Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Canada

Hommage to Alex Colville

By

It signalled the end of an era last month when Alex Colville passed away in Wolfville, Nova Scotia at the age of 92. His wife of 70 years, who had been the model for almost all the women in his paintings, had predeceased him by only a few months and there was a certain sense of order and correctness when Alex died at home  in the old family home in a small town in Nova Scotia.  Like several of the elite formers of modern American literature – we’ll just mention the great American poets Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht and the novelist Norman Mailer – Colville had experienced the horrors of the Second World War first hand, where it really counted, as a young lieutenant with the Canadian troops that fought their way from Juno Beach in Normandie through the Netherlands to the concentration camps of Central Europe.

Like Hecht he had been there when a concentration camp was freed – in his case it was Bergen-Belsen – and witnessed a scene he could never forget. And he was commissioned to catch that for the historical record, for he was a war artist. He was under orders to use the primitive painting materials in his pack to make the sketches on site that he could later turn into oil paintings. Years later, when he was considered one of the elite world artists and his painting were sold for small fortunes, he would indicate that he felt that those sketches, now almost all in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, captured something of the nightmarish horror he was witnessing but that he could not transform them successfully into oil paintings. The colour itself was so out of place that it destroyed even the painterly illusion of reality by its very existence.

And then Hecht would go on to write splendidly controlled presentations of an ordered world that on occasion ended with a messenger of death and concentrations camps knocking at the door.  Wilbur would go on to be one of the best classical poets in the English language, a complete master of linguistic form, but the reader  often  had the strange feeling that something threatening loomed just below the surface of the beautifully described things of this world.  Mailer offered the naked and the dead in all their helplessness in  the battles of the South Pacific islands, before himself becoming an anarchic self-destructive wanderer in an inebriated universe.

As for Alex Colville – He returned to his roots, rarely leaving his Maritime home base with all its beauty and idyllic familiarity.  He would soon become a reasonably celebrated artist of this world, often drawing on family, animals and the sea for his compass.  But beneath the surface of an apparently tranquil scene of beauty, a kind of terror emerged from the beginning of his career and never disappeared.  Often it was conveyed by the unexpected presence of a gun on a table or a potential weapon in a hand and sometimes it was the due to the dramatic  presence of  a horse he railroad tracks running straight at a roaring train.  In all of his great works Colville displayed a masterly control of the scene on the canvas, often geometrically prepared in advance, that  drew on old and new masters of realism like Vermeer and Hopper and made no attempt to join the popular movements toward abstract expressionism.  With the exception of a year spent in Berlin at the invitation of the German government (in this time he painted one of his greatest works, The Woman on the Spree) he spent no time in the art centres.   In his professional isolation and family centrality, he knew that he was gathering together an oeuvre of superlatively painted super-realistic works containing more than a strain of explosive power that  could erupt at any time and destroy the idyll.    just as the march to Bersen-Belgen would destroy the old hope of basic human decency and a superior European culture.

 

 

Dada Politics and real sports

By

Lost among the general brouhaha about Mr. Obama mentioning that a good-looking woman was indeed a good-looking woman, that poor Canada has taken its $300,000 annual grant and run from the UN council to combat drought in Africa, becoming the only country in the world not in it, apparently satisfied that it has enough water to supply the whole world itself so why should they help those who don’t, that North Korea threatens to attack the USA (not to mention South Korea) at a time when it gets most of its scarce food as a gift from increasingly unhappy China, that that great American film genre, the Western, is finding new relevance in Texas and Colorado as the rule of the gun wipes out the rule of the law, that three prominent New York politicians have been caught red-handed trying to buy their way into a mayoral candidacy,  and that Pierre Trudeau’s late-in-life mistress, Mme Coyne, is one of the six candidates still standing in the race to become head of he Liberal Party of Canada, thus confronting head-on Pierre’s son Justin, who is going to win, and then will have to attempt to explain how he understand his familial relationship to Mme Coyne and her daughter, who is also Justin’s father’s daughter.

