Tag: Humour

The Faces of Fascism

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

We all have a picture, a mental representation, of what fascism looks like, based on experience and images from the twentieth century.

A common representation would be this: Adolf Hitler being greeting and saluted by a loyal and admiring crowd.

But there are other possible faces and looks of fascism. For example, a face could be as bland and benign-looking as this:

This is the billionaire founder of a gigantic online retailer, who owns the venerable Washington Post, long known for its investigative reporting and vigorous defence of democracy. This man instructed his editorial staff to write only articles favourable to free markets, and that opposing viewpoints “will be left to be published by others.” (1) Of course, in a good newspaper, articles favourable to free markets are desirable, but along with articles that are critical of same or aspects of same. A free, unfettered, professional press is, as we all know, one of the pillars of democratic society. Is this a face of fascism? Do monkeys eat bananas? It surely looks like it: one of the first things fascists do is to take control of the press, cloaking their efforts in apparent blandness.

Or consider this as potentially a face of fascism:

This is another billionaire industrialist who in this case has attained authority to dismantle long-standing institutions and service programs of democratic government after donating enormous amounts of money to an autocratic president during his election campaign. This billionaire has been indiscriminately cutting programs beneficial to people and the country and engaging in mass impersonal firings of staff. He was brandishing the chain saw, of course, to symbolize what he was doing to public services. Could this be a face of fascism? One of the things fascists commonly do is to brandish symbols of powerful masculinity, especially phallic ones, for psychological reasons. This guy certainly does that.

Consider another:

In this case, during a diplomatic meeting in the White House, the two highest officials in the land initiated a shouting match, berating and attempting to bully a courageous democratic statesman who was trying to elicit aid in his country’s fight against a totalitarian enemy. The disgusting ambush and bullying session was the culmination of a meeting in which the two officials, acting in a way similar to Mafia “Dons,” had offered unguaranteed “protection” in exchange for tribute payments in the form of valuable minerals. The two acting in the fascistic manner are on the right wearing blue suits, and the statesman is on the left wearing a sweater emblematic of his beloved and threatened country. Psychologically speaking, fascist types, with their psychopathic character structure, commonly bully and attempt to overpower others in an obvious effort to compensate for their underlying weakness and inadequacy along with doubts about the size of their genitalia.

And so, one can see from this that face of fascism is variable.  Fascism can take many forms that are not always obvious. It may be right in front of our eyes, but we fail to recognize it.

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1. Reilly, Liam. “Jeff Bezos announces ‘significant shift’ coming to the Washington Post. A key editor is leaving because of it.” CNN Business, 26 Feb. 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/26/ media/washington-post-opinion-jeff-bezos-david-shipley/index.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.

2. Liptak, Kevin et al. “Trump and Vance erupt at Zelensky in tense Oval Office meeting.” CNN Politics, 28 Feb. 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/28/politics/trump-zelensky-vance-oval- office/index.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.

Who Are You Calling “Woke!?”

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Them’s fightin’ words.

     At least some people, particularly politicians, appear to think so. Lianne Rood, a Conservative Member of Parliament for Lambton, Ontario, has been railing against “woke” coffee lids, of all things. She is complaining about the Canadian coffee and doughnut chain, Tim Hortons, that in an effort to become more planet-friendly, is changing from plastic to fibre lids for its take-out coffee. She has Xed (1) about “woke paper lids that dissolve in your mouth” (2) – which does beg the question of what kind of person eats coffee cup lids, but we will leave that for now. “Until Tim Hortons gets rid of this paper lid, I’m done with Tim Hortons,” she has said.

     The lawmaker’s pronouncements make one wonder what has happened to us. How is it that our politicians have ditched the concern that generations of parliamentarians have had for the Canadian value of good governance, and instead have elevated warring about cultural leanings to prominence – along with dissing those who care about the planet and social issues?

     Another Conservative anti-woke warrior, Saskatchewan MP Corey Tochor introduced a private member’s bill in February that would reverse the federal government’s single use plastic ban. He is most concerned about the loss of plastic straws, and in a moment of cleverness, he said: “Soggy, limp, wet and utterly useless: we are not talking about the Liberals. We are talking about paper straws.” Heh, heh, witty that. I hope it got recorded in Hansard, the official parliamentary record, for posterity. It’s a keeper.

     There are many entangled issues here, such as: what is “woke” anyway, what is the job of Members of Parliament, how should they spend their time (should they be eating coffee lids, for example, while on the country’s payroll), and what about the importance of cultural symbols, the environmental crisis, and bad grammar? However, we can only deal with a few of these.

     First, for our American readers, some background on Tim Hortons, since there is no U.S. equivalent. Comparison to Dunkin’ Donuts falls flat (it is now called Dunkin’ in a radical re-branding effort, given that in the age of social media, remembering two words in a row taxes the attention span). Not even close. There is nothing similar in American culture, not even the family bonding ritual of consuming a six-pack of Bud Light while watching football on Thanksgiving day. Tim Hortons is sacred, representing a trinity that includes sacramental doughnuts, coffee, and a deceased hockey hero all in one. At the heart of it – other than a great Canuck staple, doughnuts (its stature matched in Canadian cuisine only by Kraft Dinner) – is the beloved Maple Leaf (and later, Buffalo Sabres) hockey hero, Tim Horton. He died on the Queen Elizabeth Way in February 1974, on his way home from Buffalo, heading to Toronto.

     Tim was driving his exotic De Tomasa Pantera, going so fast that the cop he passed could not be sure of the colour. Rumours at the time were that he had been with a mistress, but no! Not Tim, don’t even say that! In any case, no Canadian hockey heroes ever had mistresses. No, instead he was having a business conference at one a.m. in Hamilton. Perhaps there was consumption of salutary social lubricants at the business meeting. After that, he took to the road, and sadly lost control at well over one hundred miles an hour, was ejected from the car, not wearing a seatbelt. (Hey, it was 1974!) It was too sad and the whole country grieved. (3) Tim was a good guy and we all loved him.

     There you have it, the Canadian Holy Trinity: a dead hockey hero, coffee, and most important, doughnuts, preferably chocolate-glazed. I offer a warning about this. For generations, the U.S. has had, and still has, standing plans for an invasion of Canada (4) – and in fact, during the pandemic, Candace Owens, a supporter of Trump right-wing rowdies, called for the invasion of Canada to stop Prime Minister Trudeau from cracking down on “Convoy” hooligans. (5) But given the importance of doughnuts, I have a warning for the Marines: Don’t get between Canadians and their Timbits. You will regret it, profoundly so. The hand-to-hand combat will be vicious.

     So, then! We have to admit that Ms. Rood exhibits some substantial cojones. To attack Tim’s because of its apparent wokeness, and to say she is done with the brand is unprecedented, radical. It may even be against Canadian law, violating hate-speech statutes. I’m not sure of this, but it is just possible.

 

But just what is a “woke” coffee lid, anyway?

     Webster’s, at least the online version, defines woke as: “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)” (6) “Stay woke” has been in use since the nineteen-thirties in the African-American community, and the blues singer Lead Belly is reputed to have used the term as early as last mid-century. The word was used to refer to awareness of structural racism that goes beyond individual prejudice, especially in the American South during the Jim Crow era. Use of the term became more common after 2010, particularly within the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then its meaning has widened to include injustice in many forms: to be aware of not only racism, but prejudice and discrimination aimed at many groups, including women, gay people, and people who do not conform to gender expectations, as well as advocates for environmental and climate concerns. Quite simply, although expressed in dodgy grammar, the word refers to consciousness of important societal and civic issues, particularly those of injustice.

     Rapidly there was a backlash, as there always is, when the status of the privileged is challenged. The word quickly became a pejorative. This transformation was an extension of a tactic that the right has been enormously successful in carrying out; that is, co-optation of positive words that call for social change and progress. Now, even hard-core Liberals can be heard denigrating wokeness, as though it implied someone who is fey, superior in attitude, someone who is ridicules, but who nevertheless fascistically wants to impose thinking and beliefs on others. This disdain for woke has spread to Canada and many other countries. A good deal of this has been orchestrated by entrenched powers: for example, fossil fuel interests manufactured a deliberate war on “wokeness” in order to undermine environmentalists. (7) More on that it a bit, but first…

     It is not that “woke” is without problems: questionable grammar, for one. My inner- grammar-child recoils at “woke.” I can feel Miss Scott’s ruler, my second grade teacher at King George School, rapping my knuckles as I say the word. Ouch. “Awakened,” would be more correct in terms of the English language, but it implies that the individual is in a state of Buddhist enlightenment, so that is not quite right. “Awake” would be correct – as in, “she is awake to the reality of structural racism.” But I have to grant that the inventors of the term wanted something unique, something that would stand out, hence: woke. This is similar to the adoption of the term “gay,” by gender-script non-conformists. Although I miss the old usage of gay, I have to accede to them the right to take the term, given how much mistreatment they have had to endure.

     Of course there is another tangential English problem associated with this discussion: namely, Tim “Hortons.” It should be Tim Horton’s, of course, unless there were several hockey players who started different restaurants and who were all called Tim Horton. I don’t understand why we accept this travesty so passively. They could call it Tim Horton, as in Walmart, but since they chose the possessive, there should be an apostrophe, and we ought not tolerate its absence without a fight. It is the same for Lands End and Starbucks, which should be Land’s End (or less sensible, but still correct, Lands’ End) and Starbuck’s. I wrote to Lands End about the issue and received a jokey reply intended to humour me. I was not amused. Even more egregious, from a few years back, was Apple and “Think Different.” Outrageous. Of course, despite the catastrophic loss of the adverb in North American culture, it should have been “Think Differently.” Or, if the monsters at the helm of Apple did want people to think the word “different,” then it would have been “Think: Different.” A simple colon would take care of the problem. But no – the cads said to hell with the decline of civilization – we don’t care! Low.

     The other problem is that woke people can appear superior, intolerant, and downright annoying. What comes to mind is the unfair treatment of J. K. Rowling, who, without rancour or prejudice against trans people, put forth a not-unreasonable position on sex vs. gender. (8)  Another example concerns the invented concept of “cultural appropriation.” For instance, there was the cancellation of yoga classes at the University of Ottawa a number of years back. Some students complained of discomfort due to North American people engaging in a practice that is originally part of the culture of India. Yoga was being “appropriated” by Canadians, the woke students kvetched. (9) What nonsense. There can be misappropriation, as when a fashion house, in a massive exhibition of crass insensitivity, used faux North American Indigenous headdresses in a show. Ugh – tacky and disrespectful. Still, there is really no such thing as cultural appropriation.

     Cultures are not things; nobody owns them. Culture is a process, a way of living, and elements of culture spread or diffuse to other people all the time and there is nothing wrong with that. It would be silly of me to be upset, for example, if a Sherpa mountaineer wore a kilt in the traditional way, without undershorts, during an ascent of Everest, nor should I be perturbed with a Japanese teenager playing the bagpipes, nor an Iranian who chose to wear a Montréal Canadiens’ hockey sweater. So woke people: enough with self-righteous posturing, already.

     But back to the organized war on wokeness. In addition to the think-tank inspired campaigns, such as that noted of the fossil-fuel industry, commercial entities and politicians are jumping on the ant-woke honey wagon. Not for comedic effect, although it would appear that way, there are retail marketers that cater to the denigration of social consciousness. Right wing outlets, such as The Daily Wire, have launched lines of anti-woke products, including vitamins to “reclaim masculinity,” called “Manly Green Vitamin Capsules.” Jeremy’s Razors, Black Rifle Coffee, Ultra Right Beer all follow this line, promoting themselves as antidotes to the “woke mind virus.” The working class staple, Bud Light, almost tanked after using a transgender person in an advert. The Daily Wire advocates that people not “buy your men’s health products from a company that partners with drag queens and supports radical organizations that push gender procedures on children.” (10)

     The cynics of the political world have seized the opportunity also: the aforementioned Ms. Rood, and the Canadian Conservative populist wanna-be, Pierre Poilievre are two. But most notable is the self-declared leader of the anti-woke Brownshirts, Ron DeSantis in the U.S. “Florida is where woke goes to die,” he has famously declared. (11) It would be tempting to ridicule this statement and this man, were the consequences of this not so disheartening and harmful. For example, under his approval, the Florida middle school social studies curriculum and texts discuss how African slaves benefited from slavery by learning new skills! The curriculum makes no mention of who it was that did the enslaving, or slavery’s horrors. Despicable, that.

