Category Archives: Culture

Nov 25 2013
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Culture, Humour

Straighten up and fly right this week

Just go with the flow

Just go with the flow

Thanks to newspapers the western world over having nothing actually new to cover during the shoulder season between Halloween and Christmas, we learn from them the modern codicils of an ancient philosophy.

Welcome, dear reader, to Live Like a Stoic Week, which The Globe and Mail’s John Allemang describes in his front-page piece yesterday as, “a global self-improvement experiment, starting Monday (Nov. 25), that aims to spread Stoic virtue across the virtual world.”

By “Stoic virtue”, he means what the dictionary defines as indifference to both pain and pleasure. Other synonyms that may apply include: resignation, imperturbability, fortitude, fatalism, and stolidity.

Writing in 167 AD, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius – perhaps that most famous of historical Stoics – commenced Book Two of his “Meditations” (translation by George Long) thusly:

“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.

“But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him.

“For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.”

That’s easy for him to say.

Still, the good folks at Exeter University in the United Kingdom think what the world needs now is more of the old boy’s stiff-upper-liplessness. These organizers of the second annual Stoic Week write sweetly on their website, “the only thing that has real value is an excellent mental state, identified with virtue and reason. This is the only thing that can guarantee our happiness. External things such as money, success, fame and the like can never bring us happiness.”

And that’s not all: “Many of our negative emotions are based on mistaken judgements, but because they are due to our judgements it means they are within our control. Change the judgements and you change the emotions.”

Meanwhile, heed the natural order of things: “We ought to acknowledge that we but small parts of a larger, organic whole, shaped by larger processes that are ultimately out of our control.”

And, so, “there are some things we have control over (our judgements, our own mental state) and some things that we do not (external processes and objects). Much of our unhappiness is caused by confusing these two categories: thinking we have control over something that ultimately we do not.”

Oddly enough, modern Stoicism sounds very much like a mash-up of quasi-New Age doctrines of self-actualization, positive thinking and environmentalism, right down to the “Gaia hypothesis,” which proposes (according to a Wikipedia entry) that “organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.”

The question, of course, is whether any of this can do us any good. Are we humans already past the point of no return to sanity?

The problem with Stoicism is that its practice requires a disciplined and (here’s the real rub) mature mind. Be honest. Who among us can claim to own one of those? Are we not more like classic hedonists, who believed that pleasure – in our case money, cars, booze, drugs, sex, and mindless channels of electronic entertainment  –  was, in and of itself, the greatest good of all?

At any rate, I’ll give forbearance a whirl. After all, a week without my many indulgences isn’t an eternity.

It’ll only feel that way.

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Nov 21 2013
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Culture, Society

One nation united in logical impairment

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When the Great Rending of Canadian culture occurred is hard to say, exactly. It’s easy to locate the momentous event in one of the terms of office enjoyed by Stephen Harper and crew of grumpy old men and women. They helped it along, of course, but they didn’t start the tear in the tissue of society.

At some point, years before the Great Recession exposed the nasty truth for all to see – the rich really do get richer, and the poor really do get poorer – we began to separate into two camps, a process that lazy mainstream media was all to happy to enable with facile headlines and preposterous sound bites.

On one side of the moat sauntered the educated elites, the vile progressives, the evil socialists – the loathsome Liberal establishment.

On the other bank stood the underschooled commoners, the conspiracy theorists, the science-doubting bootstrappers – the reactionary Conservative outliers.

These might have remained only convenient stereotypes to feed late-night standup comics their gag lines. But, somewhere along the line, we began to believe the characterizations about ourselves.

And while some of us pranced around displaying our Keynesian colours, spouting good-government bromides, a goodly number of us actually became the blunt-nosed, opinionated hardliners we were said to be. Indeed, suddenly, we were proud to count ourselves among such company.

On the subject of embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford – now stripped of many of his official powers, though his Conservative bonafides reportedly go all the way to the Prime Minister’s Office – a reader recently wrote to The Globe and Mail.

“There is a coup at city hall in Toronto, no different than in some Middle Eastern country, except they stopped before there was bloodshed,” he observed. “They have done a marvellous job of character assassination on Mayor Rob Ford. Meanwhile, in your front-page index, you reported that ‘no one in Ottawa has offered an apology – or an explanation – for the apparent disappearance of $3.1 billion that had been allocated for anti-terrorism projects.’ Well, maybe Rob Ford should become prime minister.”

