What Really Matters

The Madman of Moscow has invaded Ukraine (again!) and dares anyone to try to stop him. “I’ll nuke you—I swear I will!” Putin has spent the last ten years trying to persuade the world he is just mad enough to think Russia, or anyone, can win a nuclear war. He’s probably bluffing now, but who wants to take the risk? The West responds with severe sanctions—let’s take their money! Hey, it sort of worked with people in convoys, why not try it on people in armoured columns?

The funniest gesture of support—if anything can be funny today—is the demand from Mr. Obvious, Jason Kenney, Premier of (oil rich) Alberta to immediately block all oil and gas exports from Russia. Are we really supposed to believe he’s thinking about the Ukraine’s interest right now?

Meanwhile, every one and their dog (yes, I know of dogs that have Twitter accounts) is lashing out on social media demanding that something be done. I suspect even Russian bots have been caught up in the frenzy, though the right-wing of the Republican Party seems dubious as to whom they should support. Let me help you. When Ronald Reagan said: “Tear down that wall!” he was speaking to a Russian leader (and, indirectly Vlad Putin who was head of the KGB in East Berlin at the time).

You might think I am adding to the wave of condemnation by blogging today. I am not. Of course, I condemn the Russian invasion and worry that one wrong move by someone—who knows who—will bring about nuclear Armageddon, just when I got used to the reality of the much longer slower extinction promised by climate change. However, I know that absolutely nothing I write here or on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit or whatever other popular or unpopular social media site exists will slow a single tank from rolling into Ukraine or prevent a single Ukrainian soldier from firing an anti-tank missile at said tank. Taking Putin’s money may seem far removed from the immediacy of an angry tweet, but it probably will work in the long run—if there is a long run.

The sole purpose of social media is to provide an outlet for outrage, the comfort of cat pictures and the proliferation of clever comments by me. Oh, yeah, and to make oodles more cash for the people who own them. Don’t believe me? Then why does J. K. Rowling still make more money annually than almost any other author despite a years-long social media campaign against her? I’m sure someone will explain it to me at great length and in high dudgeon. Save it, it doesn’t really matter.

So, what does? I’m getting to that.

One might think that the invocation and termination of the Emergencies Act, given that I was living in the centre of the emergency in question, would be a matter of great import to me. Sort of. I had no doubt that the Act needed to be invoked. Nothing else was stopping the torment and if it was an overreach, who cares? It got the job done and, surprise, surprise, it was used exactly as advertised, in a focused, geographically limited way, respecting Charter rights and ending when it was no longer needed. A tool was taken out of the tool box, used to fix what was broken and then put away again.

It’s true that things might have been solved using existing laws (by the way, the Emergencies Act is an “existing law” and has been since 1988) but the Ottawa Police, recently criticized for its brutality and tasked to do better, was slow to respond forcefully either because of being surprised or unprepared or too mellow. One can say they should have done things differently but, my friends, hindsight has always been and always will be, more accurate than foresight. Some speculate that the response might have been quicker if it had been indigenous or black protesters, and, given our history, it is not an unreasonable speculation, but it is still unproveable as speculations about alterative histories always are. Besides, should we really criticize the police for acting in a limited and proportionate way? Now, we can point to Ottawa in the future and say to them—see, that’s how it’s done.

By the way, the use of existing laws would have required the Premier of Ontario to step up. While he made a few tut-tut remarks he did little else. Even after the state of emergency was called in Ontario (and where was the Conservative outrage at that?), he did almost nothing, leaving it up to municipalities to do the heavy lifting. At least, he had the guts, unlike his conservative counterparts in Parliament or Alberta, to speak out against the damage the blockades were doing and to distance himself from Randy Hillier and even his own daughter.

Meanwhile, two conservative Senators demonstrated clearly why patronage appointments to the Upper House are a bad idea. One in a drunken rant, denigrated the people of Ottawa and his own wife (he subsequently sort of apologized for his remarks which he didn’t know would actually become public). The other described the convoy members as kindly and patriotic, which given the stated goal of some of them to overthrow the elected government and hang the Prime Minister, suggests either complicity or stupidity.

Not that I care. They will eventually turn 75 and retire and be forgotten. If Putin doesn’t kill us all first. Meanwhile Jason Kenney says anyone who supported the Act must now feel humiliated. Ha! Not me! Dear Jason, I know it’s been tough being dumped on from all sides, but projecting your feelings on others is a sign of mental disorder. Seek help.

