Politics and Press

Mr. Obama goes to Europe

President Obama has set aside 6 days for a foray into europe, a respectable amount of time, though less than what he spent in Asia last year. He’s visited Ireland with a somewhat dubious bit of the old Irish blarney, but, like Kennedy, Reagan and Mulroney before him, he seemed to genuinely enjoy a stop in a small-town pub that some ancestor had once frequented, at the same time demonstrating that an Amurcan of power receives a friendlier reception on the emerald island than does the queen of England.

But now comes the hard part for the president. A cheerleading speech before the British parliament could not really paper over the obvious cracks in the wall of NATO solidarity, once the proof of “western” superiority in the world. Economically that is obviously no longer the case as southern europe risks falling off into Mediterranean bankruptcy, held together only by the rapidly disintegrating good will of the sole european industrial society that continues to produce economically at previous levels – Germany. In fact German production has been dramatically successful since it came out of the recession, while Spain has 20% unemployment, Greece is hardly functioning at all and France and Italy stagger along with governments that can’t even control their own leaders’ personal behaviour. Soon this part of the world will only have 7% of the world’s population, and if it cannot act with a common cause, it is going to become increasingly sidetracked as a world power leaving only the nuclear-weapon countries and Germany to have some weight to throw around.
For his part, Obama is not stopping in germany, a snub the Germans have of course noted, and they think they know. Nobody will admit it, but it is because Germany, siding with Russia and China, declined to take part in the bombing of Ghaddafi’s Libya. Considered an act of betrayal by Germany’s NATO allies, led in bellicosity by the old colonial powers in the Arab world, the UK and France, many Germans also felt unease with Chancellor Merkel’s decision, though the stalemate that has developed certainly there makes that decision more defensible, and the US has also declined to play a a leading role in the military action. What this scenario does bring into focus is the fact that western Europe and North America ( the US and Canada have a similar relation to the Libyan campaign), no longer have a common policy to the rest of the world. These bases have become less important to each other and the rest of the world has become more important to them and vice verse. Canada, in particular, looks to Asia for its future economic and industrial connections, and, from the other side of the world, so does Germany. The common vote by China, Russia and Germany to not get involved in the Libyan campaign, may be more than just a surprising lapse in west European solidarity. It may be a sign of the future.

Where you want to live – - the Commonwealth by Jove

The British magazine The Economist has come out with its annual ranking of most livable cities, and the results, controversial though they may be in the particulars, do indicate in their overall findings a remapping of the desired urban world which would have seemed frivolous only a decade ago. For the fifth straight year, Vancouver is ranked first, which is no surprise. But that 3 of the first 5 cities are in Canada – Toronto (4) and Calgary (5) join Vancouver in this group – and that 7 of the first 10 – Melbourne (2) , Sydney (7), Perth (8), Adelaide (9) and Auckland (10)- are from the British Commonwealth must give the Brits a rare sense of pride in the old colonial empire and the feeling that it did bear some fruit. After all, London itself is only ranked in the mid 50s, just after New York, and only 2 European cities – Vienna (3) and Helsinki (6) make the top ten. In its analysis of this surprising shifting pattern of livability, the Economist find a common denominator: the most livable cities are mid-sized and in wealthy countries with a low population density – Canada and Australia -and are splendidly situated, usually on the coast.

Back to the Past – Mutiny on the sailing ship

German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is suddenly in big trouble because of a military incident that recalls the nineteenth rather than the twenty-first century. In early November, 2010, the German military sailing ship Gorch Foch, one of the largest and most beautiful sailing ships in operation, that is now used to train German naval cadets in the skills of nineteenth century seamen, anchored in a Brazilian port. Cadets were ordered up into the rigging to reef the sails and one of them, a 25 year old female officer candidate who had arrived on board two days before, fell to her death. When the captain ordered other cadets to climb up, some refused, an act of mutiny by naval military code, and the entire crew was flown back to germany and replaced by professionals for the return trip. It is a scene out of a work like Melville’s Billy Budd.