Another reader, writing in a different publication, suggested that Mr. Ford’s crack smoking, public drunkenness and violent outbursts were all tolerable as long as he continued to put the boots to the true enemies of the people: liberals.

The ironies, in all of this, abound, too numerous to count. But Globe columnist Jeffrey Simpson did his level best the other day when he wrote, “You can see the contradictions everywhere in the Conservative/conservative world. Conservatives who support Mr. Ford are the ‘tough on crime’ voters of the kind also targeted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. You would logically assume therefore that a mayor who confesses to having broken laws – smoking crack cocaine, for example – would be just the sort of public person the Conservatives/conservatives would revile. Apparently not.”

This syndrome of systematic logic-impairment, however, extends far beyond the gates of fair TO.

No real thinking is required (in fact, none is preferable) of the jerky-kneed, law-and-order type who likes the cut of Mr. Harper’s jib as he pilots his penal reform agenda through society.

Actual crime in the streets may be at an all-time low, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon our plans to send more people to jail for increasingly minor offences (such as possession of marijuana) over the next several years.

Actual prisons in this country face what Correctional Services Canada now calls “imminent” threats related to “the risk and implications of serious failure of physical infrastructure, critical to life safety, security, operations, and occupant health.” Again, though, that doesn’t mean we should spend the billion-or-so bucks to upgrade them.

Let the bad guys suffer. Who cares if we turn them into very type of people we find we must keep locked behind bars at the extraordinary expense of the one thing we truly care about: our personal bank accounts?

Where is the moderate middle when you need one?

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Oct 23 2013
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Culture, Humour

Writing economically, not all it’s cracked up to be

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Apparently, economists can’t write. Alert the media, many of whose members, by the way, also can’t write.

Perhaps, that’s not an entirely fair observation of either profession. I know plenty of journalists who can churn out truly spiffy prose. Thanks to handy Google, I even know of a few economists who possess mean turns of phrase.

There’s John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run we are all dead.”

There’s Robert Solow: “Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.”

And there’s Karl Marx: “I am not a Marxist.”

But, these are exceptions to the rule. And as a rule, economics does not specifically require of its practitioners an excellent standard of scribbling.

In fact, according to The Canadian Press the other day, “auditors examined an elite group of bank economists, most of them with graduate degrees, who regularly dissect the current state of the Canadian and international economies.”

This chore was important because the group’s advice and analysis has been crucial to the Bank of Canada, which makes the country’s monetary policy, ever since world markets lurched sideways in 2008.

The problem, or so says the audit, is that these highly educated servants of the state experience “difficulties being succinct, grammatically correct, and prioritizing the data into useful information” in the reports they write.

Consequently, “ad-hoc demands by the governor and others for quick analysis, which now absorb up to half the time of these economists, also appear to have created a paper jam as managers must then edit the below-standard English or French,” CP reported. Quoting from the audit, the news service continued: “The cause for lengthy review was in part attributed to writing skills, both in terms of basic communication, as well as how to convey an appropriate level of detail in telling ‘the story.’”

This may be a lousy turn of events for central bankers, but it’s a potential bonanza for people like me, who has spent many profitable hours, over the years, rescuing the Queen’s English from various experts on various subjects, both commonplace and arcane.

A few years ago, I had a chance to edit a thick document on a rather complex issue of social policy. A highly regarded PhD had prepared the work for a well-known Canadian think tank (no names, please).

My assignment from the board of directors was to “action item” (their words, not mine) the organization’s new plain-language policy, which gamely embraced the virtues of clear, uncluttered prose.

All of which looked good on paper.

Some days later, I emerged with a draft that, all agreed, met their expectations and fulfilled their new literacy standards. Then, the great unravelling commenced: the second-guessing; the hand-wringing over missing jargon with which they had, unbeknownst to them, grown accustomed; the startled reaction to the unfamiliar muscularity of the active grammatical voice.

It was all just too much. They quietly returned the document to its original shape and away they went, not the sorrier.

