Leap In The Dark

You were eight years old when they invaded the first time. At that time your village was ignored. The tribe went on much as it had since even before they settled and gave up the ways of wandering the desert. Nobody cared for a little village made of mud and straw.

But Oil For Food and embargos take their effect and as you've grown to manhood your country has begun to disintegrate around you. Somehow your father managed to find money enough to send you to university in Baghdad, but one night during your studies the sky explodes and your future ends.

You return to your village and do nothing, because there is nothing for anyone anymore. The war hasn't come to your little village, but you and everyone else, watch it on television every day in the café. The talk is of resistance and self-recrimination.

"The Americans wouldn't have come if we had had the spine to get rid of Saddam on our own"

"They would have come anyway for the Oil; to pump us dry"

"They came to make sure that Israel stays the power centre of the region"

The Sirens Of Baghdad, published by Doubleday Books an imprint of Random House Canada, is the latest novel by Algerian author Yasmina Khadra (the pen name for Mohammed Moulessehoul). Like his earlier works Wolf Dreams and In The Name Of The God Med. Khadra takes us into the world of the men and women who have been pushed so far by circumstances that they've ended up on the path of violence and vengeance.

For our nameless protagonist in The Sirens Of Baghdad the killing of an autistic young man by American soldiers at a check – point, the accidental bombing of a wedding party in the village that killed village elders, and finally a raid on his house looking for weapons by American troops who humiliate his father are what put his feet on that road. It wasn't so much the first two incidents, they were merely horrific and caused him to faint, it was the last one; the assault upon his family's honour that pushed him over the edge.

An empty vessel, or a vacuum, will eventually have to be filled with something. When his one armed, elderly father is knocked down by a soldier and ends up laid out on the floor of the house with his genitals exposed (In the Bedouin tradition a son must never see his father in a state of undress, and to be exposed to his genitals is the gravest of dishonours) because he wanted to put some pants on to cover his nakedness, the floodgates of anger are opened and it streams in to fill the void created by hopelessness.

As the story develops and we follow our young man to Baghdad where he hopes to strike a blow against the occupiers, Khadra shows us in no uncertain terms how the American occupation of Iraq has driven the young men to a life of terror. It's the complete indifference to them as people or any sort of recognition that their culture and beliefs matter that turn them into killers.

"I wanted to set fire to the world and watch it burn" Is how more then one character describes how they felt when they left their villages to come to Baghdad in the hopes of joining the resistance. Our newspapers are filled with stories about fanatical zealots who are promised paradise in reward for their martyrdom when the truth is far different.

Most of them are simply young men who have no hope anymore,. All their dreams have been crushed and they no longer see any reason for living. If by their deaths they can bring some meaning into their life and regain a vestige of the self-respect they feel has been stolen from them and their country, they will.

Our young man connects up with people from his village in Baghdad who have become one of the "resistance groups" that blow up anything they feel like. Khadra doesn't paint them like heroes or martyrs; he describes them as people so full of anger that they don't care who they kill anymore. They want revenge on the world for what they see as the injustices served upon them.

At one point in their lives they may have been like our young man who abhorred violence to such an extent that he was ostracized as a child for being "womanish" and had fainted at the sight of blood. But now he idles away his time in Baghdad going to the scenes of terror attacks and rejoicing in his complete lack of feeling.

He is so far gone that he's almost beyond being touched by anything. When one of his compatriots dares to suggest that their cause is just but they might be going about in the wrong way he tries to ignore him. Even when told the truth about a brave suicide attack on soldiers; the man had become sickened by the violence after he blew up a school bus full of children and strapped belts of bread to himself to look like he was wearing bombs and got an American sentry post to shoot him to a pulp; he is not swayed.

Yasmina Khadra has shown in the past that he has an amazing capability for creating characters that are believable and whose actions are consistent with what they are and where they've come from. He tells a story in a manner that is reminiscent of the way Bertol Brecht wrote theatre, while we can fairly easily predict what will happen, that isn't important.

What's important is why the story happens and how. It is information that we in the West have been turning a blind eye to for years. Instead of being willing to shoulder our share of the blame for creating these people or at least the circumstances that allows them to exist, we find it convenient to blame it on their religion. Until we are willing to accept the responsibility for our actions we will be at constant risk from someone who has been completely inured to violence and has lost all that he or she cares about.

We see these people around us in the West too, the ones who are willing to destroy the world as vengeance for the wrongs committed against them. One only needs to look at what happened at West Virginia Tech. to see that.

Khadra's gift is being able to turn the world on its head and give us a view we never see. Life is seen through the eyes of the people we habitually call rag heads or evil. These people see the soldiers of the West as brutes who yell at them in an incomprehensible language, make no attempt to understand what's important to them, and treat them like they are all evil.

Khadra reminds us that the location of Baghdad marks one of the birth spots of all civilization, for it was on the banks of the Tigris that humans created some of their first settlements. The people who live there take pride in their history and their culture and when you look at the world through those eyes; and they are also the eyes of a person who sees no hope for a world any better then what he has now, you can't help but at least understand the experiences that make them "terrorists"

The Sirens Of Baghdad is a warning and an education that every Western person should have as required reading. If we fail to learn anything from this book or heed its warnings than quite frankly we're only getting what we deserve. The world doesn't end at the Atlantic or Pacific seaboard and we would do well to start remembering that sooner rather then latter.

Canadian residents can purchase copies of The Sirens of Baghdad through Amazon.ca or directly from Random House Canada

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:43 AM | Permalink

Any time that someone dares to criticize Canada's policy in Afghanistan they are accused of not supporting our troops. The theory seem to be that by demanding that they be returned home to not be blown into a million tiny pieces in a war they have no business fighting you are sapping their morale.

Steven Harper and his government have been singing the same refrain ever since they took office; no decent, patriotic Canadian would say anything against our armed forces being in Afghanistan because that wouldn't be supportive. We have to rally behind them and let them know we believe in them and the job they're doing, otherwise they may not feel appreciated.

Over and over again they reiterate how proud they are of the men in Afghanistan who are risking their lives on a daily basis because they sent them there. They have become emotional pawns in a publicity war between the government and those in the opposition parties. By accusing the opposition of not supporting the troops the government is trying to take the spotlight away from the issues about the war.

Instead of allowing for a debate on whether or not it's the right thing for our country to be doing sending troops over to Afghanistan they are attempting to turn it into an either you care about the soldiers or you don't. In actual fact the issues at hand have nothing to do with anybody's feelings about the soldiers, save for the fact of is the mission in Afghanistan worthy of spending their lives on it. I would think if you believe it's not and you say so then you care at least as much, if not more, for the troops as those who believe it is okay for them to die there.

Of course there is a lot of irony involved with this government's emotional pleas to support out troops. This is the same government that moved to cancel lowering the flag on parliament hill when a soldier was killed in Afghanistan. It is the same government that tried its best to forbid ceremonies at the airbases when those who had made the "supreme sacrifice" returned to Canada.

It was only after the families of the first fatalities starting protesting in the press about the lack of respect the government was showing their children that they began to relent somewhat. I'd hate to think what the case would have been if the government weren’t in a minority position and were trying to win a majority in the next election. They can't afford to alienate anybody who might be their natural constituency or not only won't they win a majority in the next election they could be defeated.

In fact a recent poll already shows that the lead they had built up recently has now evaporated again and they are falling back to the same position they were in at the end of the last election. The fact that this poll was taken before the recent revelations that the government had been lying about what they knew and didn't know about the treatment of prisoners of war that Canada was turning over to Afghanistan security forces might mean they are even worse off than this poll shows.

But what could hurt them even more than those revelations are the reports starting to come out of the office of the armed forces ombudsman on the treatment of soldier's families by the Department of Defence. Although the two investigations that Yves Côté, military ombudsman currently reported on could be laid at the feet of previous governments as they date back to 2002 and 2005 respectively, the current folk won't be able to dodge it completely as some of the problems reported on are more recent.

What the report says is that the means of transmitting information to the families of two soldiers, one suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and the other killed in a training exercises, have been without compassion for the feelings of either soldier's family.

As a result of the investigations into those two cases Mr. Cote says he also came across records of numerous occasions where families of wounded soldiers requesting information about their child's welfare have been treated like a bureaucratic problem rather than human beings. Now he doesn't offer any dates for those letters but as casualties have escalated substantially in the past year one, and the report has only just been tabled it's easy to believe the practise has continued to this day.

In fact his conclusions lead one to believe that is the case as he said he is very troubled that the families of Canadian armed forces personal continue to be treated like second-class citizens to this day. That would mean that the current government has been in power for part of the time that this report covers, and has done nothing to implement recommendations that were made by the military ombudsman's office in 2005 that the treatment of families by the ministry needed to be improved upon.

Mr. Cote's primary concerns are the military's unwillingness to deal with the requests for information – he experienced delays of up to twelve months in accessing reports, something that had never happened before (none of this information is of military importance whose revelation could harm soldiers in the field) and familie's requests for information were first ignored and them treated with disdain.

What will he find when he finishes his next investigation – the treatment of families whose children have died in service to their country? Already we've seen the message sent by this government is the less said or done about them the better and families were insulted by their behaviour. If that was official policy it is more than likely it will be reflected in the attitudes displayed by the Defence Department.

What I wonder is how this qualifies as "Supporting Our Troops"? Surely part of that support has to extend to the families whose children, brothers, and husbands are being put at risk in the war zone? Don't you think if you were serving overseas that you would want your family to be able to find out how you are doing as quickly as possible and be treated compassionately if you were injured? How would you feel if you knew that your parents were being treated like a pest if you were injured and they were trying to find out how you were?

I'd be pretty pissed off is how'd I feel.

The next time the government goes on and on about how much they support the troops ask yourself what that really means? Ask yourself if a government really cared about the people it sent overseas wouldn't that include treating their families with respect and compassion? You would think so wouldn't you?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:11 AM | Permalink

You know, if the world's problems could be solved through catch phrases and impressive sounding slogans we'd be living in a veritable paradise. In some instances you'd swear that the folk behind a "concept", and maybe even a "framework", come up with a catchy phrase or title before they've even know what they're going to do.

In fact when it comes to describing what it is they are actually attempting to accomplish they string together a slew of modifying phrases that don't actually say anything. They take impressive sounding words like "cultural integrity", "a framework of networks", "community base initiatives", or "sustainable development" but don't ever say exactly what it is that they plan on doing.

It's enough to make George Orwell spin in his grave and language manipulators like former Press Secretary to Richard Nixon, Ron Ziegler, smile in appreciation. It's like the people behind the new age religions or pop psychologies that make a lot of noise without saying anything but sound impressive.

But once in a while you come across an organization that actually takes the time to not only spell out the issues they think need addressing to make the world a better place, but also define the programs they think will help. If they use any catch phrases it's within the proper context and they explain what them mean in terms of their programs.

By the sheerest of chances I came across a program yesterday on the Internet that not only meets the above criteria, but goes so far beyond it as to set a target for others to shoot at. Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme (BLP). I entered their site through a database listing a selection of projects from the around 2000 implemented through out the world.

BLP is one of the programmes run by the United Nations (UN) –Habitat, the UN's Human Settlement Programme. Its mandate is to promote socially and environmentally sustainable cities and towns, with the ultimate goal of providing adequate shelter for everyone. The BLP is only one of at least eight programmes operating on a global scope.

How global is global? Well the BLP has programmes operating form Bangladesh to Los Angles dealing with everything from issues of woman's safety, housing policy and practices, environmental planning and management, and children and youth are just of the few areas they cover around the world. Unlike so many other organizations of this nature they help communities develop programmes based on the needs and cultural requirements of the people involved. What might work in Southern India will not work in the Canadian artic after all.

