A New Country, an Old Country

“You will always remem­ber this day.” said Judge Anne-Marie Kaines. A tall and impres­sive fig­ure of author­ity, she talked about the tra­di­tion that Cana­di­ans have of vol­un­teerism, of sac­ri­fice and car­ing for oth­ers, whether we know them or they are strangers. She invoked Terry Fox, whose statue was only a few hun­dred meters away from us in the plaza in front of the entrance to BC Place. “You can’t just expect to ‘plug-in’ to health care and pen­sions and all the other ben­e­fits of Cana­dian life. That’s sim­ply unsus­tain­able.” Besides pay­ing our taxes, she made it clear that we needed to find some­thing, some cause or char­ity to con­tribute to.

In the 7 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve noticed that char­ity, such as the almost daily occur­rence of a Walk for Hunger or Walk for Breast Can­cer Sur­vivors or Hos­pi­tal Lot­tery or Telethon, is front and cen­tre in Canada. It is telling that per­haps the most uni­ver­sally admired fig­ure in recent Cana­dian his­tory is a boy who died while attempt­ing to tra­verse the coun­try on 1 foot, hav­ing lost his other to the dis­ease he was essen­tially doing fund-raising to cure. Fox, as the Judge also noted, had a tremen­dous world­wide impact, and we should look upon his feat as some­thing that any of us should aspire to as well.

I’m glad that in Canada, char­ity is not the largely the province of Reli­gion, as it often is in the US. Yes­ter­day, Ann Rom­ney, when asked why her hus­band Mitt refused to release more than 2 years tax returns as part of the polit­i­cal cam­paign, said “…we’ve given all our peo­ple need to know and under­stand about our finan­cial sit­u­a­tion and about how — you know, how we live our life.” and added that he eagerly gave 10% of his income to ‘The Church’ as proof that he was a good per­son. Actu­ally, for me, that would be proof that he’s merely a church­goer (which means noth­ing morally and may even be a strike against him, in my opin­ion), and pos­si­bly a homo­phobe, given the Mor­mon Church’s recent activ­i­ties (they funded the sup­port­ers of the noto­ri­ous Cal­i­for­nia Propo­si­tion 8 that took away the rights of gay peo­ple to marry).

I also think that sec­u­lar char­ity is also related to a side of what I’ve often noticed in the Canada vs. US dif­fer­ences (which become harder to find, the longer I live here): Cana­di­ans are more apt to see them­selves as part of a com­mu­nity than those in the US. We see the bleed­ing over the bor­der of the worst of Amer­i­can ‘cow­boy’ cul­ture (and firearms) and are, with due cause, concerned.

A few days before the shoot­ings last night in Aurora, CO, there had been a mas­sacre involv­ing gun-play in Toronto. Our news cov­er­ing that inci­dent was mainly a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion about how we could have antic­i­pated such a tragedy or bet­ter yet, stopped it from hap­pen­ing in the first place. Giv­ing teens a rea­son to inte­grate into the com­mu­nity was about the clos­est one could get to a con­sen­sus. Nearly every com­men­ta­tor ridiculed Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford, who idi­ot­i­cally insisted that stricter penal­ties on gun vio­lence are the answer (since it’s obvi­ous that teenage gang-members are dri­ven by logic and long-range think­ing and would cer­tainly change their behav­iour if they knew that if they got caught, tried and con­victed, it would get put them in jail for a longer sen­tence. Yes, that was sar­casm, Mr. Mayor.)

The fact that Toron­to­ni­ans (and Cana­di­ans) have done a lot of soul-searching and con­sider the shoot­ings in that city to be a crime against us all and against our mul­ti­cul­tural com­mu­nity, stands in stark con­trast to US spokes­peo­ple and politi­cians (with the notable excep­tion of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg) resort­ing to empty words about prayers for the vic­tims and their fam­i­lies (Again, the knee-jerk reac­tion of Amer­i­cans to invoke reli­gion galls me). In the cov­er­age of the Aurora shoot­ings, I can’t help but see how dif­fer­ent the reac­tion of these two coun­tries are to these some­what sim­i­lar tragedies. It’s worth not­ing, how­ever, that even with the toxic influx of ille­gal firearms from our south­ern bor­der, there were  200 peo­ple killed by guns in all of Canada this past year, where in the US that num­ber is 9,484. (If it were the same ratio to the pop­u­la­tion, the US total would then be closer to 2,000.)

I’m deter­mined, now that I’m a vot­ing Cana­dian, to vote for a can­di­date who is pro gun con­trol, since such a dec­la­ra­tion here is not polit­i­cal sui­cide. I’ll also sup­port any­one who shares that Cana­dian acknowl­edge­ment of ‘The Com­mon Good’, which is not only what ini­tially attracted me to this coun­try, but was called out as a national char­ac­ter­is­tic in my Oath of Cit­i­zen­ship cer­e­mony two days ago.

Did She Just Say That?

