"'tis the season." A little phrase I utter to myself far more often than that other one. I find far more reason to be merry right around now than in other times of year - I find the weather particularly agreeable, the ceremonies, commemorating bountiful harvests and inevitable mortality, altogether appropriate, and the rituals, invariably involving food, drink, and creative expression, well, basically what life is all about.

That we as a species have managed to turn fear of death into a party is one of the great things about us. As Bradbury illustrates in "The Halloween Tree", every human culture, from cavemen on up, have had their day of the dead festivals. It's how we cope with mortality. That's why I have no truck with the idiotic objections of the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose arguments I know very well; they basically can't stand anything ritualistic, and certainly nothing that predates Christianity.   As if primitive man had nothing to offer us! What a bland-pancake of a world they would have us inherit!

But enough about them. The fact is, these rituals exist for a reason. They help us deal with death. They help us endure the changing seasons. If our current version is a little hedonistic, it reflects the culture we live in. Despite all our fancy gadgets, our electric light bulbs and internal heating, we are still apes at heart, trembling at the sound of thunder and wondering if the sun actually will rise again. I've always found the Halloween celebrations, where we pretend to laugh at darkness and mingle merriment with morbidity, more in tune with my temperament than certain other festivals. The reasons are myriad.

Again, I find the weather, no longer oppressively hot, agreeable. I like the changing colours of the trees. I enjoy the smell in the air.

 I revel in the celebration of the dark and gothic. I like old houses, gnarled trees, black bats and cats, and spiders. I have a special love for literature that celebrates these things. 

The Theatre guy in me revels in costuming. For me it, whatever it is, is not just a costume, but a character. For one night in the year, I can get into character, and the world is indeed my stage! When else do I get to do that?

Last but not least, who am I to deny the thrill of nostalgia? As I tend to consider adulthood a long, dull footnote to childhood, I am more susceptible to this than most. The ceremony of putting on the costume, the rare nocturnal excursion, the athletic thrill of darting across lawns and up porch steps in the pursuit of willingly, even eagerly, given loot (the popularity of pirate costumes is no accident). . . Greed played no small part, no denying. Where and when else could we get that much stuff for free? Call it the entrepreneurial spirit if you insist. I prefer to think of it as one of the only - possible the only - occasion in our hyper materialistic, individualistic times where communities get together and share stuff.

And of course, getting home ripping it all open, and having an abundant source of junk food for possibly weeks (storing for winter?). You could dump it on the floor and roll around in it, toss it up in the air, bury oneself in it. It was like bringing home the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Never again would I get to interact with that kind of material wealth. And of course, digging through the treasure every day was a never-ending surprise. Granted, it diminished slowly every day as the good stuff was consumed, but hey! The enjoyment of something should never be based on its permanence.

So yes indeed, I am a sucker for the season. I engage in it fully, and I draw it out as long as I possibly can. This year I got to start early, and drew it out quite a bit. . .but that's another story.

So, we haven't gone down that road after all.

We haven't thrown in our lot with the climate deniers, the bigots, the corporate fatcats. We didn't drink from the kool-aid, didn't join the march to oblivion. At the end of the day we proved that we are not all petty, vindictive, short-sighted and small minded. For once, better nature won out over base instinct.

Just to be clear, this relief is not due to the return of Justin Trudeau to the Canadian Parliament. I think he is a bit of a goof-ball, and the Liberal Party in turns insincere, opportunistic, wishy-washy, and inconsistent, the timorous party of  bland half measures. It's the failure of the Conservative Party to unseat him. Clumsy as the Liberals are, they are at least lurching down the right path.  The Conservatives, under Andrew Sheer, would have abandoned the path altogether. They have largely turned themselves into branches of Big Business in general and Big Oil in particular, advancing a platform of burning and shipping bitumen anytime anywhere, unhampered by even the feeblest environmental regulation. Basically, the Oil Fetish party, not surprisingly, popular in Alberta. They pursued tax-cuts with the single minded determination of the religiously converted, knowing full-well they only benefits those already well-off. They ran an ugly campaign, spreading falsehoods and personal attacks. They continue to be propped up by "social-conservatives", a group who define their own freedom as the ability to suppress other people's freedom. A victory for them would have been a conscious decision to go backwards, to put on blinders, to embrace all that is ugly in current world politics. It would have been a fatalistic decision to look the world's doom in the eye and do absolutely nothing.

Much of the world has made this decision. Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, the Five Stars. . . Here in Canada we seemed to doomed to go copycat, with Doug Frod and Jason Kenny.  With them, Scheer would have completed a hideous three-headed monster - I don't think I could have maintained any faith in a society that consciously embraced such a beast.

But we didn't. The Beast has been rejected, at least for now.

True, a lot of people did. Alberta (not surprisingly) and Saskatchewan ( a little surprisingly) went entirely conservative (and are now bitching and moaning about not being represented in Parliament). The Conservatives increased their seat count. The Liberals have been weakened. The NDP have been weakened. Progressives and middle-of-the-roaders are going to have to work together, and who knows if they can. Who knows how long this government will last, and who knows what'll go down NEXT TIME.

But for now, the Beast has been rejected. The culture of fear has been rejected. The Oil Fetishists have been rejected. Maxim Bernier's Far right project has been decisively rejected and is dead in the water - immigrant baiting on that scale didn't win a single seat. We Canadians showed ourselves just a little better than that. We've bought ourselves a bit of time. Maybe a year from now, I'll have to confront the Beast, but for now, the relief is tremendous.

