class enemies

I recently checked into the Verdun Library and it seems they’ve cleared out a lot of their old fiction,although some of the collection of Dostoyeski’s works,the Garnett translation,are still there
I probably read through most of that collection in 1962 when I turned sixteen and was finally permitted-officially permitted-to take out books designated for Adult Reading only
But despite being a ‘big reader’ as they say down on the Avenues,I flunked just about everything in school except History and Literature and had to repeat a couple of grades
I remember when I got the required Aptitude Test in grade seven that determined what scholastic level I was to be placed in high school,the teacher remarked,almost if talking to herself,that it seemed strange that my test points for literacy were amongst the highest in the school,because otherwise all other indications had me placed,where I eventually was placed,in one of the lower levels amongst those that would not go onto university
Her remark,made while handing me back the test result,was more a comment on the test result rather than a comment meant for me
“Oh..well..”she said and walked away
Maybe she didn’t have time to be human because of the size of the student load but that didn’t make her behavior any less belittling to me or to herself.
Public humiliation that’s what public education is when you’re working class

Planted Poison

“Western Fastidiousness Doomed Iraq Mission:
Liberal democracies reluctant to engage in ruthless tactics needed to put down insurgencies”

That’s the headline of yet another poisonous article by McGill Professor of Economics William Watson in the Gazoo on the American mishandling of the Iraqi insurgency.
The Romans knew how to crush popular insurgencies,Professor Watson writes,they simply terrorized the governing elite of the insurgent nations responsible into terrorizing their own population into submission

“The Nazis also”he says ”had relatively little trouble with national undergrounds in the countries they occupied during World War Two.Those thought to harbour resistors were sent to concentration camps or shot outright.Saddam Hussein himself was very good at counter-insurgency.Defy my rule?I will gas you or drain the marshes that provide your food”

Professor Watson goes further to write that of course democracies like the US can’t contemplate such tactics,however tempting,because it would violate their democratic principles.
But didn’t the American ruling elite apply similar tactics around the world against insurgents in Chili,Indonesia,El Salvador,Somalia,the Congo and Vietnam?
Didn’t the American ruling elite supported General Pinochet in Chili during the 70’s when hundreds of thousands of progressive people were shot down,imprisoned and forced into exile?
Wasn’t it the same American ruling elite that financed Saddam Hussein for ten years during the time when he was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?
And wasn’t Doctor Henry Kissinger charged and condemned as a war criminal for the illegal and unconstitutional carpet bombing of Cambodia?

It isn’t fastidiousness that’s stopping Washington from acting like Saddam Hussein,it’s the fear that there will be wide spread protests,strikes and riots not only in the Middle East but also in the US of A,should Washington unlease the same kind of weaponry in Iraq that killed millions of civilians in Vietnam.
It was the American people that shut down the Vietnam War and all signs seem to indicate that they are getting ready to shut down the Iraqi War too,despite attempts by neo-conservatives like Professor Watson to put forward the question of unlimited military aggression,as if it was a legitimate option.

No Blood For Oil
Books not Bombs
Troops out Now

Literati litter

I’ve been reading through "I Love",an account of the Russian poet Mayakovsky’s relationship with Lili Brik by Ann & Sam Charters
Despite having the amazing opportunity of actually interviewing Lili Brik in her old age,the book is a major disappointment for admirers of Mayakovsky’s work.
It is a trivializing account of the avant garde Futurist poet who was one of the few Russian artists to wholeheartedly support the uprising of the “Dark People’ in the Russian Revolution of 1917 But,according to the Charters,Mayakovsky the idealist tragically wasted his talents and his time supporting the attempts by te Russian people to create a more just society .In their eyes this bad career move would eventually lead him to suicide in despair over lost illusions.
They don’t understand that Mayakovsky felt he had no choice but to kill himself in protest against the very regime that later cynically claimed him as a mythical figure in the Soviet Pantheon of the Arts.
They don’t understand because they assume that Leninism and Stalinism are one and the same thing,when in fact there is a river of blood between the two traditions.
Hundreds of thousands of Bolsheviks like Mayakovsky were already being imprisoned and murdered by Stalin when Mayakovsky died in 1930.
Lili Brik could have been a major source of information on this slaughter had the Charters known what questions to ask,but their distorted perspective on Stalinism blocked that possibility.