Happy July 4^th to all of my friends and rel­a­tives back in the US. Pam and I tuned in this morn­ing to the news and polit­i­cal talk shows, expect­ing a pretty unevent­ful roundup of pre-Fireworks chat­ter, and were sur­prised to see some news­wor­thy items. One was a final reac­tion by pun­dits to the Repub­li­can National Committee’s head, Michael Steele. For the past cou­ple of years, Steele has been ‘the gift that keeps on giv­ing’ to Lib­er­als like myself, and it was always hys­ter­i­cal when he came out with one of his either undig­ni­fied or ridicu­lous state­ments. The lat­est one, how­ever, seemed to go over the line. At a fundraiser in Noank, Con­necti­cut, some­one caught Steele in the fol­low­ing video that became one of those gaffes heard round the world:

Tran­script:
“The [Gen­eral] McChrys­tal inci­dent, to me, was very com­i­cal. I think it’s a reflec­tion of the frus­tra­tion that a lot of our mil­i­tary lead­ers has with this Admin­is­tra­tion and their pros­e­cu­tion of the war in Afghanistan. Keep in mind again, fed­eral can­di­dates, this was a war of Obama’s choos­ing. This was not some­thing that the United States had actively pros­e­cuted or wanted to engage in. It was one of those areas of the total board of for­eign pol­icy [that was at least?] that we would be in the back­ground sort of shap­ing the changes that were nec­es­sary in Afghanistan as opposed to directly engag­ing troops. But it was the Pres­i­dent who was try­ing to be cute by half by flip­ping a script demo­niz­ing Iraq, while say­ing the bat­tle really should in Afghanistan. Well, if he is such a stu­dent of his­tory, has he not under­stood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Alright, because every­one who has tried over a thou­sand years of his­tory has failed, and there are rea­sons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan…”

Now I won’t go too much into how wrong that is on so many lev­els (not the least of which is that it’s his­tor­i­cally inac­cu­rate — there was no ‘choice’ involved and the US, led by George W. Bush, attacked Afghanistan after the ter­ror­ist attack on the World Trade Cen­ter and the Pen­ta­gon on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001), but the con­dem­na­tion from Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans has been pretty severe, with the excep­tion of the always-surprising Ron Paul, who said that Steele, “has it right and Repub­li­cans should stick by him.”
At any rate, we did a double-take when we heard this from Cyn­thia Tucker, the Pulitzer prize win­ning reporter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Wow! It’s not often you hear some­one deliver as blis­ter­ing a cri­tique as that. In fact, I dare say if any­one else had said what she said, (par­tic­u­larly some­one who wasn’t also black) they might have been accused of being racist.

It’s pretty clear that Steele is toast. As I hinted ear­lier, that’s a shame for Democ­rats (Al Hunt a few moments before this clip sug­gested that Steele was actu­ally a Demo­c­ra­tic Mole). How­ever, he (and Ms. Tucker) did pro­vide some early fire­works for this July 4 morning.

Tomor­row

July 5 is also a big date, at least for Pam and me. On this date, 5 years ago, we left Cam­bridge, MA and began our jour­ney to Canada. While I’m always a lit­tle pen­sive on the 4^th, remem­ber­ing those long after­noons on the bank of the Charles river get­ting ready for the fire­works and singing patri­otic songs, I also remem­ber how excited we were to be start­ing a new chap­ter in our lives. These days, I don’t intro­duce myself as a ‘new Van­cou­verite’ any more. I now con­sider the lower Main­land my home, and despite more than a few glances back at the US, we have no plans to return to liv­ing there. The July 4 of 2005 will prob­a­bly be the last one we spent as US residents.

Joe Wong Slays 'em at the Annual RTCA Dinner

Pres­i­dent Obama made the news for doing some standup the other night at the Annual Radio and Tele­vi­sion Cor­re­spon­dents’ Din­ner in Wash­ing­ton, DC, but I think the real news was some­one else on the pro­gram. I’d never seen this come­dian before,  but I was absolutely blown away by how funny he was and how good his tim­ing and deliv­ery were. If this is any indi­ca­tion of his tal­ent, I hope we’ll be see­ing more of Joe Wong:

I also hope he tours Canada soon. How about a dou­ble bill with Rus­sell Peters?

All the Emotions Fit To Broadcast

Pam and I still try and keep our eyes on the US, at least through the media that we get here in Canada, and there’s plenty of it, despite Can­con. So we have our TiVO set to record the evening news­casts of ABC, NBC and CBS. We also record the Van­cou­ver CBC report. We don’t watch all of that recorded news each and every night; we usu­ally pick one of those 3 or 4 and try and move around a lot (actu­ally, we’ve recently stopped record­ing ABC as Pam felt that Diane Sawyer was such a dis­ap­point­ment as a News Anchor that she can’t bear to watch that news­cast).
Maybe it has just crept in over time, per­haps it’s because I’m becom­ing more of an out­sider and view­ing media more as an observer, but I’ve noticed a change in the way news is reported in the US in the evening. There seems to a small and smaller por­tion of the news­cast devoted to facts and more and more involv­ing emo­tion. Nearly every story is about con­flict or a strug­gle, a cri­sis or a tragedy. Even the sto­ries that are com­plex and affect many dif­fer­ent things end up con­cen­trat­ing on one per­son about to lose their job (as the cov­er­age of that dis­as­trous and com­plex oil spill off the Louisiana Gulf Coast did) or search out the vio­lent edge of con­flict, (as the cov­er­age of the also dis­as­trous Ari­zona Immi­gra­tion Law).  In these cases, it’s clear that they are try­ing to per­son­al­ize the prob­lem or sim­ply make it more dra­matic. This isn’t just mil­lions of gal­lons of oil head­ing for the coast, it’s a Portly Shrimp Farmer about to lose his liveli­hood, it isn’t just a new law about to take in effect in the Ari­zona State Leg­is­la­ture, but a vio­lent clash between immi­grants and police.

