People Are Strange.

"Au lieu d'un chateau fort dressé au milieu des terres, il faudrait penser a l'armée des étoiles jetées dans le ciel." Jacques Maritain (or maybe Raïssa or even Jean-Luc Barré).
Up, Down, Postscript.

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Music this week, first and last, from The Doors. First: People Are Strange.

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Wall Street is Occupied!

From what I can see these guys at least know how to organize it - general assemblies (lower case intentional), food committees ... and they are still there a week later.

There are lots of videos, this one's a good start, and this one, I Am the 99%. Some crazies, some incoherence, some clear thinking - all good - I wish I was there, I might just fit in.

"I don't know if we can do it. But if we can't do it we are doomed as a species."

The police got very ugly already - and they are still there.

Good on them.

You can send them an 'Occu-pie' pizza from Liberatos Pizza right from the comfort of whatever chair you put in front of the computer deity in your household.

Go Ahead! Send them a pizza!

Just do it!

Gable gets it half-right again. He is, as he so often is, close but no cigar (Once! Twice! Thrice!). I'll leave you to figgure out how exactly if you're interested.

There is some news of the Wall Street occupation, with some pictures, in the NYT (but not on the front page of course). The newspapers, so called 'liberal' or not, all know who butters their bread - and it ain't the 99%.

A-and Gwynne Dyer reappears as a purveyor of KY jelly: Geo-engineering takes off to cool Earth's surface. The true seat of fear is in the prostate apparently - bend over, this won't hurt a bit.

Doh! One after the other these people tip in the direction of easy. Wazizname ... the maudlin clue from the Munk debate? ... George Monbiot; then there was the nimby Gaia promoter ... James Lovelock; and now the last clear-headed Newfie, Gwynne Dyer - not exactly news, he made it clear in Climate Wars, but still ... Oh well.

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There was a typo in my transcription of Ivan Illich's exegesis on the Good Samaritan (which I have fixed). In the process I looked into getting the source of this quotation from (I thought) Jacques Maritain.

"Au lieu d'un chateau fort dressé au milieu des terres, il faudrait penser a l'armée des étoiles jetées dans le ciel."

According to Charles Taylor it is on page 396 of this book by Jean-Luc Barré: Les mendiants du Ciel, 1996; Beggars for Heaven translated by Bernard Doering, 2005.

So, it is not clear that the quotation is directly from either Jacques or Raïssa, and the book is not in the library, even in translation, and a used copy is beyond my budget, so ... a quandary. I'm working on it.

Some are setting out to beatify these people, knuckleheads, and worse than knuckleheads - they'll just never learn.

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Daddy You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time ---- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off the beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine, Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ---- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two ---- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.		Doug Ford would not recognize Margaret Atwood if he saw her on the street - this has now been rectified I understand, they have been introduced somehow - and it's probably a safe bet that Rick Perry has not read Sylvia Plath. But they are making a stamp of her. Ho hum. How many theses have been written around this poem I wonder? I remember Keith reading it aloud in an english class long ago: "Ich, Ich, Ich." And the implicit 'Du' reiterated in every blue rhyme. An inversion of Buber's I/Thou ... a daemonic inversion I suppose ... such a clear window into such a dark abyss. I am certain that I have said all this before. But my memory and this crutch of a blog are now insufficient to help me find where that was (?) ... once here in 2005 but that's not it ... Oh well. I am posting it here today to dot the i's and cross the t's on the Toronto companheira who didn't like being addressed as a lady. How was I to know? Why not say it the first time? Why save it for some kind of implicit cadence? We mistake the poet for her poetry, and her poetry for something else - say, the Zeitgeist - and soon it comes ready-made instead of bespoke, doctrine carved in stone on the cathedral walls - picked out in gold leaf, wisdom of the age, handed down ... and so on. How anyone can imagine that correctitude will help the movement coalesce into something that can turn the tide I do not know. Instead it splinters into ever finer and finer shards; too often governed by "Look at ME!" The organizers are all giddy counting has-been endorsements and contingent promises. What can we possibly learn in 8 hours of 'training'? I don't know.

If I were competent I would write a Daddy parody, turn it on its head with harpies and Sullenbode, weave Medea into it - and maybe provide a balance that could make sense of it - but I am not. And anyway, balance is overrated.

