Tuesday, March 9, 2010
I'LL BE BACK
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
PAST IMPERFECT
Fear no more the heat o' th' sun • Nor the furious winter's rages; • Thou thy worldly task hast done, • Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages. • Golden lads and girls all must, • As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. - William Shakespeare, CymbellineIf I'm not mistaken it was Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, who first advanced the idea of the good dying young. Our illustrious Greek friend tells the story of a pair of golden lads who, because the family oxen had been stolen, pulled the cart carrying their mother to the festival of Hera. At the temple - if memory serves - the mother asked Hera to grant the boys the greatest of all gifts. Thus the boys, exhausted from their exertions, went to sleep and never woke. Hera's priestess told Mum that the requested gift had been bestowed: the boys would wake with the gods. Point being: "Whom the gods love dies young."
Defoe, of course, would pick up on the idea in - I believe it was - 1697, writing in elegy to his beloved pastor, Dr. Annesley, "The best of Men cannot suspend their Fate; The Good die early, and the Bad die late." And I would be remiss indeed were I not to mention Mr. Wordsworth who, in his 1814 opus Excursion (I: 27), admonishes, "Oh sir! the good die first/And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust/Burn to the socket." (This longest of Wordsworth's poems - I seem to recall - received some famously negative notices, including the Edinburgh Review's "This will never do.")
In our own era, we have the erstwhile pugilist William (Billy) Joel, penning that memorable stanza and refrain:
They say there's a heaven
For those who will wait
Some say it's better
But I say it ain't
I'd rather laugh with the sinners
Than cry with the saints
The Sinners are much more fun...
You know that only the good die young
Oh woah baby I tell ya
Only the good die young
As you may have gathered from the "I do believes" and the "If memory serveses", I cribbed the stuff on Herodutus and the rest from that immense flea-market of fact and fable called the internet. In fairness to me, I did remember most of the words to the Billy Joel song ... But for future reference, sweet reader, know that the presence of these supercilious phrases signifies erudition of web-based origin. E-rudition, we might call it if we wanted to be CBC-precious. Or just good plain bullshit.
As always, it's a fine line. Herodotus - if I'm not mistaken - was known not only as the "Father of History" but as "The Father of Lies." My current iteration - "Historian" - provides an appreciation of the enduring power of bullshit. As deputy editor of Vol. 8 of Ted Byfield's The Christians, I'm currently immersed in the 14th and 15th centuries - the period of the Black Death, 100 Years War, Joan of Arc, Tamerlane, the Fall of Byzantium, the Early Renaissance, the Borgias, the discovery of America, Papal schism, Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch - and often find myself foundering in a swamp of questionable facts originating from dubious sources refracted through two thousand generations of historical prejudices. It's like herding ghosts.
Take Henry V - that great hero of the Battle of Agincourt in which three thousand English soldiers (mostly archers) trounced twenty thousand French soldiers (mostly heavy cavalry). The primary sources on Henry are people in his employ or camp who, like modern-day PR flaks, found it in their best interests to make their liege look good. It is only by dint of these 15th century chroniclers' failure to anticipate the squeamishness of later ages, that Henry's less laudable actions - the burning of a heretic Lollard in a barrel, the massacre of a slew of captured French nobles after Agincourt, the brutal campaign of conquest in Normandy - were passed down. But, generally, king Harry, as portrayed by his contemporaries, was pious, wise, just, and the rest of it - and would remain that way until certain 19th and 20th-century historians, following the lead of that smart-ass Gibbon*, felt it necessary to cast a skeptical eye.
Thanks to Shakespeare, though, King Harry remains a star. The Bard's sources for Henry V were the Tudor historians of the 1500s - operating under the political requirement to cast their monarchs' Lancastrian forbears in a favourable light. Shakespeare, ever conscious of Elizabeth Tudor's gimlet gaze, further gilded an already gilt lily, producing a monumental being - and a most eloquent one, as demonstrated in the much-quoted St. Crispian's Day speech delivered prior to the Battle of Agincourt:
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,Of the two movie versions of Henry V, by the way, I prefer the almost whimsical
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
1944 Laurence Olivier version (war is glorious) over Kenneth Branagh's rather grim 1989 rendering (war is - yawn - hell). Olivier, of course, was operating under directions from Churchill to boost English wartime morale, and thus Shakespeare's already whitewashed Harry was further whited. For example, Olivier has removed the bloodthirsty exhortation outside the walls of Harfleur at which Henry suggests that if the French don't surrender his soldiers will:Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;This speech more closely characterizes the Henry V that Byfield wished me to produce in the chapter on the Hundred Years War. His reasons for wanting Henry demonized were twofold: firstly Ted's favourite Christian apologist and medievalist, C.S. Lewis, summarily relegates Henry to Hell in two of his books (without really explaining why); and secondly, the chapter ends with the heroism of Joan of Arc. Thus the preceding account of England's long and bloody campaign against the French, culminating with Henry's becoming king of half of the country, needed to be played up to enhance the saintliness of Joan. So despite an English-born inclination to admire Henry, I was bound to ascribe to the dissenting 19th and 20th century interpretations of Harry as prick. Desmond Seward, for example, writes in his 1978 book The Hundred Years War that the king "had more than a little in common with Napoleon and even Hitler" and quotes an unnamed Victorian historian's summation of Henry as "hard, domineering, over-ambitious, bigoted, sanctimonious and priggish."