     But this tells us what is at the root of the antipathy. The most fundamental basis is racism. The foundation of anti-woke is simply good old-fashioned racism dressed up in a brand new suit. We can add to that broader feelings of fear, hate and prejudice toward people who do not conform to society’s gender scripts, toward those who advocate for fairness and justice, and those who care about our fellow creatures and the planet. Couple all that to greed – that is, protection of wealth, especially fossil-fuel wealth – and there you have it.

     So there it is; now we understand what Ms. Rood is getting at. God forbid that Tim Hortons joins the attempt to take on the monstrous problem of plastic pollution, and thus take away our plastic lids and straws. What is next? Giving up incandescent light bulbs, having to drive electrical vehicles, and being forced to see wind turbines on the horizon? Equal and just treatment of all people, regardless of skin colour, or ethnicity, gender, or gender behaviour? Ensuring that all eligible citizens get to vote? Children free of gunfire in their classrooms, safe, happy, and learning in their schools? Living wages? Access to health care? Where will it all end?

     It probably would end in that great dream of the Enlightenment: democracy and decency – things we should be willing to fight for. I hereby declare that I, for one, am willing to fight. In that spirit, keeping in mind our rich and exemplary role-models Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who challenged each other to an ultimate fighting contest, I demand satisfaction from DeSantis and Poilievre, as a tag-team, to a fight in the octagon. Once I was a martial artist who could kick seven feet in the air (in case I was attacked by a seven-foot opponent, I suppose). Now, at 77, the best I can do is aim for the ankles, but still, I would take them. That famous arc of history that bends toward justice is definitely on my side. And by all means, Lianne Rood can join them: they will still go down. I will wear a robe with a Black Lives Matter  flag on the back, Pride flags imprinted on my gloves, an Extinction Rebellion baseball cap, and my trunks will have WOKE! printed on my arse.

     I urge every Liberal and other people, including true small-c conservatives, to embrace the term and use it with pride. I consider that every college and university sophomore, if not woke, should consider themselves as failing in their work. Let there be Woke Pride.

     After all, who would not want to live with compassion, with understanding of structural injustice, a concern for our planet, and its well-being, with a desire to defend the decency and the dignity of all people and other creatures? Count me in. Please, call me woke!

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  1. There is uncertainty as to what to call “tweets,” now that the company is X. Musk as suggested “X’s,” and a completed X would then be “X’ed,” including the incorrect apostrophes. One wag suggested they be called “2 cents,” since that is what the company is worth, post the Musk takeover. Retrieved from: https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-what-are-tweets-called.
  2. Major, Darren. Are Tim Hortons’ new lids ‘woke’? One Conservative MP thinks so. CBC News, May 8, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservative- mp-tim-hortons-fibre-lids-1.7199306.
  3. 50 years after Tim Horton’s deadly car crash, we clear up one lingering mystery. The Toronto Star, February 17, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/50-years-after- tim-hortons-deadly-car-crash-we-clear-up-one-lingering-mystery/article_079468f2-c9d1-11ee-a912-97985739c8f3.html.
  4. For example: Lewis, Dan. The 1927 U.S. Plan to Invade Canada. August 26, 2012. Retrieved from: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12366/1927-us-plan-invade-canada.
  5. Porter, Tom. Candace Owens called for the US to invade Canada to stop Justin Trudeau cracking down on trucker protests. Business Insider, February 21, 2022. Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/candace-owens-wants-us-invade-canada-defend-truckers-trudeau-2022-2?op=1.
  6. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved from: https://merriam-webster.com/wordplay/woke-meaning-origin. My old Webster print version, copyright from 1955, simply defines it as the alternative past tense of wake.
  7. Noor, Dharna. Rightwing war on ‘woke capitalism’ partly driven by fossil fuel interests and allies: Report shows connections of business and rightwing thinktanks to laws aimed at environmental, social and corporate governance. The Guardian, June 22, 2023. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/rightwing-war-on-woke-capitalism-industry- interests.
  8. Petter, Olivia. JK Rowling criticised over ‘transphobic’ tweet about menstruation. Independent, June 15, 2020. Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/jk- rowling-tweet-women-menstruate-people-transphobia-twitter-a9552866.html.
  9. Foote, Andrew. Yoga class cancelled at University of Ottawa over ‘cultural issues’: “There were some cultural sensitivity issues and people were offended,” says instructor. CBC News, November 22, 2015, Retrieved from: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/university- ottawa-yoga-cultural-sensitivity-1.3330441.
  10. Gabbatt, Adam. Poor reviews, missing product: firms’ anti-woke offerings soak consumers: A thriving retail niche caters to the performative masculinity of the right wing, oftentimes bilking its chauvinistic client base. The Guardian, May 11, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/11/anti-woke-vitamin-economy.
  11. Czachor, Emily Mae. “Florida is where woke goes to die,” Gov. Ron DeSantis says after reelection victory. CBS News, November 9, 2022. Retrieved from: https://www.cbsnews.com/ news/ron-desantis-florida-where-woke-goes-to-die-midterm-election-win/.

The Malarkey Scale

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Malarkey (mel-ŏr´kē) n. Slang. Exaggerated or foolish talk, usu. intended to deceive. (1)

Picture Joe Biden’s big blue 2019 campaign bus: NO MALARKEY! Mostly the slogan was derided, seen as antiquated, out of touch, and reflective of Joe’s advanced age. (2) However, many of us, usually oldsters, enjoyed it and understood it immediately, having endured the four chaotic years of the previous scurrilous occupant of the White House. There is some truth to the charge that it was antiquated, but that makes it even better! It is exactly the word we need to describe what we are all wading in, in our so-called “information” age. (3)

     Let me challenge, right here, those younger who would mock the word. I would say, if we old-timers have been expected to learn strange terms in our old age such as what gnarly means to a skateboarder, what gaslighting, ghosting, doxxing and catfishing mean to social media addicts, to understand what fetch means when uttered by a mean girl, or even that a really hot girl is one who wears no undergarments so as to better display her attributes – well, then, younger people should be expected to understand and use English.

     Hearken, kids: you should know what it means to peregrinate, what it is to be purblind, what chicanery involves, what sort of raiment a person is wearing, what it is to twattle, and how it is to feel crapulous after over-indulgence the night before. You should know the difference between someone being indefatigable as opposed to indomitable; they are similar, but not the same, certainly. And, for good measure, speaking as a retired professor who has graded too many papers, you should know where apostrophes go, rather than just sprinkling them on the page like confetti.

     Thus I think we owe Joe Biden kudos for his effort to revive this wonderful and useful word. In this age of distorted public discourse, social media prevarication. marketing nonsense, public relations impression management, public figure pontificating, not to mention outright lying and disinformation, we need a good word to describe it all. That word is malarkey.

     Of course, there are other words for it, as the Princeton University philosopher, Harry G. Frankfurt (1929 – 2023) described earlier. (4) Uncle Joe, though, is too circumspect and civil to have used NO BULLSHIT! on the side of his bus. The other guy, who is a much cruder and more primitive fellow, might do such, although he would be lying, of course. There are other terms; one might use “humbug” for example. Malarkey is richer, however, because it includes considerations of degree – quantity and quality – as well as consciousness vs. unconsciousness, and matters of intent. Humbug is a much simpler concept. It is mere humbug to say that the country is under the guidance of divine providence, for example, but if this is taken further, it becomes malarkey. An example would be to claim that the aforementioned providence entitles citizens to believe that they are especially selected, and have the right to exceptional privilege, usually at the expense of others.

     There are many kinds of malarkey (also spelled malarky – feel free) and the concept has important dimensions that are worth considering. Doing so leads inevitably to a Malarkey Scale: a rough measurement of the size, the qualities, and the impact of a particular piece of malarkey. Is it a little fib or a whopper? Is the intention relatively harmless, or does it seek to rob others of their well-being? Is its impact negligible or does it cause untold damage in a number of areas of civil life? That is, is it only an unconsciously believed small bit of nonsense that does little harm, or is it a monstrous lie, deliberately crafted, that harms many powerless people or helpless creatures?

     For example, it could be as harmless as the idea that not wearing your rubbers in the rain will give you a cold. Or it could be as malevolent – albeit comically preposterous, of course – as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that the California wildfires of a couple of seasons ago were caused by Jews firing lasers from outer space (in order to clear the way for a Jewish-financed high-speed rail project). You see the difference: we are talking about the size, the intention, and the consequences – each of which exist in degrees on a scale. Based on these dimensions, a piece of malarkey may qualify for one M, or it may deserve two (M M), three (M M M) or even four (M M M M) Malarkeys.

 

The first component is of course, size: how much actual balderdash there is in a particular manifestation of malarkey? Is it a tiny bit of nonsensicality, say, such as the idea that dreams predict the future? (More on this later.) If so, it probably will qualify for just one M. In many cases, although consequences are a separate consideration (see below), these tend to do little harm, and may even do a bit of good. I should mention that these constitute much of what we consider as “common sense,” which is to say, shared cultural understandings, accepted at face value, but that have no inherent relationship to reality. Some of these could just as easily be referred to as humbug.

     A good example of this would be the pronouncement, most often made to teenagers, that “you can be whatever you want to be.” It is part of the constellation of common-sense American mythology and is a satisfying bit of folderol that can even be quite useful. It can be used, for example, to inspire Junior to stop watching TicTok videos of partly-clad young girls dancing, and instead get up off the couch and do something meaningful like studying mathematics or trying out for the hockey team. But it is not exactly correct, of course. True, with a reasonable I. Q., a bit of luck, a good education, and if one did the requisite ten thousand hours of study and work, one could accomplish a lot in almost any field. Nevertheless, you may not become the next Marie Curie, Max Weber, or Eric Clapton. You may just end up being an social media influencer. Still, you are a better person for having tried.

     So, the above, even if it is a bit of hooey, has a grain of useful inspirational legitimacy in it. But the idea can be inverted and used to do damage, thereby qualifying for more than one M. An inversion can be, and is often, used to shame and unjustly blame people for their predicament. For example, there is an entire ideology that has been created that condemns the poor for their plight, thereby justifying stultifying inequality and rationalizing a half-hearted social safety net. It denies the reality of the structural nature of mass poverty, both domestic and colonial, in our consumer-capitalist society. (5) We say that the poor are poor because it is their fault; they’re lazy etc. True in some cases, of course, but it is mostly poppycock that makes us feel better about ourselves when we have more wealth. I would point out just one fact and then let it go at that. The large majority of poor families in North America have at least one member working full-time, full-year, often more than one job. (6) That is a structural problem, not a failure of the person.

     This brings us to the second dimension then: intention of the malarkey-spreader. Is the person intending to deceive and thereby to harm others? Is he or she benefiting, consciously or not, from promulgating the malarkey? Is the intention to benefit, psychologically, socially, or materially usually at some cost to others? Again, it is a matter of degree. We oldsters might criticize the music of younger people because it makes us feel better while we are dealing with our arthritis or musing about our youthful hotness that has gone AWOL. This is minor: there is no harm done and their music isn’t that bad. We really don’t mean to hurt them and the young people certainly don’t feel hurt. After all, they don’t really care about our musical opinions.

     On the other hand, the malarkey could be the malicious work of, say, an Andrew Tate, the purveyor of toxic masculinity, deliberately propagating hateful ideas to a large Internet following. He provides poisonous ideology to impressionable young men, amplifying their ignorance and feeding their misogyny so that…well, so that he can be somebody. And so that he can abuse vulnerable women. And so that he can drive expensive, fast cars. Pathetic really, but there it is: a developmentally delayed boy-man, propagating harmful claptrap with the full-on intention to harm others for personal gain. This makes his malarkey monstrous.