Within a community various levels of government, business and non-governmental agencies learn how to work together in order to benefit both the populations and the partners doing the developing. By giving everyone a stake in the final result is one way of ensuring a project. final success.

As an example of the types of project they encourage, the one that appealed to me most is one that the transit system of the city of Bangkok in Thailand. Women were reluctant to ride on the city buses because of harassment my male customers and genuine threats of violence as well. To circumvent this problem they came up with idea of "The Lady's Bus".

On the 30th, 31st, and 1st of each month, the normal paydays in Bangkok, between the hours of 4:00pm and 9:00pm every third bus on the ten buses in the shopping district is reserved for women only, except for the crew who are there to protect them. If the program is successful it will be expanded on.

This is just one of the many simple but elegant projects that are listed in the database that the link in this article leads to. The Database is also a key element to the program as it allows other communities to search for ideas on how to deal with their specific problem. You'll notice that the database is also supported by the City of Dubai, The United Kingdom, The Together Foundation, as well as the UN-Habitat group.

In fact Dubai and the Un-Habitat have taken the unique step of running a contest every two years for the most unique sustainable development idea in each of the categories every two years. The Dubai awards received 713 submissions from around the world in 2006 showing how well this programme is working.

The fact that this programme is not just geared towards one segment of the world's population, but understands that there are problems with urban living throughout the world, is enough to make it unique. Combined with the fact that it encourages the development of ideas from within the community, allowing them to create something that fits their needs not what someone in another country thinks are their needs makes this one of the smartest tools I've ever seen for assisting people in need.

A lot of people seem to always be able to find disparaging things to say about the United Nations, but I've yet to see any other group who can coordinate such a vast array of projects that genuinely helps people. The next time you hear someone spewing off a bunch of nonsense about sustainable development and you start feeling angry and depressed – a trip to UN-Habitat Best Practices and Local Leadership Programmes will make you feel a whole lot better.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:52 AM | Permalink

Up until a little over a month ago the Canadian Minister of Defence, Gordon O'Connor, was assuring Canadians that prisoners of war that Canada handed over to the Afghanistan government were having their treatment monitored by the Red Cross. Unlike any of the other countries serving as part of the occupying force in Afghanistan Canada has no arrangement in place allowing them to monitor the well being of the detainees they turn over, so we have to rely on third party reports.

It turns out he was wrong about that one as neither the Red Cross or the Red Crescent societies were monitoring the conditions of any of the Prisoners Of War being held by the Afghan government. When Mr. O'Connor came clean about that in the Canadian Parliament last month, he said not to worry though because the Afghan Human Rights people would let the military know if anybody was being mistreated.

You see according to the Geneva Convention no nation is allowed to turn over a prisoner to another nation if it suspects it will be tortured. If it finds out the prisoner is being tortured it must intervene on his or her behalf to prevent the torture from continuing or demand that the prisoner be returned to their custody.

Of course in order to do this a government must have the means in place to be informed of the well being of anybody who they had handed over to an allied power. For reasons best known to themselves, Defence Minister O'Connor and Chief of Staff General Rick Hiller couldn't be bothered insuring that we had anyway of living up to our responsibilities under the convention.

The only reason I can think for not having that language in a prisoner transfer agreement is that they don't have it the one they've established with the United States, even though those detainees end up in Guantanemo Bay where they are tortured. Of course the United States circumvents that problem by claiming none of the people they are fighting in Afghanistan are eligible for status as Prisoners of War.

Because the war is over anybody taking up arms against the occupying forces are terrorists and not soldiers. This despite the fact that while the Taliban may not be fighting a conventional war they have primarily gone after military targets and terrorist type attacks on civilians have been few and far between. (Please don't get me wrong, I've no sympathy whatsoever for the Taliban, but that doesn't mean we treat them any worse than we would want our people to be treated)

That means when Canada transfers prisoners to the United States we are able to ignore the fact that they will probably be tortured or at least kept in conditions contrary to the Geneva Convention. In fact the Americans havn't even felt the need to release the names of those being held let alone allow third party monitoring.

In the agreement signed with Afghanistan both parties agreed to comply with the Convention to ensure that all detainees' were well treated. But the Afghanistan security forces obviously have a far different opinion than the rest of the world as to what constitutes cruel and unusual.

You see it turns out that at least thirty people who the Canadian army have turned over to the Afghanistan security forces have been tortured while in custody. In a series of face to face interviews with thirty detainees Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith heard stories of beatings, electric shock, whippings, starvation, choking and freezing during interrogation.

Of course with these revelations the opposition parties want Defence Minister O'Connor's head on a platter. After over a year of assurances from him that there was nothing to worry about concerning the treatment of detainees after they left Canadian hands it's proven that he and all others involved in the agreement were either lying from ignorance or with deliberate intent to mislead the people of Canada.

Either way they are guilty of allowing the circumstances for these people being tortured to develop. If the Canadian government's representatives had only made a small effort to ascertain the condition of their former detainees they could have intervened as was their responsibility as set forth by the Geneva Convention. If a reporter for a newspaper was able to get access to these people how difficult would it have been for the military to keep tabs on them?

The ironic thing is that each and every one of the detainees interviewed had nothing but positive things to say about their treatment at the hands of the Canadian armed forces. They were treated with kindness and respect even though they might have been trying to kill their captors hours earlier and the detention facility was comfortable. One man did say he was certain that the soldiers knew he was being mistreated because some who visited him told him that he should give his Afghan interrogators real information or they would continue to hurt him.

It makes one wonder how is it Canadian soldiers were able to get into see their former prisoner so easily, and know what was going on in terms of torture, but somehow their superiors didn't. Is the chain of command that useless soldiers don't feel comfortable informing their superiors about events like this, or did they report the matter and nothing was done?

There are far too many unanswered questions and loose ends for the Minister of Defence Gordon O'Connor and Chief of Staff General Rick Heller to simply say we didn't know what was going on. There is no justification for them to have allowed this situation to develop and to not do anything about it until they were forced to. Whatever moral high ground they may have thought they had from trying to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban is fast eroding out from under them.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:16 AM | Permalink

When Steven Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, stood in front of a crowd in Winnipeg Manitoba to announce his government's commitment to pay the annual operating costs for a proposed Human Rights Museum it proved that a politician's hypocrisy really does know no bounds. It also proves that there's not much justice in the world, other wise he would have strangled on his tongue when he said it will honour Canadian values.

I have to wonder which side of his face he's talking out of when he says things like that. Is it the one that says it wants to prevent homosexuals from having the right to marry? Or how about the one that says it want to protect the people's freedom of religion by allowing them to refuse to serve homosexuals in the workplace, including government offices, forbid them employment in a place of business, or to teach in schools that homosexuality should be illegal?

Maybe it's the one who wants keep people in jail for as long as possible with no proof that they've done anything wrong, deny them access to the supposed evidence that had them imprisoned in the first place, and presumes they are guilty until proven innocent. How about the one who wanted desperately to keep anti-terrorist laws in place without holding the five-year review the bill called for?

Aside from our frontline troops in Afghanistan when was the last time a Canadian citizen was under direct threat from a terrorist? Well I guess you never know when you're going to have an Indian uprising do you? According to the Defence Ministry some native groups are as dangerous, if not more so, then groups like Hezbolah and the Tamil Tigers.

You never know when you're going to need extraordinary powers to round up all those pesky Natives wanting their land claims respected before somebody builds condominiums or a garbage dump on them. Of course this is same government that has reneged on almost every agreement signed by the previous one with the First Nations peoples that would have seen a redressing of past human rights infringements against them.

Of course Steven Harper's government describes stealing children from parents and shipping them off to boarding school to be trained as servants and janitors for white people as "education". I wonder what they call the practice of forbidding them to speak their language or practice their own religion when they were in these schools? How about the sexual, physical and emotional abuse so many of these children had inflicted on them – life experience.

Mr. Harper said that this new museum will have exhibits showing where Canada has failed the test on human rights. Is he referring to the head tax we imposed on Chinese immigrants? Will that include the Royal Canadian Legion forbidding to this day to allow orthodox Jewish people and Sikhs from wearing head covering inside a Legion hall? Or what about Canada refusing to allow Jewish refugees into our country who were fleeing Hitler in the thirties? Will the number of many people we sent back to Germany to the ovens be included in the Holocaust memorial part of the new Human Rights Museum?

How about our continued support of policies that encourage trade with countries like China where anybody who speaks out against the government is considered a traitor and thrown in jail? How about spending the lives of Canadian soldiers to prop up a regime in Afghanistan that denies civil rights to its people as much as the Taliban did? Are these going to be listed as mistakes we've made when it comes to defending Human Rights around the world and at home?

Then again maybe Steven Harper has a different concept of what Human Rights are defined as. He seems very intent on undermining the Supreme Court of Canada these days, saying things like courts shouldn't be making the laws or interfering in the running of the country.

When last I checked it was the still the House of Parliament that had the power to enact laws, the problem is that they have to abide by the Charter of Rights and Liberties. In other words a government can't pass a law discriminating against someone or denying them any of the rights that are set out in our constitution without having a very good reason. If they do the courts will strike it down.

Any American civics student could tell Steven Harper about the theory of checks and balances that was written into the American Constitution. Like in the States it’s the responsibility of the judiciary branch to ensure that the Constitution of the country is adhered to, even by the government.

Human Rights are not something that can be turned off and on as they are convenient or inconvenient, which is what makes them so important. The true test of a nation is not whether they are willing to give rights to the respectable majority, but how far they are willing to extend those same rights to every type of minority.

We cannot have one law for one people and another law for other people in the same country or we lose any semblance of moral authority. How can Steven Harper chide another country's Human Rights record when he is so willing to deny them to his own people?

As Steven Harper was making the announcement of funding for the Human Rights Museum, his government's lawyers were seeking to have a motion thrown out of court that would prohibit Canadian troops from handing detainees captured in Afghanistan over to the Afghan government who routinely torture and mistreat any prisoners of war. According to Canadian law we never turn over a prisoner who runs the risk of facing either the death penalty or cruel and unusual punishment.

In the past when this type of situation has arisen the Canadian courts have ruled that the Charter of Right and Freedoms applies and that actions have to be governed accordingly. So it makes me wonder why Steven Harper's government wants to change that and deny people held under Canadian law the rights that have been guaranteed them in the past?

Canada's record is no better or worse than most so called Western democracies when it comes to Human Rights, but when we instituted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms we went a long way in amending our past errors. Steven Harper, the first Prime Minister to actively work against the Charter, standing up and stating that this new Museum of Human Rights will be representative of Canadian values is even more hypocritical than normal for a politician.

