Posts filed under 'Politics'
December 3rd, 2008
Between the artery-splitting incomprehensible invective of Stephane Dion, and the increasingly toxic blasts of Stephen Harper–whose glaring vitriol has him seeing flags where there aren’t any, and not seeing them where they are–it’s Jack Layton who comes across as statesman. Perhaps it’s the prospect of having an actual cabinet position within the newly-minted coalition. Such new territory for him that he hasn’t yet picked up the coinage.
But I’m afraid, even without considering the latest comments of Gilles Duceppe, the coalition is an unsettling idea. Even though it’s not, as Harped on, undemocratic.
At this point, the merciful option may be to prorogue parliament. (Prorogue-hard to enounce without a marble under one’s tongue–but how readily it has slid into our lexicon.)
Yes, proroguing is an obvious gettin’ outta town after sundown–a cut and run, after a colossal Conservative blunder. But Grow Mercy likes to re-story proroguing as sending the lot of them to their room until they find a new narrative for citizens. Remember when government was understood to exist exclusively for it’s citizens?
Now every head bowed, every eye closed, as we pray they emerge to play fair. Amen.
November 20th, 2008
From the crown of Pattaya Hill, I see the astonishing natural beauty of Pattaya, reclining as it is, in the lap of the Gulf of Siam. Then, descending into the heat of the heart of town, I feel the tension of another reality.
Pattaya is a casualty of the Vietnam war. Before the war, it was a fishing village. During the war, Pattaya was an R&R destination for American soldiers on leave. Today, from the steam of two decades of foreign fuelled sex-trade, Pattaya is the number one sex destination in the world. In this smallish city of less than 100,000 people, there are around 20,000 prostitutes.
We walked “Walking Street” in the early evening, when things were slow. The strip was uncrowded but the girls, and the "lady-boys," (some of Thailand’s most beautiful "women" are boys) were already lining up…dancing, flirting, lounging.
Pattaya siphons off young girls and boys from the villages of North Thailand with promises of wealth. And because parents are often beneficiaries, they show little resistance. While the sexual mores of Thailand are relaxed regarding prostitution, and may contribute to the ballooning trade, money remains the lure. Annually, it’s a 25-30 billion dollar industry. 
But, as Nella, the Director of Tamar Center says, the “promise” of Pattaya is short lived, and often ends in despair, for children and families. Suicide is not uncommon and HIV/AIDS is still exceedingly high. Pattaya’s Tamar Center is working against the tide.
Tamar Center is an attractive, multi-function, four-story, building. One half of the ground floor keeps a tidy and trendy coffee shop. The other half holds a hair and beauty salon. Behind these shops you find a small but active bakery. A number of young women, once caught in the sex-trade, apprentice and work here at Tamar.
On the second floor, around stacked tables of mulberry craft paper, more young women, designing, cutting, measuring, and gluing. More young women who have chosen to leave the strip and try out the Tamar Center. They make greeting cards, works of art really. The creation and sale of these cards bring a modicum of income for the girls. More importantly, they find in this family-like community, a sense of self worth and dignity.
In the mean time, while city commissioners are ambitiously trying to sell Pattaya as a resort city for all, there are few initiatives aimed at addressing prostitution. Project L.I.F.E.’s Tamar Center stands relatively alone in it’s resolve, backed by hope and prayer, to extract as many girls as possible out of a degrading and exploitive trade.
(Nelle and Eve, director and manager of the Tamar Center)
October 23rd, 2008
I’m recommending that you take a moment to read Connie Howard’s article, Well, Well, Well, No InSite, No Insight, about Vancouver’s, safe injection site. Why? Because Stephen Harper seems bent on shutting it down.
I suspect the safe injection site doesn’t sit well with him. It probably has to do with a personal philosophy, or principle…which is fine, we all have them–philosophies/principles. Except here, his principles will do damage to people who need help.
