I'll Show You Stupid

Possibly the worst tactical mistake you can make, politically, is to make fun of an opponent's lack of intelligence. I say this because not only is there an influx of politically active people on the world stage who fall under the category of "lacking intelligence", but there is an absence of memory about how publicly scorning such people only empowers them (and, most importantly, voters).

It's hard. When someone says something completely false - and stupid - the well-educated person's knee-jerk instinct is to say "You're an idiot". Fair enough. But, it's the taunting that backfires. For example, look at Sarah Palin. I think she represents a necessary evil in American politics: a self-elected Voice of The People who campaigns on the rather wispy argument that the US is run by a bunch of elitists who don't understand "real Americans". It's all a bunch of crap (by elite, do you mean they have an education? don't you want the people running your country to have an education? to have seen something beyond the borders of your own country for sake of perspective? who the hell are 'real Americans'? does this imply 'false Americans'?), but it serves its purpose. And what do her critics - who, to be fair, constitute most of the people on the Earth - do? They make fun of her.

She's an idiot. A moron.

The problem is, she's a moron who appeals to a growing number of disenfranchised people who are looking for a proud, politically and morally uncomplicated banner to wave proudly over their heads. And yes, we can argue about why this is and who the supporters are, but - not to say that history is a 1:1 reflection of the future, because it's not - history has shown that history doesn't give a shit about those questions. Reflection happens in the future - that is, after we politely chortle to ourselves at all the nonsense of Palin, her "Tea Party", and her scads of uncivilized minions. That is, after they take the next election.

The elitist/commoner non-argument (it's a ploy, really) is as old as politics itself. We've had something very similar (and thankfully, tamer) happen in Canada. Our current government is a coalition of reformer factions who merged in the late 90s/early 00s to take over the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party (this would be the same as if the current "Tea Party" took over the Republican Party). They removed the word Progressive from the name and lead the country as a minority government. They too campaigned (and still do, whilst in power no less) as the party of the People, as an alternative to whomever stands against their policies (aka "the elites"). It's old hat.

Before they came into power, they - as the Alliance Party - tried very hard to unseat the ruling Liberal government (tangent: can you imagine if the US had a party called the Liberal Party?). Their leader was a man named Stockwell Day, who rode onto the scene (quite literally) on a Sea Doo. He was all charisma and commonality. But as time wore on, people found that his reformist ideas weren't very deep and a lot of the people in his party were either yahoos or - elitists? - began distancing themselves away from him. The chrome on his veneer began to chip away and the man became a running gag; the Prime Minister of the day, Jean Chretien, joked openly that he preferred having Day in opposition (as to suggest his chances were that much better to win elections against the Alliance). Long story short, all it took was a few years, a "unite the right" movement, and a new leader who could streamline (that is, squelch) internal strife and you had a winner. That is to say, the toppling of a government.

I suppose what I'm saying is this: making fun of people like Sarah Palin because she doesn't come across as polished, or sophisticated, or well-educated is ineffective. All you manage to do is inflame the passions of people - many of whom may have been too lethargic or apathetic to vote in the first place - so that they start creating local campaign offices. There is nothing like being intellectually offended to raise someone's ire - anyone's, no matter where or how they were raised. Raise the ire, that is, so as to make them active agents on behalf of those scorned by the "elites". Agents of "change".

George W. Bush was publicly derided by intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike in almost every conceivable medium and venue, yet he served two four-year terms as President of the US. If you want to take down the likes of Palin, take her down as you would take down Reagan or Thatcher - that is, as an opponent worthy of debate, worthy of your concern. To do less would be to knot your own noose.

Cellphoto: Happy Endings

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Our Home and Masochistic Land

Historically, Canada has never even been close to placing first in the medal-count of the Winter Olympics. We are, after all, an exceptionally large country with an inversely proportionate population: I'd be stretching the truth if I said we had 35 million people here.

So, when I read last week that the Canadian Olympic Committee had boasted that (no this time) we were going to take first place in Vancouver a small part of me projectile-vomited across the room. It was upsetting because this ridiculous aim (summed up by the mantra Own The Podium) is something only bureaucrats can cook-up.

News to the COC: it's not like our athletes haven't tried their damnedest in the past. It's not like they didn't "get" the whole gold thing until now. They've never wanted to do anything but put in their best, but the problem - population aside - is typically Canadian: a miserable lack of funding, organization, and foresight. Only in Canada could we create an organization like the COC, with their shallow-sounding boardroom boasts which read more like something from a corporate motivational lecture ("What Colour Is Our Olympic Athlete's Parachute? GOLD!").

