Chagal4's Blog

Even small children know that all art is magic…which is why politicians and lawyers should stay the hell away from it. It isn’t that politicians and lawyers can’t do magic…they can in some hideous obscene sort of way but it’s hardly art is it? Matters not at all if the art takes the form of some proto human pressing a greasy hand onto a cave wall and blowing ground charcoal and powdered bone through a hollow sabre tooth tusk onto it. Could be a poem, young Ginsberg as perfectly ugly as a troglydite in his underwear, composing in the window of a seedy NewYork cave, sperm dreams and dope devils dancing in his head. Hilda Humblepenny cutting a swathe of twirls and capers through the twilight shadows of the Amherstburg high school gym…and although the place is empty at this time of night, she leaves a trail of broken hearts behind her like the wake of the mothership swerving through the Milky Way. A politician can work a lifetime or three and never get close to that twelve year old serenity…go Hilda!

The Villa Alice sits like a dozing drunk ,wide bottomed and sagging, a reprobate dowager installed on the main drag of Varadero with a  comic gleam in her eye. All around her the local comrades have erected newer bunkers of socialist domesticity. Palm trees rattle in the breeze and tourist buses roar grey diesel drudge into the air leaving vapour trails of foreign currency whispering down the side streets. Who knows Alice and who built her this fine old villa …now faded and blurred by neglect and the crowding of dozens of tenants over the years. It is the thought of the Villa  Alice that promotes the artist urge. It is no villa at all but perhaps in the bad old days a fine hotel…with a railed veranda and latticed windows. A powder blue Buick with enough chrome to build bicycles for all of Thailand sits on wide white walls,  metal pinging  into the heat of the afternoon. A mullatto princess wears an ivory linen dress and a panama hat smokes a fine cigar like a broken promise, smiles at nothing through dark green Raybans.

All that gone except the memory of three old trees crowding a corner near the fence and the Villa Alice leaning into the Cuban afternoon…paint pealing and sorry hissing  “vaya” to passing strangers, inviting someone to buy her an ivory linen dress.  And Hilda dances barefoot on the shiny wooden floor while Van Morrison is wailing in her head. I woke up from a dream I had on an airconditioned bus…We were coasting into sun and sand a million miles from snow and cold…in a powder blue Buick with an overload of chrome.

It’s a damn shame. There were people in Ottawa and no doubt elsewhere who deplore positions espoused by Ms. Coulter. I happen to be one of them but I am not one who wants to curtail her right to free speech. It seems to me that we need to foster a society that isn’t afraid of words…that makes intelligent judgements about what words mean and what are the intentions of those who utter them. This is precisely the reason that we develop laws to prosecute people who incite and who promote hatred and acts of prejudicial violence against others. It struck me as wrong-headed that students and others congratulated themselves for preventing Ms. Coulter’s speaking engagement in Ottawa. I applaud their anger and resistance to the incendiary and racist remarks of the unfortunate creature but I think she should have been allowed to speak and if there was cause or reason in her speech to believe it contravened our laws, she should have been charged. As events unfolded she gained a lot of publicity, found reason to bash Ottawa as backward and  reinforced the already rabid prejudices of her followers. And…that’s a damn shame.

This isn’t a sermon. We live in polarized times. On almost any issue the lines are etched in black and white and the emotional investment on both sides of any argument carries the baggage of dozens of other issues addressed and unaddressed. Very often our leaders are sponsors of polarization rather than reconcialiation. Reasoned debate is getting harder to find as political parties resort to attack ads and obfuscation to avoid explaining policy or positions. Ordinary people have more technology and more sophisticated media at their disposal now than they’ve ever had but trying to research any given issue is time consuming and confusing as the internet and network media contain the distortions and bias of pro and con camps and reflect ideologies that are often suspect. It’s difficult to know what information to trust and the fall back is to pick a side. As a consequence more people are becoming disenfranchized and isolated…not only here in Canada but around the world in the so-called democratic industrialized nations. In elections over recent years voter turn out has dropped like a rock…and the poll end results show splits that are close to fifty-fifty. Results show that people are almost evenly divided platform by platform. It seems to me that this indicates a deep fault-line of dissatisfacton and intransigence. On even inconsequential issues there seems to be too much at stake….while at the same time paradoxically, people increasingly feel that their opinion has no value. The frustration of consistent failure to get their point across builds itself into the next issue to arise. These are the new failures of democracy and Ann Coulter is only one small face of it…and she should be an insignificant part of it. Instead she has become yet another match to light the fuses of all those frustrated and angry people. And that’s a damn shame.