Dishers and Takers: what do Trumpeters expect?

            “ You better worry, because that wave of truth and anger will come, and you, other so called progressives, and your immigrant neighbours will be the first to be washed away.”

            - F. Stevens, Hamilton

Letter to the Editor,

Hamilton Spectator,

November 11, 2016

            And people wonder why I’m depressed by a Trump victory?

            Like termites, these bigots have come swarming out of the rotten woodwork, into the letters pages, the radio-call in shows, and the Facebook echo chambers. They’re feeling vindicated now, as if their hatred of Mexicans, Muslims and scientists was somehow right all along. They’re feeling emboldened – their prejudices are official policy now. They’re excited by the purges to come. They’ve been baying for blood for months now, and yet wonder why “mainstream media” won’t respect them.

            What do they want? A gold star for their insight? A pat on the head for the deep understanding of issues?  

            Distain from the “liberal elites” was a common refrain among the Trumpeters’ many grievances. It struck me as a little thin-skinned coming from a group that supposedly admires toughness so much.  But then it’s always struck me how those who reserve the right to hold ridiculous ideas also feel entitled to immunity from scrutiny.

            To be sure, human beings deserve respect. But ideas are open to both criticism and ridicule When a politician offers up a program that’s unrealistic, unworkable, and downright dangerous, how much respect is it entitled to?  Just as when I’m confronted by a creationist, a 9-11 or an anti-vaxer, I’m not going to pretend that Donald Trump is a beacon of enlightenment. His policies aren’t just unworkable, but downright dangerous, and if that results in a little disdain for the people that empowered him, well. . . life sucks.

            Perhaps I should ask of the Trumpeters directly: what do you expect?

            Don’t like liberal condescension? Your guy is a climate change denier, and made a young earth creationist his running mate. What do you expect?

            Resent charges of racism? Your guy is openly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan! His signature issue is attacking ethnic and religious minorities. What do you expect?

            Resent accusations of callousness? Well, you seem quite ready to abandon a million Syrian refugees to their fate. You do know a lot of those people are going to die, don’t you? Just making sure.

            Resent charges of sexism? Your guy groped and openly bragged about groping women. What do you expect? Besides, have you seen some of the folks showing up to your rallies? The T-shirts and signs? What do you want, the Gruber Prize?

            Think Hillary was out of touch? And Donald Trump, with his penthouses and private jets and mansions was just a regular good ol’ boy wasn’t he?

              Think Hillary was a war monger? And Donald “bomb the shit out of them and take their oil” is just such a dove!

            Think Hillary was mean? Oh come on! Like Donald was a model of civility at the podium!

            Think liberal commentators were mean? Like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are such paragons of decorum!

            Think I’m being hysterical? Well, you’ve read the letter above. When your fellow travellers write letters like that, what do you expect? 

Talking Heads and Pen Pushers: Nobody knows anything.

How the fuck did this happen?

            No, I’m not asking how Donald Trump got elected President of the United States – that’s bloody obvious. A pile of people went to the voting booths and put a little “x” beside his name on the ballot, or pressed a button or pulled a lever or whatever-the-fuck it is they do down there.

            Nor am I asking why they did that, which is also obvious: they think the magic-man will wave his fairy dust and make them all rich and powerful, without any of Hillary’s blah blah blahing. (When are the politicians going to get that “blah blah blah” doesn’t cut it anymore?)

            No, what I’m asking is how all those alleged experts, self-assured commentators, talking heads, pundits, pollsters and pin-headed pen pushers could have kept reassuring me that it couldn’t happen. From each and every one of ‘em, the line was the same: “Trump’s done, Amen”. I’m looking at you Scott Gilmore of Macleans, who wrote October 31 (page 32) “Without some cataclysmic surprise, Donald Trump has lost”. Cataclysmic surprise indeed! And you Jonathon Gatehouse, writing in the same issue of the same magazine that Trump’s presidential hopes were “plummeting”. And you Nick Taylor-Vaisey, telling me just a few pages later his “campaign may be melting down”.  That’s just one lousy magazine! [i]

            Everywhere you looked, even the conservative ones were doing their “thank God that’s over” victory lapses before the race was even over. By what evidence, data or logic did they come to this complacent conclusion? Apparently just ‘cause all the other ones said so. “He’s so ridiculous, he couldn’t possibly  make it. The People couldn’t be that stupid”.