I really wonder how he keeps track of which face he's talking out of, because calling him two faced is an understatement. Not since Ravana, the ten-headed demon lord of Indian history, has a person presented more faces to the public at one time.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 10:56 PM | Permalink

The flowers are wilting on the mantelpiece, collecting dust and displaying an occasional cobweb.
Gesture of a supposed affection, but more likely an affectation given who and what she has come to.
If faded were a design motif then the room is well decorated from top to bottom, including its inhabitant.
Unwisely the blinds have been allowed to stand open from the night just past, as morning sun does nothing any favours.
Left more naked then if x-rayed, pity would surely war with disgust if there were any around to observe the cruel play of warm light in a place it has no business.
A lamp, made superfluous, sits on a bedside table, dripping with shawls camouflaging light for a measure of deceitful concealment.
In the depression on the mattress, formed by repeated pounding and abuse, tired buttocks are cradled familiarly; this is their home and resting place, where they belong.
Elbows, hands, the flat of a heel, long ago staked out individual claims to space where they could shelter during and after.
Use and age have been as hard on the bed as they have on its occupant down the years, as appetites grew more rapacious, less of her was left behind at the end of the night.
Never satiated, demands compounding, night in and night out, in and out, on and on, here in this room, on this bed.
Mumbled phrases that pass for appreciations have changed on occasion, but remain nothing more than excuses and justifications and nothing of love.
How long will she be here at the top of the stairs, at the end of the path in the carpet at their beck and call?
Would they change if they saw her exposed in the light instead of being blind in the night?
But how can they not feel her wasting away under them each night? As they take what they want and leave nothing behind?
Soon their night will have to turn to day. They'll come to her door and she won't answer their knock.
They'll beg and they'll weep, moan and complain, but she can't fill their needs anymore, now that they've killed her.
You'll think it's their mother, the way they'll carry on, someone they cared for, they loved and admired.
Not just some tired out old whore at the top of the stairs.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:49 AM | Permalink

When Robert Altman left this world in 2006 he left behind a body of film and television work that was ambitious, trend setting, brilliant, and awful all at the same time. You can't take risks the way Altman did and not have the occasional failure – it just goes with the territory when you make movies without a safety net.

For an Altman movie to succeed it needs to walk the fine line of being loose and seemingly chaotic without ever truly descending into chaos. To negotiate that tightrope requires a cast willing to work as an ensemble, a stellar script, and just the right touch from the director. If any of those three aren't present, or are weakened, than the movie spirals out of control.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that his finest movie in the twilight of his career was Gosford Park where he worked primarily with an English cast who came from a predominately stage background. A good deal of his movies are shot "live", where a whole scene is shot straight through as if it were being performed on stage. Later he might go back and do some "pick-up" shots for any required close-ups or reverse angles on a conversation, but the initial take for a scene would be a performance requiring the actors to be on stage for how ever long they were shooting.

That's far different from the usual method of shooting two lines at a time and then stringing them together in the editing room. In an Altman film actors genuinely have to give performances because they probably won't be saved in the editing booth.

Unfortunately the last film that Robert Altman made Prairie Home Companion falls short on nearly all those fronts. Instead of his usual satiric or insightful self, this script boarded on the mawkish and sentimental with nothing of substance for us the audience to hold on to.

In brief the movie is about the last night of a live radio show broadcast. We show up before the curtain rises and the on air light goes on to find out that the radio station has been bought out and tonight the new owner is coming to axe the show. It's the type of show where the same acts have been appearing over and over again down through the years and the host is the friendly guy next door who always has a story to tell.

They sing the ads live on air from scripts, have a sound affects man, and read mail from their viewers live on air. It's radio was done in the good old days, as we seem to be continually being reminded by someone or other.

The problems start with the script by Garrison Keeler. He specializes in doing just this type of show in the United States either live or on the radio so he can give a very clear picture of what happens on stage, but its offstage that is important to a movie like this and that is where the trouble lies with this script.

First of all it can't decide whether it wants to be a satirical look at the people involved in the proceedings like Altman's brilliant Nashville or give us a warm-hearted sentimental view of them. It seems to be trying to do both at once and you can't do that without a touch of genius that this script lacks.

While we're given plenty of reasons to think of a good many of the characters as ridiculous – Meryl Streep and Lilly Tomlin are the only two surviving members of a group of four sisters, The Johnson Sisters, who started singing together to make their mama's chores less tedious. Its details like that could have made this a really funny and intelligent attack on saccharine sentiment that passes for emotional truth in America.

But instead of exposing the hollow core behind such banal statements, like "mama said we were her ray of sunshine when we sang to her as she scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees", we are left unsure of the actor's and director's intent. It's like they don't want to commit to satire because they are afraid of insulting people.

The end result though, is something that is even more insulting then if they had gone with satire. It makes all involved with the show look foolish and silly. We end up not giving a damn whether or not the show gets cancelled or what will happen to any of the people involved.

I think the most depressing thing about his movie is in spite of the quality of the cast none of the performances are particularly inspired. Even such industry veterans like Kevin Kline and Tommy Lee Jones are mailing in their performances so that at best they appear to be simply going through the motions of acting..

Unfortunately a cast that doesn't live up to expectations and a movie that can't decide what it wants to do are all symptoms of a director losing control of a project. Too many of the actors look on their scenes as an opportunity to chew the scenery and grab attention for themselves as much as possible for the type of ensemble performances Altman's other movies were famous for. Somehow or other the whole film looks to have slipped out of the control of the director's hands.

Prairie Home Companion is one of Robert Altman's weakest films. It was also the last film he ever directed. I hope that people will do him the kindness not to judge his career based on this poor effort.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:09 AM | Permalink

It's always very humbling to find out how much you still lack in awareness when it comes to being respectful of others in the world around you. You think of yourself as being fairly aware and try to take into account various beliefs and ways of living yet you still take things for granted and make assumptions that are wrong.

A prime example of that happened to me just the other day. I've set up a writer's group for the people who are contributing to the Epic India web site. It's for the usual thing; a place where people can post announcements and where I can list any items that people want reviewed. I don't know if other groups have this option, but Google groups allow you to restrict access to those eighteen year of age or older.

In a semi-serious, semi joking manner I labelled the group adult only. I was trying to pass on the message to my people that I didn't want any childish behaviour on the board. But there was something I hadn't taken into consideration. Some countries block sites labelled adult only routinely in attempt to maintain their strict moral codes.

Which is exactly what happened too one of my writers. He's living in one of the Gulf of Arabia states that are particularly strict about enforcing a Muslim lifestyle and as long as the adult designation remained on the site he wasn't going to be able to take part in the group's discussions.

When he wrote to tell me about it he was very apologetic, which of course there was no need for him to be. In fact when I wrote him back to tell him that I was changing the designation, I apologized to him for not having realized that the possibility of that existed. Here I had been going on about a multicultural international magazine and I do something without considering the full implications of my actions in other cultures.

Well, you say, how were you to know that the country this guy lives in was going to do something like that? To me that is the wrong question, I should be asking why didn't I know or consider the possibility that someone in the group would find themselves in that situation?

No I don't think I'm being too hard on myself either. Think of what we expect people to know about us. The least I can do is remember that Muslim societies aren't as open in some ways as ours and act accordingly. It's called understanding and respect for the way others live, something noticeably thin on the ground in our age of intolerance and unreason.

It doesn't matter what it is, groups with an adult designation, a house rule that demands all heads be uncovered all the time, or making everybody recite the same prayer in school, it all comes down to the same thing. Make allowances for other people's differences and they will respond in kind. It's amazing how just a little respect goes a long way.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:01 AM | Permalink

In what seems to be a part of the pattern when it comes to progress in fighting AIDS world wide, specifically in Africa, the little glimmer of hope offered by some good news is offset by the reality of what's still needed to be done. For although the cost of much needed first line drugs has dropped and countries are coming up with innovative means of reaching their people, the number of people not receiving care still out numbers those receiving care by as much as 90%.

Pregnant Women and children are still horribly at risk; with only 15% of all children and 11% of all pregnant women world wide receiving care it's hard to get exxcited by stories of the small advancements being made. Even more depressing is the fact that the region hardest hit, Africa, is still the region where care is the least adequate.

Ninety per-cent of children who have AIDS live in Africa right now as do the majority of the two million pregnant women who suffer from the disease. Each of these women is of course a threat to pass the illness onto their children in the womb if they don't receive pre-natal care.

One of the major reasons for the short fall in treatment currently is because most countries in Africa simply lack the facilities to properly care for their people. In order for a pregnant woman to be treated she of course has to be diagnosed, which means having access to a proper health care facility with a lab for processing test results. Even that isn't adequate on it's own, there still has to be continual care until the woman comes to term or she could still be infectious.

A similar situation exists for children in Africa. Half the babies born with AIDS die by the time they are two, but during those years their symptoms are impossible to distinguish from other diseases without testing. Unfortunately the test for someone under eighteen months in complicated and expensive, which means most infants die untested let alone treated. (As to why these countries lack health care facilities, they depend on the International Monetary Fund for loans to keep their countries afloat, and one of the conditions of being a loan recipient is that countries cut spending on social programs like health care)

So even though the number of people who are receiving medication has risen thirteen fold since 2003 (100,000 to 1.3million) its' really only a drop in the bucket. Especially when you consider the fact that these figures are based only on reported cases of AIDS. Fear of being diagnosed, ignorance of the facts, and the social stigma surrounding the disease keeps large numbers of people from even being tested and the disease continues to spread close to unchecked.

The availability of less expensive first-line retro viral drugs has probably been responsible for the majority of the gains made in the fight against HIV/AIDS in places like Africa. But problems still abound with ensuring people have access to the drugs they will need. The second-line drugs which people on long-term treatment need are still priced out of reach for most African health care systems to afford.

In Canada, in spite of the fact that a previous government tried to create a law which would allow a country access to the drugs they need at generic prices, very little of the drug actually leaves the country to go where needed. In fact not one pill has left Canada at all.

The problem is red tape and the incredible pressure put on governments around the world by the powerful brand-name pharmaceutical industry that is firmly against generic products. The way the system works is that a company that produces a generic version, or even adaptation of the patented drug, must receive permission from the owner of the patent to sell it. As if that were going to happen.

So when the company with the generic version is turned down it's up to individual countries to apply for a special two-year permit to buy the generic brand. But according to Richard Elliot, deputy director of HIV/AIDS Legal Network, this becomes a problem because a country will have to identify itself in the application.

Mr. Elliot continues by saying that every time in the last decade a country has tried to force the issue they have been swarmed by the pharmaceutical industry and their buddy the American Government. Mr. Elliot claims that the American government simply threatens to cut off trade with any country that tries to make use of the compulsory licence, effectively rendering the program and generic drugs useless.

The truly depressing thing in all this is the fact that there is proof when the drugs are made available, and the systems are in place to administer them, they make a big difference in a short space of time. But because a few men have decided that the money they make from controlling the drug is more important than the lives of millions of women and children people will continue to die in huge numbers.

The current Canadian government's health minister had the nerve to say that the program wasn't working because countries weren't making requests to have patents waived. Of course it was a previous Conservative government that extended pharmaceutical patents to twenty-five years, but that wouldn't have anything do with that comment would it?

Until governments around the world are prepared to stand up to the pharmaceutical companies, and demand the International Monetary Fund stop insisting on decimating social programming in debtor nations we will continue to fight a losing battle against the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa and other parts of the world. It's not a war we can afford to lose – it's not a war we should be losing, but we are being betrayed by our own side

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:07 AM | Permalink

There have been quite a number of ceremonies in recent years honouring historic battles and the like from the twentieth century. Just last weekend Canadians "celebrated" the ninetieth anniversary of their participation in the slaughter of Vimy Ridge during World War One (why if they've waited this long they couldn't hold out for another ten years for the centenary I don't know) with the opening of a new memorial in France at the site of the battle.

Of course the Canadian Prime Minister, Steven Harper, couldn't pass up the opportunity to link Canada's presence at Vimy with the Canadian troops being killed in Afghanistan today. Not that he said anything remotely resembling the truth; ninety years later and we still haven't learned anything, our soldiers are still dying in someone else's war.

No he hauled out the usual platitudes about paying the ultimate price, making the supreme sacrifice, and dying for your freedom. Nobody has bothered to explain how a Canadian soldier getting blown up on either Vimy Ridge in France in 1917 or some outback near Kandahar in Afghanistan guaranteed or is guaranteeing my freedom.