I went to bed that night, to paraphrase Churchill, and slept the sleep of the saved. 

On Thuggish Little Men and the Toads Who Enable Them. . .

           By this time tomorrow, my country could be a very different place. I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic until the polls close, and then let reality do its dirty work.

           Looking around today’s world, it’s hard not to think about the 1930’s – thuggish little men winning power by appealing to the crowd’s baser instincts, promising simple solutions to complex problems and blaming everything on dehumanized scapegoats. It’s happening everywhere, and I can’t help noticing no one invokes Godwin’s Law anymore. Just as it’s impossible not to notice the historical parallels, it is important not to forget the historical lessons.  One of these must surely be not to overlook the spineless little men who enable the thuggish little men.

  

  

        Into this breach steps David Faber with his book Munich 1938, which will tell you everything you wanted to know about how Britain and France stabbed Czechoslovakia in the back and gift-wrapped the corpse for Hitler. I maintain it’s an important book, because if fighting a resurgent fascism is a complex issue, this will tell you most certainly how not to do it.    

  

          Don’t be Neville Chamberlain for a start.

  

          If anything, Munich shows that Chamberlain’s reputation as one of history’s biggest douche-bags is well-deserved, and probably generous. Reading this, many other descriptors will come to mind: Coward. Toady. Fool. Dim-wit. Weakling. Traitor. Adjectives may include gutless, naïve, dishonourable, spineless, authoritarian, shameless, and anti-Semitic. Yet these will only tell part of the story; the image of a fraidy-cat Chamberlain caving to Hitler is not just not new but something of a cliché. It’s not really accurate. It would appear more accurate to say that Chamberlain was, on the contrary, a strong-willed, determined, consistent, almost ruthless fighter for the fascist cause. Whether it was pushing the League of Nations to recognize the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, or pushing the English football team to give nazi salutes[i] in Berlin, or censoring anti-nazi news reports, or ignoring anti-Hitler dissidents in Germany, or ruthlessly pressuring Austria and Czechoslovakia to give into Hitler’s every demand, Neville Chamberlain bent over backwards to accommodate fascism at every turn. He was the best friend Hitler and Mussolini could have had.    

  

          After 437 exhausting pages of diplomatic minutiae, the dates and times of conferences and speeches to the House, meeting minutes, telegraphs, letters, newspaper headlines and memoires, backed up by sixty-six pages of notes, it’s difficult to know where to begin.  One gets a picture of a very stoic and strong man, who above all, wanted to work with Hitler. Not with France or Czechoslovakia, not with the anti-nazi elements within Germany, not with the US, nor with any democratic or freedom loving force, but with Hitler. We don’t get a picture of a coward who caved to Hitler, but a staunch advocate for Hitler’s interests. Not a fascist himself, as such, but one of those innumerable upper-class twerps so rife in the era, who thought fascism could be useful in preserving order. It’s grotesque.

    

        It’s not just the appeasement, but the apparent anxiousness to accommodate that is just so sickening. The infamous quotation “I go the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” must surely rank as one of the most laughable by any politician in history. Chamberlain was apparently in awe of Hitler, impressed, mesmerized and dominated by the Bohemian Corporal. He comes across as nothing so much as eager -to-please. Chamberlain swallowed German propaganda hook-line-and-sinker.  He ignored critics. He attacked domestic opponents more than foreign dictators. While willing to take Hitler on faith, he doubted people like the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who had the nerve to request a loan from Britain to deal with his country’s dismemberment. “It’s impossible to accept every statement made by Mr. Masaryk,” said the man who felt Hitler could be trusted.

         

           His toadies in Parliament are no better: Sir John Simon apparently thought the Czechs ought to have been grateful for being sold down the river: 

      It was not the case that Czechoslovakia had any legitimate grievance against us. . .;
      on the contrary, the position was that a world war had been averted and thereby
      Czechoslovakia had been saved.

          These shitheads were utterly shameless. When the Mayor of London, Harry Twyford, started a fund to help Czech refugees, Chamberlain said he was “rather afraid that the opening of a Fund might have a bad effect on public opinion in Germany.” (italics mine). That’s right folks, mustn’t offend the Germans.

     

       This was the guy responsible for dealing with Hitler.

        It’s not just Chamberlain that comes off badly. The French had a defense treaty with Czechoslovakia, which, when push-came-to shove, they simply ignored. We’ve got guys like Sir. John Simon above. There’s Nancy Astor, who claimed all the Czech refugees were just Communists anyway and should be sent to Russia (Astor really was a character. She was so utterly wrong about everything; she’d be a laughable caricature if she didn’t sound like every FOX News commentator ever). We’ve got Sir John Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Germany, who prevented a formal warning being given to Germany. We’ve got Lord Beaverbrook, a shameless pro-nazi. We’ve got Sir. Robert Vansittart, undersecretary of the Foreign Office, who bent over backwards to accommodate the Sudetenland Germans. We’ve got the captain of the English football team. The entire British establishment (with a few honourable exceptions) come across as a parade of dolts, doing every possible thing wrong.

      

      One episode in particular stands out for me. It’s complicated, so pay attention.

