I’m not sure what’s happening here. Either I’ve missed a simile while growing up, or this actually represents an old simile updated for the new millennium.
Recently, there was a huge kerfuffle over Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’ storming out of federal / provincial talks on “equalization”. In separate news conferences held to explain their positions, both the Newfoundland Premier and Prime Minister Paul Martin were standing up at their microphones whining about how each had been trying to contact the other unsuccessfully. Thing is, the microphones were placed back-to-back and just a few metres apart, which yielded the uniquely Canadian spectacle of two people almost within touching distance, each loudly protesting the other’s unwillingness to communicate with him.
But it was the analogy used in one article that I thought interesting: “It spoke volumes about the surreal nature of this federation that neither man considered walking up to his negotiating partner to tell him to stop acting like a big girl's blouse and get back to the table.” (National Post, October 27)
So is this an updated about-time-we-gave-the-other-gender-equal-time version about the badly overused comparative image of two manly men comparing their whatzits? And if so, just how the heck does “a big girl’s blouse” normally “act”, anyway? Anyone?
- 0 -
New dribblings from my ironically-named Department of Irony:
The cancellation of two recent information-related projects at work has given me cause and pause to wonder. There was a general information session entitled “Knowing Our Business” that was to have been held in our plain-languagely named Learning Centre. A couple days ago, the easel-borne sign promoting the event was diagonally draped with an enormous, red-lettered banner, “CANCELLED / ANNULÉ”.
And recently in a mid-morning e-mail, we all dutifully received a message advising us that it is time to complete our annual Learning Plan, essentially a statement of hope (a) that we will consider broadening our skill sets beyond those used in our day-to-day jobs, for which the department provides some funding for course registration, and (b) that our supervisors will approve our choices.
By early afternoon of the same day, a follow-up message advised one and all that the Learning Plan has been cancelled.
(So, today's lesson is: well, I guess... people who are caught learning anything, especially if it involves Knowing Our Business, will be shot.)
- 0 -
Mail, we got mail!
I was thrilled to hear from a couple correspondents following up my not-too-long ago whine about missing the point on the need for flu shots. As one regular reader noted, there’s a time lag between the incubation period of any disease, and the point where you actually display enough symptoms to realize you’re sick. The problem, of course, is you’re contagious during both periods. And as Tonstant Weader* argued, “I don't like the idea of passing on the virus to the very old or very young during the incubation period, when I don't know for sure that I'm going down with something, and am spreading germs all over the public transport system. I'll recover reasonably quickly, but there's the chance that others could be damaged or finished off by complications of flu.”
Tonstant Weader* also pointed out that while we might well be more modern in our methods of travel today than we were in 1918-9, we still travel much more numerously and faster than ever before in hermetically sealed tubes that recycle rather than vent our germ-laden exhalations.
But the zinger, I thought, was, “I think that someone should be making the point that if the Bush Administration can't protect its citizens from a relatively common virus, how in the blazes does it expect to shield them from terrorist-linked biological warfare? Someone did suggest yesterday that the mad goal of vaccinating the U.S. population against smallpox, and the costly business of building up a stockpile of the vaccine, meant that the flu vaccine had had to be outsourced. Anything in the nature of chickens coming home to roost pleases me.”
*...and why 'Tonstant Weader'? Well, it’s a gentle tribute to a lavishly well-read correspondent with a wit that often reminds me of a staple at the Algonquin Round Table (More information: http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/caricatures/table.htm ), whose self-generated pen-name was “Constant Reader”, but who once noted, in a review of the latest treacly offering from AA Milne: "And it is that word 'hummy', my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up" - Dorothy Parker, 20 October 1928
Meanwhile, a second message from a regular reader added a new section to my growing list of examples of “irony”: “I thought it was pretty slimy (but what else is new?) of… Dubya to announce his intention to get flu shots from Canada, only about a week after he had explained why he outlawed the practice of Americans buying medication from Canada, by saying he wasn't sure Canadian drugs were safe… Most drugs Americans buy from Canada ARE MADE IN THE US. He thinks terrorists hang around Canadian pharmacies, contaminating the drugs… [and] all these people lining up for shots have stood there for days in the cold and rain.”
- 0 -
So, is it too soon to be musing about a “Bush legacy”, as in “former” President George Bush and “What hath he wrought”?
In light of the seeds being sown by Secretary of State Colin Powell, perhaps not. How about leaving his successor President just what he needs – a brand new world hotspot? Here is a somewhat astonishing bit of “diplomacy” that was recently articulated by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff while on a mission to Beijing (as reported in China’s “People’s Daily” online):
"During his recent visit to China, Powell explicitly said the United States would unswervingly pursue the 'one China' policy and is in opposition to any attempts for 'Taiwan independence,'" said Zhang. "We also noticed Powell told Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television 'Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation.'"
The article goes to outline why it might seem somewhat confusing to the mainland China government why they are still uncertain, despite the above apparent clarification, where the US stands on the really big China question: Is or is not Taiwan independent?:
“According to the communiqués signed on Aug. 17, 1982, the United States will reduce and eventually halt arms sales to Taiwan. In addition, its arms sales to Taiwan shall be limited to only defensive weapons.”
Overlooking the fact that, so far as we can tell, a shell leaving the muzzle of a cannon still seems unable to “know” in any meaningful sense whether it was fired for “offensive” or “defensive” purposes, the US’s China policy seems to change almost with the tides, or more appropriately perhaps – like the People’s… daily.
So here’s my prediction:
Once President Kerry has finally been able to define and enact an exit strategy from Iraq (How hard can it be?: “My predecessor was horribly wrong. We’re sorry and we’re outta here. Byeeeee!”), China will consider – correctly – that the US military is too weakened to embark on yet another mission of global police-forcing and will launch a massive naval and troop “exercise” in an area that the rest of the world will collectively consider to be “alarmingly close” to Taiwan. The “exercise” will culminate with an abrupt swing over to the Island, and before you can say “Zhang’s your uncle,” there will be half a million stalwarts of the People’s Glorious Army of the Revolution (I believe the Red Chinese Army calls that a “platoon”) ashore on Taiwan.
The Chinese government will claim (also correctly, if Mr Powell’s widely reprinted assertion is to be believed) that they are merely extending their sea-borne exercise to a land-based component on their own territory and fully intend to leave “in due time”, once the exercise is declared to be over.
And because there’s no oil under Taiwan, President Kerry will hem and haw, but in the end will merely express great regret and open negotiations with the Chinese (which oughta be a project on a par with the still-ongoing treaty talks aimed at bringing the Korean War – that’s the one where they actually stopped shooting at each other in 1953 – to a mutually-agreed armistice), aimed at righting the wrong just perpetrated on the free people of Taiwan.
Oh sure, there’ll be a nothing gesture from the Chinese offering compensation – graciously allowing the Taiwanese, for example, to go on happily pirating and re-selling badly copied movies and music from the West.
But the US will eventually decide that pursuing the recovery of what it will lose when Taiwan is suddenly home to the People’s Army just isn’t worth it.
And President Kerry can kiss the Taiwanese expatriates’ vote good-bye in 2008.
Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama will be watching with great interest. After all, it’s not going to take too much liquid Correc-Type to overwrite “our sympathy lies with the formerly free people of Taiwan” and make it “our sympathy lies with the formerly free people of Tibet” as the Chinese solidify their presence there, too.
So save your Taiwanese stamps. I predict they’re en route to becoming major collector’s items. Remember, you heard it here first. (Unless of course you’ve read “Wilson’s Ghost” by Robert MacNamara, in which case you heard it a couple years ago. Oh, and Tom Clancy’s “Executive Orders”… and Dale Brown’s “Battle Born” … oh, and come to think of it, “Heaven Lake” by John Dalton, which sets itself in the maelstrom of a US / China conflict over Taiwan, “Formosa Betrayed” by George Kerr… “Taiwan: Nation State or Province?” by John Franklin Copper… Actually, now that I think of it, everybody on the whole damned planet except the Bush White House has read about the diplomatic eggshells on which one has to tiptoe in dealing with the topic of Formosa / Taiwan with the creators of the Iron Rice Bowl.)
As Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau put it, after returning from a visit there himself a couple decades ago, he found his hosts “friendly but teeming”. And the US is in no position to mess with a nation “teeming” with anyone right now.
- 0 -
And finally, your government at work:
Q: Doesn’t this statement from the Globe and Mail’s October 29th online edition just cry out, “Enough talk! It’s time to do something about it!”?
