Chagal4's Blog

Winter will be over soon…but not before it beats the crap out of us northerners at least a couple more times. It’s hard not to see winter as a vindictive, nasty, creature with a human brain and a body built from rusty razor blades and patches of sunshine that burn your eyes. It’s just that this is the time of year when winter’s charms wear off  like a guest that has stayed too long…and you start feeling that the guest HAS stayed too long. You wake up in the morning and look out the window thinking that maybe, while you were sleeping…winter had packed its bags and grabbed a cab. But noooo. There’s eight inches of new snow and no tire tracks from any cab….and the wind is blowing like somebody left the door open at the north pole. You turn on the tap and the water says…bip bip and the pipes moan and the old window in the bathroom has a gorgeous etching from top to bottom and you realize how lucky you are….to be indoors. Here in Canada’s capitol every year they have an event called “Winterlude”…primitive people, wrapped in wool and clothing filled with bird feathers appear in the thousands and launch themselves onto the frozen canal wearing skates and hoping for a following wind. It’s colourful and hopeful and the kind of thing that intends to prove to ourselves and the uncaring winter…that we can take it…we can not only endure freezing rain and blowing snow and nights of thirty below…but we can jump into our storm boots and get right up in winter’s face. That trip along the canal lasts until you remember how to spell coccyx and your fingers are frozen solid inside those ridiculously expensive mitts you bought. But there is nothing like the joy and sense of achievement that sweeps over your whole body when you arrive home, peel off the space suit and boots and feel the glow of warmth rushing over your windburned cheeks. I don’t ski anymore and I admit that it is an abiding hole in my soul that I cannot fly down the left hip of a beautiful mountain…but I learned late and when I first started I spent whole days falling down the slope…I was wet in places that don’t even get wet in the shower…and although I had several frozen parts…I was sweating ferociously. And I loved it forever. It seemed to me that if winter had to have a reason…that was it. And now that it’s gone…well…now I look out my window to see if winter grabbed that cab.

I bought my own true love a radio for Christmas last year. It wasn’t just any old radio mind you…it is a Tivoli Audio music system…with little buttons and lights and a screen that tells what day it is and the time. When music plays the little screen scrolls the name of the artist sometimes. Otherwise it is the very paradigm of of minimalist design…a simple rectangular black oak box with an aluminum face. Sits on the dresser quietly waiting to be awakened with the slimmest remote control device ever. Now you might think that buying her a radio is unromantic…but I also had the stairway to our apartment carpeted and honestly…that is unromantic. It’s nice carpet though. The thing is that it gets more difficult every year to endure the cringe of crawling through the malls with desperation leaking from every doorway. I watch those sad and increasingly angry husbands being dragged along by determined wives or vice versa. Actually I saw the picture of colossal “I-Don’t-Want- To-Be-Here” the other day when I saw a wife being coaxed along the aisle of the automotive parts department. That woman could not have been less interested in the  latest developments in windshield wipers. Every time the hubby stopped to investigate a nearby bin…she’d cock her hip and cross her arms, turn her head about forty five degrees and stare though a small window inside her head that looked out onto the Boulevard St. Germaine in Paris. I love watching people.  I’m fascinated by people. This used to be a favourite time of year for me….going to places where people gathered in big numbers with all sorts of intimate and unconscious behaviour. Unguarded facial expressions offer incredible insights on the human condition but It’s important that one follows the rules. This isn’t personal research…the object isn’t to get “inside someone’s head” for nefarious purposes. For me it’s about trying to understand who we are. And each of us is less a singular being than a combination…a cohesion…a conjunction of everyone around us. More importantly we are also shaped by everyone who ever was around us. I stopped believing in the Miracle on Thirty Fourth Street  years ago…although I knew his beard was real…but the holiday season remains a time when the best and worst of human nature flows like a herd of cats in every direction. If you want to know the state of the society or community you live in…this is the time and place to start paying attention. A lot of bad things have happened over the past couple of years and every year around this time there are those who get knocked off their perch…go all white noise and bullets…It’s a very pressurized time. Standing in a shopping mall with hundreds of people moving by is like having a kind of barometer…”How are we doing?” is the question and the sum of the answers tells us whether we need to go home and pack…move to another town…or just put on some old Joan Baez music and chill. This is also the time of year when we reflect and wonder about next year…I always wonder about next year. At seventy every next year is a miracle. Checking out the malls this year I was reassured. In spite of the fiscal cliff and the general mess that is still chewing on Europe…In spite of the widening gap of filthy rich and desperately poor in the world…In spite of the belief held by some of my pals…that the world is going to hell…(and I do agree), it doesn’t seem to be getting there any faster than it was last year or the year before. However…the reassurance of a seventy year old man with a limited education and several chronic and potentially fatal diseases should offer no comfort what-so-ever to younger generations. It merely means that I will probably be long gone before the worst of our excesses finally pisses off mother nature to the extent that the new rulers of this planet will be cockroaches. The best advice I could whisper from my little corner of the shopping mall this year is this…Cut the shopping in half…get off your ass…your parents and grand parents were idiots…you can love them if you want to…but they injured the planet…or did nothing to prevent it…and the planet needs our help. Right away. Happy New Year.

