Category Archives: A - BLOG - Page 17
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 — Juniper and Bones
Posted by Phil Paine
on February 16, 2016
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I cannot smell juniper without thinking of small bones. I have very strong smell memories, sometimes stronger than visual memories. I can still call up in my mind the smell of the north rim of the Grand Canyon, the myriad smells of different deserts, the scents of tamarack and black spruce as you get near the Wînipâkw, the smells of the blessed neem trees in Kano, the spring lilacs in Canadian towns, the comforting scents of freshly-sawn lumber, the many smells of snow in different settings.
Hold that thought, for I must digress.
I just re-read Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror for Observers for the eighth time. The only other novel I’ve read as many times is Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Regular rereadings of Carroll’s masterpiece would not surprise anyone — I’m sure there are people who have read it dozens of times — but you might find it puzzling that I would give equal loyalty to a science fiction novel written in 1954, by an author who was respected in his day, but never a high-profile celebrity in the field. A Mirror for Observers is not even his best known book (though it is his best). I read the book in childhood, and it imprinted itself on my mind so vividly that I hardly needed to reread it, for I could play out every scene in my mind at will. But, at regular intervals throughout a lifetime, I have read it with full attention. Read more »
Some Thoughts on a Year of Reading
Posted by Phil Paine
on January 3, 2016
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It’s been an average year of reading. 160 books and about 500 academic papers, articles, short stories and other short items. History and anthropology dominated the book reading, as usual, with an emphasis on Australia, the Pacific, the Canadian North and West, and the ideas of 19th century Canadian democratic reformers. I became particularly fascinated by the 19th century convict colonies of Australia and the French Pacific possessions, and I amplified previous readings (such as Robert Hughes venerable The Fatal Shore, and the eye-opening but little known Australia’s Birthstain, by Babette Smith). Thomas Keneally, giving Hughes a run for his money in A Commonwealth of Thieves, covers the general subject with extraordinarily vivid prose, and Siân Rees makes a closer case study in The Floating Brothel — The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth- century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts. Read more »
Image of the month: a Syrian refugee “menaces” Europe
Posted by Phil Paine
on January 1, 2016
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I’m proud to say that Canada is welcoming 30,000 Syrian refugees. They will make fine Canadians.
Sunday, December 20, 2015 — Pride
Posted by Phil Paine
on December 20, 2015
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Canada’s Cabinet Ministers of Immigration (John McCallum), Defense (Harjit Sajjan), and Health (Jane Philpott) with Syrian refugee children.
I’m a curmudgeony cynic, most of the time, so it’s not often I get to proclaim that I’m proud of my country. But the behaviour of Canadians in the last week has filled me with pride. Last month, I posted a letter I sent to my Member of Parliament, asking that the commitment to admitting Syrian refugees to Canada be expanded to greater numbers. My sentiments seem to be shared by most Canadians, but that is not the case elsewhere.
In the United States, the majority of politicians (all Republicans, of course, but many Democrats, too) have decided to be pals with ISIS, collaborating in their attrocities by making it difficult for their victims to find refuge. The Marching Morons have triumphed, and there have been numerous acts of terrorism against innocent people, encouraged and abetted by Fox Pravda and the usual Conservative scumbags. Read more »
Image of the month: being male is more exciting than I expected
Posted by Phil Paine
on December 1, 2015
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Friday, November 20, 2015 — A Letter to My Member of Parliament
Posted by Phil Paine
on November 20, 2015
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I just sent this letter to my Member of Parliament:
To Hon. Bill Morneau, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1A 0A6
The events in France make it perfectly clear what kind of thing the Syrian refugees are fleeing from. Your party won the recent election with a mandate to accept more Syrian refugees and increase our participation in this crisis.
As my Member of Parliament, I urge you to stand up in that legislative body and propose that we TRIPLE THE RECENTLY ANNOUNCED NUMBER that we will commit ourselves to accept.
The recent generation of Canadian politicians — especially those in the Conservative Party — have fallen completely out of touch with Canada’s history and traditions. They have grotesquely transformed our immigration policy into a racket where we sell Canadian citizenship to the rich of the world, giving a safe place for them to park their assets. Such people will never see Canada as anything except a convenient pied-à-terre, or a sort of tax-dodge-with-a-passport. Those aren’t the kind of people that built Canada. We are a nation built by offering a home and a second chance to the poor and oppressed of other lands. That should be our pride, our glory.
We are a wealthy, underpopulated country. We can easily afford to take in triple the amount proposed by Mr. Trudeau. Think of it as “infrastructure investment”. The real kind.