Reports that followed did not mention the breakdown of order on the ship. In January the true story emerged through unofficial channels, and only then did the Defence Minister act by removing the captain from command. While he denies having acted only after coming under media pressure, Guttenberg, probably the most promising younger politician to be considered as a Chancellor candidate as Merkel’s tenure seems to be running down, may well be the first post-modern head-of-state candidate to be removed from his potential command because of dangerous winds blowing out of the supposedly long-forgotten past. One thing all agree on: climbing up into the rigging – six people have fallen to their deaths from the rigging since the Gorch Fock first set sail – is an unnecessary task for a modern naval officer.

Ten for the New Year – a quiz

A quiz for 2011;
Which of the following stories were covered in the January 14 issue of Globe and Mail and which were gleaned from Tom Lehrer’s blog?

1. China has made clear its willingness to save key European nations from looming bankruptcy.
2. Brussels, the bureaucratic hub of the European Union, will soon be a hub without a country.
3. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has banned Dire Straits’ 25 year old hit song Money for Nothing from Canadian air waves because it includes the word “faggot” even though this is spoken in the text by an obvious bigot, and generally understood to be satire
4. A former vice-presentential candidate in the United States said that commentators who registered their disapproval of the shooting of a Jewish congresswoman were engaged in a “blood libel” campaign.
5. Supporters of the vice-presidential candidate defended her on the grounds that she literally didn’t know what she was talking about.
6. 61 year-old Sandra Finley, head of the Albert Green Party, faces jail time after having been found guilty of refusing to fill out a long-form Canadian census. The ruling Conservative Party also opposes this census.
7. 69 year old retiree Barb Copp has had her driver’s licence revoked after her doctor reported to the Ontario government that she had had elevated alcohol levels in her liver after she attending a wake. Ms. Copp had no previous flaws on her driving record and had taken a taxi to and from the wake.
8. Mr. Wally Balloo had his driver’s licence revoked when Vancouver.
police reported that he had used improper diction in a radio report criticizing police.
9. Poland announced that it had removed visa restrictions for all citizens of Belarus except the government leaders.
10. Quebec securité confiscated the pots and pans in 55-year old Mary Magoon’s kitchen after she had been denounced for using cookery made in Newfoundland.

Wikileaks, apologies and spies

In the last episode created by Henning Mankell for the iconic sleuth of the post-Soviet world, Kurt Wallander is sent out on his most surprising trail of discovery.. (No, we won’t tell you how we know there will be no sequels this time – learn to read Swedish or be patient and wait for the translation.) In the complicated unravelling of the plot behind the plot that culminated in the grounding of a Soviet submarine right in front of Sweden’s supposedly most secure naval base (It was discovered by a mink farmer out for a walk), the presumed Russian spy turns out to have been a spy for the United States. Anyone who has been in Sweden’s top-secret military information office (my brother and I walked in by mistake while looking for a washroom) will have noticed that on the top-secret maps pinned to the walls, all the theoretical invasion threats were indicated by arrows coming from the east. Neutral, non-Nato Sweden apparently had no fears about threats from the west or the south.

So what kind of fantasy trip was Mankell on with this story of an American threat? Nutty Swedish paranoia, no doubt, the US didn’t spy on its supposed allies, not to mention its real NATO allies like the dastardly Russians would be expected to do, would they? Well, recent events in the Foreign Affairs office of Germany’s hapless foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle suggest the opposite. Wikileaks has provided ample reason for the governments of supposedly friendly nations to raise alarm flags on all fronts with regard to the arrogance of leaders of a country that is not exactly prospering at the moment. The German-speaking countries – Germany, Switzerland and Austria – are not going to forget what these gunslingers said to each other about them though they will deny being overly offended. And the US ambassador to Germany, Philip Murphy, will have to be recalled for the actions of his office overstep the line of what is acceptable for an embassy enjoying the privilege of a foreign government on somebody else’s turf. For, as is now known, the US embassy was receiving information from in-camera meetings of the German Foreign Office through an informant who was sitting at the table, or rather behind it, listening carefully and taking notes that he then passed on to someone at the US Embassy. The German government seems to be avoiding calling the informer, Westerwelle’s chief of staff Helmut Metzner a spy (“Spion”), preferring “Informer” (Informant) because they are still not certain who it was who put him up to this, or if he was, rather incredibly, simply acting on his own. Whatever the truth on that turns out to be, the Germans will certainly never again say a word in confidence to US ambassador Murphy, who accepted this supposedly secret information without informing the Germans of the offence. Spiegel Magazine headlines the articles on the Wikileaks and spy scandal disclosures “Time for Apologies”. For Germans the whole miserable story reminds them all too easily of the tale of Gunter Guillaume, right hand man of Prime Minister Willy Brandt, who was a spy for the DDR and ended Brandt’s rule. It’s certainly not quite the same, but it’s also not that different and it will bring an icy period in German-US relations unless the Obama government does some intelligent fence-mending, something they have not proven very good at up till now.