On September 5, 1938, one of Chamberlain’s advisors, Sir. Horace Wilson, was visited by Thomas Kordt, counsellor at the German embassy. Kordt apparently told Henderson that there was a significant Opposition group within Germany, that there was

                          sufficient opposition to Hitler’s plans within the German Foreign Ministry and among 

                          senior generals, that ‘all was required of Britain and France was to remain firm and not 

                          give ground before the fury of Hitler’s diatribes’.

While all this nonsense was going on in Britain, things were afoot in Germany as well. No one (besides  hard-core nazis) was happy with Hitler’s plans for Czechoslovakia, and more than a few generals believed Germany wasn’t ready. General Beck wrote:

                          I feel it my duty to urgently ask that the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces call-off 

                          his preparations for war, and abandon the intention of solving the Czech question by force  

                          until the military situation is fundamentally changed. For the present I consider it hopeless.

General Wilhelm Adam worried that Germany would be vulnerable to French attack if Czechoslovakia was invaded. “With the bulk of the army concentrated against Czechoslovakia, he would have only five active divisions at his disposal, and would be quickly overrun by the French.”

Taken together, what does this mean? Consider:

             1) German foreign ministers assure British authorities that Hitler’s full of shit.

             2) German generals think the French can take them out.

That is to say, there is evidence that the British and French were stronger than they thought, the Germans weaker, and that if stood firm, the Germans might have caved to them. What do we get instead? According to Faber:

                        “[Kordt’s] suggestion was so out of step with British policy at the time; 

                          no further action was taken or advice sought”.”.

In other words, nothing was done. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Now, it’s possible that nothing would have come of it anyway – the aggravating part is that no one even tried to do anything with it. Chamberlain and his gang seemed to want Hitler to have his way. It is tantalizing in the extreme to wonder what would have happened if someone else had been in charge at that time.

It has been said that Britain wasn’t ready for war in 1938. But, as we see here, neither was Germany. In 1938, Germany did not have Czechoslovakia’s splendid factories at its disposal. The Czechs were ready and willing to fight. The Germans would have had to contend with the French before even starting on Poland. Who knows how things might have gone?

Of course, a lot of this actually depends on French as well as British willingness to go to war. The French could have overwelmed the Germans if they had been ready and willing to do so. But they weren’t. They’d already had one nasty war, they were in no mood for another thankyou very much.

There’s the rub. While the lesson of this whole episode might seem to be “never ever give in to fascism”, the implication seems to be that readiness for war is a necessary precondition for standing up to fascism. I confess, I am disturbed by this possibility. Appeasement at Munich was a huge justification for subsequent military adventures, from Vietnam to Iraq. I have to ask the horrible question: what if the war-mongers were correct?

  Before you start screaming and yelling, do remember that this is not my conclusion – only a thought, a what-if. I don’t think it’s ever wrong to ask a question. To this one, I might respond that every situation is different, and must be looked at on its own realities. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya, Syria are not just recreations of Czechoslovakia, they are their own places with their own histories and their own politics and their own needs which are unique in history, and cannot be treated the same.

I might also throw in that our own condemnation of Chamberlain comes from hindsight, from knowing what it was impossible to have known back then. That most people’s experience of war had been the First World War, which had just happened, and was an absolutely unjust meat-grinder of a war. People could be forgiven if they were in no hurry to repeat it. And how were they to know that the Germans, who’d suffered just as badly, actually wanted to do it all over again? They wanted to avoid war - was it wrong to try?

No. I’d argue it wasn’t wrong to try for peace – it was wrong to trust Hitler. Chamberlain was not wrong to seek peace. He was wrong to cow-tow to Hitler, wrong to recognize Italian Abyssinia, wrong to make decisions on another country’s behalf. He didn’t have to be so sensitive to German public opinion. He could have considered Kordt’s advice. He didn’t have to go to war – he just needed to be ready to.

To take the analogy into the school yard, the solution to bullying isn’t to punch everyone you see. But stand firm when they come after you. The jellyfish approach never works, and neither does befriending the bully.

The a lesson for today in there somewhere.   

---

[i] To be fair, this was the Foreign Office, rather than him per se. But it was his foreign office.

Benford_The Berlin Project

             

                As an armchair historian, you’d think I’d gravitate more often to alternative history. I mean, with all the million little what-ifs that come up, the possibilities would seem endless. Trouble is, the what-ifs that interest me are of interest only to me, and maybe some other equally nerdy arm-chair historians. What we often get instead are flights of fancy more didactic than historical, or doomgloom scenarios, more masochistic than speculative.  I for one don’t need another “Hitler wins the war” book – not only is that too depressing to think about, but it requires no great feat of imagination. I mean, we know what that world would look like, why waste time there?

            So, when a book like Gregory Benford’s The Berlin Project comes out, I find it irresistible. I mean, what would happen if the Manhattan Project was ready a year early? Tell me, from an educated and informed perspective. My curiosity is aroused. Alas, having lured me in with the scenario, I find myself utterly unconvinced by Benford’s projections.

            Before we even get into Benford’s historical analysis, I gotta mention its length. It goes on for four-hundred and forty-eight fucking pages, four hundred sixty-four if you include the afterward. It’s two hundred and eighty pages before they get around to dropping the bomb, and another hundred sixty-eight to deal with the aftermath. Benford is a physicist, not a historian (he certainly knows more physics than history) and the physics of it are his focus. These pages painstakingly detail how scientists opt for centrifugal separation of isotopes rather than the historical gaseous diffusion method, complete with diagrams. I’m sure this is fascinating stuff for physicists; for mere civilians like me, eyes will glaze over after pages and pages and pages of this stuff. Subplots, character development and drama aren’t permitted to interfere with the lectures, nothing really happens in between them – spies do not try to steal the plans, commandos do not have to raid Heavy Water plants in Norway, there are no explosions or radioactive leaks in the lab. Not even an extra-marital affair. Nothing in short to break up the monotony.

