue. It might be said that The End of History theories had a history of their own.

What is most stupid about proclaiming, with all the fanfare of a Michael Jackson sighting, the end of history is that it violates a central pillar of historical reasoning: history is told after the fact, not during it. Whether something - an idea, event or person - lingers in the public consciousness cannot be determined by those contemporary with it. The best that people living in any given present can do is to document through various media what's going on, and if those of an unborn future notice what we've left them or not is not for those in the present to determine. There's simply no getting around it. We can hold up events and individuals as high as we're able, but whether or not those after us get around to picking them up cannot be foreseen for certain.

This criticism cuts both ways, just as any claim of an end to history is mockery-deserving, so is the growing preponderance of the use of "historic" to describe everything from cricket matches and editorial mission statements to the reopening of a library in Colorado and relations between Australia and Indonesia. It seems that everything under the sun might be described as historic without anybody raising the slightest murmur of doubt. This tendency is even more bizarre considering the prevailing indifference and apathy towards history in general. We certainly like to describe things as historic, somehow this strikes us as meaningful, but we couldn't care less about historic ideas, events and people of the past, you know, historic history. "Historic" as an adjective is at its most powerful only when used in the breathless present, the word alights in our ears like an insect, squeaks for a few seconds before flying away into a forgotten oblivion. Somehow we rest assured that what we've seen, where we live, what we do, will somehow parade through the ages, a fabled apex of humanity amidst generations of mediocrity and sleepiness.

With the incoming helm-taking of Barack Obama we are probably in the calm before the storm where pronouncements of historic this and that are concerned. Few commentators have failed to describe Obama's election as the most profound and powerful - historic - event in recent years. To claim otherwise is to court scorn and alienation. But strictly speaking, Obama's presidency has yet to make the slightest imprint in the pages of history. And we ignore the yawning, abysmal silence of so much of the human past to presume that somehow Obama will be an exception to the general rule that the enormous present withers to a minute footnote for all but a few people. The past is like a shipwreck, most sinks to the bottom, only a few scraps remain afloat on the surface, and in our age of immediate information, people are (at present) much more likely to inquire about celebrity relationships than what happened in this world before they arrived. No one and nothing is immune to this historical law of diminishing returns. For all Napoleon's greatness, is he anything more than a cliche today? My wish is that we stop using the term "historic" so stupidly and think a little harder about what we mean when we use it.