            Well, they can and they were. But these egg-headed experts were just as clueless.

Was it naivete? Wistful thinking or wilful blindness? Only Michael Moore, who actually talks to working class people, saw it coming. He tried to sound the alarm, but they didn’t listen to him either.

            I remember after the first debate having a sinking, stinking feeling that Trump had it in the bag. “My money’s on Trump” I wrote in my journal. Everyone went on about how much more presidential, more professional, more eloquent, more logical, more factual, more inclusive, more policy specific, more graceful under pressure Hillary was, which was absolutely true. And it didn’t matter a bucket of dog spit! If any of that mattered, Trump wouldn’t have gotten that far.

            Do you think a Trump supporter cares that he groped women? Hates Mexicans? Had no political experience? No fucking clue what he was talking about? If they cared, they wouldn’t have been Donald Trump supporters. So it didn’t matter how much more qualified Hilary proved herself to be, she couldn’t dent his narrative and didn’t really try. What she needed to do was try to undermine Trump on his own terms, demonstrating, somehow, that he couldn’t actually do what he promised, while she, somehow, could. How could she, or indeed anyone, have done that? Well. . .not by doing what she did. Not with all that blah blah blahing. . .

Trump had won, I felt it, I smelt it. But everyone, I say everyone, went on about how wonderful Hilary had been and how ridiculous Trump was and how it was as good as done. So of course I think to myself that I’m just imagining things because, after all, what do I know? I’m just a lousy peanut-gallerist, they’re the experts, they’re supposed to know this shit, not me.    

Would it have made a difference? Probably not, but maybe the Trumpeters might not be so god-damned smug right now.   

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[i] Gilmore, Scott. “The Morning After Donald Trump” Macleands, October 31, 2016, page 32

Gatehouse, Jonathon “Could This Get Any Worse?” Macleans, October 31, 2016. page 28

(Damn friggin’ right it can!)

Taylor – Vaisey, Nick. “The Perfect Voters”. Macleans, Occtober 31, 2016

Slow Suicide Trumps all. . . (In which the author gives up on his fellow man)

They say most species go extinct eventually, and dogs, given the chance, will eat themselves to death. Why should humans, being apes, behave any differently?

The Easter Islanders chopped down every tree on their island to erect their statues, and erected themselves out of existence. Did not one of them see they were on the march to extinction?

Ronald Wright, in his CBC lecture series, argued that most great civilizations of the past went the same way. The Mesopotamians. The Greeks. The Romans. Each consumed more than their environment could provide. Each went down like a deck of cards.

Now it’s our turn. 

As I write, it is almost impossible that Donald Trump will not be the next President of the United States. The nation that produced Thomas Jefferson and Frederick Douglas is following Bozo the Clown en-masse into his little car to oblivion. Legions of the alienated, the disillusioned, the disenchanted, the disenfranchised, the lost and forgotten have spit up the lies they’ve been force fed for generations. But instead of rolling up their sleeves and taking on the real enemy, they’ve accepted the poisoned kool-aid of the nearest miracle man, following him lemming-like straight to a precipice in search of la-la land.

Democrats are as much to blame as anyone: complacent, self-satisfied, self-serving, tone-deaf dullards all. They saw Trump blow away his rivals like match-sticks, and huge swaths of their own party – the youngest, most energetic, most ready-to-vote dedicated among them - throw themselves behind a self-proclaimed socialist. The people were thirsting for change, salivating for something different, and what did these donkeys offer? More of the same! Here’s Hillary Clinton, Ms. Establishment, best friend of Wall Street, Goldman-Sachs Laureate, and her melba toast running mate. Isn’t that exciting folks?

Trump is our nemesis, sent to punish our hubris and complacency.  He’s the kind of phoney revolutionary folks go for when real revolutionaries can’t get their act together. They promise miracles, blame everything on outsiders and minorities, and hearken back to mythical golden ages. They offer easy answers and quick fixes; they shield delicate minds from pesky realities, and protect them from the burden of thought.