It adds insult to injury because there simply is no chance in hell that we are going to top the medal count, this Olympics or any to come. I'm saying it aloud: there is no...well, you get the idea. Heck, I'd be happy if we top Russia. The facts don't lie: despite our northernness, our wintry and sporting dispositions, we simply don't have the population to consistently support a proportionately competitive Olympic powerhouse, especially when up against the U.S. which has 10 more people to every one of ours! In retrospect, we should all be getting mad-drunk with delight! We're currently fifth in the freaking world, in spite of our pathetic sports infrastructure, despite our catch-us-while-you-can stagnant population growth, in spite of corporatist "iceholes" (if I may quoth Colbert) in the COC putting a bragging chip on our shoulder that we didn't need in the first place.

There should be a banner flying at the top of Whistler, just underneath the Canadian flag, with the phrase: "We're Actually Doing Pretty Damn Good".

Seriously.

“If you don't get what you want, it's a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.”

– Rudyard Kipling

Photo: McCaul Street Post #3

The Sky is Falling (Very Slowly), or, Will The Real Science Please Stand Up

The problem with having a belief in something which happens to be provocative (and by provocative, I mean something which is not embraced by the whole and which may be a bit thorny for some) is that, like in most aspects of life, all it takes is a few zealots to make you look like a fool by ideological proximity.

As I pointed out many moons ago (December of 2006!) when it comes to climate change (as opposed to the slightly misleading term global warming), outside of blind ignorance our greatest liability are people who jab an accusatory finger at every natural disaster and scream "You see! It's global warming! Climate change caused this! If we don't do something NOW we are doomed as a species!". For me, it started with Hurricane Katrina, when people (a fantastic percentage of whom had no scientific accreditation) began to suggest that it simply wasn't an old-school "act of nature", but rather something to be blamed upon worldwide environmental collapse (as if New Orleans didn't have enough problems to contend with). It fed into a grand conspiracy theory which gave certain people a quixotic reason to exist: that mankind was the chief culprit all along, and that it was only a question of years to fix it. Cue epilogue of Planet Of The Apes.

On the other (self-evident to the point where I wonder whether it's worth mentioning) end of the spectrum are the usual assortment of deep-pocketed corporate "carbon monoxide is good for you" state polluters, and knee-jerk libertarian radio hosts who feel that idling their cars is akin to patriotism (and, as an aside, the whole libertarian-patriot thing seems like an oxymoron, doesn't it?).

The thing is this, panic aside: I do believe in climate change. All that shit turning to water north of us (that would be the Arctic ice) is a sign. Much less lachrymose is all that science, provided by all those scientists, which pretty much confirms that, yes, climate change is real, and that, yes, human industry is a variable in its occurrence. The issue of how the future is looking as a result of climate change is less clear. The problem is this: remember those largely non-scientific people blaming Hurricane Katrina on climate change? The ones telling us that if we don't do something NOW then the world's a goner? They got a lot of attention; the cameras kept rolling. This was probably just a knee-jerk reaction of mass media which was (and is) delighted to scare the public any chance they get (it keeps ratings up). Well guess what: some scientists found that if they used the same sort of seismic analogies and kept the ticking clock of doom just a few minutes away, not only would they get attention, but they could get funding.

Inevitably, it had to end - the speculative bubble that is. You can only say that we have five more years to change the world for five years until people start asking why societies haven't collapsed like the finale of an Irwin Allen movie. And then someone or some group hacked into the records of some climate scientists and found that some of them were acting like jerks, that some of them didn't want to play nice with their facts (unlike all those journalists and columnists we read). To me, this was heart-breaking, because it allowed both honest sceptics and partisan political hacks alike to pull a j'accuse and call it Climategate (seriously, I look forward to a world without the silly and dated gate suffix) and call the science itself into question, as opposed to the questionable actions of a few. Some have hinted that the bad publicity fall-out could set climate science back by a decade if increased public persecution gets worse. However, I feel this is as likely as, well, the world ending in five years.

The good news is that the world hasn't ended; neither our world, nor the world of science. If anything, reading today's op-ed by Margaret Wente in the G&M, even people who previously took every opportunity to deny the existence of climate change are now looking at things plainly: no pro trumped-up worries about imminent global catastrophe, and no con lefty/green/hippy bullshit stereotypes. If anything, perhaps bringing those few scientists into the spotlight has, post whatever-gate, calmed everyone down a notch. Perhaps enough so that we will be able to parse our language into something which does not use fear as a means of persuasion. Perhaps so that we won't dilute the meaning of words like green and sustainable to homeopathic degrees.

I believe (or at least I hope) we can find an entry-point where we can use science and research rather than propaganda and fear to motivate ourselves to improve our prospects (that is, both human prospects and business prospects, two things which have not always shared mutually fulfilling goals). It is heartening to see that there may be an X-Prize for fuel/energy production, similar to what was done for sub-orbital exploration. I'd also like it if we could reboot the message of environmentalism with a good 'ol back-to-basics mantra of: use less (as in packaging, unnecessary products, natural resources). I will be happy, even if it is all a hopelessly lost cause, that we go down working on something together as opposed to a Purgatory of scoring political points against ourselves.