This is, of course the curse of clear writing: It doesn’t hide flawed thinking at all well. It’s aggressive, discomfiting and entirely scrutable.

“In the 20th century, economics consolidated as a profession; economists could afford to write exclusively for one another,” writes Ronald Coase in the December 2012 Harvard Business Review, “At the same time, the field experienced a paradigm shift, gradually identifying itself as a theoretical approach of economization and giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter. Today, production is marginalized in economics, and the paradigmatic question is a rather static one of resource allocation. The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.”

Or, they could be driven by the irresistible urge to commit “bafflegab”, as defined by its inventor, Milton A Smith, assistant general counsel for the US Chamber of Commerce, in 1952: “The multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.”

Now, that’s what I call writing.

Oct 10 2013
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Culture, Economy, Environment

Counting down the days to the Great Transformation

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The world as we know it has been coming to end for years now. We haven’t had to look far to perceive the portents of impending doom: in the entrails of Wall Street corpses; in the tea leaves of governments that no longer work; in the uromancy that predicts widening income gaps between the rich and the rest.

We just haven’t been able to reliably nail down a year for the Great Transformation. Until now.

A researcher at the University of Hawaii, who used to work at Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.S., thinks he knows. The point of no return will arrive. . .wait for it. . .in 2047. . .give or take.

Camillo Mora, who studies numbers for a living, tells the Globe and Mail’s science reporter Ivan Semeniuk that, overall, this is the year in which climate change will become a permanent feature of life on Earth. . .more or less.

According to the article, “The turning point arrives. . .as a worldwide average, if fossil fuel consumption continues unabated; as late as 2069 if carbon emissions are curbed. City by city, the numbers are a bit more revealing. In Montreal, for example, the new normal will arrive in 2046, and for Vancouver not until 2056. But the real spotlight of Dr. Mora’s study is the tropics, where profound changes could be entrenched in little more than a decade.”

As the good doctor says, “Today, when people talk about climate change, the images that come to mind are melting ice and polar bears. People might infer from this that the tropics will be less affected.”

People would be wrong.

But, then, there’s nothing new about that.

Once, not very long ago, people assumed that economic globalization would insert several chickens in pots from Beijing to Kalamazoo – that gross domestic products around the world would rise like juggernauts, heedless of any and all counterforces they may encounter.

Once, not very long ago, people assumed that democratically elected governments served the best, common interests of the majority of voters – that reason and circumspection would effectively quell fanatical and reactionary figures intent on reshaping the public sphere in their own ideologically pinched and impoverished image.

Now comes word from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that, generally speaking, the world’s got itself in an economic ringer – one from which it is not likely to emerge any time soon. Welcome to the age of slow growth.

“Emerging economies have cooled off,” an item in The New York Times reveals. “Europe remains in the doldrums. The United States is facing fiscal uncertainty, and its powerful central bank is contemplating easing up on its extraordinary stimulus efforts, with potentially global ramifications.”

As things stand, the IMF “foresees the world economy increasing by about 2.9 per cent in 2013 and 3.6 per cent in 2014. That is down from 5.4 per cent in 2007, before the global recession hit.”

If its predictions pan out, a few will be spared, thanks to their impenetrable cocoons of wealth and privilege. But most can expect lower standards of living, fewer good jobs, higher costs and increasing poverty and homelessness.

Meanwhile, over in Washington, D.C., legislators are twiddling their thumbs.

“The federal government shutdown and looming deadline to raise the debt ceiling have merged into one major problem on Capitol Hill, though neither issue has a resolution in sight as the government shutdown heads into its second week,” CBS News reports. “Democrats and Republicans (have) dug further into their respective positions: Republicans are calling on Democrats to negotiate over a short-term spending bill and a debt-ceiling increase, and President Obama says he is ready to negotiate over any topic – once the Republicans pass legislation to re-open the government and raise the U.S. borrowing limit without any conditions.”

All of which prompted Laurence Booth of the University of Toronto’s esteemed Rotman School of Management to tell the Toronto Star, “Any sane person obviously believes the U.S. isn’t going to default. That would cause an earthquake in financial markets around the globe.”

Of course, once upon a time, any sane person obviously believed that climate change could very well spell the end of the world – at least, as we know it.