This year I gave her diamonds…it was the least I could do.

There’s an old dog on the corner that’s dying of something or other and she can’t get around much anymore. I don’t know whether to nod my sympathy at the old dog or at my friends who are already hearing doggie dirges in the distance. Years ago Elvis recorded a song that melted the speakers on our trusty RCA Victor (can you remember their logo?). It was called “Old Shep” and my old man cried when he heard it. Sentimental days back then…and the bond between a man/woman/boy/girl and their dog was a special thing. It still is of course, even though the incredible explosion of puppy mills dealing in mini dogs and Chihuahuas, and Pekinese and tiny hairless creatures resembling long legged rodents makes us seniors dubious. No matter how much you love the little buggers, dogs ain’t jewelry. They shouldn’t be stuffed in your cleavage while you order colourful drinks at your favourite club. But I digress…there are many types of dog/person relationship and they range from lifelong companion to loyal guardian to working partner to drug sniffing narc and eyes for the blind. The proliferation of urban dogs has me wondering about our society though. I don’t mean those feral, lean, mean and wary beasts that have a third world gleam in their eyes…You see them all over the world…those dogs. You want to think that they belong to somebody but you’re afraid that they don’t…and you get sort of uncomfortable when there’s more than one of them and they’re watching you. No…I mean the ones that are walked daily on brightly coloured, spring loaded, leashes, sometimes wearing lovely little plaid coats through the neighbourhood…on their way to the “Dog Park”…I figure those parks should be named after famous dogs…like Rin Tin Tin park or Lassie park. There were dogs that did heroic deeds in war…and in the frozen north. come on, name some dog parks after those guys. So these dogs and their people go off daily to the park to socialize and catch up on the latest canine news. It must be frustrating too because the male dogs are checking out the chick dogs and those upright citizens holding the leashes are not about to allow any  doggie sex around here. I see them every day and I think something deep and dynamic is going on here. People are spending more and more time on-line and in interpersonal situations that are non-social (like work) so I’m thinking people are becoming un-socialized. They want a meaningful relationship but the opportunities are limited and if you read the papers and watch T.V. you have to wonder…who can you trust? And getting a dog starts to look like a very viable option.  Incredibly they discover a very meaningful relationship…after all…they follow their dog with a little plastic bag…and also discover other dog people and have meaningful relationships with them too. That’s what city people call a “win-win” proposition. And everything is fine on all of those levels for years…until one day the dog gets sick…not that “Oh My God look at the mess”…type of sick. Nope …the sick that has big sad eyes and no energy…that can’t get off the blanket/box and wheezes ominously. If that sick had a voice it would whisper and what it said would break your heart. The real love between a dog and its person sneaks up on both sides…takes years to build and comes as a pleasant surprise until the day it comes as a sad and awful one. I don’t have much patience with people who say “Oh, it’s only a dog…” because it isn’t. It’s about the relationship of people to their world…and the dog that keeps them connected to the fullness of their lives. There’s a lot of dogs that I don’t much like…not their fault. There are a lot of people I don’t like either. In the end I guess I have more respect for the dogs I don’t like than the people I don’t like. As for the dog on the corner…she’s gone now…(I heard the other day) and my sympathy goes to her and to her people. Dogs don’t live as long as people…and that’s a sad fact because some dogs are better than a lot of people.

