TriumphAnt

We’ll get back to our regular blog, but first here’s a word from The Rantmeister…

It’s difficult to sound unsympathetic about the whole notion of state-mandated public grief, or for that matter public grief whether state-mandated or not, without sounding unsympathetic about the nature of the tragedy that triggered the grieving in the first place.

But I am indeed both: very sympathetic to the victims and their families of the December 26th earthquake and tsunami in the Far East, while very unsympathetic, indeed not a little ticked off, about recent actions connected to it by some of our politicians and some of our media.

On a recent Monday morning, our Ottawa local CBC radio station was lamenting the noticeable absence of much of the “public” from a public ceremony held two days earlier for the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami, on what was declared to have been a “National Day of Mourning”.

The event was held in a local hockey arena. It was attended by the Prime Minister, the Governor General, religious leaders from nine “affected” faiths, relatives of several of the victims and, among seats for 15,000 members of the public, about 400 other people.

It’s hard to know where to begin in responding to the CBC morning person’s distress, if only because he seems to function best when his answers are 15 seconds long, and this is something that requires significantly more than a soundbite to argue.

The event was a huge natural disaster. The victims were ordinary parents and children, pupils and teachers, employers and employees, foreign vacationers and local providers of services for foreign vacationers. In other words, almost no one who was killed or wiped out of home and livelihood was performing any extraordinary task demanded by their country or dictated by their professions. These are not people who died “in the heroic performance (that is, “above and beyond the call”) of their duty.” They were simply going about their day-to-day lives, or taking a vacation from same, when a natural marine catastrophe of vast magnitude smashed unexpectedly onto their shores.

It is an enormous tragedy, and recovery will take years. In some areas, de-salinating sea-poisoned farmland will take a generation. Whole families were wiped out at a stroke; others left with often but one survivor. In minutes, the region’s social roster was re-written to include a significant new population of widows, widowers, unsupported seniors and, perhaps saddest of all, thousands of orphans.

But a cause for a Canadian “National Day of Mourning”? No.

At its worst, it is crass political opportunism for the Prime Minister and Governor General to participate in an arena event to which grief-shocked relatives of the dead and missing were paraded in a public display of their sorrow. Even if Mr Martin and Madame Clarkson personally were there for what they honestly felt were good reasons, it was at best a terribly inappropriate event. For “event” it was.

Why in this day and age of growing public cynicism, politicians still feel they gain by appearing at an opportunistic photo-op, with their heads bowed reverentially, or photographed as they walk among the ruins, is something I have difficulty understanding. And 14,600 people who didn’t show up at the observance would seem to agree with me.

And yet why, I also wonder, do so many people in the larger world outside the “I’ll need a compassionate image for my next election campaign brochure” world of politics seem to feel the need to wallow in the grief of others? It is now a routine part of every tragedy for people completely unrelated to the victims or their relatives to go to the site of the event, whether it was a calamitous accident with a large death toll or a brutal kidnapping and murder of a single victim, and lay flowers, leave notes or, God help us, little teddy bears when the victims are children.

Think of a media-saturated tragic event and think of what images you associate with it: When the Challenger disintegrated on that chilly January 31, 1986 Florida morning – we saw repetition after endless repetition of that image of the shocked, still uncomprehending faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents while they looked upwards at the remnants of the explosion and its sinister, horn-like trail of separating plumes of smoke. When the Princess of Wales died – we were shown repeated close-ups of the poignant “Mummy” card atop a bouquet of white roses on her coffin as it was wheeled sombrely through the streets of London on September 6, 1997. A year and a half earlier, on March 13, 1996, schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland died in the hail of a madman’s bullets – and we saw that terrible image the next day of one shaky little girl pushed reluctantly forward into the camera lights’ glare by her mother to place a bouquet of flowers on the growing mountain of colour at the school’s gate. (That one took me away from watching any television news for a month.)

We have become a world of “grievers” for whom the media no longer simply report the event, they relentlessly seem to feel there is a need to find some way to bring home the tragedy for each and every one of us to share.