[ Social Services Minister Ken Dryden’s spokesperson Linda Kristal ] “said the meeting is part of a series of meetings between federal and provincial social service and social development ministers and its goal is to begin working immediately on action to improve child care. ‘He's looking for an agreement with all of his partners to work on this national initiative. They want to establish that they are going to work on a more long-term vision.’ ”
A. No.
Friday, October 29, 2004
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
“If you’re lost and you look, and you will find me, Time after time.” (Cyndi Lauper)
A recent Ottawa-local television newscast carried an item announcing that City Council is “poised” to buy a new system called “Smartbus” for our public transit system. It will link OCTranspo’s fleet of buses to a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) tracking system for a start-up cost of about $5.2 million. (To be shared with the federal and provincial governments – but not equally; the City’s responsible for $3 million of it.)
Advocates say the system will help reduce operating and maintenance costs, but in practical terms its purpose is to ensure that the city’s buses more closely adhere to their schedules, thus reducing the amount of time that a passenger has to wait at a bus stop.
Well, here’s what I think about that. OCTranspo has a pool of about 1450 drivers. If the City of Ottawa were to budget an annual cost of, oh let’s be generous and say $25* per driver, then OCTranspo could lay out $36,250 every year for the next 143 years (assuming the fleet doesn’t significantly enlarge in that time), and for the same price as it would take to launch the GPS system, buy each and every driver a brand new $%#$@#!!!! wristwatch for each and every one of those 143 years!
Alternatively, we could elect a City Council made up entirely of retired WWII Italian fascists who, given Mussolini’s enormous success at making the trains run on time, could surely apply those same administrative abilities to OC Transpo. (And hey! I hereby nominate his granddaughter to head up the program – http://www.db-decision.de/Interviews/Italien/Mussolini.htm )
Either option would be far less costly than the stupidity of spending over $5 million (!) to link a city bus fleet to a satellite just to keep the drivers on schedule.
* In fact, you don’t even need to spend $36,000+ a year. I buy very nice watches for $9.99 at a kiosk at a local shopping mall. Each comes with a one-year warranty and a replacement battery. Assuming I can find the battery when the one that came with the watch wears out, I get at least a full year, usually longer, out of my $9.99 watch. When the replacement battery dies, I throw the watch away and go buy another watch. Using a similar supplier, OCTranspo could keep its drivers in watches for the next three centuries for the same total “Smartbus” start-up cost that this City Council plans to buy into.
- 0 -
Am I missing something in all the news coverage about the growing panic in the US over the number of available shots of flu vaccine?
I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that yes, the “flu” carries the possible risk of becoming a serious illness – possibly fatally so – but only for some highly susceptible seniors, infants, and some people for whom current serious medical treatments (on the order of chemotherapy) have so reduced their bodies’ natural immunity that even a strong breeze might be harmful to them.
Here, for example, is a note from UVIG (the UK Vaccination Industry Group), citing a report from the Blair government’s Department of Health’s Chief Medical Office (and one might think if anyone harboured an agenda aimed at pushing as many flu shots onto as many of the public as possible, it’d be a Vaccination Industry Group. But not in this case):
“According to the influenza immunisation program 2004/2005, influenza vaccination should be offered to: (1) All those aged 65 and over; (2) All those aged over 6 months in the following clinical ‘at-risk’ groups: Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma; Chronic heart disease; Chronic renal disease; Diabetes mellitus; Immunosuppression due to disease or treatment; (3) Those living in long-stay residential and nursing homes or other long-stay facilities; (4) Healthcare workers in the NHS are being encouraged to take up vaccination, especially those employees directly involved in patient care.”
The growing hysteria in recent media stories, however, seems to me to be suggesting that we’re on the cusp of a continent-wide epidemic that will kill tens of thousands if something isn’t done now to rebuild the US store of flu doses. We’ve already had George Bush spouting about how he assumes “our good friends in Canada” will help by sending our “surplus” stores of flu vaccine south. (Gee, doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that we were lumped in with the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and other global whores for al-Qaeda for failing to send the requisite platoon of soldiers to enable our being counted among the “Coalition of the Willing” – those nations who were actively supporting the US and British invasion of Iraq?)
And of course Canada is in these stories wearing our usual hat – our political one. And of course, our politicians in their turn have immediately leapt to the microphones to announce that only when Canada’s needs have been fully met will we ever consider releasing any “surplus” to our “US friends.” (And of course, that’s only so long as they don’t re-target a large number of their nuclear warhead-equipped missiles and then “ask” us again.)
But even more fundamentally, when did the “flu” become such a threat that people are lining up for hours – days even – in order to get their shots? So far during my life, I’ve had the flu several times in several of its incarnations if I recall correctly. And while I remember it was never too much fun, I also recall that it only ever knocked me down enough to call in sick for a couple days at a time. Certainly it never got to the point where I felt I needed a flu shot the next year.
And yet looking at the people featured in current TV news coverage, I see hundreds of young, healthy, indeed apparently robust young and middle-aged adults, waiting in long lines and answering with a panicky edge in their voices when a reporter asks if they’re worried they might not get their flu shot right away.
So somebody tell me please, what do they know that I don’t know?
"In 1918-9 the world suffered a major influenza pandemic in which in one year at least 25 million people died world-wide, including around 228,000 people in Britain. Most experts believe that it is not a question of whether there will be another severe influenza pandemic but when." (Again from the UK government)
Well OK, but in 1918-9 the world was also at the very beginning of its long recovery from circumstances where vast tracts of continental Europe and western Asia had been blasted to atoms in four previous years of warfare, not to mention the staggering debilitation imposed on countries who lost among the annihilated flower of their manhood countless doctors, medical students and young men of science (RIP John McCrae) – exactly the people who would be called on first were the threat of a major pandemic to arise.
Add to this the lax hygiene attending an unprecedented intercontinental relocation in crowded troopships of hundreds of thousands of soldiers both healthy and wounded returning home to dozens of nations, hundreds of cities, and thousands of small towns. And add to this the fact that many of them carried in their weakened bodies the germs and infections picked up in hospitals and aid centres whose focus on sterilization was somewhat lower in priority than the simple need to stop the bleeding. It’s hardly surprising that the last great influenza pandemic erupted in such fertile conditions for a disease to grow and spread uncontrollably.
I just don’t see it in 2004, certainly not on a continent so medicine- and doctor-rich as North America.
Even with our present shortage of flu jabs.
- 0 -
Finally, here’s another in my ongoing series of things I find amusingly perplexing at work. Just recently, we all received a cheery e-mail from our ADM (Assistant Deputy Minister) about this year’s version of the Workplace Charitable Campaign that’s held every year in conjunction with the country-wide United Way appeal. And I was struck by this part of it:
“It is a pleasure to inform you that the canvassing blitz for the Charitable Campaign within the Communications Branch is completed. We have collected $29,837.20 and our target is $34,120.00. If you have not been canvassed, please communicate with Jane Doe at xxx-xxxx and it will be a pleasure for her to help you help us. Since we do not want to contribute towards a target but rather contribute towards helping people, we will pursue our efforts to collect the remaining $4,282.80.”
In other words, “We missed our target…”
“But we don’t care about targets, do we? We care about helping people. So let’s all get together and help people…”
“…by reaching our target.”
(Or who knows? Maybe I’m somewhat handicapped by my blind insistence on reading what’s actually written there.)
Government of Canada Communications: Do like we say, not like we do.
A recent Ottawa-local television newscast carried an item announcing that City Council is “poised” to buy a new system called “Smartbus” for our public transit system. It will link OCTranspo’s fleet of buses to a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) tracking system for a start-up cost of about $5.2 million. (To be shared with the federal and provincial governments – but not equally; the City’s responsible for $3 million of it.)
Advocates say the system will help reduce operating and maintenance costs, but in practical terms its purpose is to ensure that the city’s buses more closely adhere to their schedules, thus reducing the amount of time that a passenger has to wait at a bus stop.
Well, here’s what I think about that. OCTranspo has a pool of about 1450 drivers. If the City of Ottawa were to budget an annual cost of, oh let’s be generous and say $25* per driver, then OCTranspo could lay out $36,250 every year for the next 143 years (assuming the fleet doesn’t significantly enlarge in that time), and for the same price as it would take to launch the GPS system, buy each and every driver a brand new $%#$@#!!!! wristwatch for each and every one of those 143 years!