     Finally, the third dimension is: consequences. Does spreading the malarkey do no, or little harm? Belief that the world is flat, for example, does no harm. Nobody cares, and usually the belief has no effect – and if it does have an upshot, it is positive: that is, providing beneficial amusement to others.

     But the consequences of some malarkey can be catastrophic. Think blaming immigrants for crime as Trump did when he entered office and is doing so again this year (in fact, crime rates among immigrants are consistently lower than in the host population). (7) Trumpery, indeed. Think of (Trump again) the failure to condemn white supremacists after the Charlottesville demonstration and the murder-by-car of Heather Heyer, and later, in 2020, of his message to the Proud Boys, to “stand down and stand by.” It was an endorsement of the group and their cause, and they were thrilled and encouraged. (8) Think of Hitler blaming Jews for the political and economic woes of Weimar Republic. Enough said.

    There you have it in assessing malarkey: the size or scale or degree of the lie, the intention, and the consequences. This leads quite naturally to the Malarkey Scale, as follows:

1. Minor Malarkey M:

     This involves a smaller lie, just some flapdoodle made usually without intention to harm others, and the consequences are quite minor. I was, for example, in teaching about the sleep and dreaming cycle in psychology, surprised at how many students claimed not only that dreams predicted the future, but that they, themselves, had experienced such a prognosticating function resulting from the activation of random neurons in the brain stem during rapid-eye-movement sleep. It is untrue, of course, but there is no intention to harm another, and the effects, other than the believer sounding a bit silly, are inconsequential: just one M.

2. Moderate Malarkey M M:

     This level of malarkey involves a greater degree of fibbing, possibly in more that one direction. The intention may not necessarily involve directly harming others, but there is definitely some intention to get something from or put something over on someone, for personal gain. One common example is the claim to psychic powers. One of our regional newspapers used to feature a column by someone claiming to be a pet psychic. She would tell you what your pet was thinking and even could tell you how Fido was doing beyond the grave. She could gather these “insights” just from the letter you sent her – no need to meet Buddy or hold a seance in person! A clever bit of gimcrackery, of course. Often the proponents of this kind of malarkey claim no intention to deceive and may even believe their own flim-flam. But deceive they do, with the benefit of either appearing more special than the next person, or having gainful employment (such as a clairvoyant column-writer) or both. The consequences are usually light: not much harm is done most of the time. I enjoy a good astrology column myself, and I make sure to get fortune cookies with my Chinese take-out, though I would not want to become delusional and start thinking there was anything to these things.

3. Major Malarkey M M M:

     This involves a bigger lie, sometimes even a whopper, and the intention is usually to harm others, or at least separate people from their autonomy, power, and/or money. Most advertising is this: the major lie is the claim that this product will somehow magically make one happy. Research clearly shows that this is never really the case once you are above a basic level of material well-being. But the sleight of hand connecting greater material possession with happiness is accomplished masterfully; your fundamental human emotions, and your desires for experiences like relationship, love and sensuality are cleverly linked, that is, psychologically associated with material objects though a vicarious conditioning process. The intention is to rob you of your money, of course. The consequences of this marketing ballyhoo can be quite serious: the dead-end pursuit of endless material satisfaction, slavery to a paycheque, resulting over-consumption of resources and production of waste, and even, for some, an emptiness in living, that is, the old ennui. Three Malarkeys for this existential lie: M M M !

     Some codswallop might otherwise qualify for four Malarkeys because of its maliciousness, but the fabrication is so outlandish, unbelievable, and moronic as to make it otherwise completely laughable. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s previously noted claim of Jewish outer space lasers is such an example, as well as the entire Q-Anon conspiracy theory, to which the congresswoman also adheres, by the way. (9) The scale of the bunkum would ordinarily lead them to be considered as M M M M. However, these theories are so outlandish that the harm to public discourse is somewhat curtailed in that nobody in their right mind would believe them, which leads to, of course, the non compos mentis factor – the dispensers of this baloney have lost contact with reality, and therefore most likely do not understand what they are doing and what the consequences are. Some allowance must be made here, although certainly these people should not be elected to positions of public responsibility or leadership.

4. Monstrous Malarkey M M M M:

     This is the worst level of tommyrot. Racism is M M M M. Misogyny is M M M M. The lies are huge, the intention is to exploit, disempower and oppress others, or worse, and the consequences are very damaging, if not catastrophic. In addition, the charlatan is of a sane state of mind: that is, not delusional, although usually psychopathic, like Steve Bannon or Roger Stone, both sycophants of Donald Trump. Trump’s “stolen election” bunkum qualifies as Monstrous Malarkey on all fronts: degree of nonsense, intention and state of mind, with tremendous consequences. The twaddle that the election was stolen is entirely untrue – so outlandish, with all the investigations, evidence, court cases and the like as to no longer require refutation, if it ever did. The intention is absolutely clear: to seize power, not only undeservedly, not only illegally, but immorally. The state of mind of the perp is clear: he is a psychopath, without conscience. The consequences for America are catastrophic: the undermining, and if successful in this return election engagement of 2024, even the unwinding of the two-century-plus experiment in civil democracy. M M M M !

     Monstrous Malarkey is so nefarious, so odious, that one might think that another, more dramatic word is called for, but at the bottom of it is classic malarkey. And so, I stick with the term.

 

America is in its long, tortuous election year and so we have to expect to be eyeball-deep in malarkey this year. There will be plenty of malarkey in Canada, too, which will have an election in 2025, if not before. Consider: Canada’s banking system is considered one of the best, most stable in the entire world. (There was no melt-down in 2008; the Canadian banks did not participate in the mortgage follies that preceded the crash.) However, the leading opposition candidate, Pierre Poilievre, who is likely to be the next prime minister, has proposed getting rid of the Bank of Canada and that the country go big into cryptocurrency. Go figure. And the current premiere of the oil province of Alberta, Danielle Smith, after the past year when Canada pretty much went up in smoke as a result of cumulative climate change problems, has implemented a moratorium on the development of…wait for it…renewable energy! Ah…well, go figure.

     Still, the situation is less dangerous there right now than it is immediately in the U. S. In this country, the very democracy is at stake; at the same time, we are drowning in hogwash, disinformation, law-breaking, and fraud in the political sphere. It will get worse with the use of artificial intelligence, which will make dupery much easier to carry off, and much more difficult to discern.

     Overall, “only” one-third of Americans believe the 2020 the fraud perpetrated by Trump, that the election was stolen; however that translates to close to seventy percent of Republicans who believe this hokum. (10) It also leads, incredibly, to a sizeable proportion of the population who intend to vote for the fraudster who inspires unbelievable loyalty, like a Mafia Don, and who aspires to dictatorship. The danger is grave, indeed.

     My hope is that the Malarkey Scale presented here is helpful in identifying and assessing what we are facing – and ultimately in overcoming it. One hopes that intelligence, rationality, and sanity will prevail over the dark forces, and that in the long run, good will prevail. In the meantime, what specifically can we do? The simplest and most direct thing, when we hear, read, or see something, is to ask: is it true? Is it true, for example, that immigrants have a higher crime rate than native people? Then we dig in and find out from real, objective sources.

     And finally, we all must thank Joe Biden for reminding us about the power and menace of malarkey – and for the need to be straight and true, to the best of our abilities. I, for one, would like to see the slogan go back on the bus. 

____________________________

1. ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary of the English Language: An Encyclopedic Reference. Thompson Canada Limited, 1997.

2. Yglesias, Matthew. “No Malarkey,” Joe Biden’s unabashedly lame new slogan, explained. Vox, December 3, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/3/20991841/joe-biden-no-malarkey. Accessed January 26, 2023. 

3. An equally or possibly more legitimate term would be the “disinformation age.”

4. Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.

5. Desmond, Mathew. Poverty, By America. Random House, 2023.

6. Carl, John, and Marc Bélanger. Think Sociology. 2nd Canadian ed., Pearson, 2013.

7. Fact check: Immigration doesn’t bring crime into U.S., data say. PBS News Hour, February. 3, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fact-check-immigration-doesnt-bring-crime-u-s-data-say. Accessed January 23, 2024. 

8. Subramanian, Courtney, and Jordan Culver. Donald Trump sidesteps call to condemn white supremacists — and the Proud Boys were ‘extremely excited’ about it. USA Today. September 29, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/29/trump-debate-white-supremacists-stand-back-stand-by/3583339001/. Accessed January 23, 2024. 

9. Begs the question: how did this person ever get elected to Congress?

10. Kamisar, Ben. Almost a third of Americans still believe the 2020 election result was fraudulent. NBC News, Meet the Press Blog, June 20, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/almost-third-americans-still-believe-2020-election-result-was-fraudule-rcna90145. Accessed January 24, 2024. 

Copyright © Peter Scott Cameron, 2024

Good News 2: Climate Change

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Good news! No, sorry, it is not that Elon Musk has blasted off on a one-way rocket to Mars, or that Taylor Swift has laryngitis – even better news than that! We have made progress on the climate front.

     Good news cannot help but be most welcome after an anxiety-provoking year with record heat, Canadian fires, and a final COPS 28 document, that like Bob Dole in his last years, suffered from erectile dysfunction. The COPS document should have been no surprise, given that the conference president was Sultan al-Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, who was also chair of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. This (having an oil executive in charge of the world conference on climate change) was such a good idea that we have already decided to replicate it. Mukhtar Babayev, former executive of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan for twenty-six years, has been named as president of COPS 29.(1) Talk about foxes guarding the hen-house, or I would say, hiring wolves to tend the sheep. No wonder the COPS outcomes tend to be, as the wise-beyond-her-years Greta Thunberg would put it: “blah, blah, blah.”

     Sorry! Back to the good news:

     The price of renewable energy is coming down exponentially. This is affecting fossil fuel use to such a degree that we likely have reached a positive tipping point. That is, fossil fuel use may peak as early as 2030. All forms of renewable energy are surging and by 2027, solar is expected to become the cheapest source of energy, period. There are strong indications that we are at peak electric power emissions right now – such emissions are expected to decline in 2024.

     Our awareness of the poison of plastics is rising. With varying degrees of success, countries such as India, Canada, and the U.K. are fighting to ban single-use plastic, despite stiff opposition from the likes of DOW Chemical and Exxon. Canada developed a plan in 2023 for a plastics registry that includes manufacturers, which would gather and use evidence in the effort to reduce and even prevent plastic pollution. The goal is zero plastic waste by 2030. Meanwhile numerous lawsuits are underway in several countries against high plastic users such as Pepsi and Evian etc.

     In the past year, oil companies such as BP, Exxon and Saudi Aramco pledged to reduce methane emissions by at least 80% by 2030. This is completely achievable. Oil companies, of course, are notoriously unreliable partners in efforts to improve public well-being, but we can hold their feet to their methane flares, so to speak.

     COPS 28 did establish a fund provided by wealthy, high-emissions countries to help development of poorer countries without adding to fossil fuel emissions, as well as to address problems caused by climate change in these countries. This is a big deal; it will help huge swaths of the world to avoid following our path toward high fossil-fuel development.

    Deforestation in the Amazon in Brazil is plummeting under President Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva, exactly as he promised, after the previous populist bad guy, Jair Bolsonaro, was turfed from office (good news all by itself, that).

     “Kids” are not waiting for their parents to get with it. Not only are they changing their consumption patterns, but they are filing lawsuits, making the claim that they deserve, of all things, a liveable world. Young people, for example, won a suit in Montana (Held vs. Montana). The state trial judge ruled that the Montana government violated the plaintiffs’ right to a “clean and healthful environment” by failing to consider the harms of fossil fuels.