I guess he agrees with his health minister Tony Clement, who calls safe injection sites, "abominations." It’s telling language. And it’s a shame. Because on every humane and practical score, as Connie H. reports, InSite makes sense.
Harper’s own advisory committee has examined the evidence and concluded that the site makes financial sense, saves lives, acts as a deterrent to drug use, has not increased crime, drug dealing or relapse rates and effectively increases the number of addicts seeking detox and treatment. Criminologists commissioned by the RCMP say it should be left open.
There should be no controversy about reducing harm and saving lives.
If you care about harm reduction and basic human dignity, please read the article and sign the letter to Stephen Harper, linked at the end of Connie Howard’s article.
October 13th, 2008
Before you vote, here are a few techniques to make your time in the voting booth a bearable experience:
-Wear something comfortable…but no sweater vests.
-Picture kittens, not white Huskies.
-Meditate on proportional representation…I mean really meditate!
-Recite some Rumi. Like: "Where is the one whose candle burns in the dawn?"
-Hum anything, except Celine Dion’s, "You and I." (It just didn’t work for Hillary C.) Better: Frank Sinatra’s, "High Hopes," or Tom Petty’s, "I Won’t Back Down."
-Give a Twoonie to the homeless guy outside the polling station.
-Finally, gird your loins, and enter.
And then, upon exiting…having done your best at marking an X, relax, and console yourself with this:
While I was in Bangkok the governor’s race was on.
Consider: At least we don’t have candidates like Chuwit Kamolvisit.
Chuwit made his fortune on Bangkok’s sex trade–his, "empire of flesh." Having done so, he feels eminently qualified to be Governor of Bangkok. And so he’s financing his own campaign to take on the hypocrisy and deceit that is, as he says, rotting Thai politics.
Here’s some Chuwit candor:
-"Politics is so dirty, so ugly, I would rather sit tight in the nightclub, surrounded by girls, smoking cigars, drinking brandy, champagne. That was the perfect life."
-"Who better to wipe out bribes, than someone who got rich paying them?"
-"I cannot fix the traffic. Nobody can fix the traffic."
-"The sex business is not a problem. If you don’t have sex, that’s a problem."
One of Chuwit’s many billboards reads: Last night I dreamed that Thai people love each other, but will my dreams come true? Now there’s an appeal that has possibilities: A kind of introspective anxious snivel. Ah yes, now we’re back to Canadian politics…save the introspection.
October 7th, 2008
This morning, sporadic clashes are still be going on between Thai police and PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy) protesters. The police are using barbed wire and tear gas. The protesters, for their part, are armed with, "weapons to chase away the evil that has twisted the minds of this government," namely, purple clappers.
If I lived here, I would come understand that the main reason for the formation of PAD, and the on-going anti-government demonstrations, was the corruption of the Thai government, lead by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Thaksin, bowed by pressure, is now in exile. He has been replaced by prime minister Somchai Wongsawat. However, Somchai happens to be the brother-in-law of Thaksin. And so the current protest, from what I gather, is about abandoned promised reforms, and the “re-Thaksinisation” of the government.
Well, yesterday morning (not sure if you’re getting this news where you are) the police moved in on the protesters. Instead of lobbing the tear gas canisters, the police fired the cylinders directly at the crowd of 20,000. Many injuries, some serious, and one death–a young female protester. (picture is from Bloomberg news)
The government says the 100-plus injuries were inflicted by protesters running into each other. (However, deputy prime minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh has resigned over the "incident.")
The protesters retaliated by throwing marbles into the police headquarters.
In the mean time, her majesty (Thailand is still theoretically a constitutional monarchy) pledged 100,000 baht to treat all injuries, including paying for a prothesis for one man who lost a leg (presumably by running into a fellow protester).
From what I’m seeing and hearing on Thai TV, (I found a Thai channel in English) the protesters are mostly women sporting yellow shirts and headbands printed with big bold letters which translate as “Save the Country.”
It has the potential to get uglier than it already is. But the Internet is still working, news is getting out, and their is no military music playing on all the channels.