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Sep 30 2013
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Culture, Humour

Sitting up for the real truth

The truth has gone to ground

The truth has gone to ground

In the immortal words of Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agent in the ‘90s cult TV show, The X Files, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. I used to turn that aphorism on its ear: Just because they’re out to get you, doesn’t mean you’re paranoid.

At the time, that seemed to make more practical sense to me as I watched not one, but two, of my employers go bankrupt overnight, victims of shadowy forces they barely perceived, let alone feared.

Lately, though, I’ve come to believe that Mr. Mulder had a point. Conspiracies swirl. Threats are extant. The men in black wear double-wide sized 9s and stand at the foot of my driveway, sifting through the confetti my shredder produces.

Oh yeah. . .the truth is out there people, but trust no one to tell you exactly what that is. (Is it coincidental that the actor, David Duchovny, who played the G-man is exactly the same age as my wife, to the date and year, and that she finds him oddly off-putting? I think not. There’s more to this than meets the eye. But, I digress).

Let’s talk about sitting.

Just released is another in a long line of studies that “prove” that resting on one’s derrière for long hours a day is not only bad for you; it will actually kill you as surely as an assassin’s blade.

Late last year, The Guardian had this to say about the hazard: “Sitting for more than three hours per day cuts about two years off your life expectancy. . .Watching more than two hours of TV per day will cut your life expectancy down another year. An even bleaker discovery? Moderate exercise doesn’t seem to offset the effects of this excessive sitting either. ‘It’s not just about getting physical activity in your life,’ Dr. Peter T. Katzmarzyk of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told Businessweek. ‘Just because you’re doing 30 minutes of physical activity, what about the other 23.5 hours. Don’t just sit the rest of the day.’”

That sounds like good advice, until you consider the source: The globally interconnected medical establishment.

By now, it knows that most people don’t trust it. (How else do you explain the rise of homeopathy and the latent terror of vaccinations)? Therefore, most people will continue to sit around on their arses, watching, say, reruns of The X Files, despite, or, indeed, because of, the expert warnings.

That plays magnificently well into the hands of Big Pharma, who can expect record profits accruing from the drugs they sell to cancer-ridden, diabetes-debilitated patients, ministered to by – you guessed it – the medical establishment. Let the kickbacks commence.

But the conspiracy doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s diabolically nuanced. Think office furniture. Are you getting the picture?

Physicians know that a percentage of people, though in the minority, will actually heed their warnings and immediately shell out hundreds of dollars each for the latest, spiffiest “standing desk” and workplace treadmill so as to avoid stroking out at his keyboard. What’s in it for the doctors? Prescription and post-it pads for life. I kid you not. You can’t make this stuff up.

Yes, gentle reader, the dark confederacies are everywhere.

Just ask Jesse Ventura, former pro wrestler, Minnesota governor, author and occasional actor. (He actually played a man in black in several episodes of The X Files. So, he should know a thing or two about cover ups). “Hidden power, secrets, corruption,” he said at the top of his short-lived TV show, Conspiracy Theory. “You think you know the whole story? Think again. I’ve been a Navy SEAL, a fighter. I’ve heard things that will blow your mind. And now I think it’s time that you get the whole story.”

On the other hand, we may never really want to know the whole story.

The truth may be out there. But you can keep it to yourself, especially if it’s boring.

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Sep 16 2013
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Culture, Government, Politics

Quebec leaders sing a looney tune

State-enforced "neutrality" is for the birds

State-enforced “neutrality” is for the birds

Ranking high on the lengthening list of Quebec Premier Pauline Marois’s dubious political talents is her unerring ability to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from history – especially other people’s history.

Earlier this year, while on a trip to Scotland, the Partis Quebecois leader gamely offered her help to the independence-minded Alex Salmond, that country’s First Minister. She would, she said, send him a few morsels of information from her province’s 1995 referendum on sovereignty. His reaction, in turn, was to go out of his way to avoid being seen with her in public.

Then, last week, she told Le Devoir that ethnic diversity lies at the heart of social unrest in England, where, apparently, “they’re knocking each other over the head and throwing bombs because of multiculturalism and nobody knowing any more who they are in that society.”

