Chagal4's Blog

Eight o’clock and it was

Already hot…

Sunlight filled windows and doors

Bounced on the street

Polished the floors.

My eye lids were helpless…

Used the pillow instead.

When the European Union launched the notion of open borders among members I thought it was a brave and progressive move. Dogmatic nationalism had been the abiding curse that managed to kill off millions of people over the past century.The off spring of Queen Victoria turned out to be toxic. So…I thought …Europe can set an example and back away from the worst elements of nationalism. I was wrong I think. At least for now the resurgence of xenophobic right wing arguments in response to the shifting of demographics caused by decades of immigration capped with the arrival of the “new refugees” is frightening. None of these things happen in a vacuum. A complex series of events led to the outrageous sitation in Syria and the creation of a devastated population there…likewise the bungled affair of Iraq and the even more extreme case of Afghanistan. I mean…really…really. The U.S. response to 9-11 was to try to obliterate a country that had been returned to the brink of the stone age by the Soviet Union…???What? The majority of the terrorists on those planes and the greatly unloved Osama Bin Laden were Saudi Arabians…not Afghans. O.K. enough of that.

What’s up is that even though nobody is swimming to North America from Eastern Europe this is still a global problem. And to illustrate how welcoming and charitable the response is likely to be…Donald trump is applauded for suggesting that he’d build a wall along the Mexican border (and get them to pay for it!!!) Not long after that another American politician says that they should build a wall along the Canadian border…(well I’m kind of liking that idea …if it keeps those sorts of politicians out of my country…we have enough lunatics of our own thanks).

So I don’t see any bright ideas on the horizon and it’s now September…in three months it will be winter…We need to start thinking about blankets and winter clothing for people stuck in those camps…or worse.

When I draw it sometimes feels like I’m playing piano, although I don’t actually play the piano. It’s almost always jazz…but really…I love almost any music.

This drawing was done for part of a painting that never happened. I like it anyway.

Don Juan writes letters to imaginary lovers,

Dressed in silk pajamas he dreams of long ago

And rich red wine when love was young,

the scent of perfumes filled the night.

He loved the sound of shadows

Where the rustling

of silken skirts and satin thighs

Set his heart on fire…

Well, it was more difficult when I was a bureaucrat. Dozing behind your desk in mid afternoon is frowned upon. So I’d wait until I got home. Of course there are those whose default setting is more asleep than awake. You can see them in almost any office…Their eyes are open…body’s moving…but you know that a humming bird could fly in one ear and out the other…and they wouldn’t blink. Years of watching the same piece of paper slide across your desk can do that. But for me…the nap is a sacred part of the day…it draws a line under the frustrating lunacy of the early part of the day and it recuperates enough strength to salvage the rest of the day. But more than that…it somehow allows my mind to consolidate and clarify things I’ve seen, heard or experienced…and I often come away with a better understanding of things than I had before I dozed off.

Since I retired there was so much that I just didn’t understand…How one could be “unemployed” and still have the day fill up with things to be done…How one could be ambushed by pain here or an ache there and…it turns out to be worse than you could have imagined…How whole pages of a newspaper can make no sense at all…How there’s always a great little book to be read…A piece of music to be discovered (The Bach Cello Suites by Pablo Casals)…The list is endless and actually…I love it all. So my naps have become an afternoon refuge, a sanctuary where my mind can find a shady corner to dream in…I take my current favourite book, read a few pages and drift off…

On a sunny summer day….this is what it feels like.

Once we walked on hands and knees

Once we lived in the arms of trees

Then we learned to tie our shoes

Wear the hats, wear the suits

Kill the buffalo, chop the trees

Did we think that Mother would approve?

Oh…it was soo-o-o cold in Canada and when we got off the plane in Varadero…the heat was like a fog of palm oil…My bones turned to rubber and they sold ice cold beer on the bus to the hotel. The next day…exploring, I heard kids playing, laughing and shouting. I knew that sound and found a kind of vacant lot construction site. The kids had mapped out a diamond. With home made bats and a ball wrapped with electrical tape. They were playing and …damn they were serious and they were good. I watched a couple of innings  and applauded the moves…noticed Che watching from the fence. I left feeling very far from home…and thinking…These kids are alright.

