A poignant, satirical commentary on modern Canadian culture, “There’s stupidity … and then there’s willful stupidity.”
Pick a country, any country. LooA poignant, satirical commentary on modern Canadian culture, “There’s stupidity … and then there’s willful stupidity.”
Pick a country, any country. Look closely and it won’t take an astute observer long to determine that modern politics, modern government, modern courts and laws, and modern culture lie somewhere in a triangle bounded by “shitstorm”, “clusterfuck”, and “incurably dysfunctional”. The USA today, for example, is within a hair’s breadth of placing a convicted felon in the Oval Office, empowering him with the assistance of other varied criminals in their House of Representatives and the Senate, and enabling his conversion of the country to a neo-Nazi theocracy. (But I digress …)
I might prefer to think otherwise but Canada is not immune.
Its situation may be somewhat more peaceful (one might say somewhat more “Canadian”) but, sadly, we have our troubles. Ineffective minority governments created by an aging and ineffective “first past the post” electoral system drastically in need of revision; enormous disparities across the country in local language, culture, regional economics, provincial and municipal GDP, taxation, and employment; perennial head-butting with Quebec; aboriginal issues writ large; our very own national version of participation in the global flirtation with hard right wing politics; and so on. KING JOHN OF CANADA is a satirical vision of a country on the verge of national break-up, and provincial and municipal secession via the typically Canadian approach of democratic referendum, a country that comes to grip with its issues by the very unlikely method of dissolving the office of Governor-General, Canada’s head of state and local representative of the King or Queen of England, and installing its own down home monarch selected by (are you ready for this?) lottery!!
I was ecstatic over the enormous possibility for satire and commentary promised by KING JOHN OF CANADA’s brilliant creative premise. But, ultimately, I was sadly deflated by Gardiner’s inability to put together an interesting, compelling story line and novel that took advantage of those possibilities. Not to take away anything from his observations on Canadian culture and its current political situation, but KING JOHN OF CANADA just fell flat for me and, to be honest, I didn’t even bother finishing it.
Some of those observations:
“Quebec was the place where most money in Canada was spent, Toronto was the place where it was earned … Toronto’s duty was to be taxed. While the federal government pumped money from the city to pay for daycare in Quebec, Toronto’s public schools were being closed for lack of funding.”
On politics in journalism:
“If a liberal minister spoke approvingly of motherhood, headlines were to read: ”GOVERNMENT SLAMS DADS”. Managements with a Christian bias referred to employees of fertility clinics as “abortionists”, while writers for publications belonging to Jewish-owned syndicates understood that there was no other noun for the adjective “Palestinian” but “terrorist”. And so it went”
On the legalities of a referendum for secession:
“The plan was to position Toronto independence as a fait accompli. There was any number of legal barriers, of course – not the least of which was that, technically speaking, municipalities had no standing in the Constitution – but revolutions don’t respond to legal niceties.” (Something right-wing USA would do very well to bear in mind when they scoff at the Constitutional illegality of California or New York seceding from the USA. But, once again, I digress … )
On Quebec and bilingualism as national cultural policy:
“There was never any shortage of billboard-sized examples of Quebec’s contempt for English Canada … On one hand, here was the federal government spending tens of millions encouraging anglophones to learn French; on the other was Quebec, defying the country’s own Charter or rights in its determination to suppress the use of English in the province.”
Well, there’s plenty more where those came from but I think you get the idea. Lots of meat in KING JOHN OF CANADA but, for my money, it was presented poorly, it was under-cooked, and there were no potatoes, vegetables or dessert.
In late 1929, “ … the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, …”
“… when the easy, buoyant era of In late 1929, “ … the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, …”
“… when the easy, buoyant era of the twenties – the roaring, turbulent, high-flying twenties – came to a dead stop. Yet those fevered October days were more than symptoms of a deeper malady, undiagnosed and untreated.”
And I had absolutely NO idea of the magnitude and depth of those issues – hard-core right wing fascism that threatened to blossom into actual support of Hitler’s Nazism; a paranoid fear of socialism or public programs which knee-jerk reactionaries labeled as Communism; xenophobia and anti-immigrant racism; the enormity of the already well-developed divide between what Hugh MacLennan would characterize as THE TWO SOLITUDES, Quebec, French Canada and the Roman Catholic Church versus English Canada and all comers; the nasty, near criminal nature of Old Boy politics at municipal, provincial, and federal levels; the decade long (and more) domination of federal politics by RB Bennett and Mackenzie King; illegal right-wing police tactics from both municipal forces and the RCMP; work farms for unemployed men more properly described as prisons and military concentration camps; hunger marches, soup kitchens, protests and riots quelled with police batons and truncheons, endemic unemployment, grasshoppers, dust bowls and multi-year crop failures; … I repeat, I had NO idea!