     States and localities are taking the initiative ahead of national governments (although there is progress by nations there, too: Switzerland, for example, has made a legislative commitment to get to net-zero by 2050). But even small cities, where you might not think it would happen, are making efforts to go green: think Greensburg, Kansas (conservation rebuilding), Georgetown, Texas (wind and solar in the heart of oil country), and Juneau, Alaska (developing electric vehicles infrastructure). In Canada, cities like Vancouver, Edmonton, Halifax and Montreal are tackling the problem with retrofits, clean energy projects, road pricing and carbon accounting. And many Canadian indigenous communities are leading in fighting fossil fuel expansion as well as the development of renewable energy projects.

     A piece of great news and a tremendous victory for people and the planet: The Green Belt has been preserved in Ontario. It was intended to protect environmentally important land from unfettered urban sprawl in a large area around Toronto, from Oshawa to Hamilton, referred to as the “Golden Horseshoe.” The Horseshoe has been the fastest growing area in North America for years and is expected to approach twelve million people by around 2031. Within and around the Horseshoe, the Green Belt is a swath of two million acres of land, including agricultural, forest, and wetlands that was established in 2005 under the Liberal premier at the time: a brilliant idea.

     But alas, as Cameron’s Fifth Law states: “no idea is so great that some dunderhead will do all that can be done to take it down.” Enter Doug Ford. Americans might not know Doug Ford, but will remember his younger brother Rob Ford, the former crack-smoking mayor of Toronto, perhaps best known for showing up inebriated at Tim Horton Doughnut shops in the middle of the night, spouting gibberish in an ersatz Jamaican patois, and for his campaign promises to “tear up” the newly installed bike lanes in the city.(2) If Rob was a drunken Chewbacca figure, then his older brother is more like Darth Vader, only more devious but not that smart.(3)

     The election of Doug Ford in 2018 was not a happy moment for the climate movement. The former provincial premiere, Kathleen Wynne, a good climate warrior who introduced a cap-and-trade program, was thoroughly trounced at the polls. She was a highly intelligent woman who also happened to be a lesbian. She lost the election because she was: a) highly intelligent, b) a woman, and c) a lesbian. This hat-trick of threats was too much for the fragile male egos of the province, so they tossed her out on her green lesbian bum. Sad.

     Ford, on the other hand, touted prosperity through burning lots of fossil fuel, which is always a good selling point for a sizeable percentage of any electorate. One of his potential cabinet ministers promised to “tear out wind generators by the roots,” if elected. Not good, though a somewhat comical image: perhaps she was confusing wind mills with sunflowers. When Ontarians woke up the day after the election and realized what they had done, they were like black-out drunks in the morning, saying, “no, wait, I did what last night?” But then, brains addled by Long Covid, the good people of Ontario elected him again in 2022. Goes to show you.

A Digression.

If you want, you can skip this section – it is off topic. But if you do that, you will regret it. It will enrich your life, so I recommend you stay with me.

     Americans should know that – and it may come as a surprise to those who see Canada as a more civilized (true) and more peaceful nation (true) but similar to their own – Canada has a long tradition of tolerating and electing politicians…let’s say, without all their oars in the water. Canadians don’t seem to expect that their politicians to be any less or more bonkers (4) than the general population.(5) So leaders with quirks or issues are not unusual. None of this should come as a surprise, when you realize that among the greatest exports from Canada to the U. S. have been William Shatner, Norm MacDonald, John Candy, and Jim Carrey.

     One mayor (Mel Lastman) of Toronto who preceded Rob Ford by a decade or so, was an appliance hawker who went by the name of “Bad Boy” and who appeared in those goofy television commercials wearing a striped prison outfit – you know the kind of ad I am talking about. He was a Liberal Party member, but claimed that fact was a result of a “misunderstanding” although the nature of the misunderstanding was never explained. Bad Boy is remembered best for exclaiming, before a diplomatic trip to Africa, that he didn’t really want to go because, and I quote: “I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.”

     Completely without charisma, the highly intelligent William Lyon Mackenzie King (fondly known as “Weird Willie” by the populace), was elected as prime minister three non-consecutive times and led Canada during WWII. By all accounts, he was an excellent prime minister. He was also a spiritualist and held seances while in office in order to consult with his dead mother, his deceased dogs, and Leonardo da Vinci, among others, about public policy. No doubt his full formal moniker was a big part of his problem. He was a bachelor, it probably goes without saying.

     W. A. C. “Wacky” Bennett was a leader of the Social Credit Party in Western Canada and served as the premiere of British Columbia for – count ’em – seven consecutive terms, beginning in the early nineteen-fifties and stretching until the end of the sixties. Wacky was…well, you figure it out. The Social Credit Party itself was founded in the nineteen-thirties by a radio evangelist, “Bible Bill” Aberhart who mixed fundamentalist Christianity and a dash of anti-Semitism with the dubious economic theories of an engineer by the name of C. H. Douglas. Douglas sought to apply engineering theories to rationalize economics. His theory was that…oh, well, never mind. In any case, in the first campaign for the Social Credit Party in the Great Depression in Alberta in 1935, I understand that the party promised to hand out $100 cash to every citizen if elected. Bible Bill and the Social Credit won, and the day after the election people are said to have lined up outside the legislature waiting for their money, but were surprised to find the doors locked.

     Even the (arguably) greatest Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, the cultured intellectual, told his fellow parliamentarians, right in session, to “fuddle duddle.”(6)

     So there, you see.

End of digression: Back to Doug Ford and Saving the Green Belt:

Ford had promised to develop housing on the beloved Green Belt, but Ontarians had elected him anyway. Sure enough, a few years later, he made crooked deals with developers and announced plans. The electorate was surprised and outraged, which begs the question…well, it is hard to think what the right question is in this situation. In any case, the population rose up in opposition and protest, which demonstrates that some of the time, people actually understand things. Not only that, but the dealings were entirely shady and have caught the attention of both ethics watchdogs and the Provincial Police. The plan was hastily withdrawn. Even though Ford has hinted that he has not given up, this is a victory of inestimable value in the climate fight.

     Plus everyone knows that the solution to twenty-first-century exploding-population housing crisis in urban areas is to build vertically, not horizontally – condos and apartments, not sprawling housing developments. Anyway, let’s hear it for the people of Ontario, who it appears, might have come to their senses!

     There is more good news, and it is possible I’ve saved the best for last:

     Joe Biden’s efforts and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act have had a profound effect already. The U.S. is pivoting away rapidly from gas, oil and coal toward wind, solar and other renewables. Progress resulting from the Act is happening faster than expected. Emissions from electricity in the U.S. is on track to be reduced by 83% by 2030. A bonus, but predicted and promised: job generation was been huge. At the same time, China has sped up also, and is expected to double its solar and wind energy in just the next two years. Further, in the face of the Russian war against Ukraine, European countries are weaning themselves off Russian oil and accelerating toward renewables. Overall, the momentum is tremendous.

     Notably, India’s emissions have dropped by thirty-three percent in the last fourteen years. This has been accomplished mainly by increasing both renewable energy and government-initiated reforestation. India is clearly on track to meet its commitment to reduce emissions from 2005 levels; the country is expected to show a reduction of 45% by 2030. This is a demonstrative case: given India’s overpopulated society and rather messy economy, it shows us that it can be done, no matter what the conditions.

     The U.S. and China agreement, from late 2023, to ramp up renewables and phase out of fossil fuels, even if modest, will have huge effects since these two countries are the biggest producers overall, and China is big producer of methane. It also portends well for further cooperation, despite the otherwise combative stance that these two countries take in relation to one another.

     U.S. emissions fell a tad – about two percent – in 2023, despite an apparent frenzy to fly in aeroplanes after the pandemic, as well as a neurotic compulsion to drive all over the damn place in gargantuan pickup trucks and gigantic SUVs. Overall American emissions have declined just over seventeen percent since 2005. Mostly this is due to an ongoing decline in coal burning resulting in the lowest level of coal emissions since the early 1970s.

     Clearly, given climate events of 2023, this latter is not enough, but – it is something. It is progress. And since we are fossil fuel addicts, I think it is appropriate to borrow a phrase I have heard from members of Alcoholics Anonymous, to the effect that they seek “progress, not perfection.” 2023 was not good, but there was progress, so let us not be disheartened.

     Let us instead, embrace this progress and promise to ourselves, to each other, and to the creatures of the planet, that we will do more in 2024.

 

Notes:

1. I am going to eschew my usual practice of providing bibliographic references this time. There would be no end to them. But you can DuckDuckGo the points and find supporting references easily if you wish. Also, in this piece, I am returning to my practice of preferring Canadian English spellings whenever I can remember to do them.

2. It is not my intention to speak poorly of the dead. Rob died of cancer a couple of years after leaving office and I am sorry about that. I am only making fun of him while he was alive, which is fair enough. And I would note that he had a heart and was personally generous to a fault; we can use more people with those qualities. If he met someone without money on the street, he would hand them $20 from his pocket. 

3. As executor of his brother Rob’s will, Doug Ford was accused of mishandling and possibly embezzling money intended for his brother’s widow.

4. As a long-time community mental health worker, I use these terms as in common vernacular, referring to defects of character and maladies of impoverished and distorted thinking – not in reference to actual serious mental illnesses. People who suffer from these real illnesses deserve our empathy, our help, and our respect. 

5. Americans elect just as many, if not more, politicians who are not firing on all cylinders, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz. The difference seems to be that the news media and the American people appear feel compelled to pretend that these people represent normal and legitimate ideas, which makes them more dangerous and leads to some dissociated public discourse, to say the least. 

6. Pierre told them to “fuck off.” At first he said, when asked, that he was merely moving his lips, and challenged them, demanding to know whether they were lip readers. Asked about it later, he said it was “fuddle duddle.” This became the big Fuddle Duddle Incident of 1971, a landmark event in Canadian politics, challenging even the Mange de la Merde episode Trudeau had with union workers in Montréal a year earlier.

On Retirement: Part II, The End Game

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

          Be happy if there is something to be happy about!
          When the moment comes, do not lose it!
          Though they say life lasts a hundred years,
          Who has seen a full thirty thousand days!
          You are in this world but an instant,
          So don’t sit there grumbling about money.
          At the end of The Classic of Filial Piety
          It tells you all about what funerals are like.(1)

“Be here, now!”

     So Alan Watts charged us.(2) In my twenties, it sounded great. The problem was that I couldn’t do it. I observed that I was mostly running ahead, toward completion, toward the next thing. There was much to do: studying, jobs, money, marriage, a child, where and how to live – “caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.”(3) Admittedly, there were times of Flow: becoming lost in a ego-less process, absorbed in the moment, losing track of time itself in the pure pleasure of being.(4) But mostly not: mostly, it was do this or that, and get on to the next thing.

     This goes on for years, with the cares of family and daily life and concerns of career. Then, with retirement, an opportunity opens up. Unless one is planning a new career as a winemaker, tractor-trailer driver, or TikToc fashion influencer, or you fill the void by chauffeuring grandchildren around to Sufi dancing or kettle drum practice, the present opens in a way it has not been open for a long time.

     In this openness there is a natural inclination to review the past and to assess how one has done.(5) You have run your career race and came in seventh. This can be okay and work out well enough, depending on attitude: “I was married more times than a radio talk-show host, but I never lost hope.” Or, “I didn’t end up writing The Great Novel, but that chapbook of racy limericks was a killer!”

     In my work, I made the world a better place.

     Or this can turn to rumination and recrimination, which is never a good thing for the emotions or disposition. My ship came in, but I failed to get on board. It can be depressing, because we all fail spectacularly, and at this point there is nothing you can do about it. But the latter is also the good news. There most definitely is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well give up on it and make a nice fried egg and tomato sandwich.

     Your thoughts also go forward toward The End Game, as a ninety-two-year-old friend calls it. Somewhere along the line, starting in late middle age, our mental calculation changes from time spent on the planet to time left. In older age, this is acute. There is no room for denial: time is limited and the outcome is fixed. It is just a matter of when and how.