And in the process we have given birth to a whole new job description. Stand up, “Grief Counsellors”, to me a most peculiar breed of professional. I can’t help but see them as anything but a collective of psychic wet nurses, who are deployed like some spiritual SWAT team into a community or an institution the moment the bodies are removed from an accident scene, or a crime-related tragedy’s perpetrators are either shot dead or hauled away in handcuffs. When I was growing up, my “grief counsellors” could always be found, indeed could be counted on to be found, among family members, close friends, priests… even in my own brain, firing neurologically along my cranial pathways, in emotional channels nurtured and shaped by my developing lifetime of contact with those same caring people.

But equally unfortunate, to me, is our media’s tendency to unleash their “Gotcha!” attack dogs when "official" response is not what the media feel it should be. In this most recent example, the CBC is exceedingly guilty on this count, having spent the days immediately following the tsunami excoriating the government, in ever-increasing stridency, for its “failure” in getting our Disaster Assistance Relief Team (DART) on the ground only days after the actual event and to a particular point in a geographical region whose boundaries frame a considerable portion of the far east. Never mind the logistics and never mind the local politics, which always transcend disaster. (Already the Prime Minister’s next planned photo-op – a visit to parts of the affected area – is running up against intense lobbying at home for him to make a token visit to that part of Sri Lanka under the control of rebel Tamil Tiger forces.)

“Where was Canada?!” the media still bleat, as though it were a matter no more complex to arrange than shouldering a backpack and taking a bus downtown.

Some reporters even drew the odious comparison that since they found resources to get them to the shattered countries, then so should the government have been able to deploy its relief forces with equal alacrity. Then they are so baldly hypocritical as to focus their coverage on the “growing criticism” -- their own -- of the deployment of our aid.

Here’s a clue, fifth estate members: Pretend your job is not only to get there on someone else’s dime, but also to get there with everything you own, including all your house’s furniture, food and clothing, with none of it broken by the trip halfway around the globe. Then if you can still beat the DART deployment speed, well feel free to criticize the Government.

- 0 -

We now resume our regular focus on the trivial and the unimportant.

= = = = = = = = = =

The Government of Canada keeps forcing me to reset my personal benchmark for the definition of “irony”. Or maybe it’s “hypocrisy”. One of the two. Or both.

Recently, in a grand display of high-dudgeon pissed-offedness over federal-provincial natural resource revenue sharing (“offshore oil money”) negotiations, Newfoundland and Labrador's Premier Danny Williams ordered that all provincial government offices in the province have the Canadian flag removed from their exterior flagpoles.

In response, the Prime Minister delivered this verbal slap at the Premier:

"Let me say that I believe that the Canadian flag should not be used as a lever in any federal-provincial negotiations. ... I don't believe that it should, and I believe that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians don't believe that it should be used as a lever. The flag is a symbol of unity, and it shouldn't be used in terms of differences."

Now this is a man who was Minister of Finance when his governing party embarked on the blatantly propagandist use of the Canadian flag that has come to be known as “the sponsorship program”. Ostensibly, the program was intended to heighten the federal profile at events where federal sponsorship money was provided by setting up public displays of the flag, or a logo-ized version of same, on everything from the beer billboards displayed at a Bryan Adams concert to the (literal, not figurative) horses’ asses cantering along under the derrières of the Mounties in their world-famous Musical Ride.

But for well over a year now, the sponsorship program has been the target of ongoing coverage and a formal investigation into allegations of kickbacks and faked invoices for work that was never done. The investigation aside, the physical manifestation of the program was the Canadian flag. And the investigation has already heard evidence from several key players that they viewed it as a vehicle for suppressing the Separatist messages in the Province of Quebec. Their defence, in other words, has been that when the country itself is at risk, the normal rules of accountability can be waived… can’t they?

(“No,” is the short answer many have since heard in the documentation accompanying the notices of their firings.)

But Lord, it seems to me that if ever there was an example of the flag’s being used as a “lever in any federal-provincial negotiations”, it was in the governing Liberal Party’s ill-advised and horribly monitored sponsorship program.