And, suddenly, on September 8, 1939, “ … Parliament declared that a state of war existed between Canada and Nazi Germany. On that day, the Great Depression can be said to have ended. For war, which would bring mutilation and death, would also bring jobs … Suddenly a country that had been unable to provide work for a fifth of its people found work for all. The chronicle of the Great Depression is a catalogue of ironies, but that is the bitterest irony of all.”
The greatest irony of all is that Canada’s conversion to a left-leaning country with universal government paid health care, unemployment insurance, social welfare programs of all stripes, Old Age Security, Family Allowance, minimum wage laws, accident and sickness insurance, amended income tax laws to correct serious inequalities in wealth distribution, laws limiting hours of work, and a host of other ideas which in the twenties and during the Depression would have been reviled as much dreaded Communism is attributable to Canada’s decision to participate in World War II, to combat the Nazism which so many in Canada at the time seemed to genuinely support and believe in. The bullet that we dodged in our development of the policies of that new nation was not a mere infantryman’s bullet fired from the trenches. It was a full-fledged bomb that any tank in the coming war would have been happy to launch at a Canadian population well on its way to right-wing hatred and governmental autocracy.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION should be considered as mandatory reading in any Canadian history course. It’s not light reading and it’s not a short, easy read by any stretch but it’s informative, it’s compelling, it’s gripping, and it’s genuinely eye-opening. Thank you, Pierre Berton.
Paul Weiss
An interesting personal observation:
One of the developments of that decade was the formation of the CCF, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation – the precursor of today’s NDP - a left-leaning political party whose objective was to formulate and effect change through parliament in the manner of Britain’s still youthful Labour Party. With a rather rueful shake of my head, I can recall ever so clearly my deceased father’s (he was born in 1930) pejorative scornful reference to that party “CCFers? Common Cow F—kers!” I guess that will tell you clearly enough what he thought of any new-fangled socialist ideas at the time!...more
“The President of the United States was a drunk, an adulterer, and a woman beater.”
“He smiled to the press, kissed babies and flirted with enchanted o“The President of the United States was a drunk, an adulterer, and a woman beater.”
“He smiled to the press, kissed babies and flirted with enchanted old women, held important meetings, flew around the world as his country’s leader, and he was a fucking asshole who screwed married women, then beat them up and then got them killed.”
No doubt about it. David Baldacci’s fame today as one of the world’s premier thriller authors started right out of the gate with a jaw dropping debut. In an instance of almost blinding prescience, ABSOLUTE POWER posited criminality in the oval office, political cover-ups and the gritty all important question as to how far the administration of the White House would go to protect the occupant of the Oval Office as a matter of political necessity.
I wonder if Baldacci wakes up these days, reads the morning news about a president already proven to be a con man, a grifter, a thief and a rapist facing 91 criminal indictments, and shakes his head over the extent to which even the most outlandish ideas in fiction seem to ultimately be overshadowed and outdone by reality.
ABSOLUTE POWER might have benefited from a moderate amount of editorial trimming but there’s no doubt it was an eyebrow raising suspense thriller when it was published 30 years ago and it seems even more timely and important today. Definitely recommended.
The shocking criminal history of American capitalist greed and the sub-prime mortgage crisis that rocked the world's markets!
Make no mistake. THE BIG The shocking criminal history of American capitalist greed and the sub-prime mortgage crisis that rocked the world's markets!
Make no mistake. THE BIG SHORT is a non-fiction piece of American history, it’s a story of American culture, it’s a complex reality tale of the structure of the US economy and its financial markets, it’s a shocking revelation of the negligence of US regulatory agencies and their lack of oversight of the markets for which they were responsible, but, more than anything else, THE BIG SHORT should be characterized as a true-crime dramatization of what was arguably the grandest of grand thefts in the history of the world!
The self-entitled attitudes of the moneyed class in the riotous aftermath of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage derivative market was simply appalling:
“The ability of Wall street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”
The powers that be could have stepped “in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers.”
“The Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understand of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.”