The scariest thing about a Trump Presidency is the thing probably least focussed on; his environmental policy. Whatever his misogyny or his racism or his voodoo economics, there’s little he can do that can’t be undone by the next President (god willing, someone else). But Climate Change is happening in real time. It may be too late already. It will not wait another four years. Trump wants to tear up the Paris Climate treaty, drill for oil wherever it may be found, and go back to burning coal. He apparently wants to take back the title of “World’s Biggest Polluter”.  Without the USA onboard, the rest of the world’s efforts are largely token. There’s no way China or India will do much if America doesn’t do anything. Billions more tons of carbon pumped into the air just when there desperately needs to be less. This decade was our last chance – we may as well give up now.

This is not a trivial issue, and this isn't hyperboyle. This will NOT resolve itself, and it is NOT reversible. This WILL have real, very bad consequences that we will not be able to undue. So sit there and laugh all you want, but the science is in, and as indisputable as heliocentrism: the climate is changing, and Trump and his groupies won't even try to stop it.

Interesting how those most callous about Climate Change are the ones who will never have to live with its consequences. Seventy-year old Trump will be long gone before the caps melt. He will never have to live in that world. Someone else will have to pay his bill. Not only doesn’t he care, I’ll bet Mr. “I don’t pay taxes” is tickled pink. “Makes him smart” I suppose.

Trump has exploited legitimate grievances to satisfy his boundless ego, and raised people’s desperate hopes with promises he knows damn well he can’t keep, emboldening racists and anti-semites and sexists and every kind of bigot along the way. But he was chosen by the people. Every democratic society gets the leader it deserves, and democratic societies have a healthy record of voting democracy away. Meanwhile, we’re fast clearing every tree on the island, and just elected to keep right on going, though the end is clearly in sight. We don’t care that bozo’s car is heading straight for the abyss, so long as we get a turn in the front seat.

Maybe our statues will outlive us.    

"Won't you come and read my blogpost?" said the pseudo intellectual: horror fiction, fairy tales, and the world

As Climate change with Indian summer conspires, to keep autumnal winds away,

I set my mind to poetry, for a lesson come Monday. . .

            Sorry. That’s in aid of saying I’m preparing a poetry lesson for Monday. Digging through old volumes, looking for examples of personification, or figurative language, or whatever soulless term the GED insists poetry can be understood by, I stumble across “The Spider and the Fly: a Fable” by Marry Howitt. You probably know the first line:

“Won’t you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly

The classic line by which every lecherous predator attempts to woo a witless victim. It goes on in this fashion for some while, my favourite passage concerning the pantry:

Said the cunning spider to the fly, “Dear friend, what shall I do?

To prove the warm affection I’ve always felt for you?

I’ve within my pantry good store of all that’s nice; I’m sure you’re very welcome; will you please to take a slice?”

“Oh no, no,” said the little fly, “kind sir that cannot be;

I’ve heard what’s in your pantry, and I do not wish to see.”

I was struck by a couple things, and not just the direct inspiration for “Cobweb Hotel”. First, was Howitt’s masterful use of rhythm to create a sense of dread. Little poem it may be, it reads like a prototypal horror story: in the very use of one of nature’s most terrifying arrangements (ask any arachnophobe), silvery words spilling from an obvious danger. Be it a spider, or a big bad wolf, or a witch with a gingerbread house, or a Dracula, or a well dressed Mephistopheles or any number of saucy succubi occupying our silver screens, disguised menace is one of horror’s most prevalent themes. The spider’s words may as well come from Hannibal Lector, they are so obviously a means to an evil end. The knowledge tickles the spidey senses, warning of impending menace, or imminent doom. Even in a little poem like this, it’s titillating (at least until one remembers the darker implications – see below).

Alas, it also takes patience and imagination on the part of the reader to work – jaded modern audiences need to co-operate if they are to feel anything, and saddly so few of them do. These days, folks are more likely to say “to hell with the poem, show me what the spider does!” They don’t want their senses pricked, or to flirt with vague dread – they want the immediate visceral experience of violence. They want to see someone skinned alive, or disembowelled or deflowered, to watch it happening, and not merely hinted at.  It seems more sadistic than anything else; I’ve never understood the appeal. Such spectacles may contain the rush of an intense physical experience, but don’t allow the imagination to create its own terrors, and leave nothing else for the mind to contemplate. They certainly have no allegorical value.  

