Brilliance From Keith Olbermann

Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC pundit, and frequent spokesman for the US Left, kept me believing that common decency had not completely left our former country during the last administration. I still watch his show via an iTunes podcast, since we don’t get MSNBC here. I’ve kept watching him, mainly because I still want to keep in touch with what’s going on down there, and I have to admit that the results of yesterday’s Provincial election here have me a little disappointed, especially since we can’t vote yet. (I’d say ‘Wait till next year’, but we’ll have to wait another 4 years to get our chance.)

Despite the fact that Olbermann doesn’t have George W. Moron to kick around any more (and let’s face it, as James Carville said on Real Time with Bill Maher: “The man was a walking punch-line.”), every once in a while he is able to mix his portion of outrage with equal parts humour, and the result is priceless. Tonight, he was in rare form, and I just had to share:

He’s a genius…Genius, I tells ya’!

Coming Up for Air and Tired Old Phrases

I’ve had to neglect blogging for much of this month, because I’ve been working very hard. It’s hopefully going to work out in the end, but this is one of those times where I have to keep intoning that mantra “It’s Only Temporary.” So, while today was one of those picture-perfect days we in Vancouver get in the spring and summer, I must confess that I only saw it via the occasional peek at a the KatKam webcam from my windowless office. I might as well have been underground, instead out in the place that has once again been named by Mercer Consulting, Number 4 of the ‘Top 5 quality of living ranking for cities worldwide‘. While I am proud of the fact that my home is once again up there with Vienna, Zurich, Geneva and Auckland as one of the best places to live, I have to admit that for us personally, for a variety of reasons,  it’s been a very tough past couple months. However, I’m looking forward to beautiful sunny days with cool breezes, local strawberries and asparagus, walks along the False Creek seawall and the return of the Farmer’s Markets on the weekends. The fountain in the park across the street is flowing again, and the tulips are out in full force. I just have to be sure to get out and enjoy all of those things. After all, they are all only temporary as well.

Heard Often. Way Too Often

To keep an eye on our former country, Pam and I have tried to catch one of the network news channels from the US each evening over dinner, so we keep switching between TiVO recordings of Brian (Williams), Katie (Couric) and Charlie (pronounced the way Sarah Palin did in the puff-piece interviews he did her, as the sharp, twangy CHAR-ly, Gibson). I’ve been noticing an annoying tendency by both the reporters as well as the public (and politicians) for using the same phrases over and over again. Here are a few that I’ve just about had enough of:

Come Together
What does that phrase mean? Aside from the sexual double-entendre, as far as I can tell, it means to have a public meeting where  problems like gang violence, racial strife and poverty are all magically overcome by an aura of good fellowship. Sorry, I’m not buying it. It’s an empty phrase uttered over and over again in front of TV cameras by people who have no idea what they are saying.

Bipartisan
Until recently ‘bipartisan’ used to mean something. I think it meant that both of the big, iconic US political parties support something, as opposed to its more common opposite, ‘partisan’ (which now that I think of it, could have been Monopartisan). Now,’ bipartisan’ is uttered by politicians meaning (depending on which side they are on)  ‘Something I wanted but never got’ or ‘Something we should all look like we are trying for even though we really don’t want it anyway’.  Like Lite and Fat-Free or Sustainable, it’s an now a meaningless word held aloft like a flag of victory or rag of defeat.

Wall Street always followed by Main Street
It used to be that you could say ‘Wall Street’ and everybody knew that it referred to the New York Stock Exchange, as well as the other business and organizations in that general geographic area of Manhattan. Now, like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum or Flotsam and Jetsam, it has become a stupid shorthand for the hostility between the rich and connected in the Financial Services Sector vs. Middle America. Like two squabbling children, we are supposed to make sure both are taken care of, but not to let the other get jealous or sulky. I hope they break up the idiom before it becomes another ‘prim and proper’ or ‘tooth and nail’.

Bailout
‘Bailout’ originally meant ‘an act of loaning or giving capital to a failing company in order to save it from bankruptcy, insolvency, or total liquidation and ruin’. (Wikipedia). Now it’s almost become a joke phrase, meaning  Free Money.  Enough, already. It’s never funny.

…and the word or phrase that I’ve found the both the most ubiquitous and annoyingly imprecise on the news these past months:

Transparent
I’ve heard this word used so many times, I’ve started doing the old Pee-Wee’s Playhouse shtick (well, not screaming real loud, but saying ‘ding!’) every time it is uttered.  I think it was to suggest that like a glass house, the operations and decisions of an organization (such as the Federal Government) were to be easily apprehended by the public, typically by using a Web Site or some other publicly accessible medium. Wasn’t that what C-SPAN was supposed to do? (except of course, nobody but the wonks and fanatics bothered to watch it). Again, like ‘Come Together’, Transparent is another word or phrase overused to the point of meaninglessness.

There are others, but these are the ones that come to mind today. I’m sure that in a few weeks I’ll be sick of ‘Torture Memo’ and ‘Pandemic’, because they’ll have been made just as meaningless through repetition by that time.