I have one less friend today. And I didn’t even get to say…farewell. But then you never do… do you? Something in his brain exploded…like getting shot in the head from the inside. An impossible thought. Bruce was estranged from his family. A good word “estranged”. I know because I am and always have been estranged from mine. It’s not a topic of conversation so I rarely have to explain that it doesn’t feel like anything at all. That there are moments of regret and remorse and life goes on and I’m sure they feel the same way. That I promise myself I’ll drive or fly or somehow get down there to visit…but whether it happens or not is more a matter of chance…and chance doesn’t turn that way very often. I tell myself that it’s a long drive on dangerous highways but it isn’t dangerous, that highway and I’ve done longer drives. It’s wanting to go that is the issue. To be fair they never come to see me, except my niece to Toronto and back in the sixties my sister …turned around pretty quick and never came back. There was no malice really…no big family fight. There was a step-father who poisoned us all and who would have been better in an iron lung or traction for life but he wasn’t. These days history doesn’t go back that far and in spite of the psycho-babble about the need for closure, I don’t feel the urge. I don’t know but I suppose Bruce may have felt some of these things. Selfish maybe…certainly private and scarred…damaged…in need of redemption for sure.Redemption is too long coming for most of us and that head-shot comes instead. Friend, I called him, but he wasn’t really that. I knew him once long ago in passing and his sister is perhaps my dearest pal. Recently he and I shared some e-mail notes…checking the weather and the state of our existence. Sometimes it would be two, three months between notes and I never thought to worry about him…there was no cause. There are people in all of our lives who are not easy…people who are worse than difficult…better to be avoided unless necessity demands. I don’t know if he was one of those…I don’t think that I’m one. I don’t avoid my family because they’re not easy. If they lived around the corner I’d probably see them often but I can’t be sure of that. Some of my best friends live nearby and I don’t see them all that frequently. Someone told me a couple of years ago that she didn’t want any more friends. I understood her instantly. Friends are a burden and at some point the weight gets to be too much. They’re unpredictable, friends. When you meet them they may not look heavy and then a year later they suck all of the air out of the room and their friendship weighs a ton. On the other hand there are friends that love you and lift you and without them I’d certainly not be here at all…and sometimes they’re the same ones. I’ll mourn the passing of Bruce and maybe more for his sister’s sake…and maybe for mine. His death reminded me that I’m seventy…that my back is filled with pain and my life is filled with pills for many ills…that my own trip across the Styx is not so far away. I don’t guess I’ll see Bruce on the other side because I don’t believe that anybody ever does. But just in case, I’ll keep a warm thought for the late Bruce MacArthur, may he rest in peace.

Blues: November 5, 2012

I was walking down the street behind a sagging cat…He had those shoulders that sloped left and right so fast that rain would run straight into his pockets from the top of his head. Seemed to me that life hadn’t worn him down so much as it had managed to pull him through the narrow bathroom window of despair. And it struck me strange that he was humming a little tune and nodding his pointy head in time. Well I could have passed him up then…I’m usually fairly brisk in my stride…want to get there, where-ever there is…and get back. Sometimes I get captured in the moment while carping the diem so to speak…find myself mesmerized by the great beauty of young women sailing effortlessly through their day…or the serendipity of a fragile flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk…How does that little motherfucker avoid being stepped on? And here I am following this twisted frame cat humming a shuffling blues tune and keeping a good beat on his slipping and sliding feet. O.K. so I get with the dude, side by side, and I say “Hey, excuse me but …that tune you’re humming is going to stick inside my head all day…if you don’t mind…what’s the name of that tune?” He swung a pair of black horn rimmed shades, taped at the bridge, bottle green and greasy…zoned my face and smiled.