I try to imagine what I could have written had I the opportunity to interview Lili Brik in the 70’s as a living revolutionary artist from the same political tradition as Mayakovsky.But living revolutionaries do not get to do books on famous dead revolutionaries
It’s the literati like the Charters that get to do biographies like ‘I Love’ because they got the prestige as accredited academics and scholars along with the resources to finance their research.
Like amateur archeologists wrecking a digging site in their crude search for the inconsequential,they only make it more difficult for others to uncover what really happened.

factory boy

“The time that Charles Dickens spent at Warren’s Blacking factory is unclear and he himself did not seem to be sure.Recent commentators have varied their estimates between six months and a year,but the real point is that the young boy(twelve years old) did not know how long he would remain in employment.He might,as far as he could see,be thrown away forever.There are occasions in his fiction when Dickens seems to be speculating on what it would have been like to have been left in the factory-particularly in his evocations of those children whom nobody notices who slink through the streets.. ”
-‘Dickens’by Peter Ackroyd

A childhood of abuse and neglect did not make Dickens a revolutionary but to the end of his life,he was never able to forget what he experienced as a child
Even as a rich and famous writer he continued to look at bourgeois society,in novels like 'Bleak House' and 'Our Mutual Friend',with the unforgiving eyes of the injured and insulted.
Dickens is the only one who wrote consciously for the masses from the victim's point of view.

Sociology-911

War On Terrorism
They lock someone up in a cellar and starve and beat him and then if he gets mean and ugly and vindictive,they blame him

Red Cross calendars

Received this proposal recently in the mail:

"I am a CBC Radio producer and am working to launch a new program early in the New Year.The show is called This I Believe.I think the program gives you the opportunity to have your voice heard,as one of forty prominent Canadians,in a way that will cause fellow Canadians to pause and reflect on the values we hold dearest as individuals and as a nation.




This is what I wrote and will be reading over the radio sometime in 2007

The Red Cross Calendar Story


This happened to me when I was still in my early teens going to high school down on the Avenues where the teachers never bothered to ask us any questions,just stood at the blackboard blabbitty blab-circumference of a circle blabbitty blab-dangling participle-blabbitty blabbitty blabitty -Ringgg-ringgg-ringg goes the bell
But we had one teacher,just one,the only in my four or was it five?-felt like ten years I spent in that place-one teacher who used to talk with us,I mean really talk and that was Mort Bain,young guy who always had something he wanted to talk with us about,asking us what we thought about this or that happening in the world and sir,we’d say sir Joe Pine says this,sir,and Joe Pine says that sir and Joe Pine was the local right wing talk show host of the time,right-always trashing those welfare bums and immigrants and “You guys are too stupid to live”he’d say ..And then one day-it was during Red Cross Calendar Campaign Week when all the students were asked to buy a Red cross calendar cause one dime will feed a kid in India for a month- one day Mort Bain came in and his face,which was always red was really red and holding up a Red Cross calendar he said
“Ya know the same government that’s got you selling these goddamn calendars for a dime just spent a million dollars to buy the gasoline they need to burn millions of bushels of surplus wheat out in Saskatchewan?..All that food they’re burning it.. just burning it ..Eh?.. as in what do we think?..Well ya know,we didn’t know what to think about a government doing something like that when hey,there we were selling Red Cross Calendars for a dime to feed a hungry kid in India in a month when,hey,the million bushels of wheat that they’re burning could just about feed everybody anywhere forever and so,“Well sir”I said,putting up my hand,”Well why don’t they just give the wheat away instead of wasting it ”
And Mort said well no,they couldn’t give the wheat away,no couldn't do that cause then the price of wheat would drop to zero and the economic system would collapse..what?..
“Then I think”I said,sort of thinking out loud,”I think we oughta get rid of that government”
And all these many many years later,I still believe that

riddle of the sphinx

I’ve lived with cats all my life and have many fond memories of them so it sort of hurt to finally admit that a friend of mine was right,cats are really not that bright.
I’ve known spiders smarter than cats
The riddle of the Sphinx?
There is no riddle
Its just a big cat laying in the sun thinking about absolutely nothing.

Batman re-turns

Watching ‘Batman Returns’ set in stylistic big city Gotham of the 1930’s in the cold and chilling fear of the Great Depression
The director Tim Burton captures that atmosphere well without romanticizing it
Imagine a third of the work force out of work with no organized social services
Imagine what that statistic means
People twisted by fear into grotesque caricatures of themselves with faces defined by their desperation and despair
Hard times making people hard
Open class struggle in the streets
Revolution or War
Batman a fascistic hero in the sense of the only hope coming from a millionaire superhero

John Kerry in a mask