Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
Feeling the need to
start today's Irving press with an intelligent column, I turned to
C4 to read the column by student editor Jana Giles, a student at
Moncton High. She feels we get dosed with too much Shakespeare in our
schools. I agree.
I really got a dose
because I went to Montreal High just a few years after Christopher
Plummer. I was even in the same class he had been in and, who knows,
maybe in the same seat. By then, he already had a name as a
Shakespearean actor – if not the world reputation he would soon
achieve. The annual school play was always Shakespeare, and we just
pretended he was still a student to call him back each year for it.
My best friend in
the class had already committed his life to Shakespeare, and spoke to
me only in Shakespearean English. The word 'what', for example, was
always pronounced 'h-watt'. So I'm with Jana Giles on this one.
But I like the sonnets – like the one above.
There's nothing much
in section A. On page 1, Frank McKenna says New Brunswick needs
refugee immigration to boost its population. But he doesn't take the
idea very far. He would have a certain number sign a 'social
contract' to stay here. Cute. But not enforceable. What new Brunswick
really has to do is to treat its immigrants and its people born here
better than it has been treating them for over the last century and a
half.
Page one also has a
story about David Bowie that says people in Moncton liked him. The
story gives us not a hint of the role his music played in affecting
our thinking and our tastes or of what drove him. C2 has a bigger
story that tells us even less.
The best opinion or
commentary column is Seniority Rules (though it's really neither
commentary nor opinion. It really should be in section C as an advice
column.)
Alec Bruce is
interesting in discussing levels of support for gun control in the
U.S. But then he links it to the issue that we should allow
politicians to change their minds on promises. No doubt we should.
But the changing of minds if rarely a matter of principle – it's
more often a matter of payoffs.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Canada and the World is four, miserable pages that say little about
Canada or the world. So let's look somewhere else.
Here's a photo from
The Guardian. Get a good look at the rifle carried by the man in the
photo. It's a semi-automatic. It'll keep shooting just by pulling the
trigger – no bolt to turn, no pump, lever to reload.
Notice the
ammunition magazine just below his right hand. That's a high
capacity magazine – and the only purpose for having such a high
capacity magazine is to kill large numbers of people.
The gun is of no use
for target shooting or hunting. Only for killing lots of people.
As well, it's given
a military appearance by its metal-frame butt. That appeals to the
macho instinct of some, insecure people.
And you can buy guns
just like that in Canada.
It's much worse in
the U.S. because Americans are raised on the myth of accomplishment
by armed uprisings. It's reinforced by an idealized history of the
mass murder of native peoples. It's also helped along by a strong,
religious faith that God wants the U.S. to conquer. American leaders
for a very long time have borrowed the term 'chosen people of God' to
apply it to Americans. All of this is strengthened by an endless dose
of film and TV that glorifies gun violence as a virtue. (Check out a
show called 'The Riders'. There's a mass murder by the good guys in
every one.)
Taking the American
Revolution as their guide, Americans commonly see armed violence as
the key to freedom. (Actually, Americans were no freer after the
American Revolution that they were before it – except of course for
the big landowners and slave-holders like George Washington.)
All of this has combined to make the U.S. an enormous threat – to
itself. And the money-power of the arms industry, coupled with the
corruption of U.S. government guarantees that nothing will be done
about it. Even the very modest controls of Obama are unlikely to
last. And – we're going to see something very similar in Canada.
Also in The Guardian
and about guns is this heart warmer.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/11/gun-trafficking-battle-us-mexico-border-hampered-report
The flow of such guns into Mexico is because the US arms industry
floods the world with guns, especially with the ones designed for
mass murder. That's why at least a hundred thousand Mexicans have
been murdered in the last eight years with many more to come. That's
also why so many of the violent areas around the world are violent –
to make profits for the U.S. arms industry. That industry is also the
one that pays politicians to support the National Rifle Association
so that Americans continue to hold the unlimited right to keep and
bear arms.
Amazingly, the
eagle-eyed editors at the Irving press haven't noticed a disaster in
California that has been going on for a couple of months and more,
and has forced 6,000 to flee. It's a massive escape of methane, a
super-greenhouse gas from a fracking operation. It's one of the
worst, perhaps THE worst accident in U.S. environmental history. It
also kills people. And the company and its scientists have not been
able to deal with it for over two months.
Of course, with only
four pages for Canada AND World, you can't publish everything; after
all we need the space for a big story that the Powerball jackpot is
getting bigger. The editors should have asked Mr. Irving. I'm sure he
would have insisted the methane story be run. Front page. Big
headline.
CBC reports that
only two percent of Canadian airstrikes have been directed at Syria.
That's like saying a drunk driver killed only two percent of a crowd
he ran into. Or that, while hundreds of Russian planes flew over
Canada, only two percent dropped bombs.
It is illegal for
Canadian aircraft to go into Syrian airspace at all. We are not at
war with Syria. We have no legal right to declare a war on Syria. And
the Syrian government has not invited us. Those two percent of
airstrikes are war crimes.
Canadians should be raising hell about who authorized those strikes.
And the Canadian government should be raising hell about it. Who is
setting the rules for our aircraft in Iraq? And why are they still
there when Trudeau was promising up to the election that he would
recall them?
A reader sent me the
following item. The source is Harper's which is not , by any stretch
of the imagination, a radical magazine. It tell us about something we
should already have known – that Saudi Arabia has been funding
terrorist groups, including ISIS, from the start. But this goes a lot
further – and much of what we learn comes from the very un-radical
Hilary Clinton.
My computer is
giving me problems at the site for haaretz, but I urge readers to try
haaretz.com
I has several
articles on David Bowie, all of them far superior to those that
appeared in the Irving press.
And including a very
interesting one of the secret Jewish history of Bowie. The opinion
section, as always, is worth a read. And…
There's a very big
story on the Origins of the Montreal Smoked Meat Sandwich. There's
nothing else like it.
There's another
excellent one on how many American Jews are getting involved in the
struggle against racism in the U.S. This concern with social issues
and social justice is what I remember most fondly about the Jewish
community in Montreal.
I have doubts about
the objectivity of the writer of the following piece. But it makes
more sense than the other versions I have seen in the western press
(which is also lacking in objectivity).
I don't know the
following writer at all. But the meat of this is in quotations from
posts by Hilary Clinton. And ya gotta trust Hilary.
The following
article, on the financial outlook for the U.S. arms industry, is
reliable because it largely comes from the industry.
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/09/weapons-gold-rush-global/
The next item might
sound 'over the top'. But the writer, Paul Craig Roberts, has the
highest credentials I have ever seen in a journalist, and I've always
found his work to honest and reliable.
Finally – I have
come across a piece of information, but have lost the source. You'll
have to trust me on this. But I really did see it in a good source.
An American
scientist who has been studying the effects of pesticide chemicals
has been put out of business by a denial of any further support from
the U.S. government. The pressure to shut him down came from big
businesses that either made the pesticides, or used them for things
like, you know, forest spraying.
Why does that remind
me of New Brunswick's firing of its chief medical officer, Dr.
Cleary?
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