Hell the men who are dying in Afghanistan aren't even ensuring the freedom of the people who live in that country, so I don't know how anybody can claim they're doing anything for me. But that's what politicians do, they try and make use of symbols to generate emotional responses in people so they don't think about the illogic of what is being said and question things being done in their name.

But amidst all the hoopla surrounding Vimy this year, the invasion of Normandy during World War Two three years ago, and every November 11th commemorating the end of World War One, an anniversary of import has managed to slip by most politicians. This April 26th will mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica by German bombers supporting the fascist rebellion in Spain led Francisco Franco.

The bombing raid has the distinction of being the first full scale attack on a strictly civilian target during a war. While Mussolini had used some air power in his ugly conquest of Ethiopia the year earlier and others have tried to lay claim latterly to being the first civilian targets hit by bombs, the attack on Guernica still holds the dubious distinction of being the first ever deliberate targeting of civilians by the military.

Reading the eye witness account at the link above leaves one no doubt of the intent behind the attack. If they hadn't meant to bomb civilians they could have stopped after the first bomber dropped his payload and realized it wasn't a military target.

Instead, according to the eyewitness the raid lasted for three and one quarter hours during which three types of German plane dropped bombs of up to a maximum of 1,000lbs and over 3,000 2lb aluminium incendiary devices. Nor would the accompanying fighters have deliberately sought out and machine-gunned people who had taken shelter in the fields surrounding the town if it hadn't been a deliberate attack on the civilian population.

Of course it's not really that surprising that no one is making a big deal of this being the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Gurenica. None of the Western governments wanted to pay attention to the war when it was happening. In fact Canada even went so far as to try and make it illegal for Canadian citizens to volunteer to help the Republicans fight off Franco.

No one should get involved because it is an internal dispute, was the line bandied about by Great Britain, Canada, America, and France. So they stood by while Mussolini and Hitler warmed up for invading the rest of Europe by sending troops and planes to help Franco. I have to hope that the reason no one commemorates this war to this day is that all of our governments are embarrassed about their behaviour.

By not interfering they missed the chance of cutting the nascent German power off at the knees. Instead they sent out a pretty clear signal to Hitler that he was going to be allowed to do pretty much what he wanted for the next couple of years. Besides there are some things that haven't changed about American foreign policy – always support the right wing dictators over the democratically elected socialist.

It was a pretty common thought in those days that a strong Germany under Hitler was a good thing because it kept Stalin and the Soviet Union at bay. Of course that theory got thrown out the window when Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact in 1939. It was Stalin's way of thumbing his nose at the West for trying to throw him to the wolves, and it freed Hitler to attack Europe in 1940.

When was the last time you looked closely at Picasso's Guernica? To me it had always seemed like the most accurate portrayal of the aftermath of a bombing that I'd ever seen. Photographs don't really do anything, even if the occasional body is strewn about, they just never had the impact that even the smallest reproduction of this work had on me.

But nothing prepared me for actually seeing the piece on display. I had no idea it was a mural that took up an entire wall of the Metropolitan Museum Of Modern Art in New York City. In 1980 when I walked in the front doors of the museum I was stopped dead in my tracks by its sheer magnitude. (In his will Picasso had prohibited the painting from ever being seen in Spain until a democratically elected government was elected again. Ironically if I had come to New York City a year later I would never have had an opportunity to see the painting as it was shipped back to Spain shortly after I saw it with the election of the first government since the Republicans in the 1930s) I couldn't believe that anyone after having seen that work could give an order that would allow civilians to be bombed.

So maybe that's the other reason no one is going to be opening any champagne on April 26th of this year to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Guernica. What would a politician say at this event? Ultimate sacrifice and supreme price or whatever their damned phrases are just don't cut it for this one do they.

Standing up and admitting you haven't learned squat from the past isn't something that politicians are very good at, and that's not going to change in a little over a week's time. If they were honest they could get up and say today we remember our first lesson in mass destruction using airplanes and bombs. Seventy years later and we can now take out people in greater numbers and from further away then we dreamed of back in those primitive days.

We salute the people of Guernica for being the first victims of mankind's descent into brutality in the modern era. They gave of themselves selflessly so others could die in greater numbers in the future. They made the supreme sacrifice and paid the ultimate price, and the entire arms industry salutes them for opening up a whole new target group – civilians.

No I guess that wouldn't look too good on a commemorative t-shirt or ball cap, and don't even think of a monument. Nobody wants to be reminded of Gurenica, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, London, Singapore, Saigon, Baghdad, Beirut, Warsaw, Stalingrad, Hong Kong, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Gaza, Jerusalem, Dafur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Armenia, Somalia, Ethiopia, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Rome, Kabul, Teheran, Algiers, Mumbai, Karachi, Kashmir, Punjabi, or any other place where civilians have died or continue to be killed.

Seventy years ago, on April 26th 1937, German bombers fighting with Francisco Franco bombed Guernica a small village in the Basque region of Spain. There was no discernable military target. The combination of incendiary, devices and high explosives plus repeated passes by fighter planes with machine guns left no doubt that the target of this raid were the citizens of Guernica themselves.

They must not be forgotten.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:17 PM | Permalink

On the same day that a lone gunman killed thirty-two people at an American University, Virginia Tech the country's President, George Bush, stood in the White House pleading with American politicians to give him more money for troops in Iraq. You know that Mr. Bush is bound to release a statement soon deploring the violence and death that took place at the school. But will he make any connection between his war in Iraq and the deaths in West Virginia? Will anybody?

In fact I doubt most people in North America would think of linking a seemingly random act of violence with an elected official seeking the means to escalate his country's participation in a war. Sixty years ago, maybe even only forty, they might have been right and the circumstances would have no bearing on each other. Unfortunately this is no longer the case.

We are living in a society that has become more and more willing to believe that the only way to resolve conflict is through violence. There has always been that mentality to some extent; the let them fight like men to resolve their differences attitude that's been popularized through movies, popular fiction and attitudes. Somehow two people beating the crap out of each other was considered an adult means of solving disputes.

Well I guess it does make for a more action-packed story to have the protagonists have to fight someone instead of sitting down and working out their differences and coming up with a compromise solution. But that's always been the "American Way", to solve disputes outside, either with six guns on main street in the old west or in today's parking lots with fists, feet, knives, and whatever else you can lay your hands on.

Now obviously when you're attacked you want to be able to defend yourself against further attacks, but there is a difference between self-defence and seeking to resolve the problem through war. Even calling something a "War On" implies that the only way you can resolve an issue is through violence.

We've seen a "War On Drugs", a "War On Poverty, and a "War On Terror", but not only has there been little evidence of success in any area, we're a might too quick to turn everything into a military action without even implying there can be a peaceful way of accomplishing matters.

You may in a case of fighting terrorism have to use violence as part of your means to combat it, but why does it have to be the only angle of approach? Why not while seeing if you can find them to fight the terrorists do something practical and cancel debts to the countries that house the terrorists, support the domestic development of industry, and genuinely help them with their natural resources. Eliminate economic uncertainty and give people hope of a future and I bet they will be a lot less willing to strap dynamite to their chests as a walking bomb.

All right, you say, what does that have to do with some nut job running amok with a gun and killing a lot of people. Well it seems quite a lot actually. According to experts in the field of mass murders on the scale observed yesterday, that while the occasional rampage will occur in Europe, these events are primarily a North American phenomenon.

A study by Princeton University sociologist Katherine Newman of twenty-five such events between 1974 and 2002 showed some interesting findings. First of all they are never something spontaneous – I think I'll go on a killing spree today-, but have all been the result of careful planning on the part of the perpetrator.

In the published version of her research, Rampage: The Social Roots Of School Shootings she sets out five conditions for a rampage. The first two deal with the killer and his state of mind, and the last three deal with societal issues. It's pretty obvious that the person who does this is going to have suffered some sever psychological stress, and considers himself to be different (and is more likely to be male).

She continues on with her list of five conditions by starting to indict society for not having the systems in place to identify young men before they do this stuff, for creating a cultural that supports the view that firearms (and by extension violence) are a viable means of solving problems, and for making sure that guns are readily available.

It's of course not just George Bush and his cronies calling everything a "War" that creates that culture where violence is a reasonable solution to our problems. In fact I would suggest he just cynically takes advantage of it to pursue his own goals. Like I said earlier it goes back into the history of our continent, and "Might Makes Right" has been an American foreign policy philosophy since the beginning and it's bound to have an effect on us.

As long as we continue to accept without question the need for violence to solve our problems these types of mass murders will continue to occur. We need to grow up as a culture and learn how to communicate in a way that violence will no longer be necessary to resolve our differences with other people.

Once we are able to do that trick, we can hopefully teach our own people how to talk to each other. That way we may just end up saving a few more lives then we do now.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:13 AM | Permalink

It looks like the dust is starting to settle after the week of unrest caused by Don Ismus' stupidity on the radio. It was fascinating, to watch the amount of headline space this incident managed to grab in the media across the board.

From Meet The Press to blog sites across the Internet this one story dominated the news for a week almost to the exclusion of everything else. No one's daily coverage was complete if they didn't give you the latest update on the situation and get reactions from their panel of experts as well.

But why was this story so newsworthy? A radio host made a comment that was obviously insulting to the women of a University basketball team by calling them a bunch of whores. That he couched it in Black street/rap slang and added in the comment that they were nappy headed as well to give it credibility as slang only served to add insult to injury in many peoples eyes and making the comment racist.

So Don Ismus is either a misogynist racist creep; an insensitive lout; or a congenital idiot. In either event he was going to be sent down the river for it either by his employer or the FCC. So what was the big deal? Why was so much time spent on this one damn matter? (Truth be told if I were a women I'd want to know why no one was very upset about the women of the team being referred to as whores – somehow everyone seems to have focused on the race thing but not the gender issue)

You'd have thought it was the most important story that occurred all week. Well I guess it was a slow week in Iraq, there must have been some suicide bombs but I couldn't tell you how many. There was a tsunami in The Solomon Islands, but heck only 900 people were killed and there aren't that many people living there to begin with. Not even enough to have a decent telethon over.

Oh and wasn't there something about Iran and them claiming to have succeeded in being able to produce the right type of plutonium to make bombs? It's funny you know it's almost as if they want the U.S. to invade them, well I'm sure Dick and George would be willing to oblige them if they could find any more soldiers.

They just extended tours of duty to fifteen months from twelve months for soldiers heading over to Iraq – that was announced this week too by the way in case you missed it – so it looks like they're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of what they've got to send over there. I guess it will just have to be the ones who've done their tour in Iraq – they can now do a tour of Iran.

But stories like that don't sell newspapers, who's going to believe them for one thing – I don't do you? It's depressing as hell anyway and people want to be cheerful – that's why they watch stuff like 24 Hours and CSI New York. Shows with nice upbeat stories about pleasant subjects like the end of the world and serial killers

So when a nice human-interest story like a child falling down a mineshaft isn't available to milk for all its worth, what could be better than a celebrity deathwatch? Lets watch Don Ismus' career going down the toilet on prime time news shows with commentary. I bet that got great ratings – far better then any story about the possibility of Israel bombing Iran and what the repercussions of that would be.

There is only one other reason I can think of that made it possible for this story to have stuck around so long. I know this is going to sound far –fetched but could it be that America still has a race problem? You know Black versus White – White versus Black that sort of thing?

I know that's hard to believe, America having a race problem, but why else would people be making such a big deal over it? If society didn't have any problems, if there were no questions about what is right and what is wrong, would this have gone on for a week?