     How this goes is naturally affected by one’s state of health. Even without major problems, aging issues can be vexing. Brown things and skin tags start growing on you like you are a compost pile. Your arm hurts for no reason. Legs get stiff and athletic activities like tying your shoelaces make you short of breath. Or like me, a hand starts to shake one day and doesn’t stop: “essential tremor,” Dr. Google calls it, which means they have no idea where it comes from and there is nothing that can be done about it. Why it is “essential” beats me. My fine doctor offered me neurological testing, which I appreciated, but declined. Why bother if there is no fix?

     After seventy, one can become afraid to go to the doctor for fear of discovering something that will kill you sooner or later, but of which, until that appointment, you were happily ignorant. That has been the case with me. I go to the doctor with no complaint and pow! Now I have a problem. That is one reason that the annual physical is terrifying. Adding to the horror, if you are of a certain age, they start asking you to remember three words and recall them later, or ask you to draw a picture of a clock showing twenty to ten. (My advice on this? Refuse. Don’t do it – don’t go down without a fight!) All this naturally leads one to think that the obvious solution is not to go to the doctor at all, which was the recommendation of a friend’s mother. She lived to 91 and died happy. However, such a course can lead to a surprise heart attack while imagining Shania Twain without any clothes on when you are country line dancing at the Senior Centre, or keeling over with a stroke while serving figgy pudding to that felonious band of in-laws at Christmas dinner. So not having checkups is not most advisable.

     Entirely too many people in retirement age are troubled, if not tormented, by illness and debilitation, and I am sorry for them. I do not yet have this. I only have to know where the washrooms will be if I go for an urban walk. I count myself very lucky. I feel much compassion for those who are afflicted, who feel so poorly and who are stuck in endless rounds of appointments, tests, and treatments, and those as well who suffer pain and impairment. I have friends among them and have lost friends to the diseases they have encountered. It is something that the Buddhists warn us about, and they suggest that we prepare; but still, it does not feel quite fair. You put in a lifetime of effort and good work, kindness and caring, and it comes to debilitation and discomfort. Then you die. Jarring, that.

     So you have to face your mortality: The End Game. Retiring does both make it plain that you have been to the mountaintop and now are on the downslope, and it gives you more time to think about it. This might be alright, a sort of preparation for death as Freud proposed.(6) For some it might bring relief; you will miss things, of course, like how the kids are doing or the laughter or your mate; but on the other hand, you will be free of pain if you have that, and certainly you will not have to hear or read about Taylor Swift ever again – no small compensation, that.

     Still, death can be a ruminative burden and for some is frightening, although not inevitably so. Many are consoled by religion, and look forward to an afterlife. Others – those of us without a strict belief in the continuation of a human soul – are without this solace, yet we are still not afraid. After all, if we come from the cosmic ether, we will go back to it; there is not much frightening about that. Although to be sure there can be anticipatory grief – about one’s pending absence from the dance.

     So with the past done, and a future that is dodgy, what we are left with is the present moment – just as good old Watts prescribed. And as Freud implied, and the Buddhists advise, contemplation of mortality provides a focus, an opportunity to experience the present to its fullest, in a way we never have before.

     Friends and companions help a great deal on this journey. The old gang at the office or the plant have gone on ahead without us. What we are left with is a partner, if we have one, and our old friends. The old reliable, more-or-less daily, enforced socializing of the workplace has vanished, and for many a void is opens up.

     Much is made of the value of socializing in general, especially in popular psychology and the New York Times. This notion is a regular feature and sells a good number of issues of Psychology Today. But the idea appears to be overrated and there is not much real social science behind this.(7) As a confirmed and contented Introvert, I am skeptical about the value of casual socializing. I can take it or leave it, mostly the latter. And I don’t think I am alone in this: ask the third of the North American population who share my temperamental trait.

     That said, complete isolation is bad for one, and correlates with higher rates of depression, heart attack, early death and inebriated purchasing of workout equipment from infomercials at three in the morning. So for goodness sake, despite the reservation expressed above, if you are isolated and lonely, by all means do join that backgammon club, church choir, or a weekly book club, or if desperate and in danger of developing suicidal ideation, take up pickleball. Make a friend!

 

I am sitting on an August Sunday early afternoon, eating a store-bought turkey sandwich with a good old friend at the picnic table at the Stewart’s store in the quaint village that he grew up in. He is an empathetic fellow who sat with me one time many years ago in another Stewart’s, and listened when I was at a very low point in my life. A couple of times a month I receive a brilliant multi-page longhand letter from him, describing the subtleties of everyday life, his reading regimen, and intellectual explorations. He is a member of a select class of people: highly intelligent, yes, but more, a true scholar. I count myself fortunate to know not just one, but two people like this, who, no matter what they are doing as a livelihood at a particular time, read and learn and think for its own sake. Once I called up the other of them, M.W., when he was in Brooklyn visiting his daughter and I asked him what he was planning to do that evening. “I’m going back to the hotel to think,” he replied.

     K.B. takes me on a walking tour around the village, with tales of adventures at the old school, early and later grades, middle-school exploits, and unrequited teenage love. We wander by the now-dilapidated band shell where his high-school rock and roll band debuted. As we walk away from the now sad and decrepit little public park, I am carrying on about my current side-by-side re-reading of Jack Kérouac’s The Subterraneans vs. Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, and why the former is a success, while the latter is a failure, in my opinion. I declare that it is because Kerouac’s telling is full of emotion and a visceral love of life, while Cohen’s lacks these and is rather cold. I find I have no empathy for its characters: surprising in a work by the writer of So Long Marianne and Dance Me to the End of Love. K.B does not interrupt my opining and instead listens attentively, which I appreciate. Is it not true that we all want to be heard?

     After the walkabout, we talk about his upcoming project of reading the eight hundred pages of L’Être et le Néant : Essai d’Ontologie Phénoménologique that he had ordered – half-jokingly he proposes to read two or three pages at a time, in the booths at each one of the 350 plus Stewart’s stores in New York and the few in Vermont. I think this is an outstanding idea. He jokes again and wonders how it might stack up against the wanderings of Herodotus.(8) We consider what kind of car would be appropriate for such an epic journey. K. B.’s 2018 Honda does not seen quite right for the odyssey – a more classical ride would seem appropriate. I suspect my friend leans toward something like his previously-owned late-sixties Dodge Charger, but I am envisioning something more modest, such as a Morris Minor Traveller station wagon from 1957, preferably in the classic British racing green. Of course, I am thinking that offsetting the carbon would have to be considered, which is difficult these days as it has come to light that most of the available offset schemes are fraudulent.

     Before we part, we wonder out loud if there is a market for a basic car without all the annoying features like fobs, lane correction, touch screens and heated seats. Something with key-entry, roll-down windows, no-draft vents, and a standard transmission would be nice. I am imagining a two-door Valiant with a Slant Six under the hood, not with that push-button automatic, maybe a sixty-one with the classic fins. A perfect car: would there not be buyers for such a thing in 2023, I ask? We muse that one would think so, but probably not. To be sure, for my part, this – old cars were better etc. – is retired geezer jawing at its very best. Very satisfying. I am sorry to take leave of my friend.

     Now I am back in the afternoon sun, in the yard, sitting in a weather-worn wooden Adirondack chair. I am the lazy one; I am reading and smoking a cigar while my mate labours in the garden. I see a bee – not my bee from July, the one that came to the window during news time, but another one and I wonder where my bee went. I hope it wasn’t eaten. A big Monarch butterfly comes by and flutters around me, darting here and there, up and down, back and forth. Then, apparently not bothered by the the cigar smoke, it alights on my knee and there it perches.

     I am one lucky bastard. This Monarch thinks I am trustworthy enough to rest awhile on my blue jeans. I live on an acre of rural paradise. My modest income is sufficient for my needs: there is nothing more I want to own and nowhere I want to travel. My health ain’t perfect, but it ain’t bad, either. I have some friends. My wife, K., loves me unconditionally, and when I grumble about one or another of my shortcomings, tells me that I am perfect just as I am. I am inclined to disagree with this assessment, but I do not debate the point; in any case, I feel the same about her, so have no basis to argue. The sun is on my face, the book is excellent, and our friendly dog-like cat is lying by the raised garden. My daughter, off in Toronto, is thriving, and my smart and good-natured grandchildren are launching into the world. None of this is permanent, of course; any of it could change in an instant.

     But in this moment, I am grateful. I am retired and have nothing to do.

     I have only to be here, now.

__________________________________

1. Hanshan. Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the Tang Poet Han-Shan. Translated by Burton Watson. Columbia University Press, 1970. Accurate details have been lost in time and myth, but the Buddhist recluse is thought to have lived around the seventh or eighth century. 

2. Columbus, Peter J., and Donadrian L. Rice. Alan Watts – Here and Now: Contributions to Psychology, Philosophy, and Religion. State University of New York Press, 2012.

3. Browne, Jackson. The Pretender. Flat Town Music Co., 1976.

4. Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály Róbert. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

5. Erikson, Erik, with Joan Erikson. Childhood and Society. W. W. Norton & Co., 1959.

6. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by C. J. M. Huback. Digireads Publishing, 2020. First published 1920.

7. La Grassa, Jennifer. Do Exercise, Nature and Socializing Make People Happier? Research Suggests We don’t Really Know. CBC News, August 26, 2023.

8. Kapuściński, Ryszard. Travels with Herodotus. Translated by Klara Glowczewska. Vintage, 2008.

 

 

On Retirement Part I: Being

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

For the last part of June and most of July, every day a big bumblebee arrived at the livingroom window and buzzed around for a while – not bumping into the glass like the foolish houseflies, but just checking it out, floating. I thought of Muhammad Ali. “Float like a butterfly” – and do what a bee does. The big window is my favourite in the house, a place to daydream now that I am retired, overlooking, as it does, the lush yard, the swamp beyond, and further beyond that the Green Mountains of Vermont. The bee arrived each day as K. and I watched world tragedies without end unfold in vivid colour on the BBC news.

I know it was the same guy. Scoff not: I recognized him. Like all sentient beings, bees live according to their biological patterns of course, but at the same time, they are individuals like our cats, our dogs, our chickens, and ourselves.

In any case, I have seen this on PBS, in a documentary by Martin Dorn, who stayed home during the pandemic and studied and filmed the bees in his garden for a year. (1) He showed that they have habits, traits – you could even say personalities – and that they keep individual travel and visitation schedules, according to whatever whims are driving them, beyond their biological predispositions and imperatives. This strikes me as a good way to live: to follow a schedule that comes not from without, but within. Just like me, now. After seventy years, I have a personal schedule that is free of the relentless overlay of outside demands.

It begins with grade one at King George school. Six-and-a-half-years-old, I have lucked out and missed the calamity of kindergarten, newly introduced in Northern Ontario. Still, there I am: having been free and wild on the streets and alleys of our small town, I now find myself expected to go to the same place every day, to the same dull room, to sit unmoving in the same confining desk under the hostile eyes of the sadistic Miss Scott.

Miss Scott: she is the first among a number of bad bosses. In the first few days of class, she has us come up to her desk one at a time and sing Oh Susanna or such, a cappella, standing in front of her: excruciating enough. Then, based on what she hears, she divides us into Canaries, Robins, and Crows. I am a Robin. The poor Crows probably never sang again, not even in the shower. What sort of person does that to children?

Years later I mentioned her to a cousin who is ten years older than I am, but who also had Miss Scott. He flew into a tirade, sputtering and cursing. He had never forgotten her either.

Seventy-five percent of Americans name a bad boss as the number one stressor in the workplace. (2) But despite Miss Scott, and later Kenny and Frank, I don’t really think it was only bad bosses that made me not want to get up and go to work – but they coloured that world, to be sure.

Kenny and Frank are drill operators and hence my bosses when I work as a helper during summers as a university student. Kenny has spent thirteen years in the Kingston Pen for manslaughter after jamming a broken beer bottle into the forehead of a barroom opponent. He is okay most of the time, but you don’t want to rile him, if you follow me. A year after I work with him, I hear that his clothing gets caught and he is dragged into the business end of a big auger machine, breaking every bone that could be broken in a human being, before the helper could turn the machine off. I don’t hear how he fared after that.