            There’s not even any moral conflict about building superbombs. No doubts of any kind are permitted to interfere with the righteousness of the central characters. They take it for granted the Bomb will shorten the war, and that’s that.  Those who might have qualms about slaughtering millions of people and potentially destroying the world, only make fleeting appearances, and are largely dismissed as naïve. Perhaps Benford is right: when it comes to Nazis, maybe there is only one moral decision one can make. But more soul searching would not have gone amiss. A novel about the impossibly awful decisions one has to make in war, and the toll they take on the soul, would have made for an infinitely more interesting book than the technocratic wish-fulfillment we get here.

            So, we’re more than halfway through the book before we get around to dropping the damn thing. What happens next?

            Well, it erases Berlin. No surprises there. To the consternation of everyone involved, Hitler was out of town, and the war goes on. In fact, the Nazis develop their own radioactive “Death Dust”, and start spraying it on allied lines from their Messerschmitts.

            Now this part got my attention. Hitler survives, gets a superweapon of his own, and the allied advance grinds to a halt. Could Benford be suggesting that nuking Germany would actually have lengthened the war? It’s not impossible – the allies spent five years pulverizing German cities to debatable effect, so might an A-Bomb just been more of the same? Might the Germans been able to learn from it and develop their own weapons? A “Death Dust” like the one suggested here would have decimated allied armies. It’s a nightmare scenario that would have turned this into a cautionary tale, far bolder and more original than what we eventually get.

            Alas. What happens instead is:

·         The Bomb convinces Werner Heisenberg to give the allies the co-ordinates to Hitler’s hideout.

·         With Hitler dead, the Wehrmacht High Command sue for peace

·         The Germans unwittingly blow the lid on Kim Philby, who spills the beans. 

·         Pissed off at Philby, Churchill and Roosevelt agree to a separate peace, throwing the Russians under the bus.

·         The Germans take all their troops from Western Europe, and, with their V-2s, Messerchmitts and Death Dust, stop the Soviets at the Polish border.

·         Fighting stops in the Winter of 1945, ending in stalemate.

·         The allies nuke Okinawa “near the top of the mountain, killing the army inside, without too many of the villagers”  

·         Erwin Rommel becomes German Chancellor, uses Marshal Aid money to build a Jewish state in historical Israel (the Arabs “fold”)

·         Eisenhower and Khrushchev decide not to build a Hydrogen bomb.

·         Allied blockade of USSR prevents aid from reaching Mao, who is defeated by Republican forces. China is democratic and prosperous.

·         As of 1965, nuclear reactors are being built everywhere, and everyone’s just loving all the cheap electricity.

·         The threat of nukes hold everyone in check.  

            Where do I start with all this?

            Well, you will notice that in this world, there is no V-E day. For all Benford’s rose-tinted projections, the Germans are not defeated in this timeline. I’m not sure Benford himself realizes this. He appears to take it for granted that ending the war in 44/45 would have led to a hyper-prosperous, peaceful, democratic, denazified, virtually de-Stalinized utopia as a matter of course. Yet, even as he presented the physics of it all in excruciating detail, he’s maddeningly vague about what the peace settlement actually looked like. He puts the western cease-fire on September 26, 1944. In the real world this would be one day after the liberation of Paris. But in Benford’s world, the liberation doesn’t happen – the allies have been bogged down by Death Dust, remember? Which would leave the Germans still in control of most of western Europe at this point. And if they stop the Germans at Poland, it would give them Eastern Europe as well. In Benford’s world, the war ends with the Germans still occupying most of Europe. How is this a victory for us? That’s a bloody stalemate at best. Is this what Benford intentioned? He doesn’t say. He does not tell us what the Germans and the allies agree to. It’s a weird omission for a book this ambitious (to say nothing of presumptuous).  

    

        I gather we are meant to take certain things for granted. That the Wehrmacht willingly agree to abandon their conquests, willingly agree to de-nazify and put up their remaining nazis on trial for crimes Against Humanity (were there any Nuremberg trials in this world? Benford doesn’t say), willingly shut down their concentration camps and let their inmates out, willingly rewrite nazi race laws, and willingly adopt liberal democracy. We are left to assume that Erwin Rommel would make an enlightened statesman.  “In 1939 we did not foresee the death trains, gas chambers and crematoria,” Benford has him say in 1965. “The National Socialists spoke of such, but we did not believe it would be. . .” Sure you didn’t. All I know is that even with the unconditional surrender and dismemberment of Germany, a lot of nazis got off the hook. Now imagine if Germany wasn’t occupied. . .

            And even if you do buy all this, what’s it got to do with China?

            Make a long story short, I don’t buy any of it. I’m just not convinced this is how it would work out. It depends way too much on happenstance, on too many pieces magically falling into place. It presumes too much. It doesn’t seem to understand its own implications. It doesn’t answer the most important questions. It’s altogether too neat, too rosy, to convenient.