In Praise of Prose

Here are four antidotes to the endless announcements of the death of books and reading. These are prose works written in the last couple of years in four different languages that can hold their own in any discussion of reading material that will keep you glued to the written page.

1: Per Petterson (Norway) – “Kjøllvannet” – In English “In the Wake”. Following up “Out Stealing Horses” with an equally convincing meditation on the power of memory and the importance of appreciating the potential of life before “the axe blow from within”, to quote one of his favourite authors Tomas Tranströmer, strikes home. The narrator talks about the grand perception of memory in another of his favourites, Alice Munro, and his two latest novels show that he has learned from the masters.

2. Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) “Die Vermessung der Welt” – in English, “Measuring the World”.
In his hugely successful novel about genius, Kehlmann juxtaposes the lives and adventures of two German geniuses who met in older age. One, Alexander von Humboldt, let his genius unfold through great exploratory journeys to the ends of the world; the other, Johann Gauss, explored the wonders of mathematics from a solitary room. Kehlmann’s work is also surprisingly funny.

3. Sofi Oksanen (Finland/Estonia) “Puhdistus” in English “Purge”
Oksanen takes on nothing less than the epic of the small Baltic state of Estonia from the Nazi occupation through the Soviet counter-attack and takeover followed by the establishment of an independent state after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the current situation. In a stunning display of narrative control, Oksanen delivers a grand epic through the fates of individuals. Written in Finnish, it may well become the national epic of linguistically-related Estonia.

4. John Vaillant (Canada) “The Tiger”.
Vaillant’s just-published epic of the Russian Far East as seen through the eyes of the last wild tigers in the world and the people who live with them talks the talk and walks the walk. On its way to a climax that will knock your socks off, it tells the extraordinary tale of a world that hasn’t changed much in the last century and whose inhabitants still live in awe and on occasion deadly fear of the tremendously powerful animal who wanders through their mutually-shared taiga.

The Arctic Heats Up

It’s not only global warming that is causing the Arctic to melt. It’s also the hot air and goofy pranks that the various combatants are employing to press their claims to the spoils of the ice war. Leading the pack at the moment is the smallest of the players, Denmark, which is using its colonial outpost, Greenland, which will become independent as soon as somebody or other begins drilling off its shore, to demonstrate what it has learned from the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. Apparently not a thing. Instead of sitting down with Canada and the US , even Russia, to work on a common plan that will benefit everyone, Denmark unloads 64 tourists on desolate football field-sized Hans Island, which is disputed by Canada and Denmark, who promptly build a cairn topped by a Danish flag. This is a fete that matches or even surpasses in farce the Russian planting of a flag at the bottom of the North Pole. Knut Rasmussen is rolling in his grave. Not at all comical is the Danish granting of deep-water drilling rights to a Scottish company (no, not BP) to search for oil or gas in an area near the Canadian border where a spill would have terrible consequences on the lives of the Inuit who live along the northern coast. Reports claim that Danish warships and small boats with Danish marines are keeping protesters away.