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So, as I get ready to head off for Ottawa I feel hopeless. Even accompanied as I am this time by my son and nephew - indeed, it could be as simple as commitments made to them that takes me out the door at all.

More and more I prefer to skip a day whenever I can possibly get away with it - just ... stay in bed with a book. And there have been two truely excellent ones this week.

When I first became dissatisfied with the Father God nonsense, and with Jesus, meek and mild, someone said to me to go looking into my own heritage then - the Viking originators of 'fuck' ... but I never really did get around to it. It was so comfortable to be shining with Jesus: "You in your small corner, and me in mine," and much too difficult to try walking around the KJV - I was never up for it, not enough jam.

Antonia Susan (A.S.) Byatt seems to have had the right stuff though: Ragnarok: the end of the gods, 2011.

I found the last two chapters here: A.S. Byatt - Ragnarok, The End of the Gods (excerpts).

She ends with: "As it is, the world ends because neither the all too human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it."

If we are walking to the end, running, whatever, it is just as well to look straight at it, to see it for what it is - even from somewhat to the side - and this Ragnarök is the clearest view I have seen yet.

And Madeleine Thien as well (two in a week ... Imagine!): Dogs at the Perimeter, 2011.

On the most trivial level (f'rinstance); here is a woman who can write a character who strikes her child. The photograph is included to assure all that she appears otherwise normal.

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It looks like they got the killers of Zé Cláudio and his wife Maria. These two, Lindonjonson Silva Rocha and José Rodrigues Moreira, are (apparently) small-time contract killers. The instigators, their paymasters, are still walking around.

These photographs are at reasonably high resolution - click on them, look closely at these men, they do not have two heads or forked tongues, either of them.

Several news articles in Portuguese:
Polícia prende no Pará irmãos acusados de assassinar casal extrativista, Altino Machado, 18/09/2011.
Polícia prende no Pará irmãos acusados de assassinar casal extrativista, Altino Machado, domingo, 18 de setembro de 2011.
Acusados de assassinar casal de extrativistas são transferidos para Belém, Altino Machado, domingo, 18 de setembro de 2011.
Irmãos negam assassinato de casal de ambietalistas, 20/09/2011.
Irmãos negam assassinato de ambientalistas, Diário do Pará, 20/09/2011.

And one in English (Lo and behold!):
Brazil police arrest suspects in Amazon killings, AP, 18/09/2011.

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I get no help thinking: Either it is what it is, or: It is more (or less) than it is ... and it remains always possible I guess that without at least some fiction of something transcendental, life cannot be lived? Depending upon how strong and original you really are. Whatever ...

And for the last, The Doors again: The End.

I am wondering if I might not just stay in jail if they are fool enough to put me there? If not I will report here with first-hand photographs maybe.

Be well gentle reader.

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Postscript:

"I would like to be remembered as a judge who didn’t shy away from the most difficult issues but tackled them head on with blunt honesty. Beyond that, if it doesn’t sound too corny, I think what my decisions show is a profound belief in a decent and civilized society where the law affords people as much scope as possible to make whatever they can of themselves, but an equally deep belief that the people have to take responsibility for whatever it is that they decide to do."

Ian Binnie.






What do you say now?: "... I mean really. What are we coming to? We’re coming to the end, I hope."
The end of what? : "The world."
Do you feel apocalyptic?: "I do. A lot of people do. But it’s become rather a cliché. When was the world supposed to end last, two months ago or whatever? It was a lovely thought."

Maurice Sendak.

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Down.

Perfect Metaphor indeed

Up, Down.

as we get towards the roots of language, begin to talk in terms (however besmirched by the deconstructivists) of 'master narrative' ... all good ... unfortunately for me it mostly fuels my frustration & anger (turned carefully inward y'unnerstan), but it reminded me of Social Imaginary this morning, leaving me briefly hopeful

There is much pain in the United States today, but not much humility. Nor is there prudence.

Sapatão / big shoe, Brasilian slang for 'lesbian'.

Greed grab and Bush's triumphalist national narrative, Jeffrey Simpson, December 19, 2008.

The economic tsunami now battering the world began in the United States, where it has supplied a perfect metaphor for the Bush administration.