Photo: Stunned

You Can't Be Everything To Everybody (Actually You Can, But It's Boring)

I like jazz music, even though I am not an authority on the genre. Heck, I like all genres of music. I may not have a lot of pure country & western on my shelf but without C&W a lot of the music I love (and do have on the shelf) would not exist. Period. Music, if it's possible to talk about it in such broad terms, is a wide-spanning ecosystem where every genre and sub-genre makes an eventual impact on the whole [insert pebble/ocean analogy here].

There is a jazz radio station in Toronto that I listen to (that is, when I want to listen to jazz), named Jazz.FM91 - or, less formally, JazzFM. They have some great programming (The Big Band Show with Glen Woodcock is a fave) and some great hosts (Heather Bambrick, Walter Venafro). I even like the guy who reads the news in the morning (Tim Keele, with that old-school newsman voice). Aside from a couple of annoyances, there wasn't much to dislike.

The problem is, similar to what plagues public broadcasters, in trying to appeal to a wide audience (and it should be noted that JazzFM is supported by donations) they end up playing a lot of crap which makes me lunge for the remote to change the channel: Joni Mitchell doing jazz, jazz musicians covering Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello doing "swing" versions of his own songs. Overall, an overdependence on middle-of-the-road lyrical jazz of the sort that elevator manufacturers would consider too ironic to use as background music.

It used to be easy to avoid the bad programming: namely, Ralph Benmurgui's morning show (the man insists on sucking all the oxygen out of the control room...seriously, if someone mentioned that a 737 hit a dog on a runway in Mexico, Benmurgui would instantly quip: "You know, I was in this great airport in Puerto Vallarta last winter where they served this wonderful coffee! And let me just say to our Mexican listeners: ¡Le deseamos el mejor!") and their choice of the syndicated Sunday morning program, Radio Deluxe (where hosts John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey play an assortment of jazz classics performed almost soley by - wait for it - John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey! Here's a lesson to all you starving artists: if those royalty cheques aren't coming in fast enough, just start a show where you can program your own work).

However, lately, outside of these distractions I've had to lunge for the remote more and more. JazzFM is becoming synonymous with all the clichés that keep people under the age of 55 from listening (or considering listening) to jazz: the first, that "jazz" is a never-ending series of earnestly pedantic covers of songs such as "I Can See Clearly Now" and "Aguas de Marco". The second, that everything you need to program a jazz-based radio station is contained in the Blue Note CD box set (seriously: I pulled this out last year and began listening to all 5 CDs, and I had to stop because I realized this was practically half of JazzFM's playlist).

In the end, I fear JazzFM is becoming just another Top-40/Oldies radio station. This is great news for Michael Bublé and Diana Krall - can anyone name an original composition either of them has written? But what of people who've never experienced anything but the mention of Oscar Peterson's name? Did Miles Davis stop creating music after 1960? In case anyone from the station is reading this (or not), I'm not asking for the Jolly Roger to be flown over the JazzFM building - what I'm asking is whether the middle of the road (which is where they seem to be sitting) needs to be so damned narrow.

It Was a Dark and Mysterious Person

"You are a dark and mysterious person." said my friend Simon.

We were chatting on Facebook and he had mentioned how closely we had rated to one another's tastes on the movie-rating application, Flixster. That's when I told him I'd deleted it a few months ago: the application, my ratings, my mini-reviews, my Flixster identity. I also did the same for the iLike application (also on Facebook), which rates music. And I did the same on the Internet Movie Database: I simply removed myself (the opinions, not my professional identity).

I needed to clean house, to remove clutter, and - most importantly - to get away from being an armchair critic. There are too many people playing "expert" out there and I didn't want to be one of them because it becomes a game of oneupmanship. This isn't even to mention the fact that all of the Facebook applications keep information on file about you, that, while you are wittily commenting on the 2nd season of MadMen, you are becoming a company's marketing demographic.

I wanted no part in it. I also began to feel that, the more I expressed my opinions - witty or not, bitter or not, funny or not - the smaller I felt. This is not to criticize self-expression, but rather to say that I became sensitive to the format I chose.

I'd rather bitch about things here, on my doorstep, or on Twitter, than simply be another anonymous puppy yelping on yet another movie/music/placenamehere database.

It's also healthy to eliminate your identity from time to time, not unlike the transformational qualities of a forest fire: clearing the brush and the remnants of what is dead but still lingering.

(disclosure: I'm a Scorpio and this sort of thing comes naturally to me, and no, I have no problem saying something like "I'm a Scorpio.")

Photo: The Other Oxford Street