            I for one wanted to know what happened in Poland. From what I can gather, the Germans keep it. How is this a happy ending? Nor is there any mention of widespread radiation sickness or cancer arising from all that Death Dust. Are we to understand that widespread use of a radioactive weapon all over Europe would have no long-term consequences? How about all those SS men who weren’t killed or captured because Germany wasn’t occupied? What happened to them? Benford doesn’t say.

            In his afterward, Benford writes: “Karl Cohen made the centrifugal method should have prevailed. As I argue here, that could have well have (sic) yielded a better world.” Indeed, he could have subtitled the book How I was Never Really Worried and Always Loved the Bomb. Not for Benford the nightmare of humanity obliterating itself with the touch of a button. There are even a few jabs at hippie peace protestors, communist stooges all. No, in his world, overwhelming nuclear superiority is the ultimate peacekeeper. As it indeed it might have been if all those ifs in his book transpired the way he seems to think they would.

            If I’ve learned one thing from history, it is that nothing is neat, nothing is predictable, and almost nothing goes according to plan. So I tend to take a very dim view of any argument that the Second World War could have ended more cleanly or less bloodily. It just wasn’t going to happen, whatever road we took. Fictions arguing otherwise tend to be more wistful than thoughtful.

So. . .

The two-bit oil junkie that the enlightened voters of wannabe Texas-North installed as Gas Guzzler-in-Chief, Mr. Jason Kenney, has made common cause with Vladimir Putin of Russia, expressing admiration for the way he deals with environmental activists - that is arresting them and sending them to Siberia. "Instructive" he called it. Amnesty International thought this in poor taste, and wrote him a letter. Kenny, utterly unrepentant, wrote a nice-long open letter to the National Post attacking Amnesty International. 

That's right folks, you read all that correctly. To whit:

1) An elected representative of this country mused about jailing his political opponents.

2) An international organization dedicated to freeing jailed political opponents found it necessary to lecture an elected representative of this country. 

3) \Said representative told said organization to go fuck themselves.

Yuppers. Jason Kenny wants to go from two-bit gas guzzler to tin-pot-dictator - our very own Bolsonaro North. But that's all cool as long as he keeps the drills pumping, right?

The Kenney regime's always been fraught with absurdities. Neither he nor his supporters see any irony in condemning foreign money in the environmental movement, even as he turns the Provincial government into a PR branch for foreign oil companies. There's not a thought given to climate change, even as its apocalyptic implications become more obvious by the day. Now he's claiming the moral high-ground against frickin' Amnesty International for godssakes. Jason Kenney is invoking foreign dictators, but a US group commissioning a study by the Pembina Institute is a bad thing?

And don't go boo-hoo-hooing me about Alberta jobs. The busboys on the Titanic didn't want to lose their jobs either. In any other out-dated industry (and yes, getting useful energy out of that tarry bitumen crap is an expensive, inefficient, and primitive process) the unfortunate left-behinds of progress are told to buckle up and adapt. Adapt! Adapt! Adapt! But not here - this one has to go on forever, damn the consequences. And even as governments won't live a finger to slow down automation, or prevent multi-nationals from packing up and leaving (effectively making off with billions in bailouts), they will go full Stalin on any ecological measure with even a whiff of economic inconvenience.

Funny also, how a citizenry prepared to give up every liberty and principal to fight terrorism, or who lionize the generation who gave up everything to fight a war, won't continence a ten-cent rise at the gas pumps to resist climate-extinction. In Alberta, you can't even talk about it.

That's swell folks. 

Ask any Doctor Who fan of a certain age - by which I mean anyone old enough to be a fan when the "Classic Series" was just "the Series" - about their earliest treasured memory from the show, and chances are very good that more than a few of them won't give you a show at all, but a book. I certainly would.  

 

My very first Who book. . .

I was certainly aware of the show as a terrified six year old, but what turned me into an irredeemable, lifelong obsessive eleven year old fan was The Doctor Who Monster Book, a slim little compendium of beasties from that fantastical world[i]. Daleks and Cybermen and Ice Warriors and Yeti and Axons and Zarbi and Robots and grotesqueries and curiosities innumerable blew open the lid of the curious mind. This was the place for me! And the person I had to thank for it, my guide on this new and never diminishing adventure? An easy to remember, trisyllabic name on the front:

“Terrence Dicks”.

Terrence Dicks, gratefully remembered, sadly departed.

If no one person can claim to have invented Doctor Who, one man can claim to have shaped it more than anyone.

You couldn’t be a fan of the Classic Series without knowing Terrance Dicks. As script editor during Pertwee’s time, he had a hand in almost every script, was in some capacity co-writer of every story we saw from 1968-1974. He wrote many of the classic, archetypal stories. He invented and named the Time Lords[ii]. He decided the Doctor needed a rival, who would become the Master[iii]. He wrote Tom Baker’s first story. If you enjoyed the show at all, you were tasting the sweet fruits of his creativity.

But it wasn’t just the televised episodes that at least partly his. Most of the classic serials have been novelised, and it was Terrence Dicks who wrote no less than sixty-four  of them. 64. Give or take, I may have lost count. For a young Who fan waiting an intolerable week for the next episode to air, it was common practice to reach for a Target novelization. It was a way of skipping ahead, a way of prolonging and internalizing the experience. Confirming what one had just seen (or was about to see) and experiencing for the first time yet again. If watching an episode was a syringe induced jolt of imaginative adrenaline, reading the Target novel was a restful, rejuvenative period of Buddhist meditation. The grown-ups always told us that reading was good for us, and as long as there were Target novels around, we needed no coaxing. And there were dozens and dozens of them, an inexhaustible supply. And Terrence Dicks wrote most of them. 