And all this in the straight-laced true north strong and free.  As stated above lost in all these Dada developments is the fact that the real excitement in the spring is sports.  The baseball season has started, the basketball season is wrapping up its March madness – many people hope that Wichita State will win – and the professionals in both  basketball and hockey are approaching the only weeks that really count.  Even soccer has begun to roll, at least in those places where all eyes will be on Rio about a year from now.  Not to mention curling.  It’s a great time to  to pour yourself an Augustinerbräu or a Schneider Weisse, find yourself a place in the sun under the flowering cherry (or chestnut) trees, if you are really lucky in the Hirschgarten, and watch Bayern München humiliate their opponents (9-0 against poor Hamburg), the Habs, Jets, Senators  and  Canucks make a run for it, the Blue Jays and Cubs start off strong, and the Heat show what heat is.  Go for it!

The Oscars and History

By

So no less than four films being considered for Best Film at the Oscara supposedly portray US history. One of them is relatively harmless. “Lincoln” is probably going to win everything because it does not, as far as any layman can tell, falsify history in any kind of serious way and features enough bearded men to make old testament prophets feel jealous. And it has a very Lincoln-looking British actor, no doubt thanks to terrific makeup help, who has the wrong accent but is as good at portraying a decent common man who acted well under pressure (Bob Newhart called this “The humble bit”), as were Raymond Massey – also a foreigner – Henry Fonda and others who have portrayed Honest Abe in the past. So we can give this a pass on the honest history front, although Spielberg once again demonstrates his fascination with brutal hand to hand combat and dead soldiers, though not at the level of “Saving Private Ryan”.
But what should we make of “Zero Dark Thirty” , supposedly a factual presentation of the CIA’s role in the assassination of bin Laden, or Ben Affleck’s “Argo”, another alleged representation of actual CIA operations.  And there is no doubt that “Argo” is an exciting film, especially in the opening scenes depicting the attack on the US embassy in Teheran.    But what’s going on?  Since when do films get such serious consideration that are made with government support and obvious comic-book plots  – a CIA female warrior  in one, and  a devil of a fearless handsome CIA agent in the other carry out awesomely dangerous missions for good old Uncle Sam – and against all odds succeed.  If they didn’t do that, there would certainly not be a film.  The first  has been attacked on the US Senate floor, by senators who actually personally know how torture functions, since the film seems to suggest that torture by US agents actually led to the discovery of the whereabouts of bin Laden.  From all accounts this is not true, and the very suggestion that it is  acceptable for the US  to gather information in this way, is more than offensive for those who suffered under such methods.

And “Argo” is “so full of bullshit it might as well have been a Charlie’s Angels episode” to quote Steve Burgess. The heroic people who really risked their lives and  those of their families in rescuing those US diplomats who managed to escape the chaos in the attack on the US embassy in Teheran , were of course the ambassador and the attache of Canada, who died last week.  They did what the diplomats of no other country – including some of the US’ supposed closest allies like the UK – were unwilling to do: risk their own lives to save those of US colleagues.   In real life the US citizens were hidden in two different Canadian diplomatic residences for a lengthy period before they were smuggled out, perhaps even with some input from the CIA operative who is made the hero of “Argo”: Affleck directing Affleck in the role.   One of these Canadian  diplomats, the  Ambassador, actually appears fleetingly in the film, but does not seem very important; the other  is never mentioned.    A postscript was added to the film, after howls of protest about an obvious insulting falsification of reality,  which  threw  a few crumbs  to the ambassador but never mentioned the attache, not to mention the Canadian prime minster, who allowed this mission to take place. It was all too reminiscent of how President Bush managed to  thank half the countries of the world for having helped during the 9/11 attack, but forgot Canada, the only one that had really done anything.

And then there is the fourth film”Beasts of the Southern Wild” a tale of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrine on the  Louisiana coast, which features an  amazing performance by an 8-year old girl who amazingly is also up for best actress, as is the director.  None of the above will win, because they don’t present a phoney version of history, that ranges on propaganda, but rather offer a mythic story of outsiders who have no desire to return to the society from which they have been cut off by the inundations.  This is the film of the year.  Go see it, and skip cartoon history

 

Richard Ford writes the great American novel – and calls it “Canada”.