Louis Andriessen and Passover Seders

Louis Andriessen at 70

Years ago I discovered a stunning and monumental work for Chorus and Orchestra called De Staat (which translates to The State or in this case, ‘The Republic’ based on Plato’s Republic).  If you haven’t heard it (and I strongly recommend checking out a recording), it’s kind of like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but with the volume, heart-pounding repetitions and unisonic craggy lines of force taken to 11 (as Spinal Tap would put it). It made a big impression on me, even though I only heard it on recordings, and I even remember using a bit of it in a lecture I gave about the tools and techniques that a composer can use to manipulate the subjective perception of time.  The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen wrote it, and in some ways it has become, like Stravinsky’s Rite,  one of those big, iconic pieces in music history where audiences got to feel not so much a tide turning as a tidal wave crashing upon them. To give you an idea of some of the power of this work, listen to this bit near the beginning where sections of the orchestra pound away until (in a style not unlike contemporary cinema) they get spliced right on to a vista that opens up:

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Now imagine a piece for large orchestra and chorus that does this kind of thing for over a half hour with no break. Sections build, crash, and coalesce, like tectonic plates crunching. It’s huge, exhausting, and I would imagine, shattering. As you’d expect, De Staat doesn’t get played very often, but I hope some day to hear it live.

Big orchestra or not, I was thrilled that last week, Andriessen was here, in Vancouver, as part of a world tour, celebrating his 70th Birthday and as part of the Music on Main series. The Turning Point Ensemble, one of Vancouver’s few New Music ensembles, played at Heritage Hall, a distinctive old building on Main. Andriessen’s Zilver, which he wrote in 1994 was last on the program, set up by a series of works by other composers, some of them present in the hall (and a piece by Andriessen’s father, Hendrik, which was a charming, if somewhat out-of-place 19th century-sounding Intermezzo for flute and harp).  Of all the works leading up to Zilver, I liked best David Lang’s Sweet Air, dedicated to Andriessen on his 60th Birthday. Lang won a Pulitzer last year for his Little Match Girl Passion, a setting of Hans Christian Anderson’s story set as a work for singers and orchestra (like Bach’s St. Matthew Passion). It is indeed sweet, and floats along, spinning out endless variations on this opening set of repeating patterns:

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While I don’t have a recording of Zilver (and have never heard it), it was a lot of fun, and full of all sorts of interruptions and collisions of one layer of instruments with another. We also had the treat of Andriessen telling a few funny stories before the performance, alikening the organ’s pedal parts in Bach’s Chorale Preludes to little duets between birds being interrupted by a cow mooing, and how he once performed in a ‘Left-Wing’ Ensemble called ‘Perseverance’ that made the unfortunate choice of setting up their free outdoor concert near the flight path of planes coming in for a landing at a nearby airport, where the interruptions here were a lot bigger than a mooing cow. He was wearing a fedora and raincoat, and seemed to be having as much fun as the rest of us were.  I hope we’ll get 30 more years, at least, of music and stories from this merry agitator from the Netherlands.

Seders in Vancouver, Detroit and Washington D.C.

Last night we hosted a small (3-person) Seder for Pam, her friend Heather, and me, technically on the second night of Passover. I cooked the some of the usual fare: the mortar-symbolic Charoset, which is sort of chutney of chopped apples, mixed nuts, a little honey, cinnamon and red wine, and tzimmes (lots of variation here, but basically it’s sweet carrots with some prunes, and other items – sometimes even with meat). The centrepiece of the meal was a small leg of lamb (or was it the leg of a small lamb?). I roasted it with some rosemary and it came out OK, but I’m still not satisfied with how I cook lamb and need to work on getting a foolproof technique that doesn’t produce meat that’s either rubbery or dried out and greasy.

I found out that the night before (in addition to my parents and other relatives having their Seder in Detroit), there was a Seder at the White House. I was frankly surprised and pleased that Obama would do such a thing, especially as he is the first President to ever host a Seder. The holiday celebrates the end of a period of slavery in the Old Testament, so the parallels between the the Emancipation of American Slaves and the Exodus of Jewish Slaves from Egypt was something that I hope was not lost on the people around the table. Having extended the hand of friendship toward the Muslim world last week in Turkey and preparing to participate in the typical Christian activities this weekend (Attending Church Services on Sunday, the Easter Egg hunt on the White House Lawn, etc.), the Obamas were a class act to include the Jewish holiday as well.

Arnold Says the US Should be More Like BC

Did I ever mention that my favourite TV theme is John Williams’ music to ‘Meet the Press’? It’s driving, but catchy music, and the part where the violins leap by a minor-ninth always sounds like a Mahler symphonic theme to me (I’m thinking the 6th or 7th Symphony – one of these days I’ll play excerpts and point it out). The other part I like is near the end of it, where the brass break out into a bit of counterpoint, which has been said to be a musical representation of political sparring, but I just hear John Williams making a little nod to J.S. Bach.