Alternatively, we could elect a City Council made up entirely of retired WWII Italian fascists who, given Mussolini’s enormous success at making the trains run on time, could surely apply those same administrative abilities to OC Transpo. (And hey! I hereby nominate his granddaughter to head up the program – http://www.db-decision.de/Interviews/Italien/Mussolini.htm )
Either option would be far less costly than the stupidity of spending over $5 million (!) to link a city bus fleet to a satellite just to keep the drivers on schedule.
* In fact, you don’t even need to spend $36,000+ a year. I buy very nice watches for $9.99 at a kiosk at a local shopping mall. Each comes with a one-year warranty and a replacement battery. Assuming I can find the battery when the one that came with the watch wears out, I get at least a full year, usually longer, out of my $9.99 watch. When the replacement battery dies, I throw the watch away and go buy another watch. Using a similar supplier, OCTranspo could keep its drivers in watches for the next three centuries for the same total “Smartbus” start-up cost that this City Council plans to buy into.
- 0 -
Am I missing something in all the news coverage about the growing panic in the US over the number of available shots of flu vaccine?
I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that yes, the “flu” carries the possible risk of becoming a serious illness – possibly fatally so – but only for some highly susceptible seniors, infants, and some people for whom current serious medical treatments (on the order of chemotherapy) have so reduced their bodies’ natural immunity that even a strong breeze might be harmful to them.
Here, for example, is a note from UVIG (the UK Vaccination Industry Group), citing a report from the Blair government’s Department of Health’s Chief Medical Office (and one might think if anyone harboured an agenda aimed at pushing as many flu shots onto as many of the public as possible, it’d be a Vaccination Industry Group. But not in this case):
“According to the influenza immunisation program 2004/2005, influenza vaccination should be offered to: (1) All those aged 65 and over; (2) All those aged over 6 months in the following clinical ‘at-risk’ groups: Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma; Chronic heart disease; Chronic renal disease; Diabetes mellitus; Immunosuppression due to disease or treatment; (3) Those living in long-stay residential and nursing homes or other long-stay facilities; (4) Healthcare workers in the NHS are being encouraged to take up vaccination, especially those employees directly involved in patient care.”
The growing hysteria in recent media stories, however, seems to me to be suggesting that we’re on the cusp of a continent-wide epidemic that will kill tens of thousands if something isn’t done now to rebuild the US store of flu doses. We’ve already had George Bush spouting about how he assumes “our good friends in Canada” will help by sending our “surplus” stores of flu vaccine south. (Gee, doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that we were lumped in with the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and other global whores for al-Qaeda for failing to send the requisite platoon of soldiers to enable our being counted among the “Coalition of the Willing” – those nations who were actively supporting the US and British invasion of Iraq?)
And of course Canada is in these stories wearing our usual hat – our political one. And of course, our politicians in their turn have immediately leapt to the microphones to announce that only when Canada’s needs have been fully met will we ever consider releasing any “surplus” to our “US friends.” (And of course, that’s only so long as they don’t re-target a large number of their nuclear warhead-equipped missiles and then “ask” us again.)
But even more fundamentally, when did the “flu” become such a threat that people are lining up for hours – days even – in order to get their shots? So far during my life, I’ve had the flu several times in several of its incarnations if I recall correctly. And while I remember it was never too much fun, I also recall that it only ever knocked me down enough to call in sick for a couple days at a time. Certainly it never got to the point where I felt I needed a flu shot the next year.
And yet looking at the people featured in current TV news coverage, I see hundreds of young, healthy, indeed apparently robust young and middle-aged adults, waiting in long lines and answering with a panicky edge in their voices when a reporter asks if they’re worried they might not get their flu shot right away.
So somebody tell me please, what do they know that I don’t know?
"In 1918-9 the world suffered a major influenza pandemic in which in one year at least 25 million people died world-wide, including around 228,000 people in Britain. Most experts believe that it is not a question of whether there will be another severe influenza pandemic but when." (Again from the UK government)
Well OK, but in 1918-9 the world was also at the very beginning of its long recovery from circumstances where vast tracts of continental Europe and western Asia had been blasted to atoms in four previous years of warfare, not to mention the staggering debilitation imposed on countries who lost among the annihilated flower of their manhood countless doctors, medical students and young men of science (RIP John McCrae) – exactly the people who would be called on first were the threat of a major pandemic to arise.
Add to this the lax hygiene attending an unprecedented intercontinental relocation in crowded troopships of hundreds of thousands of soldiers both healthy and wounded returning home to dozens of nations, hundreds of cities, and thousands of small towns. And add to this the fact that many of them carried in their weakened bodies the germs and infections picked up in hospitals and aid centres whose focus on sterilization was somewhat lower in priority than the simple need to stop the bleeding. It’s hardly surprising that the last great influenza pandemic erupted in such fertile conditions for a disease to grow and spread uncontrollably.
I just don’t see it in 2004, certainly not on a continent so medicine- and doctor-rich as North America.
Even with our present shortage of flu jabs.
- 0 -
Finally, here’s another in my ongoing series of things I find amusingly perplexing at work. Just recently, we all received a cheery e-mail from our ADM (Assistant Deputy Minister) about this year’s version of the Workplace Charitable Campaign that’s held every year in conjunction with the country-wide United Way appeal. And I was struck by this part of it:
“It is a pleasure to inform you that the canvassing blitz for the Charitable Campaign within the Communications Branch is completed. We have collected $29,837.20 and our target is $34,120.00. If you have not been canvassed, please communicate with Jane Doe at xxx-xxxx and it will be a pleasure for her to help you help us. Since we do not want to contribute towards a target but rather contribute towards helping people, we will pursue our efforts to collect the remaining $4,282.80.”
In other words, “We missed our target…”
“But we don’t care about targets, do we? We care about helping people. So let’s all get together and help people…”
“…by reaching our target.”
(Or who knows? Maybe I’m somewhat handicapped by my blind insistence on reading what’s actually written there.)
Government of Canada Communications: Do like we say, not like we do.
Saturday, October 16, 2004
Diary of a striker – Part 3
Day 4
“To Infinity and Beyond!”
Actually, on second thought this is getting positively Dickensian, not Disneyan… It was the shortest of strikes, it was the longest of strikes; “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
Very early Friday morning, I awoke perplexingly to the announced item on CBC radio’s top of the hour news that no settlement had been reached, but striking public servants had been ordered back to work by the union.
It took the better part of the day to collect all the pieces of the story. Apparently an offer isn’t considered “official” until it’s been received in writing, and late Thursday afternoon, the government said it would deliver its “final” offer by 10 pm that night. Then they changed their minds and said the written version would only be available at 10 the next morning.
So the union took a really interesting tack. First, they claimed the government was deliberately dragging its heels to punish the workers for exercising our legal right to strike. They (the union) angrily announced they would not subject their members to another day of lost pay while the government shilly-shallied. So in effect, we were being told to “punish” the government by going back to work for the day. Well, that oughta show them!
Friday’s work energy level could probably be called lackluster at best. Later in the afternoon, PSAC President Nycole Turmel announced that the bargaining team had looked at the final offer, and had decided to recommend that it not be accepted. She added that the strike was still officially on, but strike action would be suspended until the entire membership could vote on the offer.
Can things possibly be any more slippery sloped? We’re still on strike, but we’re not engaging in any action that typically reflects a strike. The bargaining team, which has been grappling with the dotted i’s and crossed t’s of offer and counter-offer, has recommended rejection of the last offer, but will submit the offer to a vote of the full membership, a process that will take six to ten weeks. (And why will a voting process for a mere 80,000 people take about 60 days to complete? Who knows? Must be because of all those dangling chads.)
And if it's eventually rejected, well then it's back to the bargaining table and possibly back to the picket line. (I have to confess that the idea of picketing in December or January at a building located on the north shore of the frozen, windswept Ottawa River is not especially appealing to me.)
No one feels really satisfied with this outcome. Some people I spoke to on Friday were more than a little ticked off with the union, who have also recommended "doing your job", which apparently is code for "working to rule", or no overtime and no extra duty. (Fat chance. I work with people for whom overtime is routine and whose managers expect it. Most job descriptions in fact have an expectation of at least some overtime written into their terms of reference.)
The problem of course is that if everyone suddenly started working to rule, I'm not sure the government could cope with the sudden explosion in productivity. (A little private sector humour there.)
So for the moment anyway, thus endeth my short but brilliantly nondescript career of labour activism.
Now if I can just figure out how to pad it into my résumé…
Day 4
“To Infinity and Beyond!”