“That’s the St.James Infirm’ry , you know it?” he asked, and I said I did and thank you. “I just love that old shit” He said. Yeah I do too.

“Now ain’t this a fine autumn day? The air is crisp on the skin and the sky is that day-before- Maxfield Parrish blue. A day like this you can walk about…not like those humid days when you feel like you’re swimming along a street ..in dirty water”

There are conversations that feel like a paragraph plucked at random from some obscure novel written too long ago…seem to have no prior references…no direction forward, north or south. Your mind slips a gear and your mouth goes “Uhh” with a dangling interrogative suspended suspicious. It doesn’t matter really. It’s soon over and the memorable little cat with his shades and silly shoulders hums off into his fine autumn day.

Today is one of those days.

The raccoon sprawled on our balcony rail, a heavy breathing hump of brindle fur and two masked peepers glowing at me through the back window. I knew that the dog downstairs had scared it into the climb and that now it was perched, waiting and watching in case the dog learned to climb straight up the corner post supporting the balcony. Lou Lou dithered and promised death and dire consequences to the “vermin” that simply ignored her and the hard kharma flowing out the door. It waddled around the balcony looking for the possibility of an escape that included no dogs. Raccoons are nocturnal according to my long dead father and various supplementary information I’ve gathered since then. There was even a scary hint that raccoons seen in the day-time might be rabid and that they were therefore demented and out searching for humans they could turn into vampires or werewolves with a single hideous bite. I know from experience they are far from cuddly little fuckers and when they are cornered…in your tent, for example…they can get seriously pissed off. So my solution for this mid-afternoon visitor was to log some couch time and wait until the creature was convinced that the dog was no longer lurking…and he (or she…how can you tell?) buggered off. Sitting on the sofa looking at the dancing pixels on the T.V. screen I wondered what drove the damn thing into our domain in the middle of the city in broad daylight…and was this beginning of an invasion of nature? A skunk dropped by last week..you don’t have to see them to know they’re there. And of course there are six million squirrels ducking and diving through the trees around here. We saw a fox crossing the parkway last month and rumours have deer and coyotes and even the odd bear wandering into the suburbs these days. Personally I think they’re a lot less dangerous than a lot of the human predators you could pass on the street but people tend to react irrationally to the “encroachment” of nature. The thought of pushing that raccoon off the balcony rail as urged by she who cooks the meals around here…had me counting my fingers and being content with the ten that I have… I declined…broom or no broom. As far as I’m concerned “encroachment” isn’t what’s happening when idiots insist on putting poorly bagged kitchen garbage out three days before the trucks come to take it away. I call that “invitation”. So if you find a black bear standing on your back porch you should ask yourself what you did with the leftovers from those T-bones you had the other night…Then you should call 9-1-1 of course.

Habitat is what we call the homelands of nature’s creatures. Nice neutral terminology, “habitat” …sounds vaguely foreign…Scandinavian maybe. According to the wild-life illiterates around here “habitat” ends at the sign declaring the city limits…as if there should be fine print in some universal animal language on the sign that says “You guys stay out” . Back in the good old days of course…animals that couldn’t read were called “game” or more precisely “fair game” which meant that dad and uncle Clarence could load up the shot guns  and put on the rubber boots and go out into the habitat and shoot nature’s ass full of holes…come home and hand mom the carcass then stand around the kitchen with two thumbs stuck in their suspenders and their chests stuck past their shirt buttons. Either the animals have ceased to read the signs on the way into town or they’ve figured out that there are precious few fellas venturing into the habitat these days…at least until somebody invents drive-by duck hunting…No, no, I didn’t even want to think that let alone write it down.  I suppose I can understand why the return of wild-life to our balconies and back yards is disconcerting. What if the bastards are after some pay-back? I should have taken a much closer look at that raccoon’s beady little eyes. He could have been casing the joint for a whole gang of his furry pals…They have nasty little hands that look damn near human…suppose they learn how to open the bloody door!!!