So I’m taking the day to myself, and heading back downtown via Bangkok’s invigorating transit system. (Came back to the Avana Hotel last night, using the transit.)
It will work like this: I’ll catch one of a thousand possible antiquated, rust scarred rolling hulks, resembling buses. To do this I may have to cross a lane or two, buses don’t always stop at the curb. I’ll then be spilled out onto a crowded semi-sidewalk. Pressed in, shoulder to shoulder, I’ll follow the crowd–I don’t have a choice in this–and find a gate that will lead me to a very modern, overly air conditioned, sky-train, that will take me, after a transfer, to Bangkok’s city centre. A place that must be seen to be believed–and makes our place in downtown Edmonton look absolutely rural. (Yup, I’m a small town boy.)
But–having been strongly advised–I’m thinking I’ll stay clear of the Govt. House today.
July 16th, 2008
Local Edmonton poet, Michael Gravel, offers this gem about people we’ve all observed. Those dissembled beings who owe their other-worldlyness to some kind of inner or environmental slippage. But then, slippage is a perspective.
Muttering
A man at the front of the bus
is talking to himself.
Not just muttering,
as some do,
but having a good discussion.
He does not look crazy,
well-dressed in fact.
He rags on his wife.
His lamentable youth.
His last stand at last call.
He raises his voice a bit.
His hands gesture to someone.
He is ignored by all
(all noses in other business).
The city lights trail and
the route drags on.
He pulls the cord and talks some more.
His jaw waggles to the street
and the bus pulls away.
For a moment, in the city dark,
I see him,
index finger to lips,
shushing and walking,
speaking truth
only when nobody listens.
© — Michael Gravel
July 10th, 2008
…with speech smoother than butter,
but with a heart set on war;
with words that were softer than oil,
but in fact were drawn swords. (Psalm 55)
…just wondering, apocalyptically, about this morning’s Psalm in context of the Corporation
Thank the poet, standing on the ruined ancestral halls of civilization to see clear as crystal the conjured testimony of the ancient system, the corpus-Corporation.
The poet observes…
…that when the smooth words that justify personal comfort at any cost are finally etched into our unconscious constitutions, our own hearts will stand ready for war. Our flaccid faces will hide drawn swords.
Are they not already drawn?
We’ve perjured ourselves, not in poverty or struggle, or even in the quest for happiness, but in the backwash of prosperity. The generations squandered in becoming Capital-Believers will be swept away in a single backfired hour. The engines of war built by our own silent complicity will burst into flame on our gilded doorsteps.
Are they not already bursting?
Yet, even as the flames lick at our archways, still not knowing quite when to stop, hiding from the discovery that we are truly Conservative, we remain as confident in progress as Ptolemy was in a geocentric universe. And not yet ready to draw the swords on ourselves, not yet ready for a mercy-less raid on our own acquisitive desires we stumble ahead by habit.
Mercy-less raid?
Let’s be clear, mercy for all sentient beings and animate life, absolutely, but for the bloated System blind to its own avarice consumption, self-protected by sets of subsets, wherein the flesh of all chiefs and labourers slowly turn grey; wherever this anti-Christ pops up may it die by the singular disbelief of its own, I mean us. May we all laugh it into the very oblivion it prepares for us.
June 24th, 2008
George Carlin died yesterday. Sad news. My fondness for him began the first time I saw him on Ed Sullivan. I don’t remember his material for that show but I do remember the time he did the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. “Forecast for this evening…increasing darkness tonight with light patches toward morning…” it was far and away my favourite Carlin character.
Still, not wanting to speak ill of the dead–although of course Carlin had no problem speaking ill-of, living or dead–but when George Carlin traded in comedy for caustic commentary, even though few could cut better, I dropped out.