Actually, on second thought this is getting positively Dickensian, not Disneyan… It was the shortest of strikes, it was the longest of strikes; “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
Very early Friday morning, I awoke perplexingly to the announced item on CBC radio’s top of the hour news that no settlement had been reached, but striking public servants had been ordered back to work by the union.
It took the better part of the day to collect all the pieces of the story. Apparently an offer isn’t considered “official” until it’s been received in writing, and late Thursday afternoon, the government said it would deliver its “final” offer by 10 pm that night. Then they changed their minds and said the written version would only be available at 10 the next morning.
So the union took a really interesting tack. First, they claimed the government was deliberately dragging its heels to punish the workers for exercising our legal right to strike. They (the union) angrily announced they would not subject their members to another day of lost pay while the government shilly-shallied. So in effect, we were being told to “punish” the government by going back to work for the day. Well, that oughta show them!
Friday’s work energy level could probably be called lackluster at best. Later in the afternoon, PSAC President Nycole Turmel announced that the bargaining team had looked at the final offer, and had decided to recommend that it not be accepted. She added that the strike was still officially on, but strike action would be suspended until the entire membership could vote on the offer.
Can things possibly be any more slippery sloped? We’re still on strike, but we’re not engaging in any action that typically reflects a strike. The bargaining team, which has been grappling with the dotted i’s and crossed t’s of offer and counter-offer, has recommended rejection of the last offer, but will submit the offer to a vote of the full membership, a process that will take six to ten weeks. (And why will a voting process for a mere 80,000 people take about 60 days to complete? Who knows? Must be because of all those dangling chads.)
And if it's eventually rejected, well then it's back to the bargaining table and possibly back to the picket line. (I have to confess that the idea of picketing in December or January at a building located on the north shore of the frozen, windswept Ottawa River is not especially appealing to me.)
No one feels really satisfied with this outcome. Some people I spoke to on Friday were more than a little ticked off with the union, who have also recommended "doing your job", which apparently is code for "working to rule", or no overtime and no extra duty. (Fat chance. I work with people for whom overtime is routine and whose managers expect it. Most job descriptions in fact have an expectation of at least some overtime written into their terms of reference.)
The problem of course is that if everyone suddenly started working to rule, I'm not sure the government could cope with the sudden explosion in productivity. (A little private sector humour there.)
So for the moment anyway, thus endeth my short but brilliantly nondescript career of labour activism.
Now if I can just figure out how to pad it into my résumé…
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Diary of a Striker -- Part 2
Days 2 and 3:
I confess that I entered this strike with the hope that getting to the point where the novelty had entirely worn off would take longer to reach than the end of Day 3, but here I am at the end of Day 3 and the novelty has pretty much worn off.
Show up, sign in, throw a couple fluorescent green “ON STRIKE!” / “EN GREVE” stickers on my jacket or hang a string-strung placard around my neck, so as to provide a quick visual endorsement for the doorway monitors that I’m on their side and they don’t have to challenge me or re-direct me to the waiting-to-get-in line, head across the street to the Presse Café for a large take-out cup of either Ethiopian Yirgacheffe or Kenyan AA coffee – “I like it black, so please fill it right up”, and back across the street to commune with one or more of the dozens of little pockets of striking workers that make up a population who, collectively, completely surround the large four-building complex in which I work.
Mood-wise, the vast majority of us are still joking around, because the word generally is that the strike will be settled quickly. Of course, the niggling little thought starting to bump around in my mind is that fully 48 hours earlier, the… uh, well, the vast majority of us were still joking around, because the word generally was that the strike would be settled quickly.
Since then, two of PSAC’s bargaining units have indeed come to tentative agreements and terminated their strikes. But the largest, ours (Table 1), still sits in the “optimistically hoping to reach a settlement” column in the news coverage.
So life on the picket line is already starting to coalesce, like water whirlpooling inexorably into a drain, into its routines. There are minor variations. On day 2, our strike captains circled the building and conscripted all but an essential “skeleton” group into a large march up the street to les Terrasses de la Chaudière, another large government complex where we joined our “brothers and sisters” in solidarity. (The people with megaphones really do talk like that. When we arrived en masse, a bullhorn-wielding strike captain at the Terrasses hailed our arrival and asked “our loyal brothers and sisters from Phase IV” to completely encircle the building.) I must admit that we were a pretty impressive assembly. By the time our two groups got together and strung around the building, we were probably a couple thousand strong and managed to work ourselves into one continuous line.
But that was a short-lived diversion and the mood was somewhat dampened by the wailing arrival of an ambulance. Apparently someone’s excitement had actually managed to escalate his or her metabolism to the point of triggering a collapse. Not fatal, but of sufficient concern to co-strikers that someone called 911. After that, we just sort of drifted back to our own buildings.
So now rumour has it that, if we’re still on the line on Friday (Day 4), there might be a large rally assembled on Parliament Hill, an event that is always good for a few minutes on the late evening news.
And speaking of rumours, Day 3 also saw the the start of the “Well, I heard from someone…” ones that began to fly back and forth along the picket line:
“Well, I heard from someone that some strikers are showing up early for their four hours on the line and then going to a different door to get in and still get a full day’s scab work because they say they were held up by the strikers….”
“Well I heard from someone that the union has sent in a striker with a camera to take pictures of the scabs to post them on the union’s website…”
There was, in fact, at least one person I saw festooned with four separate picket signs, making her look like one Dr Who’s Daleks ( http://www.jeffbots.com/daleks.html ), and each sign was covered with a stream of names headed “SCABS!” Thankfully everyone that I was with when we witnessed this display admitted to being a tad disgusted with that idea. But I also have no doubt that I wasn’t the only one who tried to give each sign a quick read to see if anyone I know had made the list because he or she had chosen what I consider to be actually the more courageous decision -- to tough it out by opting to cross the line.
And get duly crossed off the PSAC Christmas party invite list forevermore, in consequence.
And the latest? Well, the vast majority of us are still joking around, because the word generally is that the strike will be settled quickly…
“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” (I have the strangest feeling that someone else said that recently.)
Days 2 and 3:
I confess that I entered this strike with the hope that getting to the point where the novelty had entirely worn off would take longer to reach than the end of Day 3, but here I am at the end of Day 3 and the novelty has pretty much worn off.
Show up, sign in, throw a couple fluorescent green “ON STRIKE!” / “EN GREVE” stickers on my jacket or hang a string-strung placard around my neck, so as to provide a quick visual endorsement for the doorway monitors that I’m on their side and they don’t have to challenge me or re-direct me to the waiting-to-get-in line, head across the street to the Presse Café for a large take-out cup of either Ethiopian Yirgacheffe or Kenyan AA coffee – “I like it black, so please fill it right up”, and back across the street to commune with one or more of the dozens of little pockets of striking workers that make up a population who, collectively, completely surround the large four-building complex in which I work.
Mood-wise, the vast majority of us are still joking around, because the word generally is that the strike will be settled quickly. Of course, the niggling little thought starting to bump around in my mind is that fully 48 hours earlier, the… uh, well, the vast majority of us were still joking around, because the word generally was that the strike would be settled quickly.
Since then, two of PSAC’s bargaining units have indeed come to tentative agreements and terminated their strikes. But the largest, ours (Table 1), still sits in the “optimistically hoping to reach a settlement” column in the news coverage.
So life on the picket line is already starting to coalesce, like water whirlpooling inexorably into a drain, into its routines. There are minor variations. On day 2, our strike captains circled the building and conscripted all but an essential “skeleton” group into a large march up the street to les Terrasses de la Chaudière, another large government complex where we joined our “brothers and sisters” in solidarity. (The people with megaphones really do talk like that. When we arrived en masse, a bullhorn-wielding strike captain at the Terrasses hailed our arrival and asked “our loyal brothers and sisters from Phase IV” to completely encircle the building.) I must admit that we were a pretty impressive assembly. By the time our two groups got together and strung around the building, we were probably a couple thousand strong and managed to work ourselves into one continuous line.
But that was a short-lived diversion and the mood was somewhat dampened by the wailing arrival of an ambulance. Apparently someone’s excitement had actually managed to escalate his or her metabolism to the point of triggering a collapse. Not fatal, but of sufficient concern to co-strikers that someone called 911. After that, we just sort of drifted back to our own buildings.
So now rumour has it that, if we’re still on the line on Friday (Day 4), there might be a large rally assembled on Parliament Hill, an event that is always good for a few minutes on the late evening news.