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Phil Paine, Toronto
Bringing in large numbers of refugees from foreign lands, often with languages, customs and religions that we find exotic, many of them traumatized by terror and war, and with the distinct possibility that there will be some bad apples among them (planted agents, criminals, faked identities) is nothing new to Canadians. We have done this over and over and over again in this country. Scots fleeing the brutal highland clearances, the six Iroquois Nations fleeing ethnic cleansing, African-Americans escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad, Irish peasants fleeing the potato famine, Armenians fleeing mass killings, Ukrainians fleeing Stalin’s terror, Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Hungarians fleeing the Communists, African Gujaratis fleeing Idi Amin, Vietnamese boat people, Sri Lankan Tamils fleeing civil war, Rwandans fleeing ethnic slaughter.… peasants and slumdwellers from around the world fleeing poverty and static societies that keep them at the bottom. Yes, there are costs and difficulties involved in taking in strangers in this way. But we know how to do it, probably better than anyone in the world. It’s our specialty. This time is no different. Years ago, I saw my neighbours roll up their sleeves and volunteer to welcome, sponsor, house, and help frightened boat people who arrived after weeks on flimsy rafts, being attacked by pirates, then months in gruesome internment camps. Now those former refugees are fellow Canadians we point to with pride, and they in turn volunteer for the same task. Yesterday, a Toronto couple were married cheaply at City Hall, and turned over the full cost of their planned fancy wedding to sponsor Syrian refugees. They, and others like them, are the spirit of our country. We must never forget this.
As a historian, I seldom read the news without hearing echos from the past. Here a quote from a history of Irish immigrants to Canada, fleeing the potato famine:
Shocked by the numbers flooding Boston, New York and other ports, the United States Congress passed two Passenger Acts. One limited the number of passengers a vessel was permitted to carry. The other increased the price of the cheapest passage to seven pounds, an amount that was well beyond what most poor Irish could afford. Starting in May of 1846, this resulted in increased traffic to Canadian ports. In fact, during one occasion, Grosse Isle [the immigrant processing point in Quebec] had a line of 40 ships, carrying 15,000 souls, waiting to land there. Of that number, many were seriously ill with fever and some were already dead.
This created thousands of orphans, most of whom were assigned to Canadian families. A special decree ruled that these children, to be raised in French-speaking Canadian families, would retain their Irish names out of respect for their heritage. Conservative newspapers and the Orange Lodge — influential in Canadian politics and high society — screamed that these refugees would all be nasty, bomb-throwing Catholic terrorists, and that the streets of Montreal and Toronto would be seething with ape-like, sub-human Irish criminals. Those orphaned Irish names — Riley, Kelly, Ryan, Johnson… now resound in Canadian history and culture.
Sound familiar? Here’s the latest news from the United States:
While Democrats initially stood up to Republican fear-mongering and bigotry, too many of them lost that conviction on the final vote for a bill that creates additional barriers for Syrian and Iraqi refugees coming to the U.S. Forty-seven Democrats voted with Republicans in a final vote of 289–137.
The same assholes are always around. We have such assholes in Canada, but, hopefully, fewer of them. At least we don’t have, as Americans do, the majority of our politicians falling over themselves to support ISIS. The Syrian and Iraqi refugees turned away by the triumph of the stupid in the U.S.A. should be welcomed to Canada with open arms. And we will end up all the wealthier, happier, and wiser for it — for we are the future, not the past.
Monday, October 19, 2015 — Good Riddance
Posted by Phil Paine
on October 19, 2015
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“good riddance”
Used to express relief that someone or something has been gotten rid of. Also, “good riddance to bad rubbish”. A welcome loss or departure. This expression is often used as an exclamation. — from a dictionary of idioms.
For the information of my non-Canadian readers, Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party have finally been kicked out of power by a surprising Liberal Party landslide win. There has never been any Canadian politician that I have regarded with such loathing. He has represented everything I’ve considered vile, disgusting and immoral in Canadian politics. Divided opposition, abysmally low voter turnout and general apathy kept him in power for what seemed an eternity, but the Canadian people have finally woken up. As a succession of corruption scandals weakened his position, Harper hired an American campaign advisor — a hack strategist from the U.S. Republican Party — who advised him to run a campaign designed to exploit bigotry, superstition and ignorance in the manner of the Tea Party assholes in the U.S.. Canadians, to their credit, were largely disgusted by this kind of cynical creepiness. Voter turnout exceeded anything expected. There is little doubt that this was largely an anti-Harper wave, not inspired by any high hopes for any opposition party. “Strategic voting”, where voters carefully voted for whoever had the best chance of turning out the Conservatives, seemed to catch on, and young people seem to have flocked to the polls, too. I’m no particular fan of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, but he seemed to find his feet during the extended campaign, and his party will form a majority government, with a plurality in the popular vote on top of its victory in seats. The Liberals have many policy positions that I strongly oppose (such as support for the TPP and a partial acceptance of the hideous Bill C‑51). We’ll see how this turns out, but at least we’re rid of Harper.