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
Like those chroniclers of old, I know which side my bread is buttered on, and therefore shall our Henry be the bloody-hunting slaughterman.
Incidentally, Henry died of dysentery at 35 - a fairly young age, even in those days. Following the precepts of Herodotus and Joel, this would make him fairly good - though not as good as Saint Joan, barbecued at the tender age of 19.
* * *
Is 60 a fairly young age to die in our days? Certainly it seems so for my old buddy and business partner CFF, who attains that age this month but likely won't attain 61. Three weeks ago his doctors diagnosed a thoroughly cancerous prostate, which, although inoperable, could be managed and slowed. Estrogen shots and chemotherapy, he was told, could extend his life by three years. But when I visited the Frenchman two Sundays ago, he greeted me with the words, "It's not good."
The latest scans had showed the cancer to have spread through the lymphatic system and erupted at five more locations, including the kidneys and the pancreas. The doctors also strongly suspected the cancer had infiltrated his bones. They are now telling him to enjoy himself as best as he is able, and to get his affairs in order before he becomes incapacitated. CFF can't bear the thought of too much palliative care and therefore wishes to end things before he becomes a drooling vegetable. "Christmas, maybe," he said. "Or maybe I should wait until after Christmas so dee girls don't always associate Christmas with ... with dat."
Since he first learned of the aggressive prostate cancer seven weeks ago, it has been the future of his fraternal twin girls - who turn 10 in September - that has most preoccupied him. He had originally thought he might remove them from school for a year and take them on the sailing trip he's always dreamed of - "Give dem a chance to get to know the old man, so dey don't always remember me as just the guy who kicked deir asses to do deir homework." Now that that's out, he's trying to put in place a system that will best keep the girls on the trajectory he has been working on, and do so with the least disruption.
He fought hard and long to gain sole custody of the twins after his relationship with their mother, a Newfie golddigger eighteen years his junior, fell apart six years ago. Since then he has been busily grooming them in a fashion befitting the princesses to whom all of daddy's millions will ultimately come. He enrolled them in Edmonton's best private school; hired tutors to teach them piano, guitar, tae kwon do, dance, French, horseback riding, etc.; tutored them himself at home using the Kumon scholastic enhancement program; has hired a series of nannies who have served as surrogate mothers (and sometimes surrogate wives); and extensively renovated his large west end house and provided each of the girls with her own big room, replete with balcony, study area, jacuzzi ensuite, and gas fireplace.
The lavish quarters, CFF once explained, are an attempt to counter any yen the girls might acquire for returning to their mother's house. And although CFF has sole custody, the mother has been allowed to take the twins every second weekend. Those weekends are as unstructured and laissez-faire as the mother, who has an on-again, off-again marriage to a sheet metal worker, and is - at least according to CFF - "a flake". Understandably these relaxing times with mom have some appeal to little girls otherwise enduring the regimented life chez CFF.
When CFF first heard of his cancer, his hope was to beat it so that his girls would not be fated to sink into the morass of mom. Now that death appears inevitable and just six months away, CFF is having to devise the best contingency he can. For mom will automatically become the girls' guardian upon his passing. His daughter from his first marriage - a 38-year-old psychologist in Québec - was not an option. She is living with a guy, but is more interested in her flamenco dancing lessons than in having kids. She already told CFF, prior to any diagnosis, that, although she likes her step-sisters, she was not to be named in his will as default guardian because such responsibility would interfere with her style de vie. She suggested CFF view that latest Hollywood demonization of the conformist 1950s - Revolutionary Road - to get some idea of where she's coming from, lifestyle-wise.
The plan that CFF has come up with is to form a council - made up of various of his employees, including his accountant, his investment manager, and the manager of his BC apartment buildings - to administer the trust for his girls according to certain stipulations. These stipulations require that the girls remain in their home and attend their same school under the the day-to-day care of the latest Filipina nanny - a kind-hearted woman in her early thirties who might be described as CFF's lover if CFF still had the ability to "get an 'ard-on" (which, to his great chagrin, he doesn't.) The girls' mother, who lives with her husband in a town 50 km away, will be assigned a suite in the basement that she can use as a pied-de-terre when visiting the children, and be granted a gas allowance of $500 a month.
Initial indications are that mom isn't crazy about this arrangement and I suspect she may be planning some sort of posthumous end run that will somehow allow her access to a portion of the girls' inheritance. The best thing would be for CFF not to die, but I don't think that's an option.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
SODOM, ETC
The rogue government soldiers apparently aren't the only ones thus availing themselves of pygmies in the steamy jungles of Congo. (That's a pygmy woman and her two kids in the photo, by the way). The article also fingered the Rwandan Hutu Democratic Forces (the chaps involved with the genocide of those 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda back in '94) among other groups of roaming rapers and pillagers.