If the country can get so caught up in something like this to the exclusion of almost anything else, you'd have to think there might be some unresolved issues along those lines. If there weren't a problem would this have been such a problem? Like I said in an aside earlier it seemed like the comments were more offensive to women then to Black people and nobody has made an issue out of that in the same way they've made it a Black and White issue.

To me it means Black and White is still an issue in the United States no matter what anybody wants to say. Don Ismus was the story of the week, when he was only another in a series of foul-mouthed shock jocks who went too far. There shouldn't have been any debate – he was foul mouthed and insulting to women and should have been fired on the spot.

Instead it degenerated into a debate about Black and White, "Ghetto Culture" and Rap music. To me that says this runs a lot deeper then just an "incident". Too people on both sides are too eager to close the door on something that still exists. I know why White people don't want to think about there being a race problem, I even think I understand why Black people don't want to know about it either.

Maybe they feel guilty for having left so many of their own people behind while they mix it up in the White world. Or maybe they feel if they say too much and rock the boat they'll find themselves on a slide back down the rungs of the ladder they struggled to climb.

When you see no one rushing to rebuild the poor, predominately Black neighbourhoods in New Orleans after Katrina (the mayor said if they came back the areas would be rebuilt – but what do they do while they wait for that to happen – go back and live in the Super Dome?). When the prisons are still full of predominately poor Black people, and the inner cities still home toBlack people and poverty, and you hear White upper middle class people saying things like "it's a great neighbourhood only 1% Black", you can understand a little of why Black people who are doing okay today are afraid.

They still feel like their positions are precarious, that if they step out of line just a little too much they can be replaced by any number of eager White executives, or Black ones who "don't get so uppity". The race problem in America is a difficult one now because it's no longer overt. It was easier when you knew who the enemy was and could take definite action like voter registration drives and lunch counter sit-ins.

A generation later the worries are different. Today's Black people are discovering what yesterday's Jews went through. They're wondering what they say about us behind closed doors; why are there doors still closed to us; and the feeling that it can all be taken away again at any minute.

White people still aren't comfortable with seeing Black people in the board rooms sitting across the table from them instead of like in their father's time serving the coffee and shining shoes. It's not that they don't want them there it's just that they don't know how to act with them in the same room as equals.

America is still trying to come to terms with the first generation of equality under the law for Black and White men. The problem is that no one wants to admit that everybody is uncomfortable and doesn't know how to act around each other. They are like a bunch of adolescents at their first dance and nobody wants to be the first to say anything for fear of embarrassment. Somebody needs to ask somebody else for a dance soon so you can move on.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:58 PM | Permalink

I have to wonder what world the people at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are living in. A number of Finance Ministers and Central Bankers from countries around the world met up together in Washington D.C. this past weekend and issued a communiqué saying that they thought everything was just peachy.

They expressed satisfaction with what they called the robust expansion of the global economy and that and quite happily predicted that the world economy would continue to expand through 2008 underpinned by solid economic foundations. Of course they have a couple of worries; what to do about any inflationary problem if the price of oil bounces up again and what to do if the American economy goes into the tank instead of just slumping as expected.

Now normally I can't be bothered to read any official reports or press regurgitations about IMF meetings, because the lie hasn't much changed in all the years. They're still pushing the same "Globalization will save the world economy" crap. Of course they don’t mention the fact that's only if you are in one of the so called developed countries where they take things like running water, a proper education, and medical care for granted.

But on this occasions the headline of IMF Needs To Correct Trade Imbalance caught my eye. For a second I thought they were finally going to try and figure out someway of helping countries that are being forced to have fire sales on their natural resources just so they can eat. But I should have known better.

They were talking about China and the Untied States and how they needed to reduce both America's trade imbalance with China and how the Chinese needed to play fair with the rest of the world by not fluctuating their currency. In other words all they are giving a damn about is propping up the status quo and making sure the wealthy stay wealthy.

I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised. The IMF seems to exist only to make the world safe for the American economy. But, I can hear everyone of you commerce type people out there saying, without the American economy the rest of the world would be in trouble. What I don't understand is how the world let itself get so dependant on a country that has a debt in the trillions of dollars?

If they are so important to the world why didn't the IMF step in and say, Mr. Bush stop spending a billions of dollars a year on pointless wars and military hardware? Why hasn't the IMF said anything about the escalating cost of America's continued occupation of Iraq? It wouldn't be because the IMF are an American tool for ensuring artificial trade conditions exist that favour the Americans?

Well according to the The Global Exchange web site the IMF doesn't just favour, it damn well caters to them and any other member state with enough money to buy control of it. You see the more money you put into the IMF the more you control it. This might sound logical on the surface, but what it results in is a few nations end up controlling the fates of the entire developing world by dictating to them the terms and conditions of loans.

When you consider the fact that the IMF was set up after World War Two as a means of trying to ensure that another global depression could be avoided, you would think that meant they would have the best interests of the poorer member states at heart. Originally the idea was to give developing countries short-term loans so they could start up trade with developed countries. But what's ended up happening is the IMF now controls the economies of around sixty countries in the world.

The way they work is really nasty; more like a form of black mail than anything else. A country approaches them and says we need X amount of money to help us buy some necessary technology so we can build up our manufacturing base or strengthen our ability to develop our natural resources so we have something we can sell on the world market.

First of all seeing as how they are supposed to be assisting its member states, you'd think they would offer favourable interest rates and flexible arrangements for repayment, unlike a bank. Supposedly the idea is to get countries on their feet and be competitive in the brave new world of the global economy.

Instead of doing something helpful what they do is attach conditions to the loans that no bank would ever consider doing, or bank regulator would allow. They have what they call Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPS) which they claim are needed to ensure debt repayment. They demand that governments cut spending to frills like education, health care, environmental controls and that's just the start. They then insist that restrictions on foreign ownership for things like natural resources are relaxed, publicly owned services are privatized, wages are frozen, and labour laws gutted.

The result of all this is that country takes out a loan to supposedly improve their economy but the conditions attached to the loan are so usurious that they actually cripple it. All of a sudden natural resources that would have supplied much needed trade goods and money coming into the economy are owned by foreign corporations that put as little money as possible into the country.

The workers who are employed by the company get bare minimum wages and have little or no money to spend on manufactured goods and what they can afford to buy are the cheap imports flooding the markets due to tariffs being removed. Local industry, without financing like the big multi nationals can't compete and go under or barely survive which means that no manufacturing base is being developed.

With workers wages frozen and funds for education and health care frozen or cut, families aren't able to afford higher educations for their children that would help pull them out of poverty while illness and disease can be devastating to a family's financial survival. With environmental controls relaxed to accommodate the needs of foreign owners and currencies devalued to export the goods easily and at a profit (everything just costs that much less for them now doesn't it if the local currency is twenty to the dollar instead of ten) the long-term prospects of the country suck.

Just so you understand how rigged this system is against the debtor nations, you know who it is who comes up with the repayment package ideas? That's right the same guys who have the most money and the most control. They get to set it up so they get full benefit from the loans not the poor debtor country whose had to bend over and take it in a desperate bid to survive.

Oh and just one other little thing about all these strings that the IMF attaches to loans. Remember all those promises of debt forgiveness? Well all the same rules apply to them as well. The IMF can say to some starving African nation with a horrible debt load but big nickel deposits – "lets make a deal". They wipe the slate clean and the country loses its one asset to greed heads from other countries.

Is it any wonder that most of the developing world is beginning to hate us with such an intensity. Sure their colonial masters might have given them independence, but it's a sham without economic freedom and nobody is going to be giving them that any time soon.

The only way to change this situation is to abolish the IMF in its current format. No country should be made to sacrifice its future to receive help in the present. Right now the reality is that only a few nations in the world are benefiting from the great globalization of economies.

So when they release their communiqués announcing things are going great it's just another lie in the series of lies we are told on a daily basis. Aren't you getting tired of being lied to? I know I am.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:17 PM | Permalink

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. - Ernest Hemingway

Now why would Ernest Hemingway say something like that? Was it based on his observations of human behaviour, or was it something that was pulled out of his own deeply unhappy psyche. I wonder if he even meant intelligent and maybe was thinking of something more along the lines of aware?

I don't know, and obviously can't know now, so I'm not going to waste energy on conjecture, just stay with what's given. We know that Hemingway took his own lifein 1961 by putting a shotgun in his mouth and blowing the roof of his head off. That's not the action of a person awash in happiness now is it?

You can't really blame him though, the last years of his life were damned miserable. He had been severely injured in a small plane crash in the fifties that left him near dead. (In fact some papers actually published his obituary at the time of the accident thinking he had died) He developed depression and was treated with electroshock treatments that he claimed stole his memory.

His depression increased, and this resulted in more shock treatments, which led to … well you get the picture. It doesn't help that his family seems predisposed to committing suicide. His father, brother, and sister all took their own lives prior to him. Some claim that there is an illness in his family line that lends a predisposition to deep depression, and when you consider his granddaughter also took her own life you do have to wonder.

So was Hemingway simply looking in a mirror when he said, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know" or is there more to it then that? Remember that during his life Hemingway was surrounded for a great deal of the time by some of the most brilliant artistic and intellectual minds of the twentieth century. He counted among his friends James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Morley Callahan to name just a few.

He lived in Paris during the 1920's period of artistic and intellectual upheaval when ideas and creativity were on the menu of every outdoor café and bar in the city. He would have seen some of the finest minds of his generation in the throes of addiction, the high of creative exultation, and the depths of despair produced by the inability to create.

As a novelist he would have had to be able to attune himself to the workings of other people's minds so that he could create characters and portray emotions with accuracy. Even if it only meant that in his imagination he was able to create an image for himself of what was going on beneath the surface of the people around him it still helped him gain an insight into the way the mind works. So he could have come to the conclusion that led to that sentence based on his observation alone easily enough.

As I think about the quote I realize that it me of two sayings: the one about being your own worst enemy and the other about gifts being a double-edged sword. I think the two sayings may be connected somehow. Intelligence is a gift allowing us to see with clarity and understanding, enabling the ability to solve problems quickly. The other side of that blade is knowing all the potential resolutions to a problem including the negative ones It's being able to see the negative and realize the potential for failure that allows us to become our own worst enemies.

If you are in the middle of an artistic block, unable to create at that moment for whatever reason, how easy would it be for the intelligent person to marshal unassailable arguments that prove he or she will never create again? Of course it goes without saying that these circumstances aren't limited to artistic people. Thinkers of any kind can run afoul of the same problems.

In fact people who use their intellect simply on a day-to-day basis and think about the implications of the headlines in the newspapers or their own knowledge of how the world operates can easily begin to imagine the worse. A diplomatic spat will become the war that destroys humanity; reported unrest among farmers is only the first step in the complete breakdown of society; or reports of a corrupt police officer is a signal that a police state is imminent.

These are the people who conservative politicians and pundits the world over accuse of being negative. By not agreeing that everything is just dandy and pointing out the flaw in the government's policies they are accused of un patriotic and troublemakers. It's hard to be content let alone happy when you see people of like mind as you being vilified in the press and intelligence being indirectly ridiculed as something unmanly and ridiculous.

That leads to another reason why happiness among the intelligent is so rare. The truth of the matter is that the more intelligent you are the fewer people there are in the world who you can talk to as equals. The majority of a people are of a certain intellect that allows them to be content with the world around them, unquestioning and accepting of who and what they are, and why they are here.

The minority who are blessed and cursed with intelligence see a potential beyond simply getting up in the morning, going to work, raising a family, etc. But they also wonder why they can't be happy and content with what makes everybody else happy and content. Everybody else chatters happily about television shows and what they are going to do over the holidays but to him or her it all sounds like meaningless noise.