Of course, I’ve seen on Twitter and Facebook claims that the expressed outrage of Canadians made Trudeau back down. What utter nonsense. If he didn’t blink at a bunch of yahoos, blowing horns and threatening mayhem, if he consulted the Premiers and said this is what I’m doing no matter what you think, if he stood up to being yelled and insulted by the chattering right wing,  if he did all that, do you think he even read your posts? No, what he read was the riot act. To be fair he also read the polls which showed that 57% of Canadians were for his action and 30% were against and most of those 30% were supporters of the Conservative party or the far right PPC. BTW, how could 13% of Canadians have no opinion on this?

But that doesn’t really matter.

It is increasingly clear to me that we will not have a federal election for two or maybe three years, by which time Premiers Kenney and Ford may well be in retirement (though like their mentor, Steven Harper, still stretching out their dead hands to try to influence current events). The federal Conservative Party may find a leader who can lead rather than being jerked from pillar to post by internal factions and external polls, or more hopefully, will have once again split in two. It would be lovely to have the right once again as divided as the left. Infinite diversity through infinite combination, I say (as long as none of those combinations involve conservatives).

Not that it really matters. Putin is going to kill us all next week and, if he doesn’t, the coming US civil war will do the job and, if not that, the desperation of a diminished China which is on the demographic road to have the oldest population in the world within a decade or two is in the running, or maybe our old friend, climate change, will still have a shot, or a planet-killing asteroid will strike or an evil AI will lead us all into the Metaverse, I mean, the Matrix and turn us into a power supply. Or Elon Musk will take us all to Mars to die in the cold dusty vacuum of a dead planet.

Or maybe we’ll all just get old, get cancer or dementia, and die anyway. Certainly, in a hundred years, every one I know and all their children will be dead. I suppose immortality is always an option. If they actually get fusion power to work, we can start saying immortality is just ten years away and always will be. Too late for me in any case.

But that doesn’t matter, either.

Are you depressed yet? Because I’m not. I’m increasingly at peace and I’m happy to be there. I intend to become more peaceful. No, I’m not dying, nor am I becoming a Buddhist monk or going to live in a medieval village in the woods of northern Ontario.

I am entering a new stage of life, the final one. This has been slow to dawn on me. I retired from my day job but kept being a publisher, retired from publishing but remained a freelance editor, retired from editing but continue to write. I will likely continue to write but I may retire from being a writer—the jury is still out on that one.

Last year, I published two mystery novels but, to be honest, they were written several years before that. I’ve been plugging away at a third, currently writing 500 to 700 words most days. I may write a fourth or I may not. I’m still completing a couple of contracts and am enjoying the work but I won’t take on another job. I really don’t need either the money or the effort.

This January, I started up this blog again after five years of relative inactivity. I wanted to see if I could build an audience again and I did (thanks, ironically, due to the convoy). I’ve had as many readers this year as I did in all of 2016 when I was last really active. In a week or two, I could surpass 2014 and even my glory year of 2015 is within reach, it I were to keep at it day after day.

But I won’t.

For an avowed socialist, I’ve always cared too much about money. Maybe it was because I grew up poor in a household that believed in work. Maybe it’s because I started making my own money at 13 and found how liberating it was in a society where it sometimes seems you are only as valuable as the things you own I don’t know, but now that I have enough (though not much more than enough) to live comfortably, to buy books and give to charity, and maybe, pandemics and my inevitable declining strength willing, to travel a bit, more money seems pointless.

I sold two stories this year (yippee!); the income will pay for a dinner out but not in the best restaurant in town. My last story out to market was rejected today. I may send it and the half dozen others in the inventory out again—it costs nothing, not even much time–or I may not. I still have story ideas but I only have written one piece of fiction (other than the novel) since last August and I’m not happy enough with it to do the needed re-writes.

I had a new idea yesterday and it may get written but only because it interests and challenges me, not because I think it might interest you. Writing now has become personal; I am writing for myself rather than any potential audience. I want to play, to explore and experiment, to delve deep into language for its own sake and for mine. None of that requires more than a reader or two.

I guess what I’m saying is that I no longer need to talk to the world even as I grow more and more interested in listening to it, not through social media, but through thoughtful analysis, through books and art, through history and the discovery of place and human difference. I need to think more and speak less and be present for my wife, my family and my closest friends.