And speaking of rumours, Day 3 also saw the the start of the “Well, I heard from someone…” ones that began to fly back and forth along the picket line:
“Well, I heard from someone that some strikers are showing up early for their four hours on the line and then going to a different door to get in and still get a full day’s scab work because they say they were held up by the strikers….”
“Well I heard from someone that the union has sent in a striker with a camera to take pictures of the scabs to post them on the union’s website…”
There was, in fact, at least one person I saw festooned with four separate picket signs, making her look like one Dr Who’s Daleks ( http://www.jeffbots.com/daleks.html ), and each sign was covered with a stream of names headed “SCABS!” Thankfully everyone that I was with when we witnessed this display admitted to being a tad disgusted with that idea. But I also have no doubt that I wasn’t the only one who tried to give each sign a quick read to see if anyone I know had made the list because he or she had chosen what I consider to be actually the more courageous decision -- to tough it out by opting to cross the line.
And get duly crossed off the PSAC Christmas party invite list forevermore, in consequence.
And the latest? Well, the vast majority of us are still joking around, because the word generally is that the strike will be settled quickly…
“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” (I have the strangest feeling that someone else said that recently.)
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Diary of a Striker -- Part 1
With apologies to all those through history who have weathered genuinely good-cause strikes, but at the moment this is widely predicted to be a very short strike, so a tone of irreverence and downright flippancy might permeate this probably brief series of posts about the 2004 strike of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. No disparagement of those who acted in the great episodes of workers’ action through history, to wit: http://www.civilization.ca/hist/labour/labh22e.html http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/snprelief4.htm is intended.
Day 1:
Not surprisingly, given that talks only actually broke off at 3am (although the “official” strike start was three hours earlier), the strike’s first morning was pretty disorganized. I only knew I was on strike when I woke up Tuesday morning and heard the radio traffic reporter talking about the utter chaos along roads leading to the entrances to Ottawa’s largest collection of government offices, a complex known locally as “Tunney’s Pasture”. (One is tempted to conclude that the name relates to the multi-building site’s production of a bovine fertilizer equivalent in bureaucratese, but its etymology is probably historical rather than editorial.)
After I dropped my daughter off at school that morning, I drove home to park the car and headed off to my usual bus stop.
The bus ride was insane. Because of pickets pacing slowly back and forth across the major downtown intersections where government office buildings are located, coupled with cars backed up in lanes turning into downtown parking garages where access was being only slowly allowed by the strikers, by the time the bus got to a stop close to downtown, the transitway was jammed solid from there all the way through the city’s core to the other side. It took a numbing 45 minutes to travel a distance of about four blocks.
Eventually, fed up with moving at a pace that would have seen us outrun by a glacier, I asked the driver how long he figured it would take to get to the other side of downtown, where I normally got off the bus. He said about an hour. So I walked from that point to work, and got to the picket line about 10.
Picket shifts at our building are simple time blocks of four hours. You sign in when you arrive and what you’re supposed to do is sign out four hours later. It took me about three seconds to observe that there were seasoned picketers in line ahead of me to complete the sign-in sheet who were filling in the entire line on the form, including departure time and final signature. Later, one explained to me that he had no intention of leaving early, but neither did he have any faith in being able to re-locate the sheet on which he’d signed in when it came time to sign out four hours later.
In fact, even before he had explained the logic of it to me, I had already deduced its sensibility and duplicated it when it came my turn to sign in.
After that, I found a few colleagues. We stood and chatted for a while, walked to a coffee shop across the street, grabbed a cup and resumed our stroll. After a while, we were assigned a courtyard entrance to the complex’s food court, which could also serve as an entrance to the four-tower complex. We were told to steer everyone who wanted admission at that point a little further down the street to a more heavily manned entrance where managers, essential workers, students and holders of a dozen other strike-exempt classifications were patiently lining up to await the strike captains’ grudging permission to enter, but no more than two or three at a time.
This was a cold morning, and our location fell quickly into shade, so when it got to be late enough in the morning that we figured everyone who meant to cross the picket line had already done so, we reasoned that it made more sense to be on the sunny side of the building, which was where we finished our respective four-hour shifts on the line. Thus ended day 1 of my new career as a labour activist.
We'll see how it goes, but the talking heads on the news are already pretty optimistic the strike will be a short one. The union President is actually a very well-spoken woman named Nycole Turmel. And I hasten to add that is not at all meant in any patronizing way. PSAC’s previous President was an exceedingly abrasive ranter named Daryl Bean whose mere presence in a negotiating process would pretty well ensure its descent into antagonism in no time flat. Ms Turmel, by contrast, speaks only of conciliation, and a desire to find a “mutually acceptable compromise”. She has already spoken publicly of her belief that the strike’s duration will be perhaps a matter of hours, a few short days at most.
And finally – for the strike report Day 1 – here is my choice for hands-down prizewinning picket sign (a wholly subjective award based on my own state of mind, and a lifelong appreciation of the appropriate combination of message and attitude. This comes with the perhaps necessary explanation that the Head of Treasury Board and chief representative of the Government side of the table is named Reg Alcock, the first two letters of his last name being pronounced “all”):
“Alcock and No Action”
- 0 -
Non-strike section:
This is probably an opinion being voiced too soon to find much agreement, and I would qualify it by noting that I am second to very few people in my deep respect for the working members of Canada’s armed forces. But I really wonder about the motives of many of those giving microscopic attention to the recent episode in which a Canadian submariner became a fatality in what, parse it however you want, is really nothing more than a tragic job site accident, an event that kills many Canadian workers annually.
His death has, in the past few days, launched two separate federal government enquiries, caused the Prime Minister to abbreviate a multi-nation tour so as to be present, along with the leaders of all three of the other “federal” political parties, when the sailor’s body finally arrived on shore, dispatched the Minister of Defence to the sub’s berth in Scotland to gaze photo-op’ly at the smoke-stained bulkheads in its interior, caused the nation’s federal flags to be lowered to half staff, triggered international live coverage of not one, but two simultaneous funeral ceremonies, one in his home town with family and friends, and the other in Scotland with his surviving shipmates and representatives from both the US and British navies who helped bring the crippled submarine – HMS Chicoutimi – back safely to port, caused the subsequent immediate yanking from active service of her three sister vessels and spawned an orgy of Canadian media attention, as well as dominated the agenda of the House of Commons for the past week so far.
I am frankly scratching my head. Yes, there’s grist for putting into motion the wheels necessary to determine the cause and recommend remedial action. But on this scale? A submarine is, after all, a working environment that by its nature comes with a higher-than-average element of risk.
And while “accidents will happen” sounds perhaps outrageously callous, depending on how much you’ve bought into all the recent political and media railing about it, accidents, nonetheless, will happen. Should the navy honestly be expected to do more than discover why, and fix it? And should the navy stop doing everything that it does – under the sea – while it finds and fixes the problems aboard HMS Chicoutimi? Because it sure seems to me that the navy is being asked in effect to all but swear on a stack of Bibles that no Canadian sailors will ever again die in the line of duty.
… With my profound respect to Lieutenant Saunders’s widow.
- 0 -
The power of a two-letter preposition
Long-winded intro to the point: One of my favourite music genres is something I call “big guitar” for lack of a more specific name. It’s music that features the instrument prominently. It doesn’t refer to any one traditional music classification. There’s stuff I’d call “big guitar” in rock (Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen), blues (Sue Foley, Steve Earle), bluegrass (the Flatt half of Flatt and Scruggs), country (Johnny Cash, the Dixie Chicks), folk (Gord Lightfoot), even easy listening (The Ventures) and classical (Liona Boyd). And one of my favourite practitioners has always been John Fogerty, now enjoying well-earned success as a solo act, but who also was the source of the Bayou Rock sound that was Creedence Clearwater Revival.
The point: Mr Fogerty has just released a new album, called Déjà Vu All Over Again, and the title song seems to open with a chorus that is a wide condemnation of the entertainment industry (the more so when you understand that he went through a decades-long legal battle with Creedence’s original label, Fantasy Records):
“Did you hear ‘em talkin’ ‘bout it on the radio?
Did you try to read the writing on the wall?
Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before?
It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Then you swiftly realize, after a couple verses, that the man who wrote “Fortunate Son”, a hammering condemnation of the class divide between those who fought, and those who avoided, the Vietnam War (“Some folks inherit star spangled eyes, ooh, they send you down to war, Lord. And when you ask them, how much should we give, oh, they only answer, more, more, more.”), is not whining about anything so selfish as missed royalties. Instead, he has turned his well-ground crystal-clear “Fortunate Son” lens onto the present war in Iraq:
“Day by day we count the dead and dying;
Ship the bodies home while the networks all keep score.”