But as to laying of criminal charges and the prosecution of traders and corporations and their boards of directors?? Don’t be ridiculous. It didn’t happen then and, to this day, if hard right-wing Republican politicians continue to have their way in government thanks to millions of starry-eyed, gullible, misinformed voters who imagine themselves as the next possible billionaire on the block, it never will happen. Strict regulation of financial markets remains a pipe dream!
“… the unwillingness of the US government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system.”
My mind is still reeling as I try to absorb the reality of a US political, legislative, judicial and regulatory system that betrayed its citizenry by the refusal to recognize the criminality behind the virtually complete collapse of markets in 2008 and the necessity for steps to ensure it doesn't happen again!
A timely, topical techno-thriller for a dysfunctional government!
The inside front flap provides a concise and accurate description of HAMMERHEAD’s stoA timely, topical techno-thriller for a dysfunctional government!
The inside front flap provides a concise and accurate description of HAMMERHEAD’s story-line:
“The South American drug cartel maintains the influx of dangerous narcotics into the US at an all-time high; cooperation among US government agencies responsible for drug interdiction is at an all-time low. The situation calls for a radical solution.”
Rear Admiral Ian Hardcastle has an idea for a solution to that problem – a hammer that hits the nail on the head, as it were! (Did you see what I did there?)
HAMMERHEADS will appeal only to those readers who get off on high speed, militaristic, aviation based techno-thrillers that wow you with weaponry, machismo and self-assured feminism, battles, technology and gizmos, and plenty of acronyms. If that’s not your reading cup of tea, then set HAMMERHEADS aside and look elsewhere for your next fix (These puns just seem to write themselves!). On the other hand, if that kind of story gets your mojo going, then pour yourself a stiff one, turn on the reading lamp, sit down and get ready for a serious piece of credible, exciting, fast-paced enjoyment. At the end of the story, your only question will be why the government isn’t signing Dale Brown up to a consulting contract and asking for his advice.
“The Pacific is an oceanic behemoth of eye-watering complexity.”
“A near-limitless range of human and natural conditions exists within its borders, as “The Pacific is an oceanic behemoth of eye-watering complexity.”
“A near-limitless range of human and natural conditions exists within its borders, as one would expect of something so unimaginably enormous.” In a word, its dimensions are staggering.
When I began my reading of PACIFIC, my expectations were that I would encounter something similar to its sister tome which I reviewed with the following summary:
“… , ATLANTIC moves from the tectonic formation of this vast body of water in the mists of antiquity through the various stages of its participation in the history of man upon the earth such as exploration and discovery, colonization, imperialism, warfare and violence, transportation, communication, exploitation, pollution and, as one would expect today, anthropogenic climate warming.”
Obviously, Simon Winchester reached the decision that the Pacific was simply too gargantuan and too overwhelming to attempt that type of all-inclusive approach. Instead, he picked a series of dates scattered throughout reasonably recent history that allowed him to touch on each of these topics someplace within the Pacific Ocean’s vast domain while making no attempt to be exhaustive or even particularly linear.
For me, that approach worked well and made for some interesting, informative, instructive reading on a diverse set of topics that almost read like a series of nominally related novellas. Potential readers might be interested in Winchester’s choice of topics:
1) January 19, 1950: Truman Backs Making The Hydrogen Bomb – The Great Thermonuclear Sea 2) August 7, 1955: First Japanese Transistor Radio is Made – Mr Ibuka’s Radio Revolution 3) April 10, 1959: The Surfing Movie Gidget is Released – The Ecstasies of Wave Riding 4) January 23, 1968: The USS Pueblo is Captured by North Korea – A Dire and Dangerous Irritation 5) January 10, 1972: The RMS Queen Elizabeth Sinks, Hong Kong – Farewell, All My Friends and Foes 6) Christmas Day, 1974: Australian Supercyclone Tracy Touches Down – Echoes of Distant Thunder 7) November 11, 1975: Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is Dismissed – How Goes the Lucky Country? 8) February 17, 1977: The Submersible Alvin Spots an Abyssal Heat Source – The Fires in the Deep 9) December 12, 1981: Coral Bleaching is Seen on Great Barrier Reef – A Fragile and Uncertain Sea 10) June 15, 1991: Mount Pinatubo Erupts, Philippines – Of Masters and Commanders 11) June 2, 1976: The Hawaiian Canoe Hokule’a Completes Her Maiden Voyage – Epilogue: The Call of the Running Tide
Aside from the chapter on surfing which I thought to be fatuous and, quite frankly, boring to tears, the stories ranged from interesting and informative to jaw-dropping, worrisome, and head-shaking. That said, perhaps that chapter on surfing was intended to show up the oft-times silly proclivities of US culture and to contrast with the self-interested, bombastic, and imperialistic manner in which the US destroyed so many lives and contaminated so much territory with toxic nuclear fallout during the 1950s nuclear development program.