Americans have overwhelmingly passed judgment on George Bush, consigning him to the dust heap of awful presidents. But have they passed sufficient judgment on themselves? Americans elected Mr. Bush twice and, even today, amidst the economic ruin of his policies, still seem wedded to the triumphalist national narrative he evoked.

There is much pain in the United States today, but not much humility. Nor is there prudence.

Had prudence been America's guide, the credit-card splurges, the bingo capitalism, the Wall Street greed, the executives' grotesquely inflated payments, the personal and national indebtedness, the fiscal deficits and all the other symptoms of a society living beyond its means that marked the Bush years would never have occurred.

There was a time, back in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Republicans believed in prudence, or at least thought they did. In those years, they stood for a strong defence, anti-communism, small government, low taxes and a balanced budget. Spend what you have, and no more, was a bedrock Republican idea.

Then came the intellectual revolution of Barry Goldwater's rage against the state, social conservatism, Arthur Laffer's curve, and the idea that ever-lower taxes would bring ever-higher revenues, so that budgets could and would be balanced by some miracle that had previously escaped economists and, indeed, previous generations of sound-money, balanced-budget Republicans.

Mr. Bush epitomized and practised all these ideas, with the result that he presided over tax cuts that disproportionately favoured the already wealthy, deficits in every fiscal year, more national debt, and wars abroad without revenue at home to pay for them. His answer, after 9/11, included the advice to Americans that they could fight terrorism by going shopping.

As the rich got richer, some got more venal, or at least practised venality on a vast scale. On Wall Street, and beyond, the prevailing attitude was to get rich as quickly as possible, since everybody else was doing it, and tax rates were so low on the wealthy that you really could - and should - keep almost all of what you earned.

The greed grab led to hedge funds, demand for instant returns, cutthroat attitudes and executive compensation of breathtaking size - while the wages of ordinary Americans stagnated. The resulting inequalities were staggering, and the debt loads immense, but entirely in keeping with a trickle-down theory of economics that had implanted itself in Republican theology once prudence and balance were abandoned.

In the Bush narrative, everyone would get ahead in the transcendentally powerful United States, the envy of the world, whose economy could not fail and whose houses and stocks and investments of all kinds would just keep rising. The country could fight two wars without taxing itself to pay for them, and spend at home far more than it earned, and borrow from the Chinese, who depended on the U.S. consumer to buy China's products.

As the debts grew, rather than whistles being blown at the White House and the Federal Reserve, new and increasingly incomprehensible financial devices were invented to bundle debt and sell it to someone else who might, in turn, repackage and sell it, so that the financial services industry increasingly defied transparency and took on the shape of a vast pyramid scheme. But the United States, Mr. Bush kept saying, was the land of freedom and free markets, a light unto the world, even though in most corners of the planet, the country's reputation had darkened under the Bush presidency.

Seldom, if ever, has one president so damaged his country's international profile; and seldom, with the possible exception of Herbert Hoover, has one president's economic policies so damaged his country's domestic capacities. But remember that George Bush merely practised a certain set of policies, and pursued a certain set of approaches, that reflected the intellectual revolutions that had transformed the Republican Party and, because it was the dominant party, transformed the United States into a debtor nation at home and a disliked one abroad.

Having bequeathed such a disaster to the country, the unsuspecting might assume that Republicans would embark on a wholesale self-examination.

Instead, the last election so shrank the party that its core of the elderly and the angry and the devoutly religious now control the intellectual and political leadership. The heirs of Mr. Bush, and of the thinking he practised, are in charge, having learned and forgotten nothing.

The opponents of Mr. Bush, soon to be in charge, must add trillions to the country's existing debts, hoping to begin what must at some point, necessarily, be a return to some semblance of prudence and moderation and limits, or what we might call good old-fashioned, although recently out of fashion, pragmatism.

Down.

Gods?

Up, Down.