But in a powerful evocation, after the song’s third verse he takes the chorus (above) and replaces just one little word:
“Did you hear ‘em talkin’ ‘bout it on the radio?
Did you try to read the writing at the Wall?
Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before?
It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Did you catch it? -- “the writing at the Wall”. In this one deceptively tiny adjustment, Fogerty places you at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, asking the same kind of questions that he and his angry contemporaries were asking about that wrong war 40 years ago.
And who would have guessed that Fortunate Son’s label, people who “inherit star-spangled eyes”, would be even more perfectly applicable to the current occupant of the White House than it was to Lyndon B Johnson and Richard M Nixon in the 1960s?
Man, that’s danged good writin’! Throw in a powerful chugging guitar and it’s danged good music, too!
With apologies to all those through history who have weathered genuinely good-cause strikes, but at the moment this is widely predicted to be a very short strike, so a tone of irreverence and downright flippancy might permeate this probably brief series of posts about the 2004 strike of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. No disparagement of those who acted in the great episodes of workers’ action through history, to wit: http://www.civilization.ca/hist/labour/labh22e.html http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/snprelief4.htm is intended.
Day 1:
Not surprisingly, given that talks only actually broke off at 3am (although the “official” strike start was three hours earlier), the strike’s first morning was pretty disorganized. I only knew I was on strike when I woke up Tuesday morning and heard the radio traffic reporter talking about the utter chaos along roads leading to the entrances to Ottawa’s largest collection of government offices, a complex known locally as “Tunney’s Pasture”. (One is tempted to conclude that the name relates to the multi-building site’s production of a bovine fertilizer equivalent in bureaucratese, but its etymology is probably historical rather than editorial.)
After I dropped my daughter off at school that morning, I drove home to park the car and headed off to my usual bus stop.
The bus ride was insane. Because of pickets pacing slowly back and forth across the major downtown intersections where government office buildings are located, coupled with cars backed up in lanes turning into downtown parking garages where access was being only slowly allowed by the strikers, by the time the bus got to a stop close to downtown, the transitway was jammed solid from there all the way through the city’s core to the other side. It took a numbing 45 minutes to travel a distance of about four blocks.
Eventually, fed up with moving at a pace that would have seen us outrun by a glacier, I asked the driver how long he figured it would take to get to the other side of downtown, where I normally got off the bus. He said about an hour. So I walked from that point to work, and got to the picket line about 10.
Picket shifts at our building are simple time blocks of four hours. You sign in when you arrive and what you’re supposed to do is sign out four hours later. It took me about three seconds to observe that there were seasoned picketers in line ahead of me to complete the sign-in sheet who were filling in the entire line on the form, including departure time and final signature. Later, one explained to me that he had no intention of leaving early, but neither did he have any faith in being able to re-locate the sheet on which he’d signed in when it came time to sign out four hours later.
In fact, even before he had explained the logic of it to me, I had already deduced its sensibility and duplicated it when it came my turn to sign in.
After that, I found a few colleagues. We stood and chatted for a while, walked to a coffee shop across the street, grabbed a cup and resumed our stroll. After a while, we were assigned a courtyard entrance to the complex’s food court, which could also serve as an entrance to the four-tower complex. We were told to steer everyone who wanted admission at that point a little further down the street to a more heavily manned entrance where managers, essential workers, students and holders of a dozen other strike-exempt classifications were patiently lining up to await the strike captains’ grudging permission to enter, but no more than two or three at a time.
This was a cold morning, and our location fell quickly into shade, so when it got to be late enough in the morning that we figured everyone who meant to cross the picket line had already done so, we reasoned that it made more sense to be on the sunny side of the building, which was where we finished our respective four-hour shifts on the line. Thus ended day 1 of my new career as a labour activist.
We'll see how it goes, but the talking heads on the news are already pretty optimistic the strike will be a short one. The union President is actually a very well-spoken woman named Nycole Turmel. And I hasten to add that is not at all meant in any patronizing way. PSAC’s previous President was an exceedingly abrasive ranter named Daryl Bean whose mere presence in a negotiating process would pretty well ensure its descent into antagonism in no time flat. Ms Turmel, by contrast, speaks only of conciliation, and a desire to find a “mutually acceptable compromise”. She has already spoken publicly of her belief that the strike’s duration will be perhaps a matter of hours, a few short days at most.
And finally – for the strike report Day 1 – here is my choice for hands-down prizewinning picket sign (a wholly subjective award based on my own state of mind, and a lifelong appreciation of the appropriate combination of message and attitude. This comes with the perhaps necessary explanation that the Head of Treasury Board and chief representative of the Government side of the table is named Reg Alcock, the first two letters of his last name being pronounced “all”):
“Alcock and No Action”
- 0 -
Non-strike section:
This is probably an opinion being voiced too soon to find much agreement, and I would qualify it by noting that I am second to very few people in my deep respect for the working members of Canada’s armed forces. But I really wonder about the motives of many of those giving microscopic attention to the recent episode in which a Canadian submariner became a fatality in what, parse it however you want, is really nothing more than a tragic job site accident, an event that kills many Canadian workers annually.
His death has, in the past few days, launched two separate federal government enquiries, caused the Prime Minister to abbreviate a multi-nation tour so as to be present, along with the leaders of all three of the other “federal” political parties, when the sailor’s body finally arrived on shore, dispatched the Minister of Defence to the sub’s berth in Scotland to gaze photo-op’ly at the smoke-stained bulkheads in its interior, caused the nation’s federal flags to be lowered to half staff, triggered international live coverage of not one, but two simultaneous funeral ceremonies, one in his home town with family and friends, and the other in Scotland with his surviving shipmates and representatives from both the US and British navies who helped bring the crippled submarine – HMS Chicoutimi – back safely to port, caused the subsequent immediate yanking from active service of her three sister vessels and spawned an orgy of Canadian media attention, as well as dominated the agenda of the House of Commons for the past week so far.
I am frankly scratching my head. Yes, there’s grist for putting into motion the wheels necessary to determine the cause and recommend remedial action. But on this scale? A submarine is, after all, a working environment that by its nature comes with a higher-than-average element of risk.
And while “accidents will happen” sounds perhaps outrageously callous, depending on how much you’ve bought into all the recent political and media railing about it, accidents, nonetheless, will happen. Should the navy honestly be expected to do more than discover why, and fix it? And should the navy stop doing everything that it does – under the sea – while it finds and fixes the problems aboard HMS Chicoutimi? Because it sure seems to me that the navy is being asked in effect to all but swear on a stack of Bibles that no Canadian sailors will ever again die in the line of duty.
… With my profound respect to Lieutenant Saunders’s widow.
- 0 -
The power of a two-letter preposition
Long-winded intro to the point: One of my favourite music genres is something I call “big guitar” for lack of a more specific name. It’s music that features the instrument prominently. It doesn’t refer to any one traditional music classification. There’s stuff I’d call “big guitar” in rock (Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen), blues (Sue Foley, Steve Earle), bluegrass (the Flatt half of Flatt and Scruggs), country (Johnny Cash, the Dixie Chicks), folk (Gord Lightfoot), even easy listening (The Ventures) and classical (Liona Boyd). And one of my favourite practitioners has always been John Fogerty, now enjoying well-earned success as a solo act, but who also was the source of the Bayou Rock sound that was Creedence Clearwater Revival.
The point: Mr Fogerty has just released a new album, called Déjà Vu All Over Again, and the title song seems to open with a chorus that is a wide condemnation of the entertainment industry (the more so when you understand that he went through a decades-long legal battle with Creedence’s original label, Fantasy Records):
“Did you hear ‘em talkin’ ‘bout it on the radio?
Did you try to read the writing on the wall?
Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before?
It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Then you swiftly realize, after a couple verses, that the man who wrote “Fortunate Son”, a hammering condemnation of the class divide between those who fought, and those who avoided, the Vietnam War (“Some folks inherit star spangled eyes, ooh, they send you down to war, Lord. And when you ask them, how much should we give, oh, they only answer, more, more, more.”), is not whining about anything so selfish as missed royalties. Instead, he has turned his well-ground crystal-clear “Fortunate Son” lens onto the present war in Iraq:
“Day by day we count the dead and dying;
Ship the bodies home while the networks all keep score.”
But in a powerful evocation, after the song’s third verse he takes the chorus (above) and replaces just one little word:
“Did you hear ‘em talkin’ ‘bout it on the radio?