On an aid agency's website I read that the groups with the guns are even keeping pygmies (a tribe indigenous to the Congo) as slaves - just as in the old days before the Arabs and the whites came along to show them how a cottage industry could go global. Scuds, a former Journal colleague of mine, was recently employed as a flak by the UN's food distribution arm in Goma, near the unrest in Kivu province. In an email, he confirmed my facile estimation of the place: "Yes, this truly is the asshole of Africa," he wrote, then described a recent trip he'd made:
I was recently up in a town called Dungu, near the spot where the Congolese, Sudanese and Ugandan borders meet. There's a military offensive up there against the "Lord's Resistance Army" a militia group led by a psychotic Christian mystic who loves capturing young boys to turn them into child soldiers and/or sex slaves. One of his favourite trips, when his group was based in Uganda in the 1990s, was to cut the lips, noses and ears off his captives and force them to eat their own body parts - on pain of death. I have seen photos of the survivors. it's not a pretty sight.It probably isn't fair to single out the DRC as the asshole of Africa. How can one bestow the definite article on a single location in a 51-country continent that's thick with sphincters? Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Somalia, Sudan, Angola ... You name 'em, they're shit holes. But like volcanoes, some are active, some not.
Dungu must have been a lovely town at one time. A big coffee producing area back in colonial times, with Belgians, Greeks, Spanish and Portuguese in the town. There is still a Greek Orthodox church there with Greek writing, but since there's not a single white left in town, it's been taken over by some evangelistic cult. The hydroelectric plant on the river hasn't run in decades. The power lines have all been looted for their copper. The brick buildings in town are falling to pieces. Most people now live in mud, thatch-roofed huts. To export what little coffee is now produced, the coffee is put in 30 kg. bags, loaded onto motorcycles and transported to Uganda. The roads are too bad to allow cars or trucks.
Burundi, which I believe ranks as the second-poorest, third most-violent, fourth most-corrupt nation in the world (though I may have the rankings switched around), is currently in its dormant phase. Nonetheless, my old chum CFF, who runs the orphanage in Burundi, has finally, I think, come to his senses and decided to pull out. This decision was prompted by the realization that he will never find anyone trustworthy or reliable to run the place or operate the business (imported used clothing) that was to pay its upkeep. He'd signed agreements with an assortment of what to him appeared promising partners and all have been disappointments - either absconding with the inventory or just drinking and doing nothing. "Eet's a fucking nightmare," CFF has told me several times - though he does like the hyperbolic phrase. Partly because of the unreliability of his native associates, partly because he has prostate cancer and may or may not live much longer - he's taking female hormones and jokes that he can now indulge himself in the PMS of which he had so often been a victim - the Frenchman is now trying to figure out a way of unloading the 50-kid orphanage near Bujumbura. (If any of you have the $50,000 a month to support this coterie of cute African kids - pictured being taught how to smoke by CFF during a 2007 visit - and their pain-in-the-ass minders, drop me a line.)
It's probably best that he gets out while the getting is - relatively speaking - good. Burundi - like the Congo and Rwanda, a remnant of Belgian colonialism - had its own round of Hutu-Tutsi troubles just
prior to Rwanda's. Around 300,000 were killed, but in Burundi's case the Hutus stuck around and they now dominate the Burundian government. There's a hostile faction of Tutsis in the government, and it and the Hutus maintain rebel groups in the bush who periodically assassinate cabinet ministers and occasionally massacre civilians. It's hard to figure out the dynamics from the less-than-comprehensive news coverage, but no doubt there'll be another full-scale civil war before long. Invariably child soldiers are part of the mix - which I guess can provide a career for CFF's orphans when the orphanage closes. What is it about Africa that makes it such a hopeless mess? The standard liberal explanation puts the blame on the colonial powers: Rapacious and racist, they drew borders where none had been drawn, lumped together tribes that should never have been lumped, and thus set the stage for the vicious inter-tribal rivalries that have occurred since independence. The colonial subjugation, the slavery, further retarded future growth by instilling in the people a sort of infantilism that is now being exploited by the new black aristocracy of Oxford- or Paris-educated kleptocrats - generally putative Marxists - who keep the masses is a state of pathetic dependence (meet the new boss, same as the old boss; two legs good, four legs bad - pick your cynical allusion.)
Meanwhile, now able to avoid the bother of running their own colonial governments, the Western powers use their embassies to help corporations make deals with the kleptocratic rulers to extract the worthwhile resources. To assuage our western guilt, the UN, the churches, and other assorted NGOs import corn-rowed twenty-somethings, up for a little adventure and some easy balm for the soul, to putter about in Land Cruisers distributing band aids, condoms and solar-powered laptops to the unwashed. A trillion dollars in aid has been sunk into Africa by western governments since the 1950s. But still the populations explode, the diseases rage, the famines come with regularity, and the bum-fucking of pygmies continues apace. What can one do?