Which is not what anybody wants these days, which is exactly my point.

The second, probably more important thing: this is definitely the archetypical cautionary tale adults have been foisting on children since time immemorial. Basically, “don’t talk to strangers”. Least of all the ones who flatter you. This mantra was drilled into our head again and again growing up – they never specified what the strangers wanted with you, but they were to be avoided at all cost. (And the message doesn’t go away in adulthood, it just reverses itself: social norms demand you don’t talk to strange children). Horrible world that we live in, this conditioning is sadly necessary. But I think about all those other archetypes of children’s horror stories – orphanages, wicked step-moms etc. – and wonder if they would be archetypal fears at all if adults didn’t insist on trotting them out so often.

Do children really fear their step-moms so much? Why are they being taught to do so?

When I was little, I of course feared losing my parents, but I did not dwell on it, and even then wondered why so many cartoon and storybook writers insisted on reminding me of the possibility. What I actually feared most though, prodded by Pinochio, American Tale and others, was being sold into slavery. (To this day it pisses me off that Pinochio never went back to rescue the other donkeys).  Sadly this happens as well in many parts of the world, not with western indifference, but active participation: how many of our clothes and shoes are stitched together by child-slaves in the third world?

Does no one notice the hypocrisy?

But getting back to “The Spider and the Fly”: the spider could stand in for just about anyone who would abuse your trust. He could be a record executive who wants to exploit your talent for all we know. But let’s face it: nine times out of ten, the spider is a sex predator. It is our instinctive conclusion any time someone tries to lure you into his lair. Is this a modern preoccupation, or did it occur to readers in Howitt’s day? It cannot be a coincidence that the Spider is male and the Fly female. Maybe Howitt was only thinking of a maiden’s modesty. I don’t know. But these days, we have a pretty good idea of what goes on in the spider’s pantries,  and it’s far worse than anything that could be hinted at in a mere poem.

 

The Medicine and the Poison: thoughts on Merhcant of Venice

Having never seen a production of it before, I took out a copy of  Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford, and starring Al Pacino[1]. I didn’t like it. Despite Pacino giving as magnificent a performance as any I’ve seen anywhere in anything, I couldn’t get over the ugly anti-semitism and apparent injustice at the heart of it all.

that line feel so weird to write?), but I couldn’t help finding him more callous than evil, driven to lash out by a lifetime of prejudice – how lenient would you be with someone who spits on you regularly? – and, at least as portrayed by Pacino, finally over the edge by the abrupt departure of his daughter (she could have left a note). Whatever the case, there’s too much nuance here to take any pleasure in his downfall, which is far more thorough than justice would strictly demand. He is not just thwarted, but completely ruined, stamped into the ground and washed out completely. He doesn’t even get his initial loan back. And while this might feel like just desserts for a bastard like Richard III, who in this day and age can relish the spectacle of a Jewish financier being ruined by a Christian court?

Granted, Shylock isn’t the most sympathetic of characters (and why did

There are a couple things at play here. The first is hindsight: we in the twenty-first century know where the kind of attitudes that created Shylock will eventually lead, and not even the golden pen of William Shakespeare can make the archetype of the sleazy Jewish money-lender palpable ever again[2]. Let’s face it ladies and gentlemen, for all his wonderful “If you prick us” speeches, Shylock is still the bad guy, still the merciless would-be hewer of flesh, still the embodiment of all the worst prejudices of a viciously intolerant age. And at the end of the play these prejudices are vigorously upheld, all but laughing at the silliness of a Jew who thought Christian law could ever benefit him. Alas, we can’t get around that, no matter how wonderful the Pacinos of the world might play him. The more they humanize the villain, the more problematic his comeuppance becomes.

Yet, here I’m confronted with a paradox: suppose Shylock had not been humanized? If the text only allowed for shallow portrayals of a truly villainous sleazebag, would the conclusion be any more palatable? Of course not. Then it would have been only a vile piece of hate speech quite rightly forgotten by history. Shakespeare is no one’s propagandist, no cheer-leader for any social more. No motivation is allowed to be simple. No attitude goes unchallenged, even if only by the bad-guy’s speeches (and how many villainous monologues in all of literature and fictioin, I wonder, are just reflections of doubts and fears we dare not utter?). You will notice that the words condemning anti-Semitism, challenging slavery and calling out the hypocrisy of the age are the ones best remembered today, and hold up so much better than the ones upholding them.  To the extent Merchant of Venice is quoted at all, it is the “If you prick us, do we not bleed” speech, the moment attacking the dominant values of the day. If Shakespeare wanted his audience to walk away feeling complacent in their prejudices, he had a funny way of going about it.