If the grown-ups were ever disdainful of us reading so much TV-tie in, they could have consoled themselves that we were reading, willingly and voraciously, forming good reading habits early on that would last well into adulthood. They should thank Terrence Dicks: the man has done incalculable good for the cause of childhood literacy. Why wasn’t he given a medal?

 

A very small sample of the ouvre

(And the man was a machine! His Wikipedia bibliography lists a hundred and forty-three [143] books before even mentioning Doctor Who! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrance_Dicks)  

To us middle-aged fans, he did us the further service of preserving the missing episodes in the form of novels – the BBC, remember, in an act of mind-bogglingly idiotic dim-witted short sightedness, actually junked a whole pile of the early episodes. Almost three quarters of Troughton’s era in fact. For many of us, Dicks’ novelizations were the only versions of these serials we would ever experience. We owe him a special gratitude.

Dicks was perhaps not the greatest prose-stylist, philosopher or literati of the lot. But he infused his stories with a spirit of adventure, of innocence, and unabashed wonder that became the template for everything that followed and still holds to this day. Any doubt, just consider his formula for the Doctor:

“The Doctor never gives in, and never gives up. He is never cruel or cowardly”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Peter Capaldi himself uttered as a line of dialogue.  

You’d be hard pressed to find a more generally agreed upon summary.

There was a time when consuming Doctor Who meant consuming Terrence Dicks. And he’s gone now. But far, far from forgotten.

---

[i] Like so many franchises I got into, my interest was piqued not by any actual sample from the franchise, but by other people talking about it. Godzilla and assorted space operas would fall into this category.

[ii] With Malcolm Hulke

[iii] Robert Holmes would write the story, but Dicks and Producer Barry Letts called for the villain. 

Send in the Clowns - Terror on Tour and the Video Nasties.

                As a kid in the eighties, one of the great illicit thrills of a trip to the video store was to browse the horror aisles and gaze in morbid fascination at the lurid covers of the films one wasn’t allowed to see (what the Brits called “video nasties”). It was a different world – a grown up’s world - but all the same: what weird wickedness lay therein?

                It would almost come as a relief to find, in adulthood, that the overwhelming majority of these were way too inept and amateurish to frighten or even bother anyone. They almost never lived up to the expectation – which is just as well, considering what kids are capable of imagining. It’s the kind of let-down the Youtube generation will never know.

                Terror on Tour is certainly no exception.   I took a special interest in this one for its rock themes. Rock music has always blended well with horror films. There’s always been a mystique around it that seems to demand supernatural treatment, to say nothing of its appeal to outlaw aesthetics and baser, primitive instincts. By the time it started mutating into Heavy Metal, all superstition, demonology and minor chords, horror seemed the only way to cinematically treat it. Even the straight up docudrama Lords of Chaos felt the need to include surreal nightmare sequences more akin to The Conjuring than Bohemian Rhapsody.

                 But back to Terror on Tour. Not-surprisingly, the movie’s not that good. Quite surprisingly though, the music, written and performed by a real band called “The Names”, rather is. At least to my taste. While it is a bit upbeat for the subject matter, it nevertheless has that guitar and drum-filled energy that pulses through all good rock and roll. This makes all the difference: not only does it lends it authenticity but almost compensates for the script and the acting.

Years ago when I gazed upon this VHS box with a mixture of disdain and delight, I assumed the Kiss-klone-killer-klown band would be supernatural entities, demons who devoured their audience. Alas, this is just a regular band, who’ve had the bad luck to inspire a killer with a knife. Oh well.

And yet. . .that secular nature of it almost – very nearly might have – made Terror on Tour a far more interesting movie than it was surely intended to be. For most of the movie, the focus isn’t the killer but the band. An ordinary rock band. Not even an international-phenomenon of a band, but a hard gigging, impoverished indie-band, who’ve only just found a gimmick that might push them over the edge.

A lot of the drama early on is just the drama of being in a band. Poverty. Substance abuse. Artistic unfulfillment. Slogging from one mangy hall to the next. Hitting up sleazy managers and venue owners for royalties. Incompetent stage techs.  Big dreams. Bad behaviour. There is a verisimilitude about it that I can’t entirely dismiss. Credit is due to a film that doesn't try to glamourize the music industry. With a more creative script or director, this could have been another Slade In Flame.

Alas, these scenes are incredibly boring, delivered with all the intensity of a grade-school play. We are left waiting for it to deliver its initial promise as a low-budget knife kill film. Here too it is lacklustre – there is little real attempt to use the techniques of modern film – say shadows, camera angles or creative editing – to create any kind of suspense, even if the script did allow for it. Having said that, the final chase, through the basements of the theatre, shot in silence with only the noise of the band playing upstairs, is surprisingly effective.  

I wonder if this is the film that so annoyed Carol J. Clover in her book Men Women and Chainsaws, for setting up the “final girl” trope, only to very abruptly subvert it. This is what happens here – Don Edmunds, future director of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, isn’t about to have any empowered women in HIS film.  