His biting satire of all things may have gained him a new audience, but for me, he became just too much of a projectile. He showed no mercy. Well, admittedly, that’s his right, and as he saw it, his job as a comedian. As David Hinkley’s obit in the NY Daily relayed, “he always said his often-cynical satire simply reflected his real-life disdain for mankind’s greed, stupidity and inconsideration.”
But the comedy became wincing. For example, to wring a laugh out of the beheading of an Oklahoma corporate executive was satire that defeated itself. It was a sideways attack on greed perhaps, but Carlin was wilfully blind, or just blind, to his own special kind of inconsideration. 
With age, he became unfunny. Caustic satire, yes, fair game in context, but a steady stream without so much as an inward glance not only loses appeal, it gets boring. Carlin seemed to just have one track. When things got boring he just upped the outrageous-ante. I guess I still appreciate a self-deprecating comic. One who draws me in by pointing out her own mania and then with a few great lines implicates the lot of us. I think Carlin used to do this. But over the last number of years he just sounded angry and miserable.
The tributes are coming in, he’s being lauded for telling us the “harsh truth,” and I guess he did that. Although harsh truth about humanity is hardly revelatory. I suppose it’s my problem, but I never got the sense that he interrogated himself anywhere as close as he did his targets, and admittedly, not all of his targets were straw-men…he wasn’t a fool. It’s just that I’m left wondering how his comedy and voice may have evolved had he developed, along with his annihilating ability at piercing pretensions, an accompanying self-questioning stance.
Seems to me that’s the kind of broad quizzical standpoint Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman would have taken. He had the insight to see an encompassing view. As he said in his final and definitive broadcast, “The weather will continue to change on and off for a long, long time.”
June 17th, 2008
…I seem to be following a thread from yesterday’s post.
Years ago I came across a quote, which I can no longer locate, that said something to the effect that we need to ask for forgiveness from those we care for.
On this, initial confusion has given way to some clarity: When I started work as manager of a homeless shelter, the work was, in my mind, something far more noble than the industry I was leaving. I relished comments like, “Oh, the work you do is so difficult…but it must be rewarding.” And I didn’t resist the implication that other work, by virtue of its secularity or its attention to widgets, was socially (and spiritually) inferior.
Thankfully, over time, a number of small rancorous events served to reflect my attitude back to me. What I see now, a thing of distress to me and an irony that escaped me entirely, was that this rarefied attitude automatically undermined my compassion for the people I tried to serve. If inwardly, I saw “my work” as elevated above the kind of gainful employment I encouraged “street people” to seek, of what use was that? Worse, if I fell (which I did) for the accompanying inside message that told me that my identity is all about my work? well, now it’s not just what I do that’s more important, it’s that I’m more important. And what does all this project into the ether?
Of course it’s easy enough for those on the so-called receiving side to detect the smell of this attitude–an attitude which is really a subjugating spirit that extends a hand only through condescension.
But anyone in a position of helping another person is in a position of power. And so any sort of giving outside of some humility is mere self-congratulating care. The help may be received but not welcomed. Received, but resented. Think of America’s bewilderment at not being liked even after dropping bags of rice on drought-gutted African countries. A sense of social and spiritual superiority is a creeping vine. It takes time and perhaps outright in-the-face hostility, and then a willingness for reflection, to cut it off at the base.
Care that is condescending, that draws attention to itself and so unduly points out need in others just sets up and reinforces socio-spiritual class systems. No, the only way through this is acquiring, through contemplation and practice and much rehearsal and many refresher courses, a transformational understanding that knows, in the thick of human encounter, that we are all one.
June 13th, 2008
As a follow-up to the Federal apology to aboriginals, here’s a link to an article in the Surrey Leader that you’ll find insightful, realistic, and hopeful. The article contains an interview with Ernie Crey, author and Sto:lo activist. (…also my sister-in-law’s brother.)
But it was economic policies “designed to keep aboriginal people in poverty” that hit hardest and deepest, Crey says, virtually imprisoning aboriginal people on reserves in living conditions most non-aboriginal Canadians would never accept.
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