I can’t help check off the scenes we will no doubt see as if I’m play­ing a drink­ing game:

• Some­one cry­ing or break­ing down dur­ing a speech or interview.
• Some­one look­ing into the cam­era and say­ing how they don’t know what they’ll do now.
• Some­one declar­ing that ‘It’s all in God’s hands, now.’
• A group of peo­ple fight­ing or running.
• Some­one declar­ing that some­thing was ‘A Miracle!’
• Peo­ple hug­ging, or an adult lift­ing a child in their arms.
• A gov­ern­ment offi­cial being grilled in a meet­ing room or besieged in front of a build­ing by an angry mob (to be sure, that was more often seen last summer)
• A crim­i­nal of some sort walk­ing try­ing to hide their face with either some papers or a hood.
• A short and chop­pily edited inter­view with a per­son who is quirky and ‘Mak­ing a Dif­fer­ence’ — as a cou­ple of the net­works call them out.*
• (Add your own stock sit­u­a­tion or dra­matic exclamation.)

My friends and I used to joke back when I was going to school in Cincin­nati that the evening news they always showed the same still snap­shot of a car in a ditch in Nor­wood (a still snap­shot? Hey, it was the early 80s, OK?), even if it was a dif­fer­ent acci­dent some­where else — they all looked the same. Now, every­thing is the same; it’s con­flict, it’s emo­tional, it’s extreme and some­how a deity is involved.

What’s going on now, is that because news is part of the bud­get for the net­works that involves enter­tain­ment, by golly, it bet­ter be enter­tain­ing. I’d like to know the exact amount of oil that is gush­ing out, what that num­ber means in terms of envi­ron­men­tal dam­age, how long it takes for oil to get from the ocean floor to the sur­face. I want to know the specifics of what the new law in Ari­zona will deal with some­one wrongly accused of being an immi­grant; Can they sue? Can an employer fire a worker for miss­ing work because of being picked up for false charges? I don’t know these things, how­ever, and I’m not likely to learn them from the Evening Newscast.

I can see why most peo­ple are get­ting their news through the Inter­net these days, as the TV news has shrunken into a drama­ti­za­tion of the events of the day, done in broad strokes with an empha­sis on the sim­plest rep­e­ti­tious images and scenes. The net­works have decided that their audi­ences want their news a dumbed down as pos­si­ble. There is no point in pro­vid­ing much in the way of facts. And that’s for the net­works. Cable News, like Fox… I won’t even go there. (CNN’s also slip­ping into propaganda-laced sto­ries as well. I can only assume this is because their rat­ings have been so bad that they are emu­lat­ing Fox. )

Rather than com­plain about the way the news is pre­sented, most view­ers either take it at face value and aren’t aware of what’s miss­ing, or they are adapt­ing, by mov­ing to the Web.  I’n fact, I’m pre­dict­ing that there will even­tu­ally be an iPad app for delv­ing into facts (on an Inter­net site) dur­ing the broad­cast. The main facts of the news will be in someone’s lap, while they see the drama on the big­ger screen.

Per­haps we’ll some­day see the kind of news­cast that they sim­u­lated in the future depicted by the movie Star­ship Troop­ers, where each set of State Pro­pa­ganda fas­cist slo­gans is fol­lowed by a screen that looks like a but­ton and a voiceover that asks: ‘Would you like to know more?’

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*I must con­fess that I’m get­ting really to loathe these ‘human inter­est’ pieces, because they are always cut and pre­sented the same way and try so hard to appeal. Harry Smith, who some­times is a guest Anchor on CBS is one of the worst offend­ers in this regard. Nearly every­thing he does smacks of that ‘human inter­est’ treacle.

Happy Thanksgiving to the US

While here in Canada we cel­e­brated our Thanks­giv­ing back on Octo­ber 12^th, this one is ‘the big one’ that we hear about from the South. With that in mind, I thought I’d send a lit­tle bit of Beethoven­ian Good Will (by way of the Mup­pets) your way, my Amer­i­can friends and family:

(Thanks to Brenda Cad­man of Octo­ber 17 Media for find­ing this. )

I haven’t been blog­ging much this month (maybe it’s the rain — 22 days of it this month!, maybe it’s the time of year — very busy). I will make a seri­ous effort to get some­thing more sub­stan­tial here this com­ing week. In the meantime…

Seid umschlun­gen, Mil­lio­nen!
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!

Be embraced, you mil­lions!
This kiss for the whole world!