During the churning of the ocean of milk, a great poison known as halahala was produced, which Lord Vayu, the god of wind, rubbed in his hands to reduce its potency. Then a small portion was given to Lord Shiva, thus knocking him unconscious and turning his throat blue. The rest was collected in a golden vessel and digested by Vayu. A little portion of poison that wasn't swallowed by Shiva became the body of Kali. Later, when the asura Rahu was decapitated by Vishnu's Mohini avatar, the demon’s allies attacked her and all except Kali were killed. Having the power to possess the bodies of immortal and mortal beings, he entered the hearts of man and escaped death. Thus Kali became “invisible, unimaginable, and present in all.”

Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want.

Jason Edmiston, Canadian Election 2008.

Wall Street's wild tribe displayed a fearful arrogance that knew no bounds, Peter C. Newman, October 11, 2008.

CAPITALISM TAKES A LOT OF KILLING - A time when the gods changed,
Wall Street's wild tribe displayed a fearful arrogance that knew no bounds.

As I frantically leaf through the daily dispatches from the killing fields of Wall Street and count the mounting casualties of American capitalism's formerly invincible totems, one haunting thought repeats itself.

Referring to a similarly tumultuous period in Hawaiian history, the iconic American novelist James Michener described the series of cataclysmic events on the islands as "a time when the gods changed."

No lesser concept can encompass the massacre of Wall Street's bulls and the defenestration of the men and women who considered themselves masters of the universe and displaying a fearful arrogance that knew no bounds. By any standard, the current upheaval in American society - economic, political and psychic - is unparalleled in recent times. Unlike the Great Depression of the 1930s, legions of regulators were already in place this time, charged with preventing exactly what happened.

Investors will not feel the same, or be the same, at the end of this mother of all stock market corrections. The fraudulent overvaluation of questionable assets was less an individual crime than the common assumption of Wall Street's most successful players. During 10 dark September days, $5-trillion in assets of the most prestigious financial institutions of the United States turned into ashes. Canada, with its staid but highly fallible banks, will be shaken, too.

The invisible hand that once governed investment decisions turned out to be attached to a malevolent magician's sleeve, whose trick was to make money disappear.

We are witnessing the dismantling of the viscera of American capitalism. Investors can no longer accept capitalism's disciples on trust. First came the shock, with many of the continent's bedrock brokerage houses and merchant banks proving to be as destructible as the soap bubbles kids blow to ward off boredom.

Then came the anger: Who were these riverboat gamblers who had put at risk not just their own reputations but those of their firms, the credibility of the stock exchanges and their clients' pocketbooks, and the viability of the system itself? And why did the countervailing forces of reform and corporate governance go along with the carnival that turned Wall Street into an abattoir?

The only member of that wild tribe I knew even slightly was one of its wildest: Michael Milken, who reigned as Wall Street's junk-bond king in the 1980s, regularly earning $700-million in annual commissions. "Morality and legality became mere conventions to him, accepted modes of behaviour for the less creative, the less aggressive, the less visionary," wrote Connie Bruck in The Predators' Ball. "Milken's firm was the brass-knuckles, threatening, market-manipulating Cosa Nostra of the securities world." (Mr. Milken was a perfectionist, even when it came to hiding his baldness. He bought 30 wigs, each with slightly longer hair to simulate natural growth and wore them daily until the end of each month, when he pretended to get a haircut.)

He eventually went to jail and was fined $200-million (and double that in settlement payments to shareholders), but his legacy abides. He became a role model for future profiteers and the Wall Street operators who, like Gordon Gekko, the buccaneer in Oliver Stone's epic film Wall Street, boasted about having had an ethical bypass at birth.

While Mr. Milken eventually paid the price, most of his current disciples, squeezing credit ratings beyond their breaking point, ran their firms into bankruptcy while rewarding themselves with obscene exit bonuses. Richard Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers, which set off the avalanche, left his desk after getting 2007 compensation of $22-million, not including what he had gathered by selling Lehman stock before it became wallpaper.

Mr. Milken's junk-bond caper was followed by the savings-and-loan swindles, the high-tech/Internet bubble and now the subprime crisis, which is the most toxic yet. After all the ditzy, pay-us-back-when-you-feel-like-it mortgages floated by American banks had diluted real values, there wasn't much credit left, and most banks have been unable or unwilling to assist their victims. Washington's $700-billion bailout will help in the same way that a Band-Aid momentarily calms a fresh wound.