PACIFIC ultimately, in my opinion, is a rather sad book that, given global climate warming and the political head-butting that we are seeing today with China and North Korea, leaves one with a worried outlook as to what our future in the second half of the 21st century might look like. Read it, enjoy it, learn from it, and reach your own decisions. Definitely recommended.
Paul Weiss
Strictly an afterthought, but I was struck by two extended quotations that I thought particularly insightful and downright ingenious. (The jealous wannabe writer in me turns green with envy and admiration)!
The first is an extended outrageous and absolutely hilarious description of Sir Leslie Colin Patterson, a memorable Australian diplomat:
"He was by all appearances overfed; was often overcome with what appeared to be libation-triggered tiredness and emotional excess; and to judge from his utterances, was evidently wildly oversexed. His outbursts caused many of his more sensitive listeners to recoil. His favorite nonsexual pastime, which he often indulged in while giving the very speeches that so marked his career, seemed to be either nasal excavation and gastronomy or competitive wind breaking. He was a caricature, in short, ... "
The second is a closing fervent wish that the USA and China can come to a peaceful understanding of each other's desire for hegemony in the vast expanse of the Pacific:
"Instead of aircraft carriers and pollution, garbage gyres and coral bleaching being the bywords of our presence, there should now be a fresh kind of lexicon. Respect, reverence, accommodation, admiration, and awe for much that the East stands for - all these should now be the new watchwords. For from these ancient calming cultures, there is very much more to learn and absorb than there is to fear and resist. The benefits of Western modernity are quite obvious and should be sought after by all. But the wise benefits of antiquity should not be discounted, either ..."...more
“I am forty-nine years old. I know this because I checked with my mother.”
For fifteen years, Rick Mercer, an ebullient, very funny, intelligent an“I am forty-nine years old. I know this because I checked with my mother.”
For fifteen years, Rick Mercer, an ebullient, very funny, intelligent and sarcastic to a fault, gay, firmly left-leaning television journalist, regaled a rapt TV audience with a weekly “rant”. You wouldn’t win any prizes for guessing that his primary targets were politics and politicians and their decisions (Trump and Trudeau heading up the lengthy list) but, that said, you have to give credit to Mercer for spreading his venom across the whole of Canadian society. Curling; the bottomless money pit that was the Prime Minister’s former residence; Tim Horton’s, the Canadian coffee icon; payday money lenders (aka loan sharks); i-phones and modern technology; university censorship; homophobia (no big surprise there!); gridlock; the Post Office; false advertising; Quebec separation; … well, as you can see, the list is lengthy and spectacularly varied!
FINAL REPORT is simply a collection of the best of those rants with a small handful of short, new essays, (“reflection, recollections and revelations”) added in for good measure. If you’re a Canadian, you need to read this collection. You’ll find yourself, on more than one occasion, nodding your head in vociferous agreement or laughing out loud. If you’re from foreign parts (particularly if you’re an American) reading this may give you a heightened insight into the thinking of left-wing Canadians in a modern world.
“There is no solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!”
Michael Meyer’s forward to the edition I happened to read sug“There is no solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!”
Michael Meyer’s forward to the edition I happened to read suggested that Sinclair Lewis “found a ready-made plot in the nervous undercurrent that accompanied the volatile politics of the period. With the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Europe and the alarming popularity of a variety of demagogues from both the left and right in the United States, there was widespread concern that the country could be taken over by a fascist dictatorship. Lewis placed these fears at the center of IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE”
Modern democracy is a frail entity that must be constantly guarded, nourished, and actively renewed. This novel, while less than scintillating in the sense of being a gripping thriller, is nonetheless deeply disturbing and stomach-churning in the accuracy of its prescience, its timelessness, its realism and credibility, and its universal application in a 21st century world flirting with far right neo-fascism.