Frank, on the other hand, has not been to jail, but is a wife-beater and drinks twenty beers a day. He can single-handedly pick up the two-hundred-and-fifty pound drop-hammer and place it on the equipment trailer – not that much if you consider the world dead-lift record, but still. At one point he rushes at me with fists clenched vowing to kill me after I drop a drill rod down a three-hundred-foot borehole. Terrifying to have that raging hulk come at you: I can still feel the adrenaline. He only stops when I threaten him with the thirty-six inch pipe-wrench, which I cock like a baseball bat. He comes to his senses and just curses me out; a good thing, as the pipe-wrench would not have been enough to stop him. No doubt these guys contributed to my having a bad – or at least a sceptical, you might say – attitude early on toward the supposed pleasures and benefits of the workplace.

Fortunately the work and the bosses got better after this, and once I became a boss myself, I improved a lot on my first role models: low bar, I know. Lest I create a completely negative impression here, I must say that management and working conditions improved dramatically over the years. I worked for terrific people and excellent organisations. 

Early bad bosses aside and given great improvements in the nature of the work that followed, it remains something of a mystery that I don’t remember ever really wanting to go in to a place of employment. I preferred to stay home and do things I wanted to do, by myself, probably with a coffee pot and the radio playing in the background. I suspect this feeling is common enough. It is true that you hear of people describing how they can not wait to get to the office in the morning, to accomplish this and that, and see the gang, etc. However, the reluctance of Covid-era remote workers to return to the office surely indicates something different for many of us.

I have thought that perhaps I am just lazy, but that seems unlikely. I have degrees aplenty, which certainly required work, and I did accomplish things in years of community mental health work and in teaching that I am most contented to remember. I know that in my way I made the world a better place. And I was a decent boss. Yet, the mental health work was trying; it wore me out. At the time I was studying Zen Buddhism and so I tried to emulate the scholar warriors (3) and to take heart from the teaching of the bodhisattvas: “Remedy suffering wherever it is, whatever form it takes and whoever causes it.” (4) This helped me, and then the years of teaching were easier. I experienced failure of course, but overall, I found success at both. And so now I retire happy, perhaps with some not-unusual regrets over missed opportunities or paths not taken, but with the knowledge that I did my best.

Not wanting to go into work might simply have been a result of my introversion. In any case, I can say I don’t miss it. I’m happy to stay home, and like the bee, figure out each day what I want to do. I have no empty feeling, no existential panic in face of blank canvases of days.

Nor does it bother me that I have no role and no status. I had a foretaste of this. In 2010, after some trials in my personal life, I decided to change how I was living. I wanted to stay home, to live more creatively, to write some and take a few pictures – and to move back to Canada. With few prospects, and no money to speak of, I resigned my tenured professorship. I recall the feeling, after I moved, of sitting on a park bench in Toronto on a cold November day, the wind whipping in from Lake Ontario, known to no one around me, with no persona, no role, no position – just another bozo on a bench, with no place to go and nothing to do. It was absolutely exhilarating.

Of course, I had to eat and pay the rent, so I built a late-season career as an online adjunct professor, with a couple of courses at my old college and some from other institutions. “Full-time work for one-third the pay,” an ex-colleague joked. True enough, but I loved it. I woke on my own time and read awhile with coffee and classical music on the radio. Sometimes I would go out on the balcony of my high-rise apartment and watch the homo sapiens racing to work on foot, in cars, on the busses and streetcars. I watched with satisfaction – not with schadenfreude, although there was something comical to all the intense hotfooting around, something that I can’t quite name. Mainly I felt empathy for these people along with immense gratitude that I no longer had to do this. After all the decades, I finally got to stay home.

I still had demands: course sites to build, clever assignments to create, tests to post, emails to answer, and useful feedback to give on submissions. Enjoyable enough tasks, but now I am glad to be without them. I am relieved not to wake up each Tuesday morning and to log on to sixty or a hundred essay assignments waiting in the mailbox, all begging timely review and grading. I liked my work very much, and especially liked working on my own, but I’d had enough. A clear example of Cameron’s Second Law: Good things go on too long.

By the way, it says something about human nature that although students had a full week to submit assignments, almost all of them came in about a half-hour before the time limit. Also, despite there being 167 other hours to take an online test, most were completed in the hour before the deadline.

In any case, in online teaching, I had gone as far as I could go. As a professor – never mind the formal “course assessments” that have been foisted off on teachers – when the semester ends, every educator worth his or her salt thinks “how could I do better?” After my last semester, this spring, my answer was: nothing. I could do no better. Time to go, then.

Although it is not the case so far, I expect I will miss the students more than some other things. You won’t hear me complaining about younger people. Some, of course, were happily illiterate or worse: resentful participants, just putting in time. But most wanted to accomplish something, wanted to learn, wanted to make something of themselves. And they cared about this world, about climate broiling, about racism and sexism and institutionalized inequity, and most wanted no part of these and other injustices. They helped me to feel optimism, to believe there was some hope for the human race.

Optimism is important when you have retired and are getting older, when your bones ache inexplicably and these warty things start growing on your bulgy, once-svelte body, and all the musicians and singers and great people who populated your world start dropping dead – and as well, you have all the time you could want to ruminate about the television news.

It must be said: it is critical not to end up being that old codger in his nasty recliner, Keystone beer can in hand, sitting in the corner of the room jawing at loved ones about the deplorable condition of the world and the decline of civilization as we know it. These things are true of course: the world is in deplorable condition, and civilization is in decline, but that is no excuse to sit around and allow yourself to develop OBD – Old Bastard Disorder. OBD, by the way, is not gender-typed; you may be a man or a woman, or in keeping with fashionable ideology, anything in between or outside of those categories, and still succumb to OBD.

No, you have to stay optimistic and carry on, even while, for example, a dreadful little psychopath slaughters the good people of Ukraine, or given climate change, when it looks like your grandchildren will live on a planet much like the one in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – or while the whole country of Canada is on fire (and, to boot, firefighters say that people are stealing their equipment when they are not looking, as CBC reported about the Kelowna fire).

And the whiners: oh my God, the whiners! These people complain when the cell signal is poor – meanwhile, I remember that my parents, for decades after the Great Depression, saved string out of fear of not having any in the future. It is hard to think that civilization has not gone down the pipe when a Yellowknife story described people complaining about the (successful) evacuations. Days before the fire reached the town (the fire never made it, in fact, due to the diligence of the firefighters), 95% of the population had been evacuated hundreds of miles by air, or guided down the one two-lane highway, with the government providing free gas from tankers along the way – brilliant! Yet the paper quoted a person complaining that the government had acted too slowly, that the evacuation should have been done sooner, even though the fire had not reached the city. In the preceding days, she could smell the smoke in her office even with the “HEPA” filters going full blast, and it was “uncomfortable,” she reported, with a straight face. Perhaps she also was put off that the civil servants did not offer fresh trays of sushi and avocado-on-toast as well, along NWT Route 3 as she headed south. Another evacuee, safely ensconced at a paid-for motel hundreds of miles south of the fire, complained that there was “nothing to do.” One wonders why the news providers give these people any air time, but that is another problem, I suppose.

So, yes, it is hard to stay optimistic knowing these knuckleheads are out there, and I am not even talking about the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world – this one, an actual American Congressional Representative elected by real citizens eligible to vote, who believes the California fires were caused by Jews firing lasers from outer space. On purpose. No, I say I won’t even talk about these people.

But enough! Remember: OBD. In retirement, with time and space to think, you have to navigate this and other similar things. One immediate solution is to limit how much you watch the news, which is what K. and I have done: hence, the half-hour of BBC with the visiting bee.

As for the rest – what to do with your freedom from schedules, tasks and bosses? If your health is decent (that’s another story: more later), it isn’t that hard. Take a walk down the dirt road and check out the wild turkeys. Plunk yourself in the yard and read The Consolations of Philosophy that has been gathering household fallout on your bookshelf. Like K., get out the watercolour kit and paint a picture. Play your vinyl version of Sticky Fingers, or stream the Queen’s Own Highlanders piping The March of the Cameron Men on your phone, if you really must. Grow some tomatoes or sunflowers. Dust off the disused Yamaha and play My Wild Irish Rose. Write a mystery, however crappy, or a letter to the editor. Volunteer, if you are up to it, to take a person even older than yourself to a doctor’s appointment. Send a few bucks to the local fire company or the U.N. Refugee fund. Meditate and find compassion in your heart for the Miss Scotts and the Kennys and Franks of the world, for surely they must have suffered, as did their victims. Sit on a rainy September day, when the leaves are just beginning to change from green to yellow, and stare out the window. Step outside into the air and sniff it. For God’s sake, avoid OBD, although I think it is good to stay a tad crusty. Probably the best advice I’ve ever read that applies to retirement is to “chop wood, carry water.” (5)

But I take inspiration from my visitor: the free, black and orange insect who, for a while, came by regularly during news time, and reminded me of the inimitable Muhammad Ali and his counsel. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Right. Got it.

     Next: On Retirement, Part II: The End Game.

1. Dorhn, Martin. My Garden of a Thousand Bees. Passion Planet, 2023.

2. Abbajay, Mary. What to Do When You Have a Bad Boss. Harvard Business Review, September 7, 2018.

3. Deng, Ming-Dao. Scholar Warrior: An Introduction to the Tao in Everyday life. HarperCollins Publisher, 1990.

4. Marchese, David. Talk (Matthieu Ricard). New York Times Magazine, August 20, 2023.

5. Fields, Rick. Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life. Penguin Publishing Group, 1984.

 

I Answer All Your Questions: Part II

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Question: Welcome back. Shall we return first to the news and some more brilliant ideas circulating on the Internet?  But later I would like also to ask you some personal questions, such as “are you a misanthrope? Are you happy?” Is that okay?    Answer: It is okay. Thank you.

Question: So, let’s talk about social movements. Tell us, are the Proud Boys and other such groups patriots, or are they cases of arrested development?      Answer: I am inclined to say that too often those are the same thing, but instead I will just say yes to the latter. Research has shown that members of such groups have trouble with complex problem-solving and have a strong preference for simplistic explanations of complex phenomena. [i]

Question: Since you are a person who has studied psychology, what developmental age would you say they are?      Answer: Per Piaget, early “concrete operational” stage. Emotionally, per Erikson, I would say the stage of “industry vs. inferiority,” which places them at about the same developmental level both cognitively and emotionally: about eight years old. Their anthem that they sing for their mothers, Proud of Your Boy, from Aladdin, gives them away.

Question: Is it true that the Proud Boys were founded by a Canadian?      Answer: Unfortunately, yes. A stain on the country. They were founded in Brooklyn by the scoundrel, who was supposedly educated at Carleton University, and who high-tailed it from Ottawa. Scottish parents, I understand, which makes it even uglier.

Question: Speaking of Canada, what about Prime Minister Trudeau?      Answer: Decent guy. Has his mother’s heart, though he is not quite as smart as his father, who was, after all, a leading Quebec intellectual, which says a lot. Gets into hot water unnecessarily. Loved the famous hand-shake with Trump. Brilliant! I agreed with the 85-year-old woman in the seniors’ building I was living in at the time: I asked her how she liked him, and she replied, “Smokin’ hot!”

Question: If an election is called in the next months, given his minority government, will Trudeau win?      Answer: Yes. He will win a minority government, and thereby Parliament and the country will be in precisely the same position as before the election. This is not uncommon in Canada and Israel. Both countries seem to enjoy having a lot of elections in which nothing changes.

Question: I have heard the term “proroguing Parliament,” and both Trudeau and the Conservative Prime Minister before him, Stephen Harper, did that. Proroguing sounds like something you would eat, possibly Polish, and perhaps on a stick. Would you explain what it means to the Americans in the group?      Answer: Certainly. “Proroguing” is a mechanism with which you can send Members of Parliament home and start over when you don’t like how things are going, say, for example, when opposition members are closing in on a corrupt deal the government has made, etc. Then, when Parliament reconvenes, the game starts over with a clean slate. Of course, in our real lives, we are not allowed do this, but those clever politicians are smarter than us and so have availed themselves of the playground equivalent of a “do-over.”