The best advice I have for our Prime Minister is to recall that old saw about being careful when you point the finger, because your hand’s configuration is always such that three times as many fingers are pointed back at yourself.

Or as internetters so eloquently and concisely put it, “Pot. Kettle. Black.”

= = = = = = = = = =

I found this in Gene Weingarten’s Washington Post humour column, “Below the Beltway” online Jan 4, attributed to “Today’s Express”, datelined Alexandria, Va. (I cite all this only to disclaim that, despite what you’ll think when you hit the end of this brief item, no, I am not making it up.)

“With towering dinosaurs, a Kentucky museum looks like a destination for ‘Jurassic Park’ fans. But the $25 million Museum of Creation, opening this spring, is for fundamentalist Christians, the Daily Telegraph reported Sunday. The centerpieces of the museum, promoting the view that God created man, are huge dinosaurs alongside men, contrary to scientific conclusions that they lived millions of years apart. Market researchers predict at least 300,000 visitors, paying $10 each, in the first year. Other exhibits include a planetarium showing that God made the Earth in six days; a Tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve; the Grand Canyon -- as formed by the Great Flood -- and a reconstruction of Noah's Ark, where visitors ‘hear people outside screaming,’ museum creator Ken Ham said. Other exhibits portray diseases and famine as the result of sin, and blame homosexuals for AIDS.”

And, from the Museum website’s (http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/about.asp) “About Us”:

“We also desire to train others to develop a biblical worldview, and seek to expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas, and its bedfellow, a ‘millions of years old’ earth (and even older universe).”

Now I’ll be among the first to admit I’m not opposed to a “biblical worldview” when it begins with sentiments such as those espoused in Leviticus 19:18: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But I’m afraid that any so-called bibilical “scholars” whose followers define their mission in terms of exposing the “bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas” get relegated to my personal encyclopaedia under the W’s, specifically “wingnuts”.

I don’t know whether one can therefore conclude that this must be why church attendance is down, or that this must be why church attendance can only soar as more and more people seek spiritual solace and sanctuary from the secular surrealism exemplified by projects like this “Museum of Creation”.

(“Spiritual solace and sanctuary from the secular surrealism” would’ve been a great title for a song by, oh maybe Three Dog Night, or an album title by Stevie Wonder, but I digress.)

= = = = = = = = = =

(Oh? It wouldn’t be because this thing gobbled louder than the traditional Christmas dinner centrepiece, would it?)

At the December London premiere of his latest epic, Alexander, Director Oliver Stone explained why it flopped in North America. (Despite the surely formidable combined acting dynamics of both Val Kilmer and Angelie Jolie on the screen at the same time, The Toronto Star, for example, said it was "not just a bad movie but a bad movie of truly epic proportions".):

“The Platoon director previously defended his epic of the Macedonian conqueror, saying that it was too complex for ‘conventional minds’. ‘The script was just too ambiguous, too questioning about an action-hero who was masculine/feminine. These are tough qualities in Hollywood,’ the Platoon director said last month. ‘It's just too big a life. It doesn't fit in into the Hollywood formula.’”

There’s the stuff of great artists: “If you don’t like my work, it’s obviously because you just don’t understand it.” (I also noticed they i.d.’d him, twice in this one short paragraph, as the “Platoon Director”. I suspect Stone himself dictated that. After all, calling him the “JFK director” in reference to another of his this-side-of-the-Atlantic box office bombs might suggest a pattern at work.

= = = = = = = = = =

The Continuing Power of Google

Just recently, I plugged another CD into the drive and, just before the door closed and the disk slid out of sight, I noticed a small printed box on the label that proclaimed “GEMA/BIEM”. So I figured why not? And ran it by Google.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to be told that a “Gemabiem” is a twelve-bulb floor lamp available at IKEA. But no, here’s what I discovered:

“On all German releases the word ‘GEMA’ (Gesellschaft für Musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte) is printed. If ‘GEMA/BIEM’ (‘BIEM’ = Bureau International des Sociétés Gérant les Droits d'Enregistrement et de Reproduction Mécanique in Paris) is printed, that means the release is manufactured in Germany and sold in Germany and in the UK as well. You can find differences on labels for the same LP with "GEMA", "GEMA/Biem", "GEMA/BIEM".

