Our Pre-Christmas Tree A weak little sapling Struggling to grow Reached past our window And put on a show.
They lopped it and topped it To keep it to size But first every spring It buds for the prize;
And late in the fall The leaves still hang on, Braving windstorm and rain When its neighbours are gone.
Now in our near-winter With snow on the hills, It shines through our window Like gold leaf on the sills
And on Christmas Day Though its time may be brief, We will still likely see One last green leaf.
Many Greetings from the old man and his wife and our weeping birch as you celebrate Christmas today and the years to come. I took the tree snapshot from our window November 27 last and was just able to see a tinge of green on one of the few leaves still hanging on this Christmas morning. I have been deficient in keeping the Post posted through December and will now wait for the new year to see how long the Old Man's Post can go on. Happy New Year!
The Mennonite in a little black dress is Rhoda Janzen, a Ph.D., poet, author, professor of English and creative writing. She is a young woman who portrays herself to me in this memoir as obviously supremely intelligent, a me generation intellectual snob, well read and travelled, and spectacularly stupid! Surely I am not unkind in that assessment for she repeatedly asserts her “idiocy” when analyzing her personal relationships. Rhoda Janzen’s memoir of going home to mommy in California Mennonite Brethren country is highly praised by critics in some of the online literary reviews. It is described as a touching and humorous confession of sorts. One such review coupled with my own village theocracy childhood roused my curiosity sufficiently to order it from the local library.
One reviewer, a feminist writer, said she “literally laughed out loud” while reading it. While I found descriptions of some of the communal ways of her parents reminiscent and worthy of a chuckle I did not consider the whole a book of humour. Her preacher father (at one point she calls him “the Mennonite pope”) and especially her mother, welcomed her home uncritically for a year-long stay to recover from surgery, accident and a second broken marriage to the same guy. She is abundantly grateful but to me she displays certain condescension and a sense that she feels her strict childhood is somehow to blame for her adult problems.
I found myself feeling sorry for the girl’s plight as she reached for her mid-forties. I respected her thoughtful analysis of religion and her apparent ambivalence about it after her time at home. Yet from my old man’s perspective I felt negatively about Ms. Janzen’s story and the way it was written after I finished the book. It must be the generational thing. After all, her parents married ten years after my wife and I did and Ms. Janzen is some five years younger than our trucker/biker son.
The deployment of extremely boorish language of the four letter street and toilet variety on the one hand and the use on the other hand of excessively scholarly words rarely seen or heard by us ordinary horde of readers added little to the story. I got the impression that she and her intellectual peers commonly used what I have for some time thought of as a sort of childishly smart-ass method of expression in social gatherings and cocktail parties. Apparently her much older and very handsome bi-sexual, bi-polar and brilliant husband was particularly adept at entertaining gatherings in that genre. Perhaps that is why she fell in love with him on their first date. In the end, although he had been generally depressed, abusive, and expensive to keep through fifteen years of marriage, Ms. Janzen, it seems still “loved” him and was less upset by his years of abusiveness than by the fact that he left her for a guy named Bob from Gay.com.
Janzen completes the memoir by what I considered a serious analysis of the faith and traditions of her family and Mennonite friends in California. After the kind reception she always has with them she professes to understand and appreciate their simpler approach to life. She even hints at a return to those ways. Yet at the same time she has begun “dating” another guy from that group who had also left the Mennonite fold, is her intellectual equal, tall enough for her, but this time he is seventeen years younger than she and admittedly not someone she would take home for dinner. I think she is still a crazy mixed-up kid!
To learn a little more about Janzen and Mennonite in a little black dress, you may wish to read the Andrea Sachs Q & A interview with Janzen at http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/.
The old man is not an ardent royalist. In today’s world the monarchy has become somewhat of an anachronism, with the British monarchy perhaps a little more so than the few remaining other royal traditions. At times I consider its “head of State” function in Canada nothing but a bothersome irritant. Yet until there is a broad consensus on adoption of a functional republican alternative here, the British monarchy is a stabilizing tradition and a useful irritant if you will. We should not encourage the inevitable divisions caused by any proposal to get rid of it.
Furthermore, the old man is not an admirer of the House of Windsor or members of its predecessor “Houses” who have occupied the British throne. I would give a pass, however, to the current occupant, Queen Elizabeth II, who served through much of the 20th century, just a year older than the old man and a comfortable contemporary. Queen Victoria of the 19th century British Empire was similarly untouchable. Of course, if one gave credence to rumour and fictional accounts, even these Queens sometimes succumbed to the ways of their male relations. For the rest, going back to the Richards, the Henrys, the Charles’s, the Georges and the Edwards and their families, what is there really to admire about their relationships with families, their aristocratic contemporaries and their subjects, during those reigns?