(John Le Carré, once a favourite writer of mine, gives full vent to all of this in his later, somewhat preachy, but solid two novels, A Constant Gardner and Mission Song. Another well-done book for those seeking an understanding of Africa's colonial past is King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild's non-fiction telling of how Leopold of Belgium [shown here with wife Henrieta], a late-comer in the rape-of-Africa sweepstakes, manipulated popular opinion in Victorian Europe, co-opted certain contemporary personages - including the reporter and Dr. Livingstone-locator Henry Stanley - and acquired the great big Congo and all of its rubber-producing riches without ever having to leave Brussels.)
* * *
I have a Palestinian masseuse called Manal. She's sturdy woman in her early 40s who expertly irons the kinks out of my shoulders, neck and arms put there by the exertions of scaffolding. As I lie face down on the table, occasionally grunting with the pleasurable pain that makes massage such a joy, we'll have conversations about the state of the world, especially that part of the world in which Mohamed holds sway. Manal is an unapologetic Islamacist. She and her engineer husband left their then home of Libya, via Dubai, for Canada with the aim of staying here just long enough to obtain the innocuous Canuck passport that makes international travel so much easier than does the problematic Palestinian issue. (O Canada, our home and native land ...)
Whilst waiting, they had a couple of kids and kind of got rooted. The kids are now in high school, heading towards one of those cheap Canadian universities, and hubby has a good job with Lockerbie & Hole. Thus their frigid country of convenience has become a more or less permanent prison. (...true patriot love, in all thy sons command..)
Manal doesn't wear a hijab but does prostate herself towards Mecca five times a day, and believes alcohol to be evil. She is also no fan of what could be called Canadian-US foreign policy vis-as-vis Israel, the Taliban, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The US and Canada, in her opinion, have no business crusading in Arab territory, imposing their decadent western practices - democracy, feminism, homosexuality, etc - on the flower of Islam. (...with glowing hearts... Okay, I'll stop.) As for Israel, she grew up in Gaza, still has friends and relatives there, and talked to them on the phone as the Israeli rockets were landing last winter. "Israel has no place there!" she said, delivering a vicious rhetorical jab with the heel of her hand to my lower trapezius. I grunted. "Is zat sensiteef?" she asked in the flat voice that somehow brings to mind the James Bond villainess Irma Bunt, though she was eastern bloc..
Somehow we got onto the subject of Africa - I think it had to do with the Islamic government in the Sudan and its annihilation of the blacks in Darfur. I steered the conversation to the matter of Africa's general hopelessness and wondered aloud about Manal's thoughts on the matter? "Well, zey're all blacks," she said with a shrug in her voice, as if nothing more need be said.
Sometimes we in the liberal west forget that there is a whole big unenlightened world out there that doesn't share our evolved views on the equality of the races. It's probably fair to say that most of Arab, Oriental and South Asian society would be horrified to see its daughter bring home a black fiance. (I wonder how I'd feel were one of my daughters to do so? Probably okay if he were like Barrack Obama; not so much if he were like the rap artist 50 Cent. The photo below is clipped from his video "P.I.M.P." and shows the hip-hop artiste with a couple of his 'hos. I'd bet the pygmy-rapers of the DRC listen to Mr. Cent on their cheap Chinese MP3s, probably seeing in him the apotheosis of black achievement. )
There is some rogue science out there that purports to prove the intrinsic mental differences of the races. When I worked at Maclean's magazine in the late 1980s I wrote a story about a University of Western Ontario professor who'd produced a paper on relative brain size. It suggested Orientals were the smartest, least aggressive and least sexed; blacks were the dumbest, most aggressive and most sexed; whites occupied the middle ground. As one might imagine, this professor - Rushton, I think his name was - was, excoriated by all the all the powers of Canadian liberaldom, was censured by the university administration, and has not been heard of since. The fact is, even if it were true, there is no way anyone in his right mind - certainly in the Western World - could publicly advance such a notion unless he wanted to be relegated to the nether land where banjos play and canned goods are stored in the basement under the portrait of Hitler. As my son John said, during a Sunday dinner visit a few months ago when I suggested the possibility of intrinsic intellectual differences between the races, "So what if it was true? How would that help anything?"
He has a point. If there were empirical proof that black Africans were 10% less intelligent on average that white Europeans, how would it help solve the problems that plague the continent?
I suppose such a revelation might give impetus to a movement by an unscrupulous outside power to re-colonize, and that re-colonization might be the only hope for some of these countries - the DRC being an example - that might otherwise disappear into their own asshole. I wonder if the People's Republic of China - a country I visited three years ago, seeing not a single black face - is in the fledgling stages of such an adventure.