By

John Updike has passed on, Philip Roth has passed his peak, and like  Updike, will  not win the Nobel Prize, Toni Morrison, who did win it quite a long time ago, and Joyce Carol Oates have been productive but have long since levelled out on  a somewhat predictable plateau. So who will take on the mantel of the leading US novelist?   I’ll tell you who. It is Richard Ford, whose latest novel shows all the marks of a writer who learned his trade very well at the feet of masters and continued to improve and now in his mid sixties has really hit his stride with a novel that should remind readers of great works  like The Sound and the Fury by that splendid  fellow southerner William Faulkner – whom Ford met as a young man in Mississippi - or So Long, See You Tomorrow by the vastly underrated William Maxwell.  Richard Ford, born in 1945 in Jackson, Mississippi, has gradually pushed his imagination north, setting a couple of  his excellent earlier novels in places like Great Falls, Montana or central New York, and now, he has written what is  arguably the best American novel of the last decades, and titled it, against the wishes of his US publishers, “Canada”.  The publishers told him that this title was “a death knell for a book”, but Ford wouldn’t be pushed around, stood his ground on the title, and has seen his stubbornness more than vindicated with regard to both sales and reviews.

The leading US and European reviews have  been superlative, and the PBS interview is much to be recommended, but their focus has been  almost entirely on the extraordinary quality of the often meditative writing in the framework of a tale full of sound and fury. This novel  explores the relationship between memory and long-ago events yet  throughout catches the reader’s attention with an action story involving extraordinary and  dangerous life choices that is presented  through the recollections of  a terrific 60-year old writer looking back at his teenage years.  And what splendid writing it is; is there anyone else out there now who can write like this? And yet, overlooked by  -and perhaps incomprehensible to – the US reviewers is the title, which Ford comments on at length in the PBS interview.  Ford has spent a lot of time in Canada, and has said how much he likes being there  and his description, in the second half of this novel, of the journey across an almost unmarked border – of course that is no longer the case – separating Montana from the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan – is simply convincing.  Dell, the teenager in desperate trouble not of his own making, enters a world so different from the one he leaves that it sometimes almost seems like he is in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (perhaops that of the Snow Queen).  The author is neither judgmental nor prejudicial in his description of both sides of the border.  It all  just simply seems to be true, in things as different as language, landscape description, and customs.  If it is a fairy tale, there is a dark edge to both worlds portrayed, but, as Ford says in the PBS interview, he is very fond of Canada and believes that in his story  Dell is given the gift of the possibility of redemption and  consolation when he is kidnapped and taken off  to the nearby but unknown land of Saskatchewan.  This is a great novel on its own, but it is also the defining work that, almost in passing, catches the different ways in which life is now lived in the second and third largest countries in the world that used to share the world’s longest unguarded border, but no longer do.  Ford now lives in Maine.  He’s moving in.

Trudeau in stunning upset

By

In the biggest upset in boxing since Pee Wee Hermann scored a TKO on Cassius Clay in that famous fight in Lewiston, Maine, Pierre Trudeau Junior (aka as Justin), a  3-1 underdog, brawled his way to a TKO in the third round of a charity challenge fight over tough-guy aboriginal Tory senator Patrick Brazeau.  By accepting the challenge of the toughest guy in Ottawa, despite dire warning that he risked serious injury, the slight 40 year old son of the greatest Canadian Prime Minister of modern times, risked his career as a potential future Prime Minister which was long threatened by a reputation as an over-intellectual type who took after his rather sensitive mother rather than his black-belt father.

As it turned out it was Brazeau who was in danger, stunned by haymakers leading to three standing 10 counts, before the ref stopped the fight in the third round. In less than ten minutes of real action Trudeau demolished his reputation as a wimp who could not stand the rough stuff of Canadian politics and emerged as someone to fear in future national elections. An amazed Brazeau admitted defeat to the new tough guy on the block and asked for a rematch. The fight Canadians would really like to see is the one with the arrogant current Prime Minister Stephen Harper who would probably also go in as a 3-1 underdog. Stay tuned.