Can't they see that the stuff is being used to distract them from the fact that 80% of the food they eat is made of plastic, that the vehicles they drive are killing their grandchildren's future, and the tax rebate check the government sends them is why they don't have the services they had ten years ago?

Why is it, the intelligent person wonders, nobody even blinks when a government changes it's reasons for starting a war four times during the lead up to and the end of it? How can they so easily forget that a year ago a politician was saying one thing and this year he says the complete opposite? To the intelligent person all of this is as obvious as the clouds in the sky and what makes them unhappy is not just the fact these things happen, it is the fact that nobody seems to care.

I think there is a lot of truth in Hemingway's quote that started off this train of thought on my part, but I also believe that happiness among intelligent people is not quite as rare as he would have us think. I would qualify his statement by saying that intelligent people are more prone to depressions and unhappiness than other people, but they are also capable of deep happiness.

Ernest Hemingway was a keen observer of human life as befits a novelist but he was also and exceptionally troubled man. He had four unsuccessful marriages and seemed to be constantly running away from some inner demons. By the end of his life he had descended into being a caricature of one of his own characters. His pessimistic outlook really needs no other explanation.

Posted by Ashok at 12:16 AM | Permalink

The results of the Supreme Court of Canada's overturning the use of security certificates to hold refugee applicants in permanent detention without trial if there was any suspicion of terrorist activity are now being seen. Two men who had been held under the law for years were both released from federal penitentiaries in the past two days.

Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub was released on this past Thursday after being held in Kingston Penitentiary for the last seven years because he had run a farming operation in the Sudan for Osama bin Laden. He has been released under conditions tantamount to him being under twenty- four-hour surveillance.

The terms of his house arrest includes being monitored by The Canadian Border Authority via a GPS bracelet permanently attached to his ankle, video cameras in his house, taps on his phone, and being followed by agents on the rare occasions he is allowed to leave his house. His family are also being held responsible for him adhering to all of his bail conditions.

Mr. Mahjoub has been the Canadian suspect with closest ties to Osman bin Laden, but he claims his association was innocent. The farming concerns he ran for the leader of al-Qaeda were during the time before bin Laden even lived in Afghanistan, and he claims to have just been another employee and eventually left the job over money disputes with bin Laden.

Mr. Mahjoub has never been accused of any terror activity, but the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) claims that he was part of an Egyptian extremist group called the Vanguards of Conquest and knew al-Qaeda operatives including a person alleged to be a Canadian financer of the group and an Iraqi who the American 9/11 commission calls al-Qaeda's principal procurement agent for weapons of mass destruction. ( It may be just me, but any American announcement containing the words Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction just doesn't seem to have much credibility)

The second man was released on Friday from a detention centre in Kingston Ontario Canada as well. Mahmoud Jaballah has been in detention since 2001, although the government has been after him since 1999. When they attempted to have him deported in 1999 they lost their case held under normal circumstances, but when the opportunity arose with the security laws in place he was immediately rearrested.

Attempts by the government to have him deported back to his native Egypt have been constantly denied by the courts because of the very real threat of torture he would face if returned. Although the current government continues to insist upon Mr. Jaballah's guilt (In a statement released by Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety, in response to Mr. Jaballah's release Day implied he was the murderer of women and children.) the judge said that although the initial evidence against Mr. Jaballah did at one time warrant the security certificate, now that he has spent six years in detention and no additional evidence has come to light she had to defer to the Supreme Court's ruling that the longer a person spends incarcerated the less likelihood there is of them being a security risk.

Based on those grounds the federal court judge changed Mr. Jaballah's sentence to that of house arrest, similar to the conditions imposed upon Mr. Mahjoub. The judge asserted, but offered no proof to back her words, that the conditions were imperative in Mr. Jaballah's case because she had no doubt that if not monitored he would get in touch with terrorists.

Mr. Jaballah first came under suspicion because of a series of over a hundred phone calls he placed to the United Kingdom, Azerbaijan, and Yemen to an alleged al Qaeda front. When those are added to the twenty calls he made to those destination and Pakistan in a subsequent two-day period and the fact that when asked to explain he either was evasive or didn't answer the questions it served to confirm his guilt in the eyes of the courts.

Given the atmosphere in North America in the days following 9/11 you can understand why he was placed under suspicion. The bombings he was accused of co-ordinating were embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But now nine years later and no further evidence has come forth, and, according to his lawyer, when the United States released a list of suspects, he wasn't even named as an un indicted co-conspirator.

The government of Canada's reaction to these events has been highly predictable. Aside from his insinuations about Mr. Jaballah being responsible for killing women and children and just awaiting his opportunity to go on another bloodthirsty rampage, he also has stated that the government would prefer that all these people remain locked up.

In another tidy bit of fear mongering he also said he hoped that the house arrest rules would be enough to keep Canadians safe from them. He then added that the court agreed that Mr. Mahjoub had clearly worked for Osama bin Laden and received a salary for that work. Well who wouldn't want to be paid for working, and since when has it become a crime to work for someone when there is no proof that your activities were criminal.

I mean if we're going to start rounding up people who've had business associations with Osama they better be picking up Dick Cheney and almost everybody on the Halliburton Board of Directors. At one point they had owned around 30% of bin Landen's company. Not just his families business – but his company. Doesn't anyone find it at all odd that on the day after 9/11 when all the planes in and out of the United States were grounded, that all the members of the bin Laden family living in the United States were able to fly home?

Who arranged that for them, and why was it allowed to happen? If Dick Cheney and George Bush, both of who would have to okay something like this, come to Canada will they be picked up on a security certificate? They've had some pretty suspicious contact with bin Laden and his whole family immediately after 9/11.

What does that sound ridiculous? Why is it anymore ridiculous than wanting to keep a man in jail because he ran a farm for bin Laden long before he even went to Afghanistan? What proof do they even have that either man had of any involvement in any terror activity? Well, none, actually. One guy made a lot of phone calls to the countries where he could have family just as easily as he could have terror contacts. Why so many calls in two days? Hell if my mom has to contact her family about an event like a death she could make twenty calls in an afternoon no sweat.

Mr. Mahjoub worked for someone who turns out to be one of the bad guys, but how was he supposed to know that back whenever it was he worked for him. In fact the government hasn't said when he worked for him, only that it was before bin Laden was in Afghanistan, which means before 9/11/01. In fact he even says he quit working for him over a dispute with money. No one has given us any reason not to believe him.

Mahmoud Jaballah and Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub were both held in Canadian prisons with no trial, not knowing what exactly they had done to end up there, and knowing if they were to lose they'd be deported to torture and death in their former homes. Perhaps it was understandable seven years ago to keep an eye on people like them, or even detain them temporarily. But now it 's just cruel and unjust.

If you're having any doubts about which side to err on in Canada, freedom or so called safety, think about Mahar Arar and his time in an Egyptian jail being tortured. It was our security service that put him there with their inaccuracies and incompetence. Do you trust them with any more lives?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:59 AM | Permalink

Sometimes you just want to put on a disc of music that's a whole lot of fun. Good music that makes you want to move and will put a smile on your face. The challenge is to find it played by musicians on instruments instead of pre programmed electronics playing behind some teenybopper with a Minnie mouse voice.

I don't know about anyone else but a drum machine and teenaged girl who sucks helium before singing just aren't my idea of either music or something that I can have a good time too. Then again I can't see the point in music that only serves one purpose either; if I'm not going to want to listen to it for entertainment, I'm not going to want to dance to it.

I don't have the ability to compartmentalize my musical tastes that way: this if eating to, this is for writing to; this is for dancing to, and so on. I might say that I'm in the mood for something up-tempo or slow at this moment or time, but that's different because it's choosing music based on how you feel at the moment and doesn't start imposing artificial restrictions on enjoyment.

For me the best "fun" music had always been Blues music with some jive and jump to it. There's probably some name for it but I've never heard it. The best I can do for you is to tell you about a disc that Delmark Records has just re-issued of Jazz/Blues great Eddie Cleanhead Vinson, Kidney Stew Is Fine

Eddie Cleanhead Vinson was born in 1918, timing it just about right to come of age when Jazz was becoming popular with a wider audience. The Big Band era of the late thirties and forties provided lots of work for musicians of all colours because of the need for players to not just fill the ranks of the formidably sized groups but be skilled enough to play the music to the standards of taskmasters like Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton and Tommy Dorsey.

Vinson started out playing tenor saxophone in bands, but also took occasional vocal duties. But it wasn't until he did some touring with Big Bill Broonzy that he began to feel comfortable in the role of band singer as well as horn player. It was Broonzy that taught him the skills to take him from a sax player who could sing, to being a singer and a saxophone player.

He seems to have done the usual tour of duty that those folk who don't fit into any of the nice round pegs end up doing. He would put together bands and would be told that your playing is too modern and your singing style is old fashioned and be stuck without record deals. One such band featured a young John Coltrane who was just starting out on alto sax and the two would have fun playing each other's instruments.

By the 1950s it looked like his career was going nowhere, and who knows what would have happened if not for Cannonball Adderly being a big fan of his work. Adderly got him into the studio to do a jazz album, getting him back on the scene again. Two albums latter he was recording Kidney Stew Is Fine in France.

Now aside from this being a damn fine collection of up-tempo Jazz/Blues songs that could get the dead dancing this disc is also great because of the fact that T-Bone Walker and his guitar joined Eddie for the one and only times in their careers. Rounding out the band was Jay McShann on piano (who just recently passed in 2006), Hal Singer tenor sax, Roland Lobligeois bass, and Paul Gunther on drums.

But this was Eddie's gig all the way from the opening track through to the close of the album. The way he sings the blues, especially the lively ones, there's almost a teasing note in his voice, like he's daring you not to have fun. The music jumps and Eddie jives and if you don't move you're not alive.

Well I'm sorry but that's what this type of music can do to you. I'm trying to think of something that you might be able to use as a point of comparison and all I can come up with is to ask if you can remember the Blues Brothers band the John Belushi and Dan Akroyd used to do. They are a pale, very pale, imitation of what Eddie Vinson and his band do on Kidney Stew Is Fine.

They may be playing the same type of music as Eddie recorded in 1969 in France, but they aren't performing it the same. Sure it's the same notes and all but they might as well be from different worlds. Eddie's voice speaks from a place in his heart that can only be found from years of playing the music and believing in it.

The Blues Brothers were an act that hired really good players to back them up, but Eddie was a singer and a musician who played with a band, wrote some of the songs they performed, and probably arranged all of them. By the time he recorded this album he'd been playing Jazz and Blues for over thirty years with some of the most amazing musicians in that world and it shows.

You know so many modern singers almost have to scream to convey emotion. Or they make it seem like it's such an effort to get a line out they're contorting so much. Well Eddie just opens his mouth and the music comes out real and raw. You know there is no artifice in that voice or that man and you are listening to a genuine article if there ever was one.

The really good thing about this disc is the liner notes give you all sorts of information about Eddie's history and the background of the music. Unfortunately they do miss out on telling you whose playing what. I got that information from a press kit. The other important piece of information that's left out of the liner notes, but comes with the press stuff, is how Eddie Cleanhead Vinson's head became Clean. It seems it involved an accident with some lye based hair straightener.

But all you really need to know about Eddie Cleanhead Vinson is contained on the ten tracks of this disc. I don't know how his Kidney Stew tastes, but I do know Kidney Stew Is Fine is probably one of the best collections of good time Blues music I've ever heard.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:45 PM | Permalink

Have you ever noticed the how the sound of a Blues guitar is instantly recognizable? Using the phrase Blues guitarist to describe the way a person plays gives you an immediate idea of what they can play. Sure you can wonder if they played like Eric Clapton, or more along the lines of the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, or if they're going to be playing Mississippi Delta style or the sound of Chicago? But the guitar is going to have the same sort of sound quality to it no matter what.