In the last half decade, China has been busy forging relations with African countries shunned by others - countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Angola ... - in order to get at their oil, platinum, bauxite and those other resources needed to fuel the big Yellow Engine. So far it's all been relatively innocent - at least according to the Chinese, who assure everyone that they are not about to interfere in the internal affairs of their new best friends. But by means of payments for resources, the issuance of loans, the sale of weaponry, the building of roads, and the export of more productive Chinese labour into the workforces of their African "business partners," the Chinese seem to have hit upon a a backdoor route to what King Leopold needed troops and Col. Kurtz-type station bosses to achieve.
Enthusiastic African dictators, sterling chaps like Robert Mugabe, speak of their relationship with China as that of one developing nation with another - two jolly ships rising together on the fair tide of mutual cooperation. Given China's GDP of $8 trillion, an annual growth projection (even after the recent hits) of 8%, and its military strength (2.7 million troops and nuclear weapons), such comparisons are either disingenuous or naive.
Compared with China, even the biggest African countries are pygmies. Still, I guess it remains to be seen whether they are about to get it up the ass. Yet even if figurative sodomy is part of the plan, it may just turn out that the totalitarian government of the PRC will have a far more salutary effect on African development than all of guilt money from the western democracies ever did.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
FORWARD INTO THE PAST
And the things you can't remember
Tell the things you can't forget
That history puts a saint in every dream.
- Tom Waits
Absolute bullshit, you say? You may have a point. Look, for example, at recent history and the futile little wars presidents Truman (Korea), Kennedy (Vietnam) and George W (Afghanistan, Iraq) had involved their countries in. All of them had the best of reasons (stopping the spread of Sino-Soviet communism, thwarting Islamo-terrorism, securing the energy supplies and keeping the lights on in the Gore mansion); all of them had the cream of the Ivy League - men presumably conversant in the lessons of history - advising them. But what happened? Needless deaths, debts and a decided lack of human improvement. It's as though we are drawn irresistibly towards policies we know haven't worked in the belief that our very modernity gives us leave to second guess our forbears. Perhaps a more pertinent aphorism might be the one about history repeating itself.* Although it really never does - at least not exactly. Mark Twain may have been closer to the mark when he aphorized, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." I prefer Voltaire's, While history may never repeat itself, man always does. Which harks back to the dog and its vomit. Specifically: As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. (Proverbs 26:11).
Which is just what the inquisitor said to Joan of Arc who, after a period of fearful denial, restated her original claim that the voice of God had instructed her to gather an army and wage war on the filthy English. But that's another story.
*It seems inevitable that every adage is countered by its opposite. Absence makes the heart grow fonder v. Out of sight, out of mind; The race goes to the swiftest v. Haste makes waste; A penny saved is a penny earned v. Penny-wise, pound-foolish; Look before you leap v. He who hesitates is lost; etc.
Medieval history is on my mind because at I am back in Ted Byfield's shop writing and editing for Volume 8 of his 12-volume series, The Christians. The scaffolding job with Hokanson had become sporadic. As luck would have it, Byfield had just raised enough cash - from a 
group of moneyed supporters he called "the 12 apostles" - to print and mail out Volume 7 (pictured; the title refers to The Crusades) to the 10,000 people who bought the previous volumes. Thus the series has been resurrected after a four-year hiatus. What's left of the apostolic infusion, along with the money that's starting to come in from those who have Vol 7 should, Ted prays, keep us going through the 6 months needed to write, produce and mail Vol 8. "Prays" is the operative verb in that Ted begins each day in the office with a prayer, calling on God to help us turn out compelling copy and to keep us from going broke. One shouldn't underestimate the power of prayer as regards Byfieldian enterprises. Somehow Alberta Report struggled along for thirty years, surviving several near bankruptcies, with Ted praying hard all the way.
Unlike Alberta Report, which when I worked there in the Eighties paid wages competitive with those at the Edmonton Journal, the Christian history does not. It in fact pays about the same as what I was paid when editor Michael Cooke hired me at the Journal back in 1994 - but without the medical, pension and other perks that Southam (aka "the velvet coffin") provided for its workers. This means that in order to support hearth, home and my middle daughter's orthodonty bills, I must continue to work part-time for Hokanson, as I did for three six-hour evening shifts this past week, demolishing the washrooms in the Alberta Treasury Branch headquarters (which are undergoing minor renovation). For Hokanson's little company does not restrict itself to scaffolding, taking what it can in an economy that, even in Alberta, appears in decline.
I suppose we writer/editor types should be adopting a similarly pragmatic attitude these days. With the recession accelerating the damage done to it by the internet, print journalism is rapidly entering its buggy-whip phase. I see that the Chicago Sun-Times, where the aforementioned Mr. Cooke was until recently editor-in-chief, is among the many American newspapers foundering in red ink. In fact both major papers in Chicago, the Sun-Times and the Tribune, are currently in bankruptcy protection. In February Cookie leapt from those burning decks and followed his long-time sidekick, publisher John Cruickshank, to the Toronto Star. Canada's highest-circulation paper is faring better than its American counterparts - and better than many of its Canadian counterparts - in that its circulation increased slightly in 2008. The Star nonetheless experienced a 7% drop in earnings in the fourth quarter of last year, due to advertising declines, and is in the process of laying off 500 people - a practice to which Cooke brings his expertise from the Windy City.