The CFL at 99 and counting, what Canadian football could teach the Yanks

By

So the big game is over, the Grey Cup has been  presented in its ninety-ninth year to aVancouver team that lost its first five games and won nine of its next ten, including today’s down to the wire victory at home against Winnipeg.  56, ooo people sold out its new half billion dollar upgraded stadium, to watch he best young quarterback in football (think Doug Flutie, Warren Moon, Joe Theisman if you want to recall the kind of players who preceded Travis Lulay in the CFL) lead the Lions to a deserved narrow victory .  It’s true that for Canadian sports fans this can’t replace the loss by the Canucks in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup championship  to Boston, but virtually the whole country watched it and it was a reminder, if one was needed, of how much more exciting  Canadian 3-down  football games are compared to US 4-down ones.  With  4 minutes to go and the team with the ball leading by a touchdown in the US, the game is basically considered over as you can run out the clock with a steady diet of four-yard runs.  Paint dries faster.

In Canada that game is just beginning at that point.  Winnipeg scored two touchdown in the last three minutes to come within 8 points of Vancouver and were driving again as the game ended.  Even more exciting was the Canadian university championship game played two days before the pro championship in the same stadium, during which the favoured rouge et or of Laval came back from 23-0 half-time deficit to pull ahead of McMaster by one point with  a couple of minutes to go only to see themselves go ahead by a single, get tied by a rouge and apparently lose by one point when McMaster missed a field goal with  no time left, but any ball that is kicked into or out of the end zone without it being returned or kicked back out results in  one  point in Canada, enough  to win the game in this case.  But the ball didn’t go over the end zone line as a Laval player caught it before it passed the  line and made it back out to the one–yard line after faking a drop kick as a return.  Eventually the winner was decided by an overtime that   had everyone standing and defies explanation.  These are rugby rules, and the NFL should send someone up to see how they add excitement in places where the NF L offers nothing but  dead air – fair catches, no reward for kicking balls into or out of the end zone, no possibility of returning kicks with kicks, ridiculous ways ways of breaking ties, etc.

The Wild Ones make a comeback

By

In a period of seemingly unending bad news about the state of the environment, it is time for some surprisingly upbeat developments: Some of the big guys in the animal kingdom are coming back to areas they had abandoned under constant human pressure scores of years ago, in some cases even centuries ago. It is true that almost all these cases are happening in the still somewhat wide-open spaces of northern North America and Euroasia, but still they are happening and there is quite suddenly some startling evidence that the often apparently hopeless attempt by some humans to undo the damage done by most humans is actually having some success. It seems that protected national parks actually work as something other than a tourist goal.

In southern British Columbia grizzly bears are definitely extending their range southward and even westward as the first sightings in a century of the giant carnivores within an hour of Vancouver lead to predictions that within twenty years a grizzly will be standing on the ski slopes of Vancouver looking at his encaged brethren at the top of Grouse Mountain. Four young male grizzlys are now being tracked on the west coast of Vancouver Island where the languages of the natives have no word for them, as there is no record of them having been there before. It can only be assumed they have made the almost unimaginable swim from the mainland by moving from island to island and are now considering whether they want to stay in a new land where they would be king of the wilderness. If the resident black bears run into them, they may regret getting to know this branch of th e family.

They would almost certainly also be meeting an ever-expanding cougar population, once seen only rarely and at a distance – my brother Doug claims to have almost hit one on the road to Zeballos – and now making thei presence felt in many places where they may be less than welcome. This summer a cougar jumped out of the bush and on to a little kid at popular Kennedy Lake in Pacific Rim National Park, only to be driven away by an irate mother. Cougars have also now been positively identified as roaming the woods of Quebec and will surely soon be back in th he Adirondacks.  Wolf packs are spreading rapidly eastwards in Germany where they have been absent for a century.   Tigers have been brought back from the brink of extinction in southeastern Russia through a decision in Moscow that a great country like Russia deserves a great wild animal.  China may be thinking that one over at the moment, since they wiped out all their own tigers, but still get the occasional wanderer from north of the Amur River. In 2009 in British Columbia federal officials estimated that the salmon returning to the greatest free-flowinng salmon river on earth, the Fraser, which reaches the sea in Vancouver, would be reduced to a rump 1 million fish and might well be considered on the way to extinction.  And then 30 million showed up from nowhere, the highest number in a century, and all bets of extinction were off. So take heart, you may yet run into a grizzly or a pack of wolves on your afternoon constitutional and never be the same again.