With friends like this who needs enemies, like the Russian bombers who last month had to be repelled by Canadian jet fighters from flying into Canadian air space. The one good thing that may come out of this is that US and Canadian scientists are actually working together on drawing up their mapping information and that it looks like a compromise will be possible in solving the US-Canadian border dispute in the Beaufort Sea. May the force of co-operation, in place of grotesque posturing, be with them.

Robert Byrd, RIP

“If I wanted to go crazy, I’d do it in Washington, where they wouldn’t know the difference.” Senator Robert Byrd

Robert Byrd was a man of considerable contradictions. A former member of the Ku Klux Klan, he voted against major Civil Rights legislation in the 60s and voted against confirmation of Thurgood Marshall for the Supreme Court. But later he became a prime fighter against the Republicans’ farce of the day – its “Contract with America”.  He collected billions in “pork’ for his state of West Virginia and   remained a social conservative for much of his tenure.

But this writer’s only personal memory of Senator Byrd is more than enough for him to have earned my enormous respect. During the Democratic Convention held in Boston in 2004 Byrd spoke at the First Parish Church in Cambridge and riveted the crowd with a powerful speech in opposition to Bush’s rush to war in Iraq. His principled opposition failed to carry the day but for at least one hour we had the opportunity to hear a man of conscience deplore an already planned war that would lead to hundreds of thousands of American and (mostly) Iraqi deaths, millions of Iraqis forced from their homes, and actual and committed costs to America of up to $3 trillion, all leading to a semi-free Iraq closely aligned with Iran.

America’s rush to an unnecessary war has left us militarily and economically weaker  with our national reputation sullied. Byrd predicted this and spoke forcefully in opposition to the war, no doubt aware that his was a lost cause. One excerpt from his speech that day catches the full flavor of his remarks that turned out to be, alas, prophetic:

“The foundations of our government have suffered. The liberties enshrined in the  constitution of the United States have  now  been designed by a presidency that is bent on a ruthless pursuit of power. A President that sees himself above the law … a presidency that relies on secrecy and manipulation in order to advance its own partisan agenda. It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people’s liberties that are in jeopardy.”

Iceland blows its top

The Montreal Gazette’s great cartoonist Aislin summed it all up by publishing a cartoon with an Icelandic text, including the ∂s. It showed a volcano spewing out ash towards the centres of western civilization with the translation of the text given below: “That’s not an exploding volcano, we’re just burning down the banks”. By encapsulating the only 2 events most of the world knows about the founding civilization of western prose literature, Aislin helped explain such scenes as the following which managed to be filmed by the CBC: A horde of teenage girls left stranded after months of bilingual training in in Paris in April because of the disaster of flight cancellations is greeted by a horde of weeping relieved parents at the Vancouver airport. The parents are apparently overcome with relief that their innocent charges have managed to survive the threat of having to stay on in Paris.. It looks like the girls are winking out secret messages that tell a different story about their awful fate of having been forced to stay an extra week in Paris in the spring. Can the parents really think the way they try to act?

An Icelandic teenager, responding to the question of my brother Doug about whether s/he thought Iceland could survive such a calamity, didn’t hesitate: “Don’t worry about us. We know how to fish and raise potatoes.” Give me that Icelandic teenager any old day.

Eulogy for Kate McGarrigle

It may not mean so much for the international readers, but Canadians of interest will know that one of their family died today, and the country will a bit more artificial without her. Kate McGarrigle and her sister Anne had the right stuff for Canuckdom. Born in Montreal in 1946 with mixed French and English heritage, Kate also died there at her home, which was no surprise to her legions of fans who could hardly imagine her being at home anywhere else. In her spare time, though, she wrote songs like Talk to me of Mendocino which must to be the national anthem of the beautiful coast of northern California.

She belongs in the company of those dominating Canadian ex-pat musicians Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, yes, and also her son Rufus Wainwright, whose cancellation of a scheduled tour of New Zealand tipped the country off that Kate was not doing well in her bout with cancer. But she never left the special world of Montréal in her secret heart – maybe that’s true of Leonard as well – and the McGarrigle sisters’ 10 albums in French and English immediately conjure up a world that the rest of us Canucks can only hope is not dying with the artists who captured it.