CanWest Global (née Southam) is, as most of you will know, tottering on the rim of the toilet. Seems like that curse I threw CanWest's way in 2003 when those spineless cocksuckers at the Herald fired me for upsetting the Indian industry is having its effect. With CanWest's share price down to around 25 cents (from $20 in 2000), a debt-load of $4 billion dollars, and the creditors unlikely to extend the latest deadline for repayment beyond May 5, it looks like curtains for the house that Southam built. Good on Conrad Black for unloading that turkey on Izzy Asper when it was just an egg for $3.2 billion. Conrad's bloviations in Saturday's National Post notwithstanding ("...the great newspaper trademarks and some of the long-ingrained habits of newspaper reading, should prove to be durable..."), it is obvious that he read the writing on the wall that the late Izzy missed. Izzy's sons and heirs, who bought Alliance Atlantis' specialty TV channels (Showcase, History. Food Network and a few others) for $2.7 billion at the peak of the market in early 2007, unwittingly multiplied the misery. One is only left to wonder which of the pieces of the doomed corporation will be picked up and by whom? Too bad that the National Post will probably be one of the unprofitable pieces no one wants (circulation is down 30% over last year and in a desperate move to cut costs, it is planning to reduce publication frequency from six to five days a week). It was nice to have at least one conservative newspaper for those whose lips don't move when they read. Not that the Suns are doing much better. Quebecor laid off 600 in December, recently jettisoned the Canadian Press news service, and when I contacted the editor of the Edmonton Sun a few weeks ago about work, he laughed bitterly and suggested he might be looking for work himself before long.
All things considered, then, the 1994-sized pay-cheque from The Christians doesn't seem quite as inadequate as it might have two years ago (though try telling that to my wife). I must consider myself lucky to have writing work at all. And I do still - touch wood - have my health. I just got an email from my old partner CFF. He has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and says the doc gave him three to five years to live. As mentioned in an early posting, CFF told me not very long ago, vis-a-vis his cigarette smoking, that he didn't care if he died before his time as he'd seen it all, done it all, and life just seemed to be repeating itself. Wonder if he still feels that way now. Anyway, the news came as a shock to me - as I'm sure it did to him. I'll have to go over and commiserate. Although somehow the word commiserate doesn't seem to cover it.
Byfield's health seems relatively okay, although he did recently suffer a recurrence of the pneumonia he'd had earlier in the year. 
While Ted - pictured here during a recent mandatory Friday afternoon beer session at Ray's Sports Bar - claims the antibiotics put paid to it, I still hear him in his office, hacking away.
The Christians quarters are a modest but not horrible second-floor affair in a cinder-block building in Edmonton's light-industrial west end. We're not far from Alberta Report's old HQ, but the ambiance is decidedly different. The Alberta Report I remember was a collection of young, hard-drinking guys (and the occasional girl) working long hours on weekly deadlines with much bantering, profanity and mordant wit. There were photographers, advertising salesmen and women, a layout department, and room full of telephone sales people who attempted to sell subscriptions in the evening hours. Ted would emerge from his office periodically to "ratch" - the word we used to describe his rasping bellow - about this or that "fucking asshole" who had somehow stood in the way us getting a story or had otherwise thwarted production. Occasionally he would throw a typewriter or put a fist through the drywall. On Thursday nights he'd buy the whiskey and beer at the bar and regale us with old newspaperman stories. It was a lively place.
The Christian history operation is not. There are only five full-time employees: Ted and myself; a middle-aged female writer called Liane (a pro-lifer who once wrote a book about a noted anti-abortionist from Winnipeg); a young, spectacled and rather reserved receptionist/order taker called Veronica; and Ted's doughty wife Virginia - aka Ginger or Gin - who is still writing strong, but who suffers from emphysema and carries with her an oxygen dispenser whose regulated hissings suggest the proximity of Darth Vader.
Despite being in his 81st year, despite the persistent pneumonia, and despite a hip that slows his climbing of the stairs, Byfield retains much of the enthusiastic procrusteanism of yore. The book is his book, just as the magazine was his, and therefore the style, tone and form of the chapters must be what he wants them to be: which in its ideal is a sprightly ménage of Henry Luce, Barbara Tuchman and G.K. Chesterton (Barbara's in the middle). Ted prepares what he calls a "schematic" for the entire volume, and ones for each of the 12 chapters, outlining how one is to lead off , where one goes from there, what should be covered in each of the ensuing sections, how many words are to be devoted to each section, suggested transitions, and how one might conclude the chapter. After reading a couple of books to orient himself on the subject, the writer obtains the specific information to colour in his chapter from in an assortment of photocopied history books and original accounts on the subject. A box of three- by four-inch cards, prepared by researchers, guides the writer through these sources, listing the facts therein in chronological order. It's a bit like paint-by-numbers, though harder - the hardest part being the compression of a subject to which long books have been devoted into 5000 to 8000 words. There is also the matter of incorporating the religious angle - for this is a Christian history.