Now, we discover through the Globe and Mail that she believes “France is a model of integration.” Further, she suggests that it is “the most beautiful example . . . (it) has a very impressive number of people (from North Africa) and has found a space to live well with immigrants from other regions.”

Wrong, wrong and wrong, again.

The roots of Scotland’s independence movement are so vastly dissimilar from Quebec’s, the comparison does not bear making. And even if they weren’t, what possible use would the PQ’s trove of documents from its failed attempt to sever Quebec from the rest of Canada be to the leaders of the Scottish National Party?

As for England, sectarian and ethnic violence — which, it’s worth noting, is no more rampant than it is in south-central Los Angeles — has less to do with “multiculturalism” than it does with the nation’s proximity to radicalized networks of European terror cells. This is a fact with which it and its continental neighbours have been dealing for decades.

And what of France, that “model of integration?”

An item from a BBC report this summer should settle the question:

“Crowds of youths have thrown stones at French police and set fire to cars in a second night of disturbances in the Paris suburb of Trappes. The trouble was sparked by the arrest of a man whose wife was told by police on Thursday to remove an Islamic face-covering veil, banned in public. He has been accused of trying to strangle the officer. Up to 300 people attacked a police station in Trappes on Friday night where the man was being held.”

Not for nothing, but methinks Ms. Marios’s staff might want to review the briefing notes they prepare for her before she finds occasion to pontificate in public. For them, and the rest of Quebec, this is getting embarrassing. And it seems to be going around.

In a recent column, my former colleague, the Globe’s Jeffry Simpson worried that Quebec’s leadership appears a tad unhinged, as Ms. Marois and company begin to “secularize” their civil service à la France. “These are the kind of policies that make Quebec look intolerant and slightly crazy in pursuit of some notional idea of the Quebec identity,” he wrote. “After all, the number of non-francophone employees of the province is tiny. From a practical point of view, this (charter of values) and the laws that might flow from it represent a fake solution to a non-problem.”

For Ontario, at least, this phony fix is turning into an opportunity.

“We don’t care what’s on your head,” an advertisement for Lakeridge Health of Oshawa reads. “We care what’s in it . . .Our focus is on safety and quality, and we’re looking for people like you to join our team of health professionals.”

If Ms. Marois cares nothing for most of what’s guaranteed by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, she should nonetheless scrutinize Section 6, Subsection 2, which reads: “Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right (a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and (b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.”

It’s mighty tough to draw the wrong conclusion from that.

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Sep 12 2013
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Culture, Politics

Fighting discrimination with more discrimination

The Partis Quebecois's Great Pumpkin: A solution looking for a problem

The Partis Quebecois’s Great Pumpkin: A solution looking for a problem

Finally, we Canadians face an issue about which all federal parties in Ottawa will concur. Even better, their consensus is morally, ethically and, quite likely, legally unassailable. The question is: What took them so long?

With its new “Charter of Values” – about which it has been hinting for weeks – the Quebec government seeks to expunge “overt and conspicuous” religious icons – such as hijabs, kippas and turbans – from its public service. No more veils. No more headdresses. No more ostentatious crucifixes dangling around teachers’ necks.

Big Brother’s foot soldier Bernard Drainville, the minister who is apparently  responsible for conformity in La belle province, explains the new policy bluntly in news reports, to wit: “If the state is neutral, those working for the state should be equally neutral in their image.”

His boss, Premier Pauline Marois couldn’t agree more. In fact, she told Le Devoir last week, “In England, they get into fights and throw bombs at one another because of multiculturalism and people get lost in that type of a society.”

What a profoundly stupid thing to say, but no dumber, perhaps, than Mr. Drainville’s assertion that ensuing “neutrality” among civic workers is a simple matter of imposing a secular dress code, as if the Province were underwriting some outlandish episode of What Not to Wear.

Contrary to the Partis Quebecois’s insustence, absolutely nothing good can come of this unnecessary, provocative nonsense. And Jason Kenney, Canada’s Minister of Employment, Social Development and Multiculturalism, is right to question the constitutionality of the move.

“(We are) very concerned by any proposal that would limit the ability of any Canadians to participate in our society and that would affect the practice of their faith,” he told reporters this week. “We will ask the Department of Justice if these proposals become law to closely review them and if it’s determined that a prospective law violates the constitutional protections for freedom of religion to which all Canadians are entitled, we will defend those rights vigorously.”