Question: The Canadian Conservative Party rejected a resolution that would have recognized that climate change was real, and that we should do something about it. What will happen to them?      Answer: They will go the way of the Dodo bird and the 50% of Republican men and certain health care workers who are refusing a Covid vaccine. It is Darwinian natural selection. Unfortunately, they may take the rest of us with them.

Question: But is climate change real and caused by human activity?      Answer: Yes, along with accompanying weather extremes, species extinction and habitat collapse.

Question: Do we have the capability, with relatively straightforward and not unduly difficult fixes, to halt climate change and impending ecological disaster?      Answer: Yes.

Question: Will addressing climate change harm the economy?      Answer: No, it will help the economy. If we pursued it, it would be like the boom after WWII.

Question: Great! Given that, will we take necessary action on climate change soon enough to avoid devastating ecological collapse, with considerable human suffering and the decimation of other species?      Answer: No.

Question: ??? But what about all that is happening right now? Biden’s plans, the fantastic drop in solar power costs and so on?      Answer: It is great; what Uncle Joe is trying to do is terrific. But we are thirty-years-plus too late to avoid serious troubles. We are already experiencing some of them, in fact. The permafrost and glaciers are melting and already we have lost three billion birds in North America alone. We knew about this problem going into the eighties. The Kyoto protocol was, after all, was signed in 1992, and it has only gotten worse. Even now, I see a lot of unwillingness by people to change or to inconvenience themselves – things like horrendous cruise ships, gigantic suburban pickup trucks, all that flying around, bottled water, etc. So, no, we will not avoid suffering.

Question: Does that mean we should give up? Are you a pessimist?      Answer: No. Of course not, to both. Remember Gramsci’s and Rolland’s dictate: “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” We can mitigate, and everything we do helps the planet and all sentient beings on it.

Question: Okay. A different subject: can established main-stream news providers be trusted?      Answer: Yes: employing, of course, your faculty for critical thinking acquired in college.

Question: What about Fox News?      Answer: No. Fox is not a news provider.

Question: Speaking of Fox News: do supply-side economic policies with big tax cuts, aka “trickle-down” (aka Reaganism or Thatcherism), work as claimed?      Answer: No. Four decades of evidence show that its effect is the reverse: it is “trickle-up.” Or rather, wealth floods up to the already rich.

Question: Speaking of Thatcher, has Britain harmed itself by pursuing Brexit?      Answer: Yes, substantially. Although I am sure it is not the case for those living through it, it has been a bit comical to watch from the outside. I suppose because it is self-inflicted. But I am sorry they have made such a colossal error and are making their citizens suffer. And it is most unfortunate that they are being “guided” through the process by a buffoon with weirdly tousled hair.

Question: Why, then, did they pursue it?      Answer: Domestic chauvinism, fear of outsiders. But a correction: I’m not sure one can say “they,” speaking collectively of Great Britain. Wales tilted “yes” for obscure reasons including a large influx of conservative English in recent years. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted “no,” and it appears that a significant number of English “no” voters stayed home, considering the idea absurd, and so the true believers won. As one wag said, watching the English pursue Brexit was like seeing them gleefully sawing off both their legs. Sorry, I may have added the adverb, “gleefully.”

Question: Okay, a big one, as this continues to be contested hotly on the Internet: what about the Holocaust? Did Hitler really exterminate six million Jews?      Answer: Most likely more than that if you include both the camps and the killings outside the camps – along with at least five million others outside of “regular” war casualties: Poles, Roma, gay people, the mentally ill, mentally retarded, and sundry other unfortunates. In addition to the millions killed in the concentration camps, there were untold numbers of Jews and others murdered in fields and towns of countries like The Ukraine. When there were children, the Nazis simply buried them alive, throwing them in with the bodies of their parents, to avoid “wasting” a bullet.

Question:  Does this history bother you?      Answer: Bother me? Bother me, you say? It stops me in my tracks. My mind freezes. It wakes me up at night. It makes me grind my teeth. It is horror, the stuff of nightmares, like the Japanese rape of Nanking,[ii] the genocide in Rwanda, the attempted genocide of the Indigenous People of the Americas, slavery, what neighbours did to each other in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, ISIS beheaders and rapists, and dreadful Taliban women-stoners. It goes on and on.

Question: What can we do about it?      Answer: Personally: what Buddhists call “lovingkindness,” or the Christian Golden Rule. Publicly: atonement and active reconciliation. Politically: the determination to prevent and stop occurrences at every opportunity, with force, as necessary and possible.

Question: Some people say that “history,” as we call it, is just a constructed narrative. Or as the Postmodernists claim, and all the students in the 90’s were indoctrinated to believe, that there is no truth, just “truth.” What do you think?     Answer: Social and historical reality exist. Truth exists. Postmodernism is a catchy idea, but it goes too far. “Desconstruction” became a parlour trick. Derrida, the great showman that he was, overstated the case.[iii] To test this proposition, try standing in front of an oncoming locomotive.

Question: Does evil exist?     Answer: ? You just asked me about the Holocaust.

Question: Does the Devil exist?     Answer: Look in the mirror.

Question: Does Goodness exist?      Answer: Of course. It is both all around us and inside us. The remarkable thing about goodness is you do not even have to exert yourself to get it. All you must do is open yourself to it.

Question: What is virtue?      Answer: Consult Socrates.

Question: Can virtue be taught?      Answer: Yes, according to Socrates.

Question: So, there is hope! What about love?      Answer: It is the best thing we do, and the capability for love is the best quality we have.

Question: Now you sound like a Humanist. Are you?      Answer: Yes, Enlightenment rationalism and humanism is one of the West’s greatest gifts, including liberating us from organized religion. Despite that, I know that there are larger and deeper aspects of existence that we cannot understand.

Question: Now you sound like a Mystic.      Answer: I am all too aware that I am but a miniscule fragment of an incomprehensibly larger whole that is beyond my capacity to comprehend. And in the face of that, the best thing I can do is to experience great awe.

Question: Earlier, you sounded misanthropic. Are you?      Answer: Misanthropic? No, I deny that. But I admit that each additional year that I continue to exist, my esteem for humanity lowers a few percentage points. It is now at 31.4%. But perhaps I have been watching too much television news. The past five years of American politics have taken a toll.

     Of course, there are many one-hundred-percent people, although I sometimes have trouble recalling whom, other than dear friends and family. Well, no, I take that back: there are all sorts of ordinary, everyday hundred-percenters walking around – kind, generous, loving people, I see them in the grocery store.

     And there are Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai for sure. Uncle Joe Biden is certainly looking like a hundred-percenter. Historically, so many: Haydn no doubt. Dickens and Dostoevsky, of course. Voltaire, and Frida Kahlo. Nelson Mandala. Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. Martin Luther King, Jr. All those great Canadian women, like Emily Carr, “Canada’s Van Gogh,” and the aboriginal poet Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), or the Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak, who was born in an igloo on Baffin Island. Then there was Viola Desmond, whose refusal to move from her seat in a movie theatre, in 1946, began to the end segregation in Nova Scotia. It took forever. The last segregated school in Nova Scotia shut its miserable doors in 1983! Don’t be smug, Ontarians, you had segregated schools from the late nineteenth century until 1965, when the last one closed in Colchester! Don’t get me started!!

Question: Okay, not a misanthrope, but touchy, if I might say so. So, given Covid and all the concerns you have mentioned, are you happy? Have you suffered with the pandemic? Answer: Let me start with the second one. No, I have not suffered with the pandemic.

     I am a privileged person in all this. At most, I have merely been inconvenienced by having to stay home, not seeing family and friends, and not going to movies or out to hear live music. Mostly trivial disruptions. I have been helped by my essentially introverted nature.

     I do miss those friends and family members very much and at times I feel sad about it. And I have had bouts of anxiety about when I will see my daughter and grandchildren again. I have gotten fatter, which bugs me. But unlike so many who have really suffered, I have lost no job, no business, nor income. I have not been sick, and most important, I have lost no loved ones. Instead, I have had a greater opportunity to be with myself, and have been able to make improvements, such as lowering my carbon footprint by not driving anywhere. I want to find ways to build on that.

Question: Okay. Then, happiness: are you happy and do you have a philosophy of happiness?     Answer: Again, I will answer the second question first. I will have to start charging you double.

     I understand that, contrary to the U.S. Constitution, happiness cannot be attained through pursuit. Nor is it “choice,” as new-agers claim. Try telling that to a Syrian refugee or a person suffering from major depression. You will risk a sock on the chin, and rightly so.

      Rather, happiness is an understanding, a realization coupled with gratitude. For me, being unhappy would be a monumental act of selfishness. I am reminded of a saying, attributed to the Ojibwa, or properly, the Anishinaabe people: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.”

     So yes, I am happy. I am a most fortunate person. Aside from being carried across the sky by a great wind, my gratitude list has become encyclopedic. Let me expound in detail. Despite all the usual human defeats and disappointments, I have made it to my overly-ripe mid-seventies, with no cancer, no heart attack or diabetes, and no Parkinson’s. So far, I have all my marbles. I am a citizen of not just one, but two of the West’s candy-store democracies. I am not, say, a Rohingya refugee living in shit-soaked squalor in Pakistan, a Uighur suffering “re-education” in despotic China, or a single mother trying to protect her children in gang-infested Honduras.

     Instead, I live in freedom and tranquility in a little white house in Grandma Moses territory, the rolling countryside near Vermont’s Green Mountains, sharing life with a wonderful woman who loves me, all my alarming deficits included. I have a remarkable daughter and two stellar grandchildren, two terrific sisters and families, and good friends – and, as I said earlier, every one of these people so far has survived Covid.

     All my life, I have been given unlimited opportunities to do meaningful work. And now, every month the American government, in its beneficence, deposits a nice sum of money into my chequing account. I never have to remind them. Mundane stuff really, but I have Beethoven on the radio, Stan Getz and Tim Hardin on the old iPod. Through the real miracle of the Internet, I can listen to my favorite radio station in the world, Jazz-FM from Toronto, any time I want, while remembering fondly when I lived there. I will never run out of books to read. For breakfast, I can sip fair-trade coffee, spread jam on my toast and devour an egg from free-range chickens. I can enjoy a modest cigar in the late afternoon and an Irish whiskey in the evening, while watching television in tranquility with my sweet partner. We have a 100-year-old rescue dog who does not bite, though God knows she would be entitled to, given her early history of abuse.[iv] We also share life with two foundling cats, one of whom thinks the dog is his mother, and the other who thinks he is part dog. Dudley walks around the yard with me when I do my daily inspection, and then when I go sit on the large stump to smoke my cigar, he jumps up and sits beside me, taking stock of things, as I do. Just that. It is amazing. So much to be grateful for.

     I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.

     But I do not live just for these “tranquil pleasures,” as Manuel Vilas said of his father. [v]

     Instead, like most human beings, I know that there is a great light within me. And every day I grow one day closer to setting it free.  

________________________________________________

[i] Grover, Natalie. People with Extremist Views Less Able to do Complex Mental Tasks, Research Suggests. The Guardian, February 21, 2021.                                                                                                                                                                                               

[ii] Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking. Basic Books, 1997.                

[iii] Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (transl.). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

[iv] Dear Sandy died on Wednesday, April 21, 2021. I left this sentence written as is, in tribute. I continue to hear her patter in the house, and to look for her poking around in the yard, blind as she was, navigating by her sniffing, very fine doggish nose.

[v] Vilas, Manuel, op cit., page 179.

