PhilPaine.com

Wel­come to the new ver­sion of PhilPaine.com. A new site and for­mat are long over­due. The old site, con­struct­ed with a now out-dat­ed pro­gram, was labour inten­sive, clut­tered, and vul­ner­a­ble to cyber-sab­o­tage. The new one cor­rects these ills. Most of the mate­r­i­al from the old site has been trans­ferred, at least in rough form, and it will all grad­u­al­ly be retro-fit­ted with graph­ics and con­sis­tent formatting. 

It’s been an exhaust­ing year, so far. I’ve been jug­gling dif­fi­cult per­son­al mat­ters, as well as try­ing to do some seri­ous work. Some­times, it has seemed to have the emo­tion­al tex­ture of this pic­ture tak­en on the Demp­ster High­way, near the bor­der of the Yukon and North­west Territories. 

But I’m one of those peo­ple who takes a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion in know­ing lone­ly places, whether in out­er or inner expe­ri­ence. I’ve spent so much time in both, that, like some crazed prospec­tor in from the bush, I tread war­i­ly where soci­ety swarms. Peo­ple, espe­cial­ly the all-too-com­mon vicious ones, will always seem rather strange to me.

Doing the text trans­fers to the new site has required me to look over the web writ­ing I’ve done for the last five years. Some of it is bad, some of it is good ― I’m as uneven in my writ­ing as in my tem­pera­ment. But if there is one uni­fy­ing theme, it is some­thing that I always believed was an inte­gral part of a Cana­di­an her­itage: a hatred of bul­lies, and con­tempt for pom­pos­i­ty and arro­gance. I grew up hav­ing been taught, and believ­ing, that to be a Cana­di­an meant that you doffed your cap for nobody, and that you regard­ed all the obnox­ious crowd of Big Shots with dis­dain. You were sup­posed to know in your bones that the osten­ta­tious rich are crooks, that preen­ing politi­cians are cheesy huck­sters, that the intel­lec­tu­al­ly super­cil­ious are igno­rant phonies, that the cler­gy­men preach­ing hell­fire and holi­ness are a bunch of sicko per­verts, that those who day­dream of war and mil­i­tary glo­ry are retard­ed nitwits, and that any­one who claims to be your “social supe­ri­or” deserves noth­ing but a kick in the pants. I grew up believ­ing that only morons and sav­ages fol­low “lead­ers”, and that any­one who claims to be a “leader” should be slapped down — slapped down hard, until they learn to mind their manners. 

Now, I don’t know if this is the self-image of most Cana­di­ans, any­more, or if it ever real­ly was for more than a quirky minor­i­ty. It is just a ghost out of my past, a sense of a nat­ur­al way of being that, for me, is inex­tri­ca­bly bound up with the scent of snow and tama­rack, wind­ing dirt roads, forests, lakes, and flick­er­ing auro­ra. It cer­tain­ly does­n’t tal­ly with, for exam­ple, the dis­gust­ing, un-Cana­di­an behav­iour of our Prime Min­is­ter, Stephen Harp­er, whose every word breathes cor­rup­tion and trea­son. I don’t know if this atti­tude has any mean­ing for the peo­ple who have grown up in an inco­her­ent jum­ble of mass media, shriek­ing end­less­ly about celebri­ties, “lead­er­ship” and bling. 

But I do know that, what­ev­er my fail­ures and missed oppor­tu­ni­ties, I’ve remained true to it.