Added NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, “We’re categorical in rejecting this approach. Human rights don’t have a best-before date, they’re not temporary and they’re not a popularity contest. To be told that a woman working in a day care centre, because she’s wearing a head scarf, will lose her job is to us intolerable in our society.”

Yet, despite the utter correctness of their points, it’s a shame that these two have come late to the contretemps.

In August, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was first and alone among federal politicians to denounce Quebec’s divisive scheme. “We sadly see that even today, as we speak, for example, of this idea of a Charter of Quebec Values, there are still those who believe that we have to choose between our religion and our Quebec identity, that there are people who are forced by the Quebec State to make irresponsible and inconceivable choices,” he told a group of his fellow Grits in Prince Edward Island.

The only official statements coming from the Conservative and NDP camps at that time were watery testimonials to civil rights and commitments to carefully review Quebec’s plans if and when they went public. Still, better late than never.

The values charter is not only a palpable jab at religious freedom; it infantilizes an entire society. It tells Quebecers that those who work for the public service can’t be trusted with the symbols and trappings of their faith and ethnicity while they are on the job; that the only way to prevent discrimination is, bizarrely, to embrace it.

Just as bad, it tells the world that the government of a sizable chunk of Canada is diametrically opposed to the principles of equity and diversity that have, for decades, burnished the country’s international reputation for fairness and inclusiveness.

The Partis Quebecois has taken a non-issue and turned it into a firestorm for no sensible reason other than cynically appealing to certain elements of its exclusionary base. This, alone, transports it beyond the realm of provincial partisanship and lands it squarely in the arena of federal politics.

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Sep 12 2013
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Culture, Humour

The 15-minute solution to (just about) everything

Fame is so fleeting, so cold in its remembrance

Fame is so fleeting, so cold in its remembrance

There’s more time than you think in 15 minutes. Just ask Stephen Harper, who claims to have written a book about hockey in daily quarter-hour increments over the past ten years. I have no reason to doubt him.

In 15 minutes, I can get a lot done. I can walk a mile. I can mow the back lawn. I can weed the front garden. I can start and finish my Pilates routine. I can hard-boil an egg. If life were truly organized the way an advertising agency bills its clients – with a tyrannical focus on getting results in bite-sized chunks of the hour – I might even solve the crisis in the Middle East or work out that whole cold fusion thing.

But, I must admit, the idea of penning a manuscript on Canada’s great game – or, indeed, on anything – in this fashion has never entered my mind. How would that work, exactly?

The prime minister comes home after a hard day of insulting the Official Opposition, grabs a quick bite with the wife and kids, retires to the study, dons his favorite sweater-vest, flips on an old Guy Lomdardo recording, taps the stopwatch sitting to the right of his computer. Go! Fifteen minutes later, it’s time for bed.

Is it really all that implausible? The math suggests the approach is remarkably efficient. Multiply 15 by 365 (for the number of days in the year) and you get 5,475 minutes. Now divide that product by 60 (for the number of minutes in an hour) and you get 91.25. So, that works out to be equivalent to one extremely long work-week a year, or about three months of full-time effort over ten. Not too shabby, at all.

We can’t yet know the quality of the project’s result (it’s only available to the reading public in early November). Still, the economy of its execution is impressive.

On the other hand, why Mr. Harper chose 15 minutes – and not, say, 10 or 20 – as the duration of his daily input remains a mystery. It could have to do with the importance of this unit of time in the popular zeitgeist.

“In the future,” Andy Warhol once said, “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” There’s even a Wikipedia entry titled, “15 minutes of fame”, in which the author, or authors, report, “Benjamin H.D. Buchloh suggests that the core tenet of Warhol’s aesthetic, being ‘the systematic invalidation of the hierarchies of representational functions and techniques’ of art, corresponds directly to the belief that the ‘hierarchy of subjects worthy to be represented will someday be abolished,’ hence anybody, and therefore ‘everybody,’ can be famous once that hierarchy dissipates, ‘in the future’.”

Again, though, why 15 minutes?