Did you try to read the writing at the Wall?
Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before?
It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Did you catch it? -- “the writing at the Wall”. In this one deceptively tiny adjustment, Fogerty places you at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, asking the same kind of questions that he and his angry contemporaries were asking about that wrong war 40 years ago.
And who would have guessed that Fortunate Son’s label, people who “inherit star-spangled eyes”, would be even more perfectly applicable to the current occupant of the White House than it was to Lyndon B Johnson and Richard M Nixon in the 1960s?
Man, that’s danged good writin’! Throw in a powerful chugging guitar and it’s danged good music, too!
Sunday, October 10, 2004
“OPERATOR FOUR : 2X2L calling CQ... 2X2L calling CQ... 2X2L calling CQ... New York. Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone... 2X2L...” (A hesitant, frightened and lonely radio operator in the Orson Welles Mercury Theater of the Air’s version of “War of the Worlds”, after the waves of Martian invaders apparently have swept his neighbourhood clear of every living soul but him.)
There are occasional events in the life of a Canadian government media analyst that require extra attention. The yearly budget is one, as thousands of people working for various government programs watch it to wonder, “Will I have a job tomorrow?” The occasional breathless announcement by one’s department of a “bold new policy initiative” is another, as entire communication sections wonder, “Does anyone care?”
And the Speech from the Throne is another, as those same thousands of people and entire communication sections simply live for mention of a paragraph, a line or even – please God! – a mere word of mention in the government’s most important occasional “broad strokes” document. (An indication of the high importance attached to the Speech from the Throne is that its most recent pronouncements are, without exception, the basis for a question in every single job interview for someone seeking a federal government job in Canada.)
In my case, that “extra attention” means that I was expected to be at work at 5:30 am the day following the most recent Speech from the Throne in order to prepare reports for the policy and spin wonks who would begin meeting two hours later.
If one is a cubicle-dwelling 9 to 5er, seeing one’s office at 5:30 am is a weird experience. First of all, I arrived by cab, because not even OCTranspo has put its entire fleet of commuting buses on the road at that hour. Then I found that all the doors through which I typically enter my office building were locked. Finally, after completing almost three quarters of a 360-degree pedestrian orbit of the building’s exterior (no mean feat when one went to bed barely five hours earlier and one’s office building is pretty well an entire square city block, and one’s entire neural network is given over to an instinct-driven quest for “COFFEE!”), I found a beverage delivery guy heading knowingly towards one particular door. “You have to ring da buzzer,” he replied to my plaintive question about how to get in. He showed me how. (Well, to be accurate, he showed me _where_. In fact, I already know _how_ to push a buzzer’s button.)
In seconds, a helpful commissionaire was at the door to admit me as far as his desk, at which point I had to wait while he radioed for instructions about whether or not he was allowed to admit a full-time employee at that hour. He was.
When I got to my desk, it was to an entire floor of lighting subdued to “emergency illumination” levels. And it was dead quiet. I realized then just how much unnoticed “white noise” I work amid. There was no faint electronic hum from the overhead fluorescent lights. There was no idling hum from the banks of photocopiers and fax machines that sit within feet of my desk. They hadn’t been turned on yet. There was no barely audible background chatter from the always-on (or at least during a typical working day) televisions a little farther away in the Media Monitoring section.
And most eerily, there was not one single other person in my entire section until my French-language colleague arrived about ten minutes later. A wide range of people noises make up a huge part of my working environment, which sits in a large open concept space. Its complete absence, and its replacement by what I now understand writers mean when they refer to a “deafening silence”, made for an eerie beginning to that day.
I won’t bore you with a recounting of just what the heck it was I had to analyze, but even that was a deviation from the norm. It was, after all, only last February that the previous Speech from the Throne was read and the summer election returned the same government to power, albeit as a minority. So its agenda was pretty well the same, and most pundits speculated that the coverage would be largely NOT about what was in the Speech, but rather about whether or not the Opposition would support it. (Or if not, would the government take the defeat of its bouquet of platitudes as a vote of non-confidence and call yet another general election?)
And as it turned out, that’s exactly where the news coverage went about eight seconds after the Governor General leaned over to the Prime Minister after reading the latest Speech and asked, “So do I get to keep my day job?”
Which made for what eventually turned out to be a world’s record in brevity for a departmental Speech from the Throne media report this go ‘round.
- 0 -
Strike’s off – for the moment. The government has “invited” the unions back to the bargaining table to consider another offer – or possibly a threat – and the union has announced that no general strike action will take place until they hear what the government has to say. That, at least, gets us through the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend without having a strike day. But I’ll bet it’s gonna put those on the bargaining team, whose weekend plans have just been toasted by the call to return to the negotiating process, in one heck of a surly mood. (“Hey! Did we say 5 per cent? Well we want 10 per cent! Per year! For five years! And we want Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq Liberation Days as new Statutory holidays!... No? Alright, everyone… This government clearly refuses to bargain in good faith! We’re on the line first thing Tuesday morning.”)
- 0 -
City of Ottawa 1: Skateboarders 0
(Sorry, but you’ll need to pay closer attention than usual here for this scintillating blog. When I’m talking about borders, I’m not talking about boarders, and vice versa. And that’s why voice recognition software will never work in English, but I digress.)
I know I’ve written about that concrete-heavy “park” I walk through twice each weekday on my way to and from work – the amusingly misnamed “Garden” (assuming cement is NOT a flowering plant) of the Provinces.
For months, it has been home to a late-afternoon group of skateboarders who have been inflicting an ever more debilitating battering on the concrete borders around the two rectangular patches of trees in the park. The surrounding border walls are about a foot high, a height that is perfect for the boarders to approach, leap up – board and all – and then try to resume their glide without fracturing any of their limbs.
In the process, they’ve missed many, many more times than they’ve hit and the concrete borders, as a result, have now become cracked, chipped, paint-scarred and just plain worn down by the repeated impact of thousands of skateboards, their wheels, and the occasional shinbone. The boarders ignore – or pay attention to only as long as it takes to laugh – the trio of graphically-rendered “No Skateboarding” signs placed in the park and, in fact, usually just topple them over to a face-down position on the concrete.
Well, Friday morning on my way into work, I noticed a team of workers energetically wielding power screwdrivers and screwing large steel cleats roughly every four feet around the full perimeter of both of the park’s rectangular tree refuges.. Each piece of steel looks like an upside-down capital “L”. The long arm is vertical, and two large screws were being driven through each. The shorter arm was in the horizontal portion on the top of the concrete border.
It reminded me of all the clamps the Borg Queen has to release to disengage her head and upper torso from her (*ahem*) battle bridge. (And if you never saw the movie, Star Trek: First Contact, or the finale of Star Trek: Voyager, you don’t know what I’m talking about. My apologies, but a quick Google search of “Borg Queen photos” will solve the mystery for anyone who wishes the diversion. In fact, I’ll save you the trouble. Here she is, clamps and all. You may need to scroll down slightly: http://www.krige-page.com/starburst3a.jpg )
By the time these workers were done – and they were by day end – there was a pile of cleats completely ringing each border -- some 300 in all (!), based on a quick count as I passed through the park on Friday afternoon. What the skateboarders will do in reaction to this latest bit of municipal deprivation of their right to turn any surface in the city into a runway or a launch ramp remains to be seen. Britannia might very well rule the waves, but Anarchy, after all, rules the boards.
Stay tuned.
- 0 -
And file this under “Don’t raise the bridge; lower the river”. Washington DC’s Dulles and Reagan National Airports apparently have some pretty stringent rules governing the carrying of weapons by passengers.
Apparently, this still surprises and even angers some people because recently, members of a Virginia gun rights group took to wearing guns on their hips in public places to make their case that the airports’ rules are “overly restrictive.” So what did the National and Dulles Airport Authorities do? Well, since this is in the United States of America, where the NRA places the “Right to Bear Arms” on the same plateau of the Constitutional pedestal as the right to draw breath, they… uh, well, they changed the rules.
Now (and I am not making this up) passengers who are taking guns with them on flights will be allowed to carry them into the terminal, but “are supposed to make arrangements with airlines in advance.”
Frankly, I wish I were making this up. But it’s all in a story that appeared in the Washington Post online on October 7th (and which will probably happily turn up if you visit Google News and search its headline, “Weapons Rules Eased at Dulles and National”.)
And the kicker? “A spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration declined to comment on whether the change at Dulles and National would threaten passenger safety.”