When it comes right down to it that pretty much applies to every Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, and Pop music guitar sound. All you have to do is listen to the earlier albums of such bands like The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin for that to be obvious. The sound hadn't really changed that much since Robert Johnson went down to the Crossroads and came back with the devil in his hands.

But every so often there's been a Blues musician who perhaps hasn't broken the mould but has changed or added enough elements that his sound has a something that makes it stand out from the pack. While Robert Jr. Lockwood (the junior was for his stepfather, the above mentioned Robert Johnson) played Blues music all his life the sound of his guitar was as distinctive as his fingerprints were from other players.

Robert Jr. was born in Arkansas in 1915 and obviously had exposure to Blues music from a young age. His main teacher was his stepfather of course, but two other guitar players also played an important role in developing the sound that would become his signature. Charlie Christian and Eddie Durham were both Jazz players and it's most likely that Lockwood 's smooth sound and texture originated with them.

Texture may seem like an odd word to describe sound but think of the difference between a Jazz and a Blues song. A Blues player's chords that are rough and tumble like the juke joints and bars from the wrong side of the tracks it came from. Jazz on the other hand is slick and smooth with the elegance of the speakeasies and nightclubs where you'd find combos laying down some cool elegance.

Listening to Robert Jr. Lockwood's 1970 release Steady Rollin' Man, just reissued by Delmark Records you can hear the Jazz influence on his guitar loud and clear. It's not that he is playing Jazz songs, but playing Blues music and Blues chords and progressions on a guitar that sounds like it should be playing Jazz.

Have you heard an electric Jazz guitar? They are usually the large hollow body type guitars that look a lot twelve string guitars that the Birds would have played on songs like "Mr. Tambourine Man". But something about their set-up makes them sound far more melodic than anything the Birds would have played.

Each note rings out clean and distinct and carries a slight bell like echo and has a cleanness that one doesn't normally associate with an electric guitar. Now imagine that sound playing a blues song and you've got a fairly good idea of how Robert Jr. Lockwood sounds.

Lockwood is a guitar player's guitar player. In other words he could always be counted on to deliver a good solid performance. How good was he? Well by the mid fifties he was "The" studio guitar player in Chicago playing for everybody from Muddy Watters to Little Walter. In the early 1960's he followed Sonny Boy Williamson to Cleveland (Robert Jr.must be one of the few guys who played with both the original Sonny Boy Williamson on the "King Biscuit Time" radio hour and his successor to the name) where they played a steady gig for three years.

When Sonny Boy went off to Europe in 1963 Lockwood backed away from music to concentrate on his family for a while. But he got back into performing in the late 1960's early 70's when the first upswing in "roots" music came around. Finally after all those years performing as everyone's sideman, when Lockwood released Steady Rollin' Man it was his first album as a bandleader.

Showing the wisdom he had accumulated from years in the business he hired the Aces – Louis Myers, Dave Myers, and Fred Below, to fill out the band. Each of these men were fine musicians in their own right who had released albums individually or as a unit in the past. The four men had even worked together on albums before this one so this marked a reunion of like minds; men who understood what the others wanted without being asked and could play together seamlessly.

This is some of the tightest and most interesting Blues music I've heard in a long time. All but two of the songs are original Lockwood compositions, and they have been created with his sound and style in mind. He has a truly compelling Blues voice in that it sounds like he's had a pack a day habit chased with bourbon. But I've never heard such a sweet sounding guitar, especially on those that he used the electric twelve string.

You have never heard anything like the bell like tones he is able to get from that guitar when he does a typical Blues run up and down the neck of his guitar. The scale is right, but the sound is different, and if sounds great.

Robert Jr. Lockwood passed away in November of 2006, but for the last thirty–six years of his life he fronted his own bands and played his own brand of Blues guitar. I would have liked to have the opportunity to see him and his band live. I'm sure they were wonderful. Judging by the material on Steady Rollin" Man I know I've missed out on something special, but I'm glad that at least this disc is available again so that there's a record of Lockwood's truly remarkable guitar sound.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:24 AM | Permalink

The chaos theory suggests that any and all actions will have a reaction somewhere in the world. One of the most frequent suggestions you hear is that a butterfly's wings flapping in Japan will cause a hurricane to occur somewhere else. How much validity there is to that statement is debateable, but I think it is used as an extreme example to demonstrate the idea of the interconnectedness of all things.

Now you can believe what you want about butterflies and their wings but the idea of the chaos theory makes a lot of sense when you listen to Joseph Jarman's 1968 recording of As If It Were The Seasons. It's just been re-released and digitally re mastered by Delmark Records allowing a whole new generation to take flight along side the men and one woman who recorded the two pieces of music performed on this recording.

Referring to this music as Jazz is not a good idea. The word Jazz immediately brings to mind a definition, and an expectation of what it is you are about to hear. While it's true many of the same instruments are utilized in the performance of this work as are employed in the music known as Jazz. But then again both Rembrandt and Jackson Pollack used paint and canvass to create their art and there are some noticeable differences between the finished work of each man.

I don't know how much Jazz music any of you know but if you're familiar with the music of Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and the later work of John Coltrane you'll know there was quite a change in styles from the first two men to the third. Well I think it is probably safe to say that it is at least an equivalent jump from Coltrane to the music that Jarman was performing in 1968.

Although chronologically the latter three men were roughly contemporary, and some of Coltrane's soloing was moving in a similar direction, Jarman and company were musically on a different plane of existence. Does that sound unnecessarily spacey and trippy to you? Well perhaps it is, but in some ways it's the truth.

In spite of earning a deserved reputation for wild improvisations on his tenor saxophone, Coltrane was still working within the structure of a recognizable tune. Much like a classical composer or musician he would do variations on a theme and have that as his foundation. A friend of mine once said, " you can't help but respect a man who took a song as nauseating as "A Few Of My Favourite Things" and turned it into something interesting". He was brilliant at improvising around something and creating magic, but there was mostly always a tune. (I qualified that statement because I've not heard all of Coltrane's music so I can't be 100% of the statement)

But when you listen to Joseph Jarman and his band you know that's not the case. On the first pass through of the first track "As If It Were The Seasons" and "Song To Make The Sun Come Up" it appears to be complete chaos – no tune, no theme, and definitely no structure. Listen a second time and you start to get an inkling of what could be happening here but you might not be listening in the right way.

Instead of trying to hear a song – or a tune, hear the sensations or the feelings that are being generated by the music. "As If It Were The Seasons" begins with what could be the sounds of spring. The soft piping sounds from flutes and whistles could easily be the voices of birds on a morning. At least that's a first impression when listening to the disc on headphones while walking on a bright spring day.

But you could also feel it like the turning of the wheel of the seasons of a life. From the gentleness of the first beginnings and when the sounds begin to pick up speed and rise to tempestuous it’s like moving into the frenetic beyond infancy and childhood. Work, and the hustle and bustle of adult life, can be heard moving through the sounds of the various instruments.

Gradually you realize that one of the sounds is a woman's voice singing, or perhaps the better word would be vocalizing, because she's not singing lyrics. Every so often you pick it out of the various sounds and it becomes more and more noticeable. As the sound builds her voice ascends a scale until it is almost no longer recognisable as human.

Just when you begin to think that you may not be able to take the aural assault any more quietness starts to appear around the edges – life is beginning to slow down again – wind down towards whatever comes next. At least that was the feeling I got from listening to it. Maybe you'll hear something else.

In my mind this type of music has to be some of the hardest to play – to create a sense of chaos without actually descending into chaos requires the finest of ears and the lightest of touches on an instrument. When Jackson Pollack created one of his splatter canvasses he wasn't just throwing paint haphazardly with nothing in mind. It may have appeared that way to some but he never could have achieved his desired effect, the abstraction of the feeling that he was trying to find way of expressing.

When Joseph Jarman and the musicians he works with create with their instruments they are doing the same thing. As If It Were The Seasons is one of the finest examples of abstraction that I've ever heard. There is a method and a purpose to their seeming madness. It is beautiful, upsetting, disquieting, scary, annoying, and pretty much all the other things that go into a life. What more could you want from art?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:36 PM | Permalink

This just in, a weather update for the planet earth for the next fifty to sixty years. Famine, flooding, fires, and drought are all predicted to be on the increase unless we do something to change our current levels of greenhouse gas emissions. In fact things are at such a state right now that even if we began to curb emissions today the planet won't start receiving the benefits from it until 2040.

Now I know, when have you ever been able to trust the weatherman before? Well in this case it's not moron reading a teleprompter. No this is a 1572 page report issued by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Some of the highlights of the report are that the yields in rice crops in China and Bangladesh could drop by up to ten per cent in Bangladesh and twelve in China. Bangladesh also faces a drop of 1/3 in the yield from their wheat crop by 2050. Of course it won't just all of a sudden cut off that year, it will be a gradual decrease over the years between now and then, slowly increasing the numbers of people in those areas of the world at risk of starvation.

The drops in yield combined with anticipated population increases could put an extra 50 million people at risk from hunger as soon as 2020, with the numbers pretty much doubling every thirty years: 132 million in 2050 and 266 million people in 2080. In just over seventy years time roughly an equivalent number of people to that as currently live in the United States will be at risk from starvation in one small corner of the world.

But according to people like Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper and American President George Bush our economies are more important then reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by businesses and cars. Far be it that the people who paid for them being elected have to do anything that will hurt business. Anyway it's only a bunch of folk on the other side of the world who are going to suffer right away, we're okay for a while.

If it gets too hot here we'll just turn up our air-conditioning, we grow plenty of our own wheat, and be real, how many people really like rice anyway? Who ever heard of having rice with your Sunday side of beef; meat and potatoes are what every right thinking person eats anyway.

So what if water shortages will be felt in India because of glaciers melting in the Himalayan Mountains? I can't see why they're complaining about water shortages anyway when over a 100 million of them are going to be facing flooding problems from the rises in sea levels.

Africa is a lost cause anyway. We keep trying to help them out by "developing" their natural resources for them, but they get all uptight about wanting to actually retain ownership of the product. With increased flooding and dependency on our aid to survive maybe they'll be a little more reasonable about letting us in on the oil and mineral development.

Does that sound like an overly cynical assessment of the two biggest economies in North America? The thing is that Canada and the United States are continually vying with each other for the position of who is the most wasteful consumer of non-renewable resources in the world. Along with the other developed countries of the world we are responsible for the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions.

We may not consciously make policy that takes advantage of other people's misfortune, although if you judge by the manner in which the Bush administration has sold off or is in the process selling off Iraq's natural resources to private corporations in the United States you have to wonder. But the countries that are suffering the most from green house gas emissions are those who actually generate the least.

The majority of the fallout, so to speak, from climate change is being felt in the developing world – specifically the continent of Africa. While the Indian sub-continent, central Asia and China are headed for hard times; it looks mild compared to what could happen in Africa if we continue at the rate we are going.

The rise of sea levels off the coast of East Africa could reduce Gross National Product (GNP) by 10% across the board. Wheat could actually be extinct as a crop across the whole continent by 2080, meaning that they will be completely dependant on foreign sources for one of the basic staples of human existence; the ability to make bread.

Even the developed world will take a hit, as the Mediterranean is close enough to Africa to get some fall out. Due to the delicate nature of the ecosystems in the area, the amount of damage will be substantial. The result would be that by 2070 as many as 44 million Europeans will be facing water shortages.