Which is why, despite my discomfort with the play, I would never call for its censorship, and not have productions of it stopped. Unlike many PC Maoists out there, I believe there is still value in art which falls on the wrong side of history. Even in work we now find repellent, we can still find beauty and wisdom. Silencing The Merchant of Venice for its anti-semitism would also take from us the most powerful condemnations of anti-semitism ever written.

I sometimes harbour the fantasy that the ending of Merchant of Venice isn’t its real ending at all, but one foisted on him by the authorities, or even tacked on by unscrupulous editors later on. It wouldn’t be the first time – tampering with the work was incredibly easy to do, as documented by Bill Bryson in his nifty little book Shakespeare. It was so easy, it’s a miracle we have any of the original works at all. A hopeless little fantasy I know (though no worse than many of the dumb conspiracies surrounding the bard today, thoroughly demolished by Bryson), but I have a hard time believing the man who wrote “if you prick us, do we not bleed” could really have been such a bigot. We musn’t romanticize – people are the products of their time. Even Shakespeare. At the same time, artists must be conscious of the regimes they live under, and in a world where the wrong words can get you beheaded, they have to be sneaky. That so much more poetry goes into questioning prejudice than upholding it makes me wonder if the man who wrote those words must, on some level, have felt them. And maybe he believed some of his audience might feel it too. Maybe some of them did.

Maybe.     

Thus are seeds planted, even in the weediest gardens.

 

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[1] I really wish he’d release his version of Richard III. Despite making a documentary about making Richard III, so far as I can tell, he hasn’t released his Richard III

[2] Though who knows: people still read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

All's Well that Ends Well is Hell: Canadian Stage stage a clunker

Don't believe the hype: this year's Canadian Stage production of All's Well that Ends Well is wrist-splittingly wretched.

I was already in a foul mood when they decided to bombard the audience with ear-splitting elevator muzak before the show even began. I find intrusive music like this something of an assault, like being groped in a public place: a violation of my personal space I neither requested nor authorized.  Yet retailers, restaurants, and waiting rooms seem to think you want to listen to shitty pop-music, and a whole generation of snot-noses have apparently never learned about head-phones. . .

But I digress. The play hadn't even started yet and I was already wishing I were drowning in Lake Ontario. Not an auspicious beginning. And it didn't get better: the whole play is suffused with stomach-churning EDM, blared unrelentingly through every set-transition and a great many scenes. I should have brought ear-plugs. And maybe an ipod. Because then I wouldn't have had to endure director Ted Witzel's grade-school poetry being read between the scenes (or indeed, any of his lousy play). Why this hack thought his own work would enhance the Bard (especially since it bore no relevance to anything actually happening on stage) is not as much a mystery as it might at first seem: after all, it requires a special kind of audacity to butcher a play in this fashion, an audacity that probably really thinks William Shakespeare of Stratford by himself isn't up to snuff.

The show is loud, crude, and grotesque. You can argue all you want that the ugliness is all in the original text, but the choice of presentation lies with each production. You can allude to something naughty with innuendo, or you can build a great big neon sign saying PENIS! You can decide what to emphasize, what to play up, downplay, or whether to insert phallic sausage references. The Bard gives you that leeway. What appears on stage is what the director wants, and if the production is trite and vulgar, it's because the director wanted it that way.

I hated every minute. But that's just me. If you yourself find butt-plugs hilarious, you just might dig this one.    

The Place Where I Lived; In Which the Author goes home

Wandering the Salvation Army depot downtown Hamilton not long ago, I was about to leave, having found nothing I needed amongst the used clothing racks, when I saw something that stopped me cold.

Behind the cashier, sharing a shelf with a marionette clown and a novelty baseball, was a framed picture – a photograph – of a tall church on a lonely hill. It was a rather stark photo, shot in reddish grey and white. The church was not a grand stone Cathedral of European antiquity, but a humble wooden steeple in state of ever so slight decay, standing beacon like in the middle of what looks to be farmland. I suspect it was taken somewhere in rural Ontario, or maybe the American mid-west. At the foot of the hill was a dirt road, with a dust cloud off in the distance, as if a speeding coach were zooming away.