There has never been an honourable war. There are always atrocities, there is always torture, rage, regret, recrimination, secrecy, lies, more lies, justification and no matter how just the cause appeared to either side at the start…the conduct of the war teaches us only that the strong win. We learn more effective ways of killing people, destroying the resources of the “enemy” and yes we manage to make some advances in medicine and science. We in the west live with the conceit that because our lives are good…it must be a product of our democratic system and the benefits of capitalism. It never occurs to us that exploiting the third world…just as all previous colonial hegemonies did…is one of the foundations of our prosperity. And we seek to redeem our exploitation by exporting our notion of “democracy” to many of the countries we have exploited. It’s a time honoured process. European colonialists exported the church and the sword while they enslaved thousands to dig and smelt gold and silver for the lords and ladies back home. Now that North America is becoming “energy self-sufficient” our version of history can begin to deny that we have impoverished millions of people in the middle east, installed puppet governments to keep the oil flowing and looked the other way when our tame government leaders filled Swiss vaults with money that could have kept poverty and starvation from devastating their people. Oh yes and when those hungry and poor people rise up to claim a piece of the profits…our own leaders come to the aid of the “friendly” governments who keep the oil flowing. The mess we leave behind lasts for generations…and eventually global opinion shifts and off we go to “fix” the problem. Never enters our mind to “fix” Wall Street or the State Department. And lest we think this is only in America…Great Britain, France, Germany, and others have equivalent bodies that could use some fixing too. Did I mention Canada?

I agree that some wars are inevitable and probably necessary. It means that somebody, somewhere has fucked up so badly that no other option is available. Sometimes the fuck ups are simply mistakes by people who didn’t foresee the consequences of their actions. I’m sure it happens all the time. But sometimes what appears to be a fuck up is a carefully engineered event planned in back rooms and board rooms by people with big brains, big technology, big ambitions and big resources…who have every intention of hanging onto every “big” thing they have and making it all bigger.

We’ll probably never know the simple mistakes from the engineered disasters…but I think we all have a responsibility to understand that our own leaders have lied and will lie to us about who are the “bad guys”…about weapons of mass destruction…about which dictator is a “friend” and which ones need to be brought down. If Saddam Hussein was bad for killing his own people…how bad is Assad? Never mind…there are dozens of despots to choose from. The point is that some of those despots are sitting in office towers in New York, Washington, Dallas, Toronto, Ottawa, London, Paris, Berlin. And it’s about damn time we put the magnifying glass on their behaviour.

We now have the most technologically smart generations we’ve ever had…we know how to use the internet…we know how to do research. Forget the big mass media outlets…the network T.V. corporations. They’ve all been corrupted. Their job is to sell things. They exist to stay in business and they are careful to shade their content in ways that do not alienate sponsors or their cash flow. Do your own research, look for the story behind the story…get some different perspectives

And next time there’s an election…pay attention.

I dreamed I saw a cat

Last night…                       

It was standing on a wall.

Summer warmed the

Evening,

You could hear the crickets call.

Across the night a siren wailed.

Somewhere I heard a laugh.

I turned around to trace

The sound and

when I turned back

The Calico Cat

was

Gone.

Almost my whole life I’ve thought that it’s important to be curious. And I still am curious and I still think it’s important. But being curious doesn’t mean I understand things. I fact it seems to me that the older i get the less I understand. Last week seventy three men, women and children were found dead in a truck abandoned beside a busy highway in Austria. It certainly was an outrageous atrocity…but one that has been repeated and building for at least several years as people flee in the thousands from lands wracked by war, poverty, starvation and disasters. Shiploads of wretched humans push off in the dark and many of this human cargo ends up in the Mediterranean sea…dead. Do they know they could die there? I think that they do…but that it’s better to die trying to reach a place where survival and maybe more is possible. Two hundred years ago people were forced into leaky ships sold into slavery in the new world…there were also thousands who crammed themselves onto leaky ships to try for a new life in the new world.

The leaders of Europe are exasperated…what to do? They blame “human traffickers” for the “problem”…but the problem is so much greater and more complex. Blame rests with a world that reacted to terrorism with massive devastation of whole countries…a world that stood still while the destabilization of countries spawned civil wars…even more hideous terrorism…and the decimation of whole populations. Our civilized nations wrung their hands in the United Nations while starvation and genocide raged in Africa…while dictators used barrel bombs and poison gas on their own cities. The U.N. spends billions to set up refugee camps in deserts so bleak that not even a weed can grow…And the camps can hold only a fraction of people driven from their homes, their lives, their minds. And so they take every penny they have…they buy passage on a battered rubber raft and hope to make it to Italy…they get loaded onto trucks and driven into Austria…and hopefully to Germany…or England…or France…or anywhere…else. I can see the back lash building…I read comments on news web-sites where people write things like…”we should sink a few of those boats and maybe they’ll get the message” or “we should just pack them up and send them back” Or the most obvious…”Don’t let them land”. I know too that it’s all contributing to the growth of a vicious ultra right wing nationalism all over Europe that will inevitably lead to more outrages. I’m losing my curiosity about this…because I can’t imagine an answer or even the beginning of an answer…and the frustration makes me both angry and incredibly sad. I don’t understand but I’m pretty sure that this is our problem…all of us…everywhere. And here’s what else I know…if we were watching our children, wives, brothers sisters starve…hide in cellars from bombs and bullets…we would be trying to do the same damn thing those refugees are doing. Escape!