I’m a little puzzled about why a recording manufactured in Germany, for sale in the UK as well, needs the approval of a French copyright registration authority – maybe it’s an offshoot of that danged Chunnel – but at least Google spit out the answer to my question in a number of seconds measured by a single digit.

= = = = = = = = = =

Unusual names update

Next in a series, of what appears to be a developing theme here:

From the Stetson University (DeLand, Florida) Varsity Basketball team biography website:

“Grlenntys Chief Kickingstallionsims, Jr. was born September 15, 1986 in Pompano Beach, Florida ... Son of Grlenntys Sr. and Barabar Kickingstallionsims ... Majoring in Sports Management ... Name means "strenghth of the fallen rocks" ... At 19 letters, has the longest last name in Stetson and Atlantic Sun Conference basketball history ... Is believed to be the tallest player in Stetson history ... Has a shoe size of 18.5 ... Can touch the net flat-footed ... Father is part Native American.”

To that last point, I can only say, “My gosh, what are the odds that a child named, in part, 'Chief Kickingstallionsims', would have Native roots…?”

= = = = = = = = = =

And finally, here’s a sparkling example our tax dollars at work.

It’s official; it’s time to take down the Christmas lights. Being the National Capital Region, Ottawa each year festoons its publicly owned spaces with Christmas lights, hundreds of thousands of Christmas lights. Each year, in fact, the “throwing of the switch” is the highlight of a celebratory event held on Parliament Hill. The resulting illumination is not quite the Griswolds power-grid-evaporating event featured in the movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, but it is a major explosion of colour and sparkle.

On a recent morning walk to work, I passed a site where the job of taking the Christmas lights down and putting them away for another year was underway.

What does the phrase, “taking the Christmas lights down and putting them away” suggest to you (mechanically, not emotionally, I mean)? If you’re like me, it suggests giving some thought to at least being able to re-use them and, thus, to store them with sufficient care that their re-use next year won’t be an exercise on a par with trying to unsnarl a badly miscast fishing line.

What I watched was one of those hydraulic lift trucks extend a platform -- like a roofless cage with chest-high rails all around -- containing two workers up and over a huge tree onto which were strung dozens of strands of multi-coloured lights. They reached down, grasped a couple strands and then proceeded to raise their platform straight up, and far above the tree. As they did so, the attached strands were simply yanked from the branches over which they had been draped and the entire conglomeration rose with them like some fibrous shroud. The mechanical sound of the lift’s elevation was augmented by the sound of the snapping of dozens of small frozen branches, which cascaded down as the lift progressed.

But what happened next utterly astonished me. Like Newfoundland dorymen hauling in their jigging lines, the two platform-bound workers simply pulled the snarled light strings into their cage, over the metal rail that completely surrounded them. No lifting, just dragging. As the lights collided with the metal rail, they began shattering and the two workers performing this act simultaneously triggered so many explosions of bursting bulbs it sounded like a cheap movie’s attempt to reproduce machine gun fire. Thousands of coloured bits of broken lightbulbs cascaded from a height of about six storeys as the snow-covered ground swiftly became littered with this glass confetti.

Yes, it was cold this morning and no doubt the workers’ desire was to minimize the amount of time they had to spend about 70 feet up in the breeze. And there was a supervisor on the ground who watched the whole thing. But he seemed interested only in making sure no pedestrians walked under the shower of shards – not in the massive amount of waste his crew was producing. Which suggested to me that this method was business as usual.

On the Internet, the acronym, “WTF??” appears frequently. (The first two words in that acronym are “What The…”) That certainly crossed my mind as I hurried along past the crystal carnage, to the audio accompaniment of the D-Day landing scene in “The Longest Day”.

But what I’d really like to do is to get a peek at their budget (read our expense) for replacing broken bulbs. Because I have a suggestion to make the next time they announce they have no alternative but to once more hike that portion of our tax bill that goes to the National Capital Commission’s Electrical Festive Spirit Enhancement Division.

Enhance this!