I recently read that we really only have deeply intimate connections to at most a dozen people, most of us only four or five. Think of that, all this effort to have five thousand friends on Facebook or a hundred thousand followers on Twitter will never mean what we want it to mean, it will never replace those intimate partners that make our life worth living and whom we could lose through neglect or in the endless noise of the world. (Of course, I want you to know that you are all my closest intimate friends!)

Is this good bye? Oh, I don’t think so. As the old man said as they carried him to the plague wagon: I’m not dead yet. But I will be quieter, less present on social media and more present in my life. My writing may appear from time to time, though I expect more and more it will be shared with a limited circle or kept to myself as befits a personal pastime.

For those who have become addicted to my daily blogs, for god’s sake, get a life! I’ll still be around on those days I have something to say but that won’t be every day. I’m not sure if it will even be every week. Or month.

If you miss my writing, you can always buy one of my books. They are easy to find, just google my name, I seem to be smeared all over the Internet.

Not that it matters if you do.

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

End Days

Apparently the world will end this weekend. Again. Every few months or years, fundamentalists predict that they have discovered the date and time of the end of the world or, as it is sometimes called, the rapture. It may be based on numerology as the current one is or on the Mayan calendar. It may be based on mysterious communications from gods or aliens. It is mostly based on wishful thinking. And, so far, it never turns out to be true.

There are lots of ways the world—or at least civilization—could end. Some of them loom on the horizon but, they are hardly preordained. If the world comes to an end, it will likely be caused by human foolishness or human agency. Or an asteroid. Hardly the stuff of heavenly prophecy. I mean, if God wanted to end the world, surely he could come up with something better than throwing rocks at it.

It’s easy enough—and lots of fun—to tease people who suggest that prophecy has predicted the end of times. It’s a little unfair to do so, a bit like kicking a puppy for barking. Sadly, more than a few people are taken in and some lives have been ruined when folks follow the advice of these religious naysayers.

In any case, predicting the end of things has a long and happy tradition well away from the sweaty-faced prophets and weird cults of the world.

Take capitalism. People have been predicting that capitalism will fail and disappear ever since the first person called himself a capitalist—whenever that was. Marx was certain that his scientific materialism showed the days of the capitalist system were numbered. Yet here we are in the second stage of post-modern, post-industrial capitalism, and the world keeps ticking along, mostly using some form of market based economy.

I think it was Faulkner who said the past is never dead; it’s not even the past. Pretty profound for a guy who didn’t know when a sentence should end.

But he was certainly right. Just as William Gibson was correct in saying that the future has already arrived, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

Because no system—once invented—ever really goes away. Don’t believe me? I know people who still play vinyl records, take film photographs, and listen to radio – all of which were predicted to disappear years ago. And did you know you can still send a telegram?

More significantly, slavery, abolished in most of the world more than a century ago, still persists, not just in the dark corners of collapsed states but right here in Canada, the United States and Britain. The slave economy—often operating as an adjunct or as a shadow parallel to the capitalist system—still thrives with an estimated 11 million people caught in its net. And though some people call capitalism ‘wage slavery,’ it is sheer pedantry to suggest the two economic systems are the same.

And what about colonialism? Relegated to the scrapheap of history? Well, there aren’t a lot of western states still elbows deep in the practice, but take a look at what China is doing in Nepal, on the Indian border or in Africa or what the newly expansionist Russian empire is doing in eastern Europe and it’s not so clear.

The belief that we are at the end of an era—or at the dawn of a new one—is deeply embedded in the human psyche and in human culture. Predictions of the apocalypse are scattered throughout history like marbles in a child’s playground. We all—even so-called rationalists—seem to embrace one death cult or another. Yet, the more I see of the world, the more I believe we are all simply muddling through, making deals with entropy to get from one day to the next. Systems are as illusory as the predictions of their end.

So don’t worry, be happy. The end days come for us all—but we don’t have to drag the world down with us.

And that’s a bit more than ten minutes.

And really I should apologize—I’m in the middle of writing a novel of post-collapse recovery. As soon as I get to the hopeful part, I’m sure my blogs will get more cheery. Or not.

Life on a knife’s edge

As those of you who read my blog will know, I am definitely a glass half full kind of guy. I have argued and will continue to argue that we’ve made a lot of progress and will continue to do so if we exercise our agency to do so. I’m not one of those “new optimists” who think progress is inevitable and largely due to the ‘hidden hand of the market’ or ‘western-driven globalization.’ For one thing I’m pretty sure that the market and global capitalism work for the interests and because of the agency of a relatively small and coherent group of very rich people.