It’s difficult to believe that this was written almost a century ago and that Sinclair Lewis didn’t have a crystal ball scrying over Trump’s shoulder and watching the USA as it flirts with self destruction and the creation of the Fourth Reich – an authoritarian, neo-Nazi theocracy that will inevitably shred the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law if he is given the keys to the White House.
Consider:
“Remember when hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?”
What about Sinclair’s musing on Windrip, the eponymous demagogue who would be king?
“Yes. Nasty enough. But what I’ve got to keep remembering is that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy – oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … we had it coming.”
(Intelligent, thoughtful readers should apply this comment to today’s American culture and its misguided worship of wealth and capitalism and make a HUGE mental note that defeating Trump is not a panacea solution to the problems that currently plague the USA. It is only a necessary condition that happens to stand in first place on a lengthy list of must-dos. But I digress … )
On the nature of right-wing politics to decrease tolerance, to sew divisiveness, and to breed xenophobia:
“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.”
And a reprise to the earlier observation, “We had it coming.”
“it becomes clear that the installation of a fascist government will not be a revolution or coup d’état; rather, the groundwork for fascism has already been constructed in the ideological worldviews of the majority of Americans. The riposte to the claim “It can’t happen here” is “It already has.” ”
I’ll close my brief opinion by agreeing wholeheartedly with the opinions, “ … a vigorous antifascist tract” even if it was “not much of a novel” and the New York Times Book Review comment, “ exciting reading, even if it does nothing to advance Mr Lewis’s art as a novelist” quoted in the afterword. IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE must be considered as mandatory reading for every American alive today. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt the world’s future if it had a wider reading in modern Europe as well.
"When partisan rivals become enemies, political competition descends into warfare, … "
"… and our institutions turn into weapons."
HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE i"When partisan rivals become enemies, political competition descends into warfare, … "
"… and our institutions turn into weapons."
HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE is, first, a scholarly and informative treatise on the history of the failure of democracies from around the world – Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Putin’s Russia, Maduro’s Venezuala, Pinochet’s Chile, and Videla’s Argentina being the most obvious examples that might come instantly to the mind of any reader familiar even in passing with politics, current events and world history. But, second and even more important, is that this book is a terrifying warning of how sharp the knife edge is on which the USA currently walks as it flirts with the implementation of a far right-wing oligarchic, theocratic authoritarian regime that is anything but a democratic republic governed by a Constitution and the rule of law.
Levitsky reviews the four key indicators of authoritarian behaviour – rejection of democratic rules of the game; denial of the legitimacy of political opponents; toleration or even encouragement of violence; and, readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media (Does anyone hear shouts of, “Lock ‘er up” or "Knock the hell out of 'em. I promise you I'll pay the legal fees"?). That Trump is a demagogue with aspirations to authoritarian rule seems beyond doubt. The open question is whether Congress, the Senate, law enforcement, the military, the judiciary, the Supreme Court and, ultimately, the electorate will allow him to do so.
How Democracies Die outlines an extended book-length metaphor in which the Constitution, written laws and regulations and the Bill of Rights comprise “the rules of the road”. But it is the “unwritten rules” that “are everywhere in American politics, ranging from the operations of the Senate and the Electoral College to the format of presidential conferences”. Levitsky goes to great lengths to describe the two norms of behaviour that are critical to the survival of a functioning democracy – “mutual toleration and institutional forebearance”. He likens these norms of behaviour to hard and soft guardrails that keep those who would attempt to navigate the halls of power without due regard to the spirit of the written rules on the road and within the bounds of a democracy.
The problem, in Levitsky’s opinion, is that the Republicans under McConnell’s leadership are operating legally in the strictest interpretation of all of the “rules” but have egregiously violated all of the unstated norms. In so doing, they have completely removed the guardrails. That is to say, Trump and the Republicans are currently driving the USA at high speeds down a highway on the edge of a cliff with no guardrails.
The USA has evaded the predatory attempts of demagogues in its past - Barry Goldwater, Joseph McCarthy, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Richard Nixon, and Huey Long to name only a few. But somehow Trump seems to be a much more profound and more complex problem that is far more entrenched in the American system, its society and its unimaginably deep and wide political divisions.
While Levitsky proffers the opinion that the ultimate result remains an open question, I saw nothing to change my personal opinion that the USA is headed for either civil war or its ultimate demise into the world’s most recent and most dangerous neo-Nazi regime. That said, I would express the fond hope that if this book found wide readership among Republican Trump voters who claim to be slightly more centrist, then the flame of hope may yet be rekindled.
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