A Los Angeles-based media and public relations company that actually calls itself “Fifteen Minutes” explains on its website, “In today’s world, anything is possible in fifteen minutes. Identities are built. Futures are shaped. Legends are born.”

Really? That seems like a mighty tall order for such a fleeting sweep of the minute hand.

Less ambitious, perhaps, is Christine from the U.S. Midwest who runs something called 15minutebeauty.com. “I’m a Pediatric Critical Care doctor,” she writes. “My husband is a professor at a huge university. . .I’m a mommy and a bit of a beauty addict. If left to my own devices, I could easily spend four hours getting ready each morning! Unfortunately, I am most definitely NOT a morning person, so I’m often running late. I need to squeeze a product heavy routine into. . .15 minutes!”

For its part, ABC Literacy Canada thinks a quarter-of-an-hour is just the right amount of time to wean junior off the gaming console. “Learning can happen at any time,” it declares on its website. Practicing literacy together for just 15 minutes a day has tremendous benefits for both children and parents.”

You can, among other things, “Create your own comic strip about your family. . .

Invent two new endings to your favourite book. . .Tell knock-knock jokes together while doing the dishes” and “find 15 things that begin with the letter ‘S’.”

Here’s one: “S” is for “Stephen Harper”, who wrote a book about hockey in daily quarter-hour increments over the past ten years, and who’s now enjoying his 15 minutes of fame for having done so.

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Sep 02 2013
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Culture, Politics

Pot’s “cool” factor is fading fast

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Never to be outdone – especially not by a Liberal usurper to the parliamentary throne – Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (how is that guy even alive?) now professes to have smoked pot. Whereas Justin Trudeau confirms that he has sucked back on a spliff maybe six times in his life (yeah, right), Hog Town’s burgemeister giggles, “Oh yeah, I won’t deny . . .I smoked a lot of it.”

Given his performance in office, that particular admission is not likely to cheer those who insist that marijuana does not impair one’s judgement. Still, he does appear to be in good company.

Ever since Mr. Trudeau’s calculated announcement this month, elected officials from all points on the political spectrum have been fairly tripping over themselves to cash in on this newest “cool” factor in Canadian politics.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne says smoking pot is among the “personal decisions that people make. I’m not going to weight in on a decision of another politician or individual.” As for her own “personal decisions,” she adds, “I have smoked marijuana, but not for the last 35 years. . .and certainly not since my children were born. It has never been a big part of my life.”

Liberal MP Wayne Easter says, “Yes I tried it once about probably 40, 45 years ago now and once what enough for me.”

His colleague Sean Casey explains, “I did as a teenager, I tried it couple of times. I didn’t like it, I was never a smoker and I hacked and coughed so much it didn’t do anything for me, quite frankly.”

Meanwhile, Liberal MP Lawrence MacAulay sounds almost ashamed when he admits “I have never smoked marijuana. . .Well I guess down in Magel it was hard to find. I didn’t know much about it back then.”

It’s the same species of answer that Nova Scotia Liberal Leader, Stephen McNeil, gives when he says he, too, is a virgin to weed: “It probably has something to do with a mother who was a sheriff and five brothers who are law enforcement officers.”

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak was actually out front on this issue back in 2011 when he volunteered, “I was a normal kid, I had a normal upbringing, a normal life in university. I experimented from time to time with marijuana. In other words, it was nothing to write home about in the “grand scheme of things.”

At around that time, U.S. President Barack Obama cracked up the Washington press corps when, in response to a question about whether he ever inhaled, he declared: “Frequently. . .That was the point.”

As a Wikipedia entry points out, “Prior to prohibition, U.S. politicians known for growing cannabis include some of the nation’s Founding Fathers and Presidents.” There’s Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James Madison. There’s also Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor and George Washington.

More recently, since pot’s interdiction, a virtual bevy of prominent baby boomers have admitted to using the stuff, including Bill Clinton, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the current U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

All of which raises the question: How cool can something be if everyone is (or was) doing it?

I was roundly considered a nerd in high school in large part because I refused to  toke up. I wish I could say this was one of my principled stands. The truth is I didn’t like the smell, though I didn’t (still don’t) begrudge anyone else’s decision to partake.