Blues

July 2012

I can see why a lot of writers were heavy drinkers. Half pissed I’m twice as clever as I am sober…and fully drunk I’m incapable. I’ve decided that the problem is focus. Under normal circumstances our focus is blurred by the horrific volume of propaganda and merchandising bullshit that clouds our skies like screaming gnats. It’s not only hard to see anything important through the cloud…it’s hard to think of anything important. And yet…we are told by the powers that be..much that is important is afoot. Watching the Republican cannibals shinny up the greasy pole I was damned if I could figure out what was important about that and several late evening rye and colas didn’t help. Using the same lens I glanced around at several other “important” topics and finding a vacuum I thought it was time to examine the lens. I grew up in Rye Whiskey country. In my home town there was a distillery that bottled Crown Royal. It was a tradition at one time that the folks working there were allowed to take home, every night if they wanted…whatever bottle would fit their lunch box. Needless to say, the local liquor store was a losing proposition. There were  undoubtedly many people in town who thought that rye sharpened the focus in their lives…but there were many others who understood that once focus became wearisome…oblivion offered solace. In the years after the big war when I grew up solace was a thing of value. Social drinking was a popular entertainment and lubricated joy echoed from Saturday night to Sunday morning when a suitably painful remorse brought a deceptive quiet to the town. Looking back I can see that the lens of whiskey wisdom is smudged and imperfect. Sitting here now though…I’m thinking…imperfect or not…and in the absence of anything better ready to hand…a couple of shots of whiskey is helping me to ignore the ignorance and incredible malice that has descended on our lives like a plague of locusts. We can’t pass a newspaper without it biting our ass. Rupert Murdoch’s crew demonstrated that nothing is private but…don’t you wonder what they tuned in to and decided not to print? Turn on the T.V. and fucking vampires fly off the screen or there are so many cop shows that you have to ask yourself …if these T.V. cops are catching and killing all these bad guys…who’s left? I mean really! Forty years of cop shows on several channels seven nights a week? No wonder the prisons are full. I can’t even start on politics…there isn’t enough whiskey in the world to screen out the insanity. Maybe it’s knowing that that keeps me from being an alcoholic. These things, ghastly and so incredibly mundane, blind us to the richness of our culture. They subjugate culture and try to convince us that this IS our culture. It isn’t. I’ll take a drink and a toke now and then…Sometimes it clears my head and lets me hear the music…enjoy the dance, appreciate the art or even more, the leaves on the trees and the sound of my true love breathing in her sleep. I don’t need a drink or a toke to do that…but I have to admit that from time to time it helps turn down the volume on the bullshit generator. It’s doing that tonight….and maybe I just passed …focus.