CANADA WILL BE SHAKEN

Slowly, much too slowly, the realization has dawned that the belief system that allowed Canadians to industrialize the brooding, silent and inaccessible land of our fathers and grandfathers will need to be reinvented. What we need is new gods, freshly minted mentors motivated by values as the source of their experience - instead of experience as the source of their values. Political leaders need not apply. Even Stephen Harper, masquerading as a cool dude in a Zellers sweater, only manages to appear overwhelmed.

These past two weeks have proved that capitalism, in Canada as elsewhere, takes a lot of killing. Perhaps we needed this catharsis as part of the debacle of a status quo that was no longer serving us well, if it ever did. The gap between illusion and reality had grown too wide, bringing into sharp focus the nostrum of the University of Toronto political scientist Abraham Rotstein, "Much will have to change in Canada if the country is to stay the same."

The specific effects on Canadian capitalism have yet to be felt. Bay Street has worn out its optimistic mandate and can no longer pretend that its financial sanctions mean anything except a universal warning, "Run for the Hills, Here Come the Money Guys." There remain few sanctuaries. Self-reliance lives.

In the cozy past, we set our faith in the individual wisdom and collective thrift of Canada's bankers, mainly one-time tellers, Scottish in their deportment and personal parsimony - even if they were born in Moncton and didn't know whether to play the haggis or carve the bagpipes. They prided themselves on their prudence and integrity, regularly reinforced at meetings of their Presbyterian synods. In exchange for having been granted an oligopoly over the country's banking system, they prevented all but a few minor runs on minor banks, and gradually moved Canadians' careful money from their mattresses into their vaults. They genuinely believed they were exercising not power, but also responsibility. Only two misdeeds were serious enough to warrant their dismissal in those far-off days: embezzlement or encouraging a tellers' union.

If they didn't quite qualify as the high priests of capitalism, they certainly were its front-line guardians. In their communities, they occupied a place between familiarity and contempt, in the same block as clerics. "We're like the priest in a confessional," confessed John Coleman, a former deputy chairman of the Royal Bank. "We have to keep everything we hear in confidence, even when we're on both sides of a transaction."

More recently, our bankers have been going bonkers in their bunkers, worrying more about seizing defunct financial institutions in the U.S. at Bay-Day prices than about tending their gardens. The system remains sound, if wobbly, but it is too early to start bulking up your mattresses again. Yet these are the same addle-brained professionals who, not that long ago, bestowed unjustified - and even undocumented - credits on the Reichmanns, Robert Campeau, Bramalea, Confederation Life, Brazil and most spectacularly, Jack Gallagher, the chief honcho of Calgary's Dome empire.

Convinced there was a Saudi-size reservoir of oil under the unforgiving ice floes churning off Tuktoyaktuk, in the Beaufort Sea, Mr. Gallagher didn't find it, but never stopped searching, using government incentives and other people's money, without ever paying dividends or taxes. At one point he ceased servicing the interest on the $6.5-billion he had borrowed from Canadian banks and simply played for time. No bank ever dared refuse him, because his combination of charm and muscle proved irresistible.

I was as mesmerized by the man as everybody else, except for a brief exchange we had when he was at the height of his fame and fortune. Not knowing how to end our interview politely, I asked him what he planned to do, once he had tamed the Beaufort.

"Why, I'm gonna irrigate the Sinai desert," he confided in the stage whisper of a mad scientist.

I started inching toward the door but he wouldn't be stopped. "Ya see, much of the sand is really silt," he explained, looking off in the middle distance. "So the eastern third of the peninsula running from El Arish to Aqaba would be set aside for nuclear-powered desalinators, which would turn the sea water into irrigation systems to transform the desert into a green belt and a new home for the Palestinians."

At the time, I mumbled, "Great idea, Jack," and skedaddled out.

In recent days, Mr. Gallagher would have felt right at home among the gamblers on Wall Street.

The best advice any Bay Street player ever gave me I received from the late Andy Sarlos, a Hungarian-born genius who felt impending market variations in his bones. When I lost some money and delivered a passionate rant comparing stock trading to playing the long odds at a gambling casino, he took me aside and read me the riot act. "Do not," he warned, "ever mistake stock markets for casinos." Adding, with an explanatory Hungarian shrug, "Casinos have rules."

Down.