In the South Pacific Australia and New Zealand face temperature increases that will lead to heat waves, forest fires, droughts and landslides. While across the rest of the region it will create conditions that will see a rise in storms like the tsunami that hit the Solomon Islands prior to the Easter weekend.

While Australia and New Zealand can probably adapt to the changes, the smaller islands will be devastated because of intense infrastructure damage. They just don't have the capacity to recover from that amount of damage on their own, especially since so much of what would be damaged are the facilities they depend on for sources of income.

The report has two very blunt recommendations: first, while it's already too late to do anything about what's going to happen between now and 2040 we can still offset the majority of future disasters by getting serious about controlling greenhouse gas emissions right now. The second recommendation is that steps be taken now to mitigate repercussions by ensuring that public food distribution, health care, and disaster preparation are improved in those areas that will be hardest hit.

If we increase the chances of people surviving and rebuilding after the disasters that occur between now and when the effects of reduced emissions start to be felt they will be in a better position to take advantage of the improved conditions.

It seems that now a days you can't open a paper without seeing some politician in North America talking about how they are going to make the environment a priority and they have a plan for reducing greenhouse gasses. They talk about tax incentives for people using public transit but mass transit in Canada is seriously under funded and expensive to use.

Years of government neglect of mass transit systems across the country have left them with insufficient facilities to handle even the minimal demands put on it now. If people were to start using it in significant enough numbers to make a difference it would require the government to spend money it shows no signs of wanting to.

They've been far too busy giving away budget surpluses as tax breaks to the rich, corporations, and the middle class to ensure their re election to be able to spend money on frills like maintaining mass transit, let alone upgrading it to the levels it needs to be at.

What the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear is that we have run out of time to prevent some disasters from occurring, but if we act quickly we can still stave off the worst damage. But it's not just controlling greenhouse gases we need to work on. This panel has only looked at one symptom of a far more deep seated problem, and more then just reducing green house gases is needed for Africa.

We need to provide proper sustainable development assistance to the countries that need it so that they can become independent. We need to work with them to help curtail the spread of sexually transmitted diseases that are decimating their populations and destroying their economies, and finally we need to work with people and governments to bring populations under control. The world cannot continue to sustain the ever-increasing number of people on the planet.

If we do not work in all three areas at once then we are deluding ourselves that we are accomplishing anything that will assist us in leaving future generations a planet similar to the one we were given at birth. In the last fifty years we have done more harm to the planet then was meted out to her by our ancestors in the length of time our species has existed.

Lets take the next fifty years to correct the mistakes we've made and redress the balance. It's the least we can do.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:08 AM | Permalink

Ninety years ago Canadian soldiers went over the top at Vimy Ridge in France during that great waste of life in the twentieth century known as World War One. There was nothing honourable or noble about that war – at least in World War Two you had the Nazi leaders of Germany as a canker that had to exorcised from the earth – it was just the last stuttering gasps of the Empires of Europe.

If we think our political leaders today our callous and stupid, and there is no denying they are, even George Bush jr. would be hard pressed to match the inbred stupidity of those folk who allowed a whole generation to be destroyed under the guns of France. Canadians like to bleat how our soldiers attacking the guns at Vimy Ridge in 1917 was a coming of age for our country. Yep it proved we could be as stupid as anyone else and knew how to spend the lives of our young men as ably as the next country.

Yep we had the balls for slaughter so that made us a country just like our former colonial masters the British and the French, or our new economic master the Americans. It sure is something for us to be proud of isn't it? So proud that we built a huge monument in France so on the ninetieth anniversary we can celebrate how many people were cut to pieces by machine gun fire.

My idea of a memorial for the fiasco that took place from 1914 – 1918 is to erect a huge plaque saying that this was a futile waste of life that accomplished nothing except set the stage for all the wars for the next hundred years . Out of that war came the mess that is the Middle East right now, the horror that was the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans, and the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One gave Hitler an excuse for war.

On the weekend of the ninetieth anniversary six Canadian soldiers were killed in the first pointless war of the Twenty-First century – Afghanistan. Their personnel carrier was blown to shit and back by a homemade bomb buried in the dirt on the road. The six soldiers were killed instantly while two more were injured, but it looks they'll pull through.

I wonder if the Canadian press will get tired of printing the headline, "The Most Canadian Soldiers Killed In Combat Since The Korean War". This is the second time they've written it in the last four months and both times it's been because one of those road side bombs had blown the crap out of a convoy. (We don't count accidents like when the Syrians shot down some Peace Keepers on the Golan Heights in the 1990s or when the American National Guard twice used Canadian troops for target practice in Afghanistan because they can't tell friend from foe. I'm sure telling parents that their child was killed by friendly fire makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside about their allies, I know that's how I feel)

I can't remember how many "The Most Since Korea" was last time, it's getting hard to keep track of things like this when there is a steady trickle of deaths. Although come to think of it they do seem to come in clumps. A few months will pass and there will be no fatalities, casualties sure, but no deaths, then all of a sudden, as if making up for lost time there will be a series of them.

Either it means that there has been increased activity on the part of the Taliban, or it means the Canadians have moved into an area where they are more active. Either way it seems the result is the same. Dead soldiers.

What I find is interesting is that the Taliban were supposedly defeated before Iraq was invaded in 2003 – almost four years ago, and a new government was installed. Our troops were supposed to be helping to rebuild the country, yet here they are being killed by people who our government call the Taliban. Were they all really hiding in Pakistan, Iran, and wherever else they have armed camps.

Or, as is more likely, did they simply blended back into the scenery again. Went home to their villages and waited for the new government to prove itself as corrupt and ruthless as they were before the Taliban took over last time. You see there is an unpleasant truth we haven't been told about the current "democratically elected" government in Afghanistan.

Do you remember one of the reasons that were cited for going to war in Afghanistan? To free women from the oppressiveness of life under the Taliban, where they were treated like so much chattel and were denied basic human rights. So why is it that nothing has changed for women at all in Afghanistan? Where is there much vaunted freedom? Why are girls still not going to school, and women still scared to go out on the streets, even in major cities like Kabul, without being fully covered in traditional garb?

It's because the current government are only different from the Taliban in that they accept American weapons and food and present a veneer of respectability so that the press buys the lie of change occurring. Did you know that until people understood how bad the Taliban were they were welcomed as liberators when they overthrew the same people who are power now?

Yep that's what our soldiers are giving their lives for, a regime that is as oppressive and repressive as the Taliban. Why do you think so many villagers give support to the Taliban? At least they are honest about who they are. Sometimes the devil you know is better then the alternative. At least with the Taliban they knew exactly where they stood, even if it was in hell.

But our politicians, especially Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper, one of the most duplicitous people to ever enter politics, aren't going to tell you any of this. They are just going to tell you about soldiers making the supreme sacrifice, paying the ultimate price, and all the other euphemisms they have for saying they got blown to shit and died a horrible death thousands of miles away from home for no good reason.

Of course the timing couldn't have been better these poor schmucks getting killed this weekend if Steven Harper had planted the bomb himself. There were all the dignitaries assembled at the memorial to the great waste of humane life at the beginning of the Twentieth century and everyone was ready to talk about ultimate sacrifices anyway. This was actually a gift from the Gods for Mr. Harper and his gang. What a perfect way to tie the two circumstances together and gain some sentimental support for a war that is becoming more and more unpopular at home.

Canadians have been told from their first history class how important Vimy Ridge was in our growth as a nation and that the soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice there did so for freedom and democracy. Now ninety years latter they're still off in foreign lands paying the price for the very same ideals. The same qualities that made them heroes at Vimy Ridge are making them heroes in Kandahar.

Well I have to give Mr. Harper credit for getting it part right. It's true that Canadian soldiers are still dying overseas, and yes it's true it's for the same reasons – just not the ones that government is giving. In both cases, Vimy and Kandahar, France and Afghanistan, there were, and are, no good reasons for Canadians to be dying.

In 1914 we went to War as a subject of Great Britain; we had no choice because they controlled our foreign policy in those days – they were at war so were we. We didn't fight for Canada; we fought for King and Empire. This time around we went to war because America did. We're not fighting for Canada over in Afghanistan, we're fighting to clean up a mess the American's made back in the 1980's when they armed the Taliban in the first place.

The Canadian government has the gall to say that the people of Canada are only against the war in Afghanistan because they don't understand how important it is. Excuse me, I think they have that backwards – the people of Canada are against the war in Afghanistan because they do understand how unimportant it is.

We're over there propping up a government which is as bad as the one it replaced, maybe even worse because they could start fighting amongst themselves at any time over who is in charge. In the meantime we're wasting valuable manpower and equipment that could be used for peacekeeping missions if places like Darfur, Ethiopia, Somalia, or anywhere in the Middle East.

Or even better our army could do what it does best and be over in the Solomon Islands helping the people to recover from the tsunami that left the island's population virtually homeless. Or they could be travelling through Africa setting up medical relief stations in some of the places hardest hit by AIDS. I'm sure army issue condoms are the toughest on the market for preventing the spread of disease so they would be a boon in Africa. Not to mention the fact that our people are superb at coordinating activities in areas to see that the maximum good is done with minimum strain on resources.

Can you imagine what field hospitals dispersed through some of the hardest hit areas of Africa could do for the people of those areas? Think of what would happen if they co-ordinated with on the ground aid agencies for the distribution of not just medical supplies, but household goods that are so essential for preventing the spread of AIDS and other diseases.

But no, that's not sexy enough for our politicians; they want to be able send young men off to die in noble causes because it makes them feel important. Anyway if you send people off to treat AIDS they might give out condoms and that according to our government is wrong. It might encourage people to have sex or something equally obscene.

What they don't get is that they are committing the biggest obscenity around. When they stand up in a war memorial that's been built to honour the people who were sent needlessly to their deaths ninety years ago and talk about the ones who they've sent to their deaths all that it tells me is that they haven't learned anything.

I was angry when I started writing this article and now I'm just sad. It's heartbreaking that young men and women continue to be sent off to die for causes that don't exist by people who continually betray the faith placed in them to lead us with integrity. Our leaders put so much energy into teaching us who our enemies are so that we can go out and kill or be killed.

Wouldn't it be nice for a change if they put that same energy into teaching us how to like people instead? When they start doing that then they might be worthy to stand up in front of us and talk of honour and nobility. But not now, not as long as they equate it with death, killing, and hate.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:35 PM | Permalink

The man standing in the foreground; successfully cuts off the distant horizon line we can see to either side of his stooped shouldered, lanky frame. He is either chewing on a fingernail or picking his teeth with it in an attempt to clear a particularly stubborn piece of food.

Being that, while his body is in profile his head is turned slightly away from us, what he is looking at is unclear. Truth be told there doesn't appear to be anything to look at aside from stubble poking through fields of snow that surround the frozen, snow covered, dirt road his sneakers are perched on.

Looking at him you feel like there might not be something quite right. Has he survived some horrible shock? Is he the veteran of one of America's wars; one of the forgotten who have come home damaged more by what they've seen or had to do than any physical scars they bear.

The sky is as white as the road he stands on, but endless. In one of those weird tricks of light or perspective it looks like it might end at the mountain range in the background. For a moment making it look like the man on the road is girded in by walls and a ceiling, but that thought is ridiculous so it can be dismissed easily. Although the next time you look at the image it comes back to you again just as strong.

The picture I've done my best to describe is the cover of a book by David Newsom simply called Skip

Perceval Press has published this loving collection of images that David has shot of his brother living a life freed from the confines of the institutions. He tells of how when his mother died his older brother and sister had taken Skip to Iowa where they had land and settled him in a group home.