Still, some recent news reports have given me pause. Nukes and missiles in North Korea should alarm us all—though no more than in any other place. I’m more troubled by headlines that describe entire islands emptied of humans by record breaking storms. Or the news this week that for the first time in decades, world hunger is again on the rise. Or that diseases we should have eliminated are again a threat because bone-headed celebrities speak out about vaccination. Or new diseases are coming out of the tropics that might take us all down.

So I’ve been thinking like Fermi these days.

The Fermi paradox poses the question: if there are millions of technologically competent (i.e. as good or better than us) civilizations in the universe, why have we never detected even one?

There are several ways to answer this question. Some will say that we are God’s special creation and therefore unique in all the infinite reaches of space. To which I can only say—well, you’re certainly “special.”

More rationally, one might say we don’t yet have the technical sophistication to winnow out their messages from the background noise of radiation – but that argument, if it was valid ten years ago, is probably not valid now.

The most optimistic answer might be that they are hiding – deliberately keeping us from finding them until we are civilized enough to join the intergalactic club. Yeah, it’s one big conspiracy and everyone is in on it except Earth.

The most common response is this: as soon as a society is capable of transmitting signals—even accidental ones—across interstellar space, they are also capable of destroying themselves and inevitably do. The reason we don’t hear from advanced aliens is that they’re all dead. Dead by their own hands.

All it takes is a couple madmen whose dicks are… I mean, whose nukes are bigger than their brains to pretty much take us back to the Stone Age. Of course, they could always be replaced if there was the will to do so.

Much more concerning is the matter of climate change, which requires nothing to proceed to its inevitable conclusion other than we keep doing what we’re doing. There is some hope there, even now. Emissions have stopped rising—though they are still high enough to tip us over the edge and earth’s natural defenses may have reached their limit. Still, every year they don’t go up, there is a chance we will act to make them go down and actually reduce civilization-killing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Which is our only real hope.

Well, your hope—I’ll probably be dead before it all goes to hell. So if the glass is now half empty, maybe I’ll just order another round and party like it’s 1999.

And that’s ten minutes.

Walls

Walls have long been a simple solution to complex problems. You know, good fences make good neighbours and all that. Spend a few days in civil court and you might find that’s not exactly true.

Still, whenever people have had a problem they have resorted to walls as a solution – either to keep people out or to keep people in. The Chinese built the Great Wall – which is not the only human construction that can be seen from space – to keep out the Mongol hordes. It was moderately successful. Of course it was built over many centuries so until it was done, the hordes could always go around.

Hadrian built a wall that is still standing near the ancient border between England and Scotland. He was worried about the Picts. And why not? Anybody who would paint themselves blue and fight naked in the Scottish climate would be someone to be worried about.

The Russians built a wall – though not in Russia. The built it along the borders between Eastern and Western Europe and most notably in Berlin. The purpose was not to keep people out but to keep them in. Many of those lucky enough to live under the Soviet heel often took to their own heels and headed west. The Israelis have built a wall to keep Palestinians out but not, unfortunately, to keep Settlers in.

The Americans have built walls along the Mexican border – a bit like shutting the barn door after 11 million horses have left but better late than… well, maybe a more rational immigration policy would serve them better than a very porous wall. Now Scott Walker, governor of one of those piddly-ass states somewhere in Middle America (I can never keep those insignificant ones straight) wants to build a wall along the Canadian border even though the cost estimates suggest it would bankrupt America once and for all. I for one am fully supportive – after Florida sinks under the waves and California finally burns down completely, we’ll need a wall to keep all those climate refugees from heading north to steal our water, jobs and women.

Now, for the first time in several decades, people in Europe are building walls again, threatening the central principals upon which the European Union is built – open borders and the free flow of people and goods across them. Hungary – led by a conservative government – is taking the lead here but they are not alone. England is fortifying the Chunnel to keep people from crossing from Calais and soon, I suspect, other countries will follow suit.

This is all in reaction to the crisis in Syria, Iraq and increasingly other parts of the Middle East – a crisis that is largely of the West’s making. Right now it seems impossible to get a handle on the magnitude of the problem let alone on possible solutions.

Still, I’m sure that a mixture of humanitarian compassion, rational negotiation and finding common cause against barbarians will serve us better in the long run than more walls, either physical or bureaucratic. It won’t be solved by America or Germany or Canada or Russia or China or Saudi Arabia acting alone but maybe together… That’s a wall worth scaling.

And that’s ten minutes.