No, of course not. After all, as true – perhaps even tragically true – as it one day will turn out to be, you clearly don’t want to piss off the people who now are carrying their guns into the building.
All of which gives a brand new air travel meaning to “terminal”.
- 0 -
Finally, here’s a bit of phone conversation I overheard spilling over the wall from the next cubicle… “I had a great weekend! I made a banana bread that tasted just like banana bread!” Which makes me wonder what the alternative is, and how many variations of taste were experienced (and what they were), before the speaker achieved this obviously satisfying result.
There are occasional events in the life of a Canadian government media analyst that require extra attention. The yearly budget is one, as thousands of people working for various government programs watch it to wonder, “Will I have a job tomorrow?” The occasional breathless announcement by one’s department of a “bold new policy initiative” is another, as entire communication sections wonder, “Does anyone care?”
And the Speech from the Throne is another, as those same thousands of people and entire communication sections simply live for mention of a paragraph, a line or even – please God! – a mere word of mention in the government’s most important occasional “broad strokes” document. (An indication of the high importance attached to the Speech from the Throne is that its most recent pronouncements are, without exception, the basis for a question in every single job interview for someone seeking a federal government job in Canada.)
In my case, that “extra attention” means that I was expected to be at work at 5:30 am the day following the most recent Speech from the Throne in order to prepare reports for the policy and spin wonks who would begin meeting two hours later.
If one is a cubicle-dwelling 9 to 5er, seeing one’s office at 5:30 am is a weird experience. First of all, I arrived by cab, because not even OCTranspo has put its entire fleet of commuting buses on the road at that hour. Then I found that all the doors through which I typically enter my office building were locked. Finally, after completing almost three quarters of a 360-degree pedestrian orbit of the building’s exterior (no mean feat when one went to bed barely five hours earlier and one’s office building is pretty well an entire square city block, and one’s entire neural network is given over to an instinct-driven quest for “COFFEE!”), I found a beverage delivery guy heading knowingly towards one particular door. “You have to ring da buzzer,” he replied to my plaintive question about how to get in. He showed me how. (Well, to be accurate, he showed me _where_. In fact, I already know _how_ to push a buzzer’s button.)
In seconds, a helpful commissionaire was at the door to admit me as far as his desk, at which point I had to wait while he radioed for instructions about whether or not he was allowed to admit a full-time employee at that hour. He was.
When I got to my desk, it was to an entire floor of lighting subdued to “emergency illumination” levels. And it was dead quiet. I realized then just how much unnoticed “white noise” I work amid. There was no faint electronic hum from the overhead fluorescent lights. There was no idling hum from the banks of photocopiers and fax machines that sit within feet of my desk. They hadn’t been turned on yet. There was no barely audible background chatter from the always-on (or at least during a typical working day) televisions a little farther away in the Media Monitoring section.
And most eerily, there was not one single other person in my entire section until my French-language colleague arrived about ten minutes later. A wide range of people noises make up a huge part of my working environment, which sits in a large open concept space. Its complete absence, and its replacement by what I now understand writers mean when they refer to a “deafening silence”, made for an eerie beginning to that day.
I won’t bore you with a recounting of just what the heck it was I had to analyze, but even that was a deviation from the norm. It was, after all, only last February that the previous Speech from the Throne was read and the summer election returned the same government to power, albeit as a minority. So its agenda was pretty well the same, and most pundits speculated that the coverage would be largely NOT about what was in the Speech, but rather about whether or not the Opposition would support it. (Or if not, would the government take the defeat of its bouquet of platitudes as a vote of non-confidence and call yet another general election?)
And as it turned out, that’s exactly where the news coverage went about eight seconds after the Governor General leaned over to the Prime Minister after reading the latest Speech and asked, “So do I get to keep my day job?”
Which made for what eventually turned out to be a world’s record in brevity for a departmental Speech from the Throne media report this go ‘round.
- 0 -
Strike’s off – for the moment. The government has “invited” the unions back to the bargaining table to consider another offer – or possibly a threat – and the union has announced that no general strike action will take place until they hear what the government has to say. That, at least, gets us through the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend without having a strike day. But I’ll bet it’s gonna put those on the bargaining team, whose weekend plans have just been toasted by the call to return to the negotiating process, in one heck of a surly mood. (“Hey! Did we say 5 per cent? Well we want 10 per cent! Per year! For five years! And we want Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq Liberation Days as new Statutory holidays!... No? Alright, everyone… This government clearly refuses to bargain in good faith! We’re on the line first thing Tuesday morning.”)
- 0 -
City of Ottawa 1: Skateboarders 0
(Sorry, but you’ll need to pay closer attention than usual here for this scintillating blog. When I’m talking about borders, I’m not talking about boarders, and vice versa. And that’s why voice recognition software will never work in English, but I digress.)
I know I’ve written about that concrete-heavy “park” I walk through twice each weekday on my way to and from work – the amusingly misnamed “Garden” (assuming cement is NOT a flowering plant) of the Provinces.
For months, it has been home to a late-afternoon group of skateboarders who have been inflicting an ever more debilitating battering on the concrete borders around the two rectangular patches of trees in the park. The surrounding border walls are about a foot high, a height that is perfect for the boarders to approach, leap up – board and all – and then try to resume their glide without fracturing any of their limbs.
In the process, they’ve missed many, many more times than they’ve hit and the concrete borders, as a result, have now become cracked, chipped, paint-scarred and just plain worn down by the repeated impact of thousands of skateboards, their wheels, and the occasional shinbone. The boarders ignore – or pay attention to only as long as it takes to laugh – the trio of graphically-rendered “No Skateboarding” signs placed in the park and, in fact, usually just topple them over to a face-down position on the concrete.
Well, Friday morning on my way into work, I noticed a team of workers energetically wielding power screwdrivers and screwing large steel cleats roughly every four feet around the full perimeter of both of the park’s rectangular tree refuges.. Each piece of steel looks like an upside-down capital “L”. The long arm is vertical, and two large screws were being driven through each. The shorter arm was in the horizontal portion on the top of the concrete border.
It reminded me of all the clamps the Borg Queen has to release to disengage her head and upper torso from her (*ahem*) battle bridge. (And if you never saw the movie, Star Trek: First Contact, or the finale of Star Trek: Voyager, you don’t know what I’m talking about. My apologies, but a quick Google search of “Borg Queen photos” will solve the mystery for anyone who wishes the diversion. In fact, I’ll save you the trouble. Here she is, clamps and all. You may need to scroll down slightly: http://www.krige-page.com/starburst3a.jpg )
By the time these workers were done – and they were by day end – there was a pile of cleats completely ringing each border -- some 300 in all (!), based on a quick count as I passed through the park on Friday afternoon. What the skateboarders will do in reaction to this latest bit of municipal deprivation of their right to turn any surface in the city into a runway or a launch ramp remains to be seen. Britannia might very well rule the waves, but Anarchy, after all, rules the boards.
Stay tuned.
- 0 -
And file this under “Don’t raise the bridge; lower the river”. Washington DC’s Dulles and Reagan National Airports apparently have some pretty stringent rules governing the carrying of weapons by passengers.
Apparently, this still surprises and even angers some people because recently, members of a Virginia gun rights group took to wearing guns on their hips in public places to make their case that the airports’ rules are “overly restrictive.” So what did the National and Dulles Airport Authorities do? Well, since this is in the United States of America, where the NRA places the “Right to Bear Arms” on the same plateau of the Constitutional pedestal as the right to draw breath, they… uh, well, they changed the rules.
Now (and I am not making this up) passengers who are taking guns with them on flights will be allowed to carry them into the terminal, but “are supposed to make arrangements with airlines in advance.”
Frankly, I wish I were making this up. But it’s all in a story that appeared in the Washington Post online on October 7th (and which will probably happily turn up if you visit Google News and search its headline, “Weapons Rules Eased at Dulles and National”.)
And the kicker? “A spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration declined to comment on whether the change at Dulles and National would threaten passenger safety.”
No, of course not. After all, as true – perhaps even tragically true – as it one day will turn out to be, you clearly don’t want to piss off the people who now are carrying their guns into the building.
All of which gives a brand new air travel meaning to “terminal”.
- 0 -
Finally, here’s a bit of phone conversation I overheard spilling over the wall from the next cubicle… “I had a great weekend! I made a banana bread that tasted just like banana bread!” Which makes me wonder what the alternative is, and how many variations of taste were experienced (and what they were), before the speaker achieved this obviously satisfying result.
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