Know what I miss about newspapers? It’s not that I’ve read or seen most of the coverage on the net or on T.V before it gets to the paper….although it seems a waste of trees to cover it all again. Newspapers are all about the local advertising business…always have been, apart from the odd iconoclast who has a message retrieved from outer space or a deep voice heard in the bathroom in the tiny hours of the night. And newspapers have always been organs of political info,mis-info,dis-info and outright bullshit. So it’s none of those things that I miss. I read newspapers only on weekends now…hoping for those analysis pieces that review the week’s news in maybe a little more depth. No…what I miss is the fillers. Fillers are those little two column inches that editors throw in to make all of the content fit a page. They made my day, those fillers. A story about a woman in Florida who got so tired of a hang nail on her toe that she propped her foot up on a chair, took careful aim with her pistol and shot off the toe…and blew a hole in the refrigerator door. “I didn’t think it could hurt anymore than that hangnail” she told the sheriff. I love the little stories of guys who stop their cars on highways to let a family of turtles cross the road…and backs up traffic for a mile of honking horns and flashing headlights. There’s always a baby somewhere that climbs out a window and drops five stories into the waiting arms of a passing stranger. Occasionally a true tabloid nugget will slip into a filler…”Man bites dog” stories they’re called. O.K. so a family in Boston moves to San Francisco along with the family cat. You already know what happens don’t you? That brave kitty makes it through hail and sleet and floods and battles with other wild animals and avoids cars and trucks and somehow….brings a tear to my eye…somehow the brave little scrawny bugger makes it back to Boston…only to find the house has been demolished to build a high-rise condominium that doesn’t allow pets…I always thought there ought to be a magazine of fillers from all over the world. It would be great…who cares about these idiot politicians who have nothing to say and insist on repeating it for weeks leading up to elections. Or the latest terrifying disaster…a brand new disease that will wipe us off the planet…or space junk..you know that stuff has to land somewhere…could come right through your roof. Don’t laugh…I was living in Vancouver years ago when a chunk of blue ice came through the roof of an apartment building in Kitsilano. It ploughed through three floors and ended up blinking coldly at some freaked out dude relaxing on his couch. Blue ice from outer space!!! Enough to make you swear off the weed. But no…no no..maybe worse than that…You know that blue stuff they use in the toilets of airliners…disinfectant…goes into a holding tank…and it’s cold up there at twenty thousand feet…Global warming…that’s good for twenty blood pressure points on the right day. And where is there not a war? It’s not that I don’t want to hear about anymore wars but …really I don’t. What I don’t is…want to hear that any more wars have started. I’m tired of hearing about stupid urban murders over some bullshit that nobody will remember in two weeks.Tired of dipshit gangbangers who are ready to shoot up somebody’s house full of kids over ‘Their Turf”. What the fuck is “Their Turf”? In twenty years these assholes will be in jail or working wage slaves, living in a tract house suburb with kids of their own and weekends filled with renovations…and heads full of regrets….nowhere near their “Turf” anymore. So it would be nice to read a magazine filled with stupid little stories of people being human…crazy maybe…dumb as doorknobs, often… doing things that make you shake your head and smile. I’ll leave you with the guy who robs a small town bank in northern Ontario…grabs the loot and runs outside to jump in a cab that’s conveniently parked at the curb…”Drive” he says in his best tough guy voice and he’s thinking “damn…I got the money” and “damn…this cab was right here waiting”

“Where to?” says the cop behind the wheel of the this-is-not-a-cab-stupid.

Damn.

O.K. I hate American Idol…I don’t just dislike it…I hate it. It’s one of the many shows that make me wish television had never been invented (CSI Miami is another) . It’s not that I don’t believe the kid down the street who sprays misspelled graffiti on random walls like a cat with bad kidneys couldn’t possibly have talent. If by some strange chance the little shit does possess a talent, I’m sure I could live without knowing. A few years ago I saw a strange phenomenon called “Tots in Tiaras” or “Toddlers in Tiaras”. Scared the crap out of me and I couldn’t go near a T.V. for days. Have you seen it?…They get these tiny girl children painted and primped and dressed up and trained like miniature human drag queens to compete in some outrageous gas bag pageants in the name of doting mothers and freaked out hairdressers, seeking beauty and the promise of future fame and glory…just as soon as we colonize Mars.  The thought of running into one of these scarred children later in life chilled me to the bone. I’m convinced that some day there will be an epidemic of stupid men found killed by a gibbering princess who lost it and started eating their faces. But I digress…again. So American Idol…yes, well if there is a hell, Simon Cowell needs to go there and sing and dance forever…probably old Danny Kaye tunes. Simon claims to have invented the talent show format in Britain and who am I to doubt him…So, here’s the plan…you get a panel of suitably sympathetic characters who have questionable skills for recognizing talent when they see or hear it…get a host who has the personality of a lounge lizard and you line up dozens of people from all walks of life who want to drink Crystal and Red Bull with Russian gangsters in the best nightclubs in Peoria…and get recognized in the local supermarket . “Hey…aren’t you…?”. And these people will perform incredible feats of entertainment in a life and death, cut-throat competition in front an audience of millions. And apparently …who knew?…there is an endless supply of such people. Not just in the U.S.A. but all over the world. Worse still, there are millions of people who not only watch this staggering spectacle but actually phone in their votes for darling flavour of the week. That was hideous enough but as with all things…it gets old. The producers change the panelists…make up little dramas between panelists to boost their celebrity bite …try to find more bizarre acts…even have a contestant collapse on camera…AHAHHH! The ratings blipped on that one. So the big brained demons came up with a great idea…Why not show the “behind-the-scenes-pressure-cooker” get a lot of people vomiting with anxiety…fainting from stress…collapsing under the pressure? Show the world what the entertainment business is all about. And that’s what the mother fuckers did. Turned a reality show into a sureality show. Anxiety pornography. These people ought to be whipped out of town by packs of psychotic children dressed in latex suits with horns and pointed tails. How far away is the end of the world?