In Praise of rugby

By

There is a world championship going on in New Zealand that can recall the golden days of sport when amateurs could play against professionals in team sports and have a chance, when small countries could field teams that could beat meganapoleanic big sports factory countries and where the best national teams in the world would nonetheless end up vying for a cup that promises honour more than money as a reward.

And look at the favourites: New Zealand, the all Blacks who seem likely to win it all at home; Australia, their bitter rivals who lost bitterly to Ireland in the first round games; South Africa, the Springbocks, who could be the All Blacks spoilers but were lucky to beat Wales; England, and France, which had its hands full for most of the match against mainly amateur Canada, also Wales, punching above its weight, Argentina, the Latino outsider, and any one of three small Polynesian islands, where very big men push and push and push. Russia and the US are also there, and try just as hard or harder to hold on to their middle-of-the-pack role than do the professional sports teams running for the cash. As is the case with the world’s second most popular sport, cricket, following soccer, it is mostly a Commonwealth gathering but profits greatly from the fact that it isn’t only that, as is the cricket world championships, but also a gathering of very tough guys, playing a very hard game without protection and doing it mainly for the glory. You won’t be seeing these lads at the Olympics.

Canada – King of Asbestos

By

Virtually every one knows that asbestos is a very dangerous product that has to be handled with extreme care. At the very least, it has to be labelled as dangerous and in need of special handling – if not simply banned – because it will kill you if you breathe it in any kind of quantities. There was a time when this was not so clear, and mining communities around the world – especially in Quebec – made a decent if hard living mining it, until the workers began dying of lung congestion. Now, decades later, billions are being spent removing asbestos from buildings in Canada. It can only be done safely with great caution by workers dressed in protective clothing, and it must be done if any building with asbestos in it is torn down, renovated or if the asbestos has been stirred up in some way. It’s the law.
And now even the lumbering the United Nations bureaucracy has concluded that at the very least asbestos must be labelled as a dangerous material needing special handling, in particular when it is exported. But that decree did not pass, since the vote required unanimity, and, despite the fact that even a rising economic power like India unexpectedly decided to vote in favour and take the economic hit, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Canada turned it down. Yes, shamefully, Canada, which knows all too well how dangerous this material is, decided it would rather protect the jobs of the 500 asbestos miners still working in Quebec rather than act with any decency. It is a good question of what the newly elected conservative majority would not do for money, or votes. The leader of the opposition socialist party called this vote the height of hypocrisy. He was being too generous

Canada and the USA: Two Countries, Two Elections

By

Canada recently completed a national election campaign that lasted all of 6 weeks. While the results were disappointing to many and the campaign was as nasty as some of the U.S.’s, at least the pain was short-lived. Canada’s winner, incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat in the driver’s seat as Canadians tried to determine if Michael Ignatieff was “Canadian enough” (he wasn’t) and not an American in sealskin clothing (apparently he was – and lost very badly).

The U.S. faces a similar campaign in tone but not in length. Is Obama a real American? Is he a Muslim in Christian clothing? The campaign will focus in subtle ways on those issues but the real issues may well be his lackluster handling of the economy and his seeming willingness to give away the ranch to the Republicans without a fight. We shall see.

But the real point of all of this is to wonder why we need 20 months of increasingly idiotic campaigning for the American people to make a semi-informed judgment. At the end of the day many – perhaps most – people will vote based on minimal understanding of how we got to where we are and what is in the best interest of the country. Why not do it in six weeks rather than drive a portion of the country insane with a campaign based on moronic slogans, outright lies and subtle racism.

Canada did it in 6 weeks and retained a Prime Minister as mediocre as what we are likely to end up with after 20 months and literally billions of wasted dollars.