That isn't difficult at the moment. Volume 8 covers the period 1300 to 1500, a time when the Christian faith infused western society like - I dunno - television and the internet and the movies do today - or, perhaps more accurately, like the Islamic faith infuses one of those feudal middle eastern kingdoms. In the godless, secular world we in the West now inhabit, it is hard to imagine the religiosity of the medieval world. It is a place where God attends one's every step and misstep, where church is a daily devotion, where the angels and saints are our protectors, and where the priest - who baptizes, hears confession, grants absolution, provides education and gives the last rites - is the gatekeeper to one's life in this world and the next.
Then along comes the 14th century and kicks the Church square in the nuts. First came the the little ice age which ended a halcyon period of global warming (1000 to 1300 AD), wrecked the crops and turned plenty into famine. Then came the Hundred Years War which would see the English lay waste to France until Joan shamed the frogs into getting off their arses to fight. Meanwhile just 20 years into that war, the Black Death marches in from Mongolia and kills between one third and one half of all the people in the known world. Imagine that. Good people, bad people, priests, kings, innocent children - none of them immune to the bubonic plague that kills horribly in a matter of days. Mass graves like Auschwitz in every town. Pigs and dogs chewing on the bodies in the streets. The stink of rotting flesh everywhere. Children screaming in pain as they die, abandoned by mothers and fathers too afraid of catching the plague to comfort them in their final terror. And the Church and the Pope and all the priests, saints and angels cannot do a damned thing to stop it.
It makes you wonder how the Church survived. Though you could just as well wonder how the medical profession of the day - reliant as it was on bleeding, on astrology, on balancing the "humors" (plegm, bile, etc) in the body, and other utterly useless methodology - endured such an obvious assault on its credibility. The official explanation for the plague was God's wrath. As in the time of Noah, society as a whole had become sinful and society as a whole was punished and neither doctor nor priest could thwart God's will. Most of the people accepted this explanation. But some didn't. And among the latter there arose a questioning and cynical attitude that might be called the Birth of Modernity. Which is the working title of this volume.
* * *
And by the way, if any of you are interested in picking up any of the first seven volumes of this very readable and beautifully illustrated series, I invite you to visit the website or phone 1-888-234-4478. I leave you with Ted's introduction to the series from Volume One as an incentive to improve your library and yourself:
THE MOST DANGEROUS PEOPLE, said the twentieth-century Christian essayist G. K. Chesterton, are those who have been cut off from their cultural roots. Had he lived long enough, he would have seen his observation hideously fulfilled. At the time of his death in 1936, Germany, one of the greatest of the Christian nations, had been amputated from its Christian origins and was embracing instead wild doctrines founded on sheer nonsense. Thus deluded, the Germans set off the world's worst-ever war. People who don't believe in something, Chesterton also said, can be persuaded to believe in anything. How right he was.
Today, we are just such a people. That America, indeed the whole western world, is being wrenched away from its cultural origins has become a selfevident fact. For half a century, our literature, our popular music and drama, the visual arts, Hollywood and much of the film industry have been disseminating a genre of nihilism that debases almost every form of human virtue and exalts sensual gratification beyond anything the senses could possibly fulfill. Meanwhile, the liberal arts faculties of our universities work zealously to cut off the branch they are sitting on, diligently destroying the very foundations upon which the whole concept of higher education rests. The result of all this is a culturally dispossessed people, the very situation in which Chesterton saw such mortal danger.
What are our foundations? Though it has of late become intellectually unfashionable to even think it, let alone say it, the fact is that our cultural origins are almost wholly Christian. Our founding educational institutions, our medical system, our commitment to the care of the aged and infirm, our concept of individual rights and responsibilities, all came to us through Christianity. Our best literature, our most enduring music, our finest sculptural masterpieces and many of the greatest paintings in every age are those of professed and dedicated Christians. Finally, our concept of democracy came to us from the Greeks through Christianity. Is it by mere coincidence that all those nations that have best instituted and preserved democratic government emerged from Christian origins? I don't think so.
The purpose of this series is to describe these foundations, to say who we are and how we got here. That is, to establish our real roots. It has been a long journey, two thousand years, and neither it nor we have been uniformly benevolent. But this is our past, this is our family, and knowing who it is and what it has done is the first step in finding our way home.Ted Byfield
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
OUR OLD FRIEND, MONEY
That same unalterable demographic will, we hope, also make my brother-in-law's medical startup a go. His company owns the rights to a robotic glove developed by the University of Arizona that recovering stroke victims can plug into a computer. This makes it possible for the patient to do rehab exercises at home - in video game form - while a technologist at a central clinic monitors their progress on-line. This will make stroke rehabilitation much cheaper by cutting down on the face time with expensive therapists. I have no real advice to offer about investments, but it seems to me that any company that addresses death and disease - assuming solid management and low debt load - can't be a bad bet.