Not long after that introduction, we had one of those jaw-dropping, did-he-just-say-that? moments this morning at breakfast. We had TiVO’ed Meet the Press (yes, once a US News Wonk, always a US News Wonk). The guests this morning were the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, and the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The three men were all campaigning for spending on US Infrastructure. I was thrilled to hear the term ‘High-Speed Rail’ mentioned more than a dozen times. What made us nearly spill our coffee was this bit, said by the ‘the Governator’ himself:

Well, they had me fooled, at least in terms of a love-fest here between the private sector and the government when it comes to transit. (The recent proceedings of a lawsuit by a merchant whose business was all but eliminated by the CanadaLine construction on Cambie Street comes to mind). Still, compared to the bitterness and hatred between all things public and private in the US, I guess we do have relatively more cooperation here than they do there.

I will be thrilled to see high-speed rail show up in the US, and it would be even more surprising to see them use British Columbia as the model for financing it.

Higher Ground

I got outside today, for the first time several days, since for a long while I was too weak even to get much further than the bathroom. The air was mild, and despite a good deal of clouds, there were what they call here ‘Sunny Breaks’, which are those (sometimes brief) moments when the sunbeams break through and everything lights up. Today, they lit up the crocuses. Yes, March 1 and Spring has Sprung in the Lower Mainland. Despite some snow on the mountains (and I heard that some friends even went cross-country skiing on Cypress Mountain today), we are soon going to be back to ‘The Other Vancouver’, which is just fine by me. The good weather also was appreciated by the Realtors who were running a couple open houses on our street today.

We Were Lucky to Move Where and When We Did

When Pam and I moved to Canada, we said that it was because of Bush (who I often refer to as WPIUSH). I also wrote that it was because I looked ahead to a future that looked to be unpleasant, because of poor decisions by the US government in the near term having an effect on our situation as future retirees. While that dim future referred mainly to the US Federal budget deficit, it also was due to the greed and corruption that we saw, and I definitely could feel some sort of collapse coming. Mind you, I had predicted that a great economic disintegration would be coming (cue Sarah Connor looking at the coming storm at the end of the first Terminator movie), but my timing put it roughly around 2015, so I was off by a few years, but it looks like I got pretty close. I’m not that thrilled that the chickens have come home to roost a half a decade or so earlier than I thought.
While I feel that we were smart to leave when we did (as we could now probably not afford to), what I didn’t count on was the fact Canada was also the right place to go, in many ways.

This past week, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek, called The Canadian Solution. Warning: I’m going to get dangerously close to smug here, but will try to hold back if I do.
According to Zakaria, our new home is in surprisingly good shape these days:

Guess which country, alone in the industrialized world, has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in the financial or mortgage sectors. Yup, it’s Canada. In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. America’s ranked 40th, Britain’s 44th.

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking.

The article goes on to laud Canada’s better housing market (and it doesn’t even have to note that there was no ‘Sub-Prime’ mess here, either). The other day we learned that Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” deals with Health Care, because the number 1 reason that an American goes bankrupt is because of a major medical problem. Not needed here, and as I found during my recent illness, the stories that some US politicians and others make that we have to wait forever to get to a doctor or get sub-standard health care are utterly false, in my experiences. Just this past week, I walked (slowly) 3 blocks to our local clinic, waited about 20 minutes to see a doctor the first time, and 15 minutes on my return visit. My blood tests were done in 3 days, and didn’t cost me a penny.
Zakaria goes on to notice the other good news for those of us in Canada:

The government has restructured the national pension system, placing it on a firm fiscal footing, unlike our own insolvent Social Security. Its health-care system is cheaper than America’s by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent here), and yet does better on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, versus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, versus 69. American car companies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advantage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michigan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.

Of course that last bit about Ontario producing most of North America’s cars is also not such good news, as the dire straits of the auto industry have hit that province at least as hard if not harder than Michigan.

Even the immigration policies that Pam is learning in detail these days, as she studies to become an Immigration Consultant, get some attention by Zakaria:

The U.S. currently has a brain-dead immigration system. We issue a small number of work visas and green cards, turning away from our shores thousands of talented students who want to stay and work here. Canada, by contrast, has no limit on the number of skilled migrants who can move to the country. They can apply on their own for a Canadian Skilled Worker Visa, which allows them to become perfectly legal “permanent residents” in Canada—no need for a sponsoring employer, or even a job. Visas are awarded based on education level, work experience, age and language abilities. If a prospective immigrant earns 67 points out of 100 total (holding a Ph.D. is worth 25 points, for instance), he or she can become a full-time, legal resident of Canada.

Zakaria notes that companies have begun to notice, and that Microsoft situated their latest research center here in Vancouver.

At any rate, I’m not trying to gloat or hold our good fortune over the old friends and family we left behind in the States, but perhaps they can now understand why we don’t seem to have the same level of dread and panic when we talk about our economic prospects that they do. Canadians right now seem to be more confident, and less likely to respond emotionally to the news (partly because our news is also less sensationalistic). Given that we have better safety nets, including health care, a stable banking system, and even our food inspection system, which caught the bad peanut butter when it came to the border, that’s not all that surprising. Pam and I find ourselves continually shaking our heads as we watch the Evening News from the major US TV Networks, sometimes in relief, and sometimes in bewilderment that things in the country we left have gotten so bad.