I know I shouldn’t hate it…I could simply not watch it. Yet it represents something ultimately depressing for me. I can’t help looking at Simon Cowell’s face and seeing arrogance and a cynicism too deep to fathom. He’s turned people into performing seals and he isn’t surprised by anything that appears before him…good or bad. And that makes us complicit and somehow empty. I can’t help myself…I hate American Idol and all of its ghastly clones.

Just this past week it was revealed that our Minister of What-If-Something-Goes-Wrong,  the honourable Mr. Toews (“the honourable” goes with the office and not necessarily the man) gave approval to the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service to use intelligence gathered by torture. Theoretically it was only to be used if Canadian lives were at stake. This honourable minister of the crown had assured Canadians that torture would not be condoned and that intelligence gathered by torture is considered “tainted”. And so it was assumed by most Canadians that torture was not our policy…ever. But it turns out that the honourable gentleman provided his approval more than two years ago while claiming that it wasn’t so. After all, he is the mInister of What-if -Something-goes-Wrong.

When I was a child of the male flavour I was arrested by my mother on several occasions for “torturing” my sisters. I was probably guilty…but since then whenever the topic or opportunity came up…I have been generally opposed. It’s not that I don’t think it works. I’m sure that it does.  And it isn’t that I’m particularly moral about it. I’m opposed because I’ve always believed that people have missed the point about torture. Torture is not a means of extracting information. It’s a means of inflicting hideous terror upon helpless people in order to convince their friends and relatives that having any knowledge in their heads that the powerful deem to be dangerous…will result in painful oblivion. It is a means of telling people that they can’t know “bad” things and furthermore “don’t even think about it”. Torture is about exercising power over one’s enemies. Any information gleaned is secondary and probably unreliable. I suppose that I should be morally outraged about this business. But being morally opposed seems to me, too narrow. Torturers are rapists and murderers and an astonishing number of them wash their hands and faces…change their clothes and go home every night to a mundane life with wife and family who have no idea and who wouldn’t believe that they live with a vampire. So what of our honourable minister of What-if-Something-Goes-Wrong? His rationalization is beneath contempt. That he’s a politician shouldn’t mean that he is ridiculous and morally reprehensible. If he happens to be it’s probably because he always was. But he’s not alone. The angry frustration of millions makes them want to exercise some terror and power over the insidious and almost invisible bombers and snipers and demons on the other side…whatever side that is. So some of the most ordinary citizens who live next door and down the street listen to the honourable Minister and think…”Well if somebody is thinking about doing something bad to us…we ought to find out about that shit before it’s too late…and if that means torture…as long as somebody else is doing it…H-M-M-M”. And that’s how we come to tolerate rape, murder, torture,anonymous terror, victimizing the innocent…becoming savages, divesting our humanity. It’s not merely morally wrong. It’s evil.

It is evil, honourable Mr. Toews…Minister of Where-Have-We-Gone-Wrong.

Feb 11 2112