(If any of you out there are interested in seeing an executive summary, email me. And, no, I'm not on commission; just trying to make sure my bro-in-law doesn't have to sell the vintage Mercedes convertible that I get to drive on the odd occasion that I'm down there.)
* * *
I visited my erstwhile partner/employer CFF* in his rambling Riverbend house a couple of Saturday nights ago and asked him the when's-it-gonna-be-over question that has economists and politicians all over the world all over the place. CFF considers himself something of a scholar in boom/bust cycles, having made his fortune during the 25 years he was buying apartment buildings at bargain rates during recessions, renovating them, then enjoying increased rents and improved occupancies when the economies boomed back. He figures the current recession will last four to five years, based on his experience. He also claims to have predicted this one - but that's a bit revisionist of him.
When we'd first embarked on our ill-fated business venture together in early 2005, CFF, who'd recently sold most of his apartment buildings to Boardwalk Equities for a great deal more than he'd paid for them, was expecting the bust by the end of that year. Oil prices - the Alberta economy's only meaningful benchmark - were up around $50, almost double what they had been three years earlier, and CFF said they couldn't last. CFF's bust theory is based on the simple premise of a 10-year cycle. The latest Alberta boom had been going since early 1995, he figured, and would end at any second. Which is why he was damned if he would be paying any of the rental or purchase prices then being asked in Edmonton for the properties in which we might put our store.
(As it turned out, oil prices prices would almost treble in the next three years, carrying Edmonton real estate prices up with them. Since then, the price of oil fell to below 2005 levels, but has lately risen back up to those 2005 levels. The price of Edmonton commercial properties, unlike residential properties, has yet to fall much, although those in the business of selling commercial are predicting an overabundance (and thus a price decline) by the third quarter. With oil prices apparently on the uptick, and some bulls predicting they'll pass $70 by fall, Alberta's recession might not be as deep as those elsewhere.)
When I asked him how the recession had affected him, CFF, puffing away on another duMaurier, shrugged his eyebrows, adopted his dismissive, bit-of-couerse Parisian tone, and blithely declared, "It wiped me out." The Frenchman's definition of being wiped out is somewhat less horrific than yours or mine. His investments - heavily skewed towards energy stocks - have dropped by about $18 million, meaning he is only worth $22 million today on paper, compared to $40 million a year ago. But, as mentioned, the price of oil is creeping back up; yesterday's Suncor-Petrocan merger suggests renewed confidence in the tarsands; and presumably the value of CFF's energy portfolio will improve accordingly.
But now he's only worth $22 million, his latest lover has abandoned him, his African businesses and the Edmonton clothing bin business will doubtlessly go poof in due time, and the lack of exercise (he has a bad hip and a big belly) and the two packs a day he smokes probably mean he won't live to a ripe old age. He claims not to care. "I've done everyt'ing," he said to me about six months ago, as he drove us in his 10-year-old Mercedes diesel to the Mac's to buy more smokes. "Everyt'ing that 'appens is the same old, same old. I could die now and I'd be perfectly 'appy." It bothered him not a whit that death, as far as he is concerned, is the absolute end. "There'll be no Santa Claus wating for me in 'eaven and that's just fine with me."
The other Saturday when I saw him, however, he was full of excitement and enthusiam about the clothing bin stores he's starting in Edmonton, and his latest "bitches" - a 35-year-old and a 25-year-old, both from Burundi - whom he will hook up with on his next visit to the orphanage in June. Both are anxious to latch onto CFF - the 25-year-old apparently wants to marry him - and he has no illusions about their motivations. "I'm an old man," he says. "Why else would they be interested? But zat's okay. I get what I want, they get what they want. No one is 'urt." There was also some talk about the nanny - who'd arrived in the Phillipines to find her husband too poor to even meet her at the airport - returning to her sugar daddy.
"So," I say, "It sounds like you are going to be a polygamist - that seems to be quite a trendy thing right now."
"Reek, we are all polygamous. It's natural. So why not?" And he began another rant about the church and its suppression of all things natural, touching on the "great con game" known as Original Sin.
He showed me photos of the two women in question on his computer screen. They were both tall, light-skinned, and very pretty black women.
Suddenly I was not feeling quite so sorry for the poor old love-less Frog. Money may not be able to buy you the real thing, but it does have its compensations.
*The self-described crazy fucking Frenchman.* * *
For those who may still be interested in buying The Book of Ted: Epistles from an Unrepentent Redneck, there are still copies of the hardcover volume available. $50 a book, $300 for 10 books. Send me a cheque , 15916 Patricia Drive, Edmonton, AB, T5R 5N4, and I'll mail you your copy or copies post haste. If you want the book autographed by Ted, add an extra $10 to the price (he and I will split that portion on beer; I'll toast you, he'll say a prayer). Thanks to all of you who have bought the book so far.
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