The legal alcohol I consume actually makes me more of an outlier (if not an especially cool one) than the marijuana some of my friends and associates smoke. I’m edgy and dangerous, flirting with disaster. In contrast, they’re all too bloody normal, even, dare I say, conformist.

Rob Ford – who has been lambasted in the press for his alleged appearance in a video with drug dealers and his infamous declaration, “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine” – wonders why all these politicians “are all coming out” regarding their use of marijuana. It is, he seems to suggest, no big deal.

For once, he’s dead right.

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Aug 29 2013
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Culture, Politics

The high times of Justin Trudeau

Death in Dhaka...600 and counting

Politically, at least, it appears federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau can smoke pot and chew gum at the same time.

His admission last week that he partook in a celebratory exchange of herb at a party with friends three years ago generated not much more than polite applause among most Canadians, who care more about their mounting household debt than the recreational indiscretions of their elected officials.

The CBC’s “Community Blog” members seemed only too willing to forgive.

“So he’s human! It makes him even more likeable,” one posted.

Declared another: “And he’s honest. It raises him in my esteem, and I’m not even a Liberal.”

Added another: “I will vote for Trudeau on this alone. . .don’t decriminalize it, legalize, regulate and tax it. And I don’t even smoke weed. It makes sense.”

Indeed, one observed, “Name me one politician who hasn’t? Seriously, does this have to be an issue? I think issues such as honesty are a lot more important.”

In contrast (naturally) the federal Conservatives reacted less sanguinely to Mr. Trudeau’s confession. Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the wayward fellow’s actions “speak for themselves”. Justice Minister Peter MacKay insisted the Grit honcho exhibited a “a profound lack of judgment. . .By flouting the laws of Canada while holding elected office, he shows he is a poor example for all Canadians, particularly young ones. Justin Trudeau is simply not the kind of leader our country needs.”

But if they were trying to have a field day at Mr. Trudeau’s expense, they soon recognized that few in the media or, indeed, the public at large were willing to play that particular game. In fact, this is becoming a pattern – as heartening to Liberal brand masters as it is worrying to their opposite numbers in the Tory encampment.

Justin Trudeau is gaining momentum as fast as Stephen Harper is losing it. Oddly, parliamentary prorogation helps the former far more than it does the latter. Although the prime minister may enjoy a short break from Question Period, his Grit rival is free to pontificate at length on social and economic justice issues about which, increasingly, Canadians care. What’s more, in sending his messages, Mr. Trudeau is using major and social media to marvelous effect.

Last week, he came out first and forcefully on the subject of Quebec’s decision to curtail expressions of religious affiliation among public servants in that province.  “I have enormous concerns about the limits that would be imposed on people, on their religion and on their freedom of expression,” he told reporters following a consultation with Premier Pauline Marois. “I don’t think it’s who we are and I don’t think it honours us to have a government that does not represent our generosity and openness of spirit.”

Online reaction to his remarks was swift and broadly supportive, if not uniformly for their contents then unanimously for their candor.

“Slowly but very deliberately Mr. Trudeau is showing Canadians that he is a different kind of of political animal,” one reader posted to the Globe and Mail’s website. “He is offering a potentially refreshing choice and is starting to prove that he is not afraid to run the risk of taking positions that may not appeal to everyone.”

Another pointedly observed, “I think it’s absolutely hilarious that after taxpayers have spent a lot of money paying for Mr. Harper’s strategically planned Arctic dog-and-pony show, he’s been bumped off the stage by Mr. Trudeau. Substance (no pun intended) prevails over photo-ops.”

This week, Mr. Trudeau launched another salvo into the hull of the Conservative dreadnaught by stating that the much-vaunted economic recovery, for which the Harper government adores taking credit, is unequal and, therefore, unfair to many middle-class Canadians. Speaking for himself (but clearly with his leader’s sanction, Liberal finance critic Scott Brison told The Globe’s Jane Taber, “The economic recovery has left behind a lot of middle-class Canadian families. Young Canadians and their middle-class families are facing real challenges, near-record levels of personal debt, some of the worst job numbers in decades.”

About which one commentator, representatively, posted, “Looks like we have a young leader who is getting better and better as he goes along. I’ll take that over Harper and his Band of Bucketheads any day.”

All of which suggests that Mr. Trudeau is riding high and in more ways than one.

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