I stood transfixed. It wasn’t just that this kind of rural gothic was exactly suited to my taste, but that this particular picture played a large role in forming my taste. This very picture had been hanging on my parents’ wall in the basement, and had been destroyed in the flood of ’14. I spent most of my formative years staring at this picture, and thought it had been gone forever.  

Funny how the mind of a kid works: when I was little, I thought the focal point of the picture was not the church, but the dust cloud. And I thought it was coming towards us, rather than going away. Something was coming. Something noisy and harsh to disrupt the staid tranquility of the scene. It was actually quite ominous – a picture of almost tomblike stillness, under permanent threat of ever imminent invasion.  

            The rest of the artwork in the basement lacked this impending chaos, but all shared its vaguely gothic quality. Right beside it there was another picture (photo or painting, I couldn’t tell) of an old derelict house in a field of snow. The house looked comparatively modern, but like the church, a completely dead monument to the past, and in this case, literally frozen in time.

            Somewhat incongruously, there was also hanging, a train yard, with a freight train pulling away. Again, I used to think the train was arriving, and thought it only slightly odd that it seemed to pulling in backwards. As a kid you trust such things: even if they appear unusual, there must be a good reason for them to happen if they’re happening. Looking at the back of the train meant no engines and no engineers, no evidence of human presence or agency. The train station appeared just as deserted as the church or the house.

            The theme of desertion abandons us (ha!) in next room which was my father’s study. Dad had a big picture of Ponce-de Leon or some such guy. A very grave, regal figure with a dark beard (the painting, not Dad), this man would have fit perfectly in any of the other pictures (even the train station). He too was a figure from the past, ancient, unchanging, unmoving. As it was, he was very at home in a study, hanging on imitation wood panelling between vast shelves of dusty books. He bespoke knowledge (if not wisdom), and disciplined scholarship.

Dad’s study was not off-limits to us – indeed, it was open access all around. But it was clearly grown-up territory. This was a place where work was done, all books and machinery. Dad was (is) a gadget hound, particularly in the realm of audio-hi-fi. On the north wall, in between two ground view windows that stared down at you like eyes, was his setup: a massive floor-to-ceiling stack of machinery, every bit as grandly imposing as Deep Thought from the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  At its base was the Marantz deck, a dreadnaught of an amplifier, to which was connected the Teac Equalizer and Reel-to-Reel machine, Nacamichi tape deck and Cd-player, Technics turntable, and Celestion Ditton 44 speakers (which were taller than I was). When given the right command, this monster could move mountains.

(Am I supposed to be impressed by your piddly little ipod?)   

 Like the church on the hill, this stack stood unchanged, apparently carved out of the earth itself, from before I was born to the very Day of the Flood. My brother and I tried to save it – the Marantz at least – but just as you can’t uproot a tree in a hurry, there were too many cables anchoring it to the ground. Too many things to unscrew and unplug, while water was rushing in. Sometimes you just gotta concede.

Anyway, this is the place where I lived. To a kid, everything looks big and foreboding, and unimaginably archaic. To me it looked looming and shadowy as well, and just a bit surreal (to say nothing about stuff like this playing on the big cathode ray tube-television:). But to me it was home; it was warm and safe, and it was where I wanted to be. Perhaps it was there I developed a lifelong taste for solitary looming, shadowy things, and became an incurable antiquarian. Why I feel so at home in churchyards and on country roads, and attracted so much to old, lonely buildings, though only from the outside – never from within.

To my horror, the photo on the wall was not for sale; it was for auction. I put in a ridiculously high bid, but did not win it, even though I still had the highest bid when I checked on the closing day. Some smart alec probably snuck in at the very last moment with an extra dollar or two. I really wish I’d thought to examine the picture first, to find out who took it or published it, which might have given me a clue as to where it came from. I’ve tried Googling “Church on a Hill”, and it hasn’t helped so far. In any case, it was clearly not a one-off work. Maybe not mass-produced, but copies exist in the world. In my mind, that makes it more valuable, not less.