All but one of the victims are women – groupies, hookers and one drug dealer – bumped off by men for providing what these men wanted in the first place. Sexualized then brutalized. I wonder, are these movies an indictment of said double standard, or an instance of it? Who can say?  All I know is, this is a film that promises lurid violence, almost all of it is against women, and there is no female retaliation. Make of that what you will.

So it’s trash, but with a good soundtrack. As music is the way to my heart, and in cinema can redeem (or at least dilute) almost any flaw, I cannot quite dismiss it. I wouldn't recommend it either, necessarily. Think of it as an artifact or a genre and an era. Imagine what the hippie generation must have thought of Kiss and Alice Cooper, imagine a time when film-making was grimy and cheap and remember the days when video-rental was something of a Russian-roulette, when the satisfaction of morbid curiosity was possibly the biggest part of the appeal.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, you'll dig it. If you don't, you won't. 

So. . .

Scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory have managed to reverse time.

True, it was only for one particle, and it was only for for one-millionth of a second. And it was under artificial conditions that could never-ever be replicated in nature.

Still - that's pretty cool.

Update:

Kovrig and Spavor have been officially charged with espionage.

They will probably be sentenced to death.

You buying Huawei?

On being lectured by the Pot; Huawei Canada and other righteous citizens. . .

When it comes to sheer, balls-out, unbridled-by-self-awareness audacity - by which I mean some combination of "impudence", "impertinence", "temerity" "effrontery" and "assholery", - you can't beat Huawei Canada. While the Chinese Communist Party aren't exactly famous for their sense of irony, lecturing me over Twitter about "rights" really made me choke on my breakfast. That the copy was probably written by some stooge from this country made it all the worse.

I really should know better than to expect shame from a country which, even now, is rounding up and imprisoning millions of religious minorities. It is after all what authoritarian regimes do: take advantage of rules they themselves refuse to follow or even recognize. But do they really expect Canadians to be stupid enough to swallow this guff about Meng's rights - ensconced as she is in her luxury Vancouver home, surrounded by the best lawyers money can buy - while Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor rot in some unmarked compound? 

Well, considering this is coming from Huawei Canada, and considering the Tweet had some 31 likes, and considering that the product is advertised by no less than Hockey Night in Canada, I guess they found some of us who did.  

Appropos of. . .a great deal actually. 

Obey the Will of Frod. . .

                There’s a great article in the Guardian by Jonathan Freeland that you ought to read right now. Go ahead:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/12/societies-referees-judges-scientists-journalists-powerful

                You’re welcome. Not that any of it was a surprise to you, but Freeland’s good at articulating that sort of thing. So Frump attacks the media, academia, attacks the scientists, and most crucially of all, attacks the judiciary, because he can’t stand anyone getting in his way. In short, he’s pushing for a world in which he, and Big People like him, can do whatever the hell he wants. Authoritarians the world over shout “Amen!”.

                Did you notice the bit about rich drivers in California routinely ignoring pedestrian crossings? This probably won’t surprise you either, especially if you spend any amount of time on the 403, but I for one kept telling myself it was confirmation bias. Turns out we weren’t imagining it after all: rich folks in their fancy cars really don’t obey the rules.

                Naturally, all this brings me to mind of our own glorious Frumpian wannabe, Premier Thug Frod. And not just for the obvious reasons.

                When Frod’s brother Rob was Mayor of Toronto, he once brazenly admitted that he often took the carpool lanes to avoid traffic. Without actually car-pooling. For me, it was the story that stood out the most, and was most emblematic of his leadership, even though it was probably the least of his wrong-doings.  It just captured so succinctly his complete lack of idealism or higher-order thinking. Nevermind the rules. Nevermind his responsibilities as a public servant. No question of leading by example by actually following the rules. No consideration at all for the reasons the rules are in place or what the rules are intended to accomplish. Rob had to get somewhere and Rob did what he had to do, and no pesky rule was going get in Rob’s way. Is it any surprise then, that the Rob Ford mayorality collapsed into an internationally ridiculed gong-show?

                And the enlightened voters of Ontario loved it so much they put his brother in charge of the whole friggin’ province. . .

                One of the first things the Frod dynasty, with its history of respecting rules https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/globe-investigation-the-ford-familys-history-with-drug-dealing/article12153014/),

                did was to go after the “unelected judges”. No mere judge is slow down Thug Ford – he’ll just use a “Nothwithstanding Clause” to ignore the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms altogether. (We can thank the infinite far-sightedness of the senior Trudeau government for that one).   Pardon me if I’m less than thrilled. 

                When Frod calls the judges “unelected”, he’s basically saying “who the fuck are these buggers telling me what to do? I can do whatever I want.” I am not certain that politicians should be able to do whatever they want. Nor am I impressed with his invoking of the “will of the people.”  The will of the people favoured slavery and the Nazi invasion of Poland as well. The braying mobs aren’t always right about everything – the courts ensure that the “will of the people” is carried out in ways that don’t get other people killed.  They should not be undermined at whim.

                The courts basically exist to guarantee your rights. The courts ensure the State cannot do as it pleases with you. The courts see do it that politicians do not overstay their welcome and treat their positions as personal pfiefdoms. The courts ensure you are not tortured in jail, no matter how many votes that might win. The courts guarantee you can piss-off any politician you like.

By way of comparison, let’s have a look at an administration that doesn’t have an independent judiciary.