Developing a Hobby in the Time of the Coronavirus

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

                 Pastinaca Sativa

 

Max Ehrmann (of Desiderata fame) had it wrong. Deep-down, we all know we are not good enough, and so self-improvement is required, and despite what the poet claimed, we should not be gentle about it. The good news is that Covid-19 provides the perfect opportunity to focus our self-improvement efforts. The pandemic has forced people, sensible and otherwise, to stay home if they can do so: no visits to unpopular relatives, no frying in a traffic jam on the Jersey Turnpike, no bagpipe concerts, no heaping plates of fries followed by hot fudge sundaes in diners, no heavy drinking at the curling rink – no nothing. It can be very trying, certainly.

     Mental health experts have come on television to advise that it is important that people fill their time positively, in order to avoid a bad case of ennui during this pandemic. They get money for this advice. One of the best ways to both fend off ennui and to improve our inadequate selves is to develop interests and hobbies that heretofore have lain dormant. Seize the day and move up the Maslovian pyramid! Take steps toward blissful self-actualization, as personified by these mental health experts on the evening news.

     And so, what is this period of Covid-19, but a time finally to learn the Cantonese that you have put off for so long? Perhaps you can renew your high school Latin, and finally translate those racy bits about Caligula. It could be cooking: time to actualize your inner gourmet and turn those family frowns upside down! Imagine the family’s excitement when you serve up Canard à la Rouennaise – Duck in Blood Sauce? Or if more intellectually inclined, you could discover a third form of indefinitesimal calculus to rival the two invented by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the late seventeenth century. If otherwise deficient, but kinaesthetically intelligent, you could take up limbo dancing, and thereby not only become fitter, but also amuse your mate during endless hours in the living room. Is it to be music? You could pick up the contrabassoon, or if you live alone, the bongo drums. There is no end to possibilities.

     I am doing no less, and in my case, my new hobby benefits both me and the larger world.

     Wild parsnip (Pastinaca Sativa), an invasive species of plant originally from Eurasia, now grows in Upstate New York and other parts of the U.S. and southern Canada. The original plants appear to have escaped captivity, like that celebrity fugitive capybara did a couple of years back in High Park in Toronto. It grows along roadsides or other areas where the soil has been disturbed. Normally it will not invade established meadows and fields; however, it can do so from areas that have been troubled, usually by men riding machines that they recently acquired at the John Deere store on the payment plan, and which they use to inflict insults on Mother Nature.

     Mature wild parsnips have a yellowish-green stalk with vertical grooves. Leaves are in pairs and reach a length of about six inches. Each plant produces hundreds of small yellow flowers arranged in compound umbels (an upside-down umbrella shape). The plants are big, often standing five feet in height. The evil parsnips tower menacingly over the beautiful daylilies. For my new self-improvement hobby, I have taken to hand-cutting these alongside our gravel road, which stretches about a mile between two paved county roads.

     I must be careful while doing my hobby. Contact with the sap from the wild parsnip will produce an intense burning rash, with severe blistering and skin discoloration. It is called phytophotodermatitis; you look like you have leprosy, only unlike that disease, it is painful. As a result of this experience, you will come to remember your days of childhood poison ivy contamination as “the good times.” It is a burn, there is no cure, and it can last two years.

     And so, twice a week, I suit up: long-sleeved shirt, long pants, leather gloves, and work boots with tall white socks up over my pants. Eye and head coverings are important too, for sun and the mobs of horseflies. At first, I used sunglasses and a baseball cap, but these were inadequate and so now I’ve settled on tinted aviator goggles complemented by a rather stylish Panama hat.

     Perhaps you wonder: why white socks? Answer: to be able to see the tiny deer ticks of course! The ticks pounce on you as you lumber along in the roadside weeds, while the horse flies are attempting to eat your face. The ticks burrow into your skin to suck your blood, and while at it, they give you Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. City people especially, say nature is wonderful, but it is not quite true. That is why I do not watch those dreadful nature shows on PBS. Too much poisoning and exuberant gnawing on the limbs of fellow creatures, as far as I am concerned. Show me that stuff, PBS, and you can forget about asking for money!

     And so, I suit up and spray my boots, socks, and pant-legs with cancer-causing deet, with a lighter bug repellent for my face as a first coating, and sunscreen as a second. Then off I go with my clippers and a sickle, making my way up and down the sides of the road while singing inspirational songs, such as La Marseillaise. I sever the plants as low as I can, but no matter how low or high, there is great joy in watching the umbels tumble.

     There are moments of embarrassment, naturally, when neighbours drive by. Fortunately, this is rare, as there are only three other neighbours on the road and one of them, Lloyd, doesn’t come out since his goat died. You have to go see him and take soup and beer with you. The worst is when Charley, who is a dairy farmer, goes by in his yellow tractor. He is a nice guy, but for some reason he is always laughing and shaking his head. I try to be casual about it, drenched in sweat while lopping the heads off the devils. I give a jaunty wave and continue working in a casual fashion. People naturally view casualness as a sign of normalcy.

     Speaking of: one must be careful not to let this develop into an obsession. Like many hobbies, such as eBay-bidding, Facebook-checking, coupon-clipping, socializing in adult-only chat rooms, or marijuana-smoking, one must keep things under control. I limit myself to twice a week. That works – it means that only half the time do I have to restrain myself and wait the full four days before cutting again. Ah, yes, it is true: this is not a one-time thing – the parsnips grow right back.

     I know what you are thinking: Sisyphus! However, this is not so different from other things that moral people do in life. There will always be good and evil, but what we do is to stand for the good, knowing we will never totally defeat Beelzebub, whether the demon himself or his minion, Pastinaca Sativa.  We keep the lights on in the tool-shed of the virtuous. In the face of Covid-19, we shrink not away. We do not allow it to push us into ennui. We declare: “no, never!” We stand tall and at the same time, improve our hapless selves with a beneficial hobby.

     And so, if you drive along a gravel road in Upstate New York, near the Vermont border, and see an old, very hot man alongside the road with clippers in one leather-gloved hand and a sickle in the other, wearing long sleeves, with white socks over his pants, sporting aviator goggles and a dashing Panama hat, do not be baffled or perturbed.

     It is just me.

     I am practicing a useful hobby. I am defeating that old Coronavirus ennui. I am improving myself and saving the world.  

Cameron’s Second Law

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

I have lived a long time. As a result, I have learned some things: not a lot, I admit, but a few useful things.

     Out of this learning I have identified a handful of important laws that operate in life. Over time in this blog, I will share these with you, starting with Cameron’s Second Law today. Be sure to return here to get the other laws. You will not get these anywhere else, such as in a book or by divine revelation.

     The reason that I am starting with the Second Law is because I don’t have the First Law formulated yet, although I am working on it. But when I get it, it will be terrific. It will be all-encompassing and will explain, basically, everything. Stay tuned. In any case, Cameron’s Second Law recognizes both a great spiritual Buddhist principle, along with a common experience that we have all had. You will recognize this great truth immediately.

     Cameron’s Second Law states: Good things go on too long.

     I will tell you how I discovered – no, that is the wrong word for this law – the correct word is realized. I realized this law during a performance of Gluck’s Paride ed Elena, which is a five-act opera that can run on for three hours and fifteen minutes.

     Despite the robust presentation of Anna Netrebko and others, I do not ordinarily like recorded opera much, but I love live performances. These have everything: love, sex, jealousy, murder, intrigue, betrayal, skullduggery, lust and bloodlust, dastardliness, and nobility. It is like a British television murder-mystery on steroids, but with costumes and unbelievable singing.

     At one time a favourite activity was to travel to the baseball town of Cooperstown, NY, to attend an opera at Glimmerglass. How wonderful: beautiful summer evenings, an ersatz-rustic theatre with moveable sides that open to the country air, top calibre singing and orchestration (in preparation for the fall New York season), English translations above the stage, alcoholic beverages, and lots of old people dressed in semi-casual nattiness including bow ties.

     My opera watching usually follows a pattern. First it begins with acute attention and excitement, which can last right through to the intermission. After that intermission, I flag a tad, and so usually slip into a dream-like altered state – the hypnogogic state that we experience before sleep. It is restful and I can still hear the music. Sometimes, of course, I transition to a full-blown nap, but as far as I know, I have never lapsed into deep sleep with snoring. After that I awake, refreshed, and if the timing is good, we are near the finale and my attention is once again rapt, though I admit that my excitement mounts as I prepare to go home.

      It was while attending the previously mentioned Paride ed Elena when I came to the realization of the Second Law. I went through the usual cycle, snapping to attention after the hypnogogic state and preparing to be excited, when it dawned on me that we were only somewhere, I believe, in the fourth act. I am unsure – there may have been a second intermission that I missed, due to extended hypnogogia or the fact that I have a case of partial psychogenic amnesia from the stress of the situation. Erasto (Cupid) had not yet even convinced Elena that she should accompany Paride to Troy. It went on and on, probably for another hour – an hour during which I could have been driving home, listening to The Zombies on my car CD player. By the time Erasto did succeed in sinking his arrow, I was ready let loose a torrent of my own arrows down on both Paride and Elena, as well as anyone else on stage.

    And so there you have it: what started out as a lovely evening, with all that excitement and a beautiful setting with fantastic music along with a first-hand experience of the reform movement in Italian opera, became, after it went on too long, an ordeal.

     A related example: this is why, second perhaps only to King’s I Have a Dream, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, at 271 words, is the greatest speech ever.

     But back to opera – this happens with other operas, of course – not to pick on Gluck, but again, in Orpheo ed Eurydice, by the time Orpheo turns and looks at Eurydice and she dies, we have long been ready to throttle her ourselves.

     But of course, it is not just opera; that is only the illustrative case. It is life. It happens all the time. Just think of salt-and-vinegar-flavoured-potato-chip-eating. Eat a handful and you will feel great; but eat the whole family-sized bag and see what happens. It is the same with beer-drinking and such: the first two drinks are excellent, and it never gets any better after that. In fact, to illustrate this for yourself, briefly visit any happy hour at a bar as it starts. Everybody is cheery and chipper. Then return a half-dozen hours later at closing time and see how the leftovers look.

     Another example: perhaps you fall in love, and you start having incredible sex with your new beloved. For the sake of argument here, let’s just assume we are talking about a plain old cisgendered man and woman. So, you (the man, in this example) have this beautiful new mate, you can’t get enough of her and all you want to do is talk and have sex with her. And so, the two of you take two weeks off to stay at home to do nothing but talk and have sex, including all those things you have been imagining doing to someone, or having done back to you, for years. And it is a miracle. For a while. As amazing as it is, I guarantee you that after six – nay, four days or even less – you will be thinking: “I wonder if the Blue Jays are on television?” or “Maybe Walt is holding his poker game this evening.” This is nobody’s failing; no one has done anything wrong here. It is just the way it is. 

    If you are a baby-boomer, think about Woodstock: Jimi’s unbelievable performance aside, would not Two Days of Peace, Love and Music have been enough, provided we could work Joe Cocker in on the second day? By then you would have had your fill of seeing naked hairy people in mud, and there would have been less garbage in Yasgur’s field, too.

     Good things go on too long. Much like this essay.

     Of course, no less than Freud himself understood the Second Law. Aside from the obvious things like compulsions and fixations, which illustrate the point perfectly, there is his concept of Thanatos, and what he saw happening as we moved along in old age. He said we turned toward death – not merely accepting it – but embracing and welcoming it. “Enough,” we say! “Time to move along.” Though the old psychoanalyst was never wrong, in this instance I confess that the Second Law has not kicked in just yet for me, although I look forward to when it does.

     Fortunately, nature and the human condition provide some limit to our excesses, even when we ourselves are inclined to blow off the Law. As the Buddhists are fond of saying, “everything changes.” To be sure, this is a comfort when we are experiencing pain or grief; at some point it changes and becomes something else and we are relieved. But the same is true of pleasures and joy; at some time, they end and if we recognize the point, we do not attach to these things. We can let them go and there is relief in that also.

     This is exactly what the Second Law invites. It invites us to enjoy, but to realize it will not get any better. And so, do not attach; let it go before things go on too long.

     A helpful practical recommendation for life from all this?    

    Leave at the intermission.