When the Meng Wanzhou, the Precious Princess of Huawei, was arrested in Vancouver, the Chinese Government threw a hissy fit and detained no less that 13 Canadians in retaliation. Now you may believe that the authorities just happened to have credible dirt on all 13, and just happed to find it right after Meng’s arrest, in which case I’ve got a Nigerian prince on the phone dying to talk to you.

Now most of those, fortunately, have bee released, but Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, a businessman, are still in custody. They’ve been subject to sleep deprivation, denied legal representation, regular consular services (once a month) and contact with their families. They are hostages of a petty, thin-skinned, vindictive regime that do whatever it wants to people within its borders. They’re certainly not restrained by unelected judges!

Speaking of judges and courts, the People’s Republic didn’t stop there: they dusted off the old case of Robert Schellenberg, a drug smuggler sentenced to life, and sentenced him to death instead. Angry at Canada for obeying its laws and treaties? Grab a Canadian and kill him.

Now there will doubtless be some knuckle dragging troglodytes of the get-tough-on-crime variety who will snarl that Schellenberg is simply getting what was always coming to him: break a country’s laws and suffer the country’s punishment. The thing they should get through their thick skulls is: Schellenberg was punished. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced. He was serving his sentence. That’s how justice works. Then the Party threw a tantrum and changed the sentence in a fit of pique. That is not how justice works. Criminal sentences are not supposed to be subject to political whim: a sentence is binding, in accordance with a set of laws. They’re not supposed to be changed when it’s politically expedient, still less to exert pressure diplomatic spats.

Our “unelected judges” see to it that citizens know what they’re getting. They will have the opportunity to defend themselves, they will not be subject to torture, they know what they are being accused of, and what their punishments will consist of. The government cannot say to you on morning “actually, you’re more useful to us dead”. That’s what happens in China, where the law is whatever the strongmen say it is. Where the Powers that Be can do whatever they want, whenever they want.

So you will see why I’m less than enthused by Frod’s contempt for “unelected judges”. This from the man who would cheerfully use a “non-withstanding” clause to ignore the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. When it comes to upholding and respecting my rights, I’ll go with the judges over him any day.

NevermindButwhatabout Notre Dame?

There has been a lot of "whataboutism" following the partial destruction of Notre Dame Cathedral.

"Whataboutism" tends to follow in the wake of just about any unfortunate event. It tends to take the form of tweets and Facebook posts along the lines of "Yeah that's bad, but what about this?" As if the human capacity for sorrow was finite, and mourning any one particular event necessitated ignoring all others. Rest assured, the minute any one of those events are discussed, someone will whatabout them as well.

The fires of Notre Dame weren't even out before folks went whatabouting for more worthy objects of our attention. I don't mean those trolls in the atheist community who've adapted philistinism in the name of secularism; I mean people who came up with very real, legitimate points. One tweeter exhorted us to remember the burnt churches of Louisiana as well. Another admonished Catholics for caring more about a building than the Church's sex-abuse scandals. We've been reminded that First Nations sacred places are routinely desecrated, and more than a few folk have wondered why billionaires, who've suddenly proven very generous, can't be as generous with people as they are with buildings.

All very true. Unquestionably, true. People are dying. We face ecological catastrophe. We have the power to solve many problems, and choose not to. It is true. It is inarguable that no Cathedral is worth more than a single human life, and it's more than fair to ask why billionaires can't fork out even a fraction of this kind of cash to alleviate human suffering as opposed to replacing bricks and mortar.
All true, incontrovertibly true.

And yet, and yet. . .

There will always be something more worthy, something more urgent, something unarguably more important.  Always and ever. And yet, if existence is to be anything more than mere survival, just living until dying, then allowances must be made for beauty. For curiosity. For wonder. If you compare it to your own life, there will always be something better you could be doing with your time, energy and money.  Ask yourself honestly how often you yourself have opted for Netflix over your long term goals. How often does entertainment beat our enlightenment? Socializing over professional development? You will admit - if you're human - more often than you'd like to admit. There will always be something better. And yet, would you really want to live a life that was nothing but work?

Societies and civilizations work much the same way. For most of human history - arguably, for ALL of human history up-to-and-including the present day - the time, energy and resources of humanity have been squandered disgracefully. Gross inequality, opulence in the midst of squalor, and gluttony in times of want have been the norm. Things are slightly better today, but still quite bad. There are mind-boggling array of seemingly insoluble problems needing to be solved.

Would you really though want to live in a world where we only solved problems? In which not an iota of human energy was spent making nice things - by which I mean, things with no inherent value besides being nice? In such a world, there would be no pyramids, no Stonehenge, no Taj-Mahal, no Sistine Chapel, no Eiffel Tower, no symphonies, no rock-albums, no Hamlet, no Game of Thrones. No music. No art. No movies. Would you choose to live in such a world?

Perhaps you would. Maybe you'd be right. But I don't think I would.

People will always seek to create beauty, and things which will outlast them. When they succeed, they are celebrated. Dynamiting ancient statues of Buddha was not the Taliban's worst crime. But it showed a world-view that didn't allow for beauty or wonder. It was no surprise that people who made no allowances for human desire will care nothing for human life.

So, just as we recoil when vandals smash stained-glass windows or project vomit onto priceless paintings, we mourn the destruction of Notre Dame Cathedral. It does not mean we care for more important things any less.

Even if you don't believe. . .come on, that's pretty cool!