The current Queen’s offspring seem to have been especially vulnerable to the practice of the less than puritan royal foibles of some of their predecessors. Unfortunately for them the liberal social mores formerly discreetly reserved for the aristocracy have been widely adopted by the commons. With modern communication and constant media watchfulness, royal foibles, including all their dalliances, can no longer be discreet. Royals are now lumped in with all other political and entertainment celebrities and subject to hourly exposure to the whole world.
Charles, our current Prince of Wales and first heir to the British throne, in his long, long wait for ascendancy has exhibited those royal foibles in abundance. He seemed to be following in the tradition of Edward VII and Edward VIII, Charles’s most recent male predecessors in that office, who except for their aristocratic dalliances appear to me to have been rather useless and unimaginative royal functionaries. From my very casual observation of media hype, though likely misleading, both sons of Charles and Diana are following the same tradition.
Throughout all this celebrity media exposure, however, Prince Charles has exhibited a certain gravitas and serious interest in and concern for the human condition. I have a vague recollection of an incident many years ago now and before the unseemly exposure of his many romantic problems, when the Prince had the effrontery to express an opinion about the design trends of modern architecture and community planning. He was immediately severely criticized for being politically incorrect in expressing opinions that ought not to be permitted to members of the British monarchy as being interference in public policy matters. Professionals of the day sneered at his preference for more moderate design and preservation of traditional communities. I agreed with the Prince at the time and thought it a useful exercise of his princely office.
After all these years of adverse publicity about the Prince’s love life it seemed his ascendancy to the throne was questionable with speculation rampant that his son, Prince William, would be preferred. My niece, the retired teacher, whose intellectual and artistic curiosity and concern with public affairs exceeds mine, emails me the most fascinating stuff she finds or is sent by friends from the Internet. This time it was the Richard Dimbleby Lecture beautifully filmed at the Prince of Wales’ London residence, St. James’s Palace State Apartments. It can be found on the Prince of Wales’ official website,http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speechesandarticles/. The lecture was titled Facing the Future and after viewing the lengthy speech and the rapt audience of important people in the gorgeous gallery I was persuaded that here indeed was the man who should be King if the royal institution is to continue when the reign of Queen Elizabeth ends, personal foibles and romantic dalliances notwithstanding.
Charles is a man whose royal training and travels and broad experience of the world, whose obvious intelligence with an appropriately staid but sharp sense of humour and peculiarly British wit could lend a new dimension to the royal duty of providing mature and objective policy advice to the political ministers of state.
In “facing the future” Charles pointed out that in the last fifty years we seem to have lost that sense of balance that our forefathers instinctively understood that we must “work with the grain of Nature to maintain the balance between keeping the Earth’s natural capital and sustaining humanity on its renewable income.” He gave many examples of the destructiveness to ourselves caused by our endless pursuit of wealth as an end in itself and the need to re-examine our position as part of Nature than as masters of it, stating that the whole world is already living on its capital rather than the sustaining income its flora and fauna and other species would naturally provide.
In that address, the Prince provided many noteworthy and quotable criticisms and his possibly too optimistic remedies and I suggest readers go to the linked website to find out more.
Prince Charles really is, I think, a useful Royal!
This issue of The Old Man’s Post really began with an article I read in The Vancouver SunNovember 20, 2009. It reported that Chuck Strahl, the federal Minister of Indian Affairs had agreed to meet a Gitxsan Treaty Team delegation to hear their proposal for an Alternative Governance Model, which involves abandonment of Indian status by some 13000 Gitxsan native people in northwest British Columbia.
As I have always had difficulty with the concepts of special status for our country’s minorities, of the idea of nations within nations, of multiculturalism and of multiple and hyphenated citizenships, I gave the piece more than my usual passing scan. I recognize, of course, that in our liberal Canadian democracy, my policy disagreements with such concepts have long been overwhelmed and a multicultural and multi-national federation has become politically as sacrosanct and untouchable as medicare and likely an unchangeable aspect of the Canadian mystique. Though I did not entirely agree with the court rulings and negotiated treaties that resulted some time ago in the Gitxsan Native Nation settlement I had breathed a sigh of relief thinking naively that for this particular group of tribes and reserves, Canada’s current population had finally done penance for the injustices they suffered at the hands of our first European immigrants.
That was not to be. A native claims industry has been put in place and has become a well paid legal specialty in practice and even in the law schools, and never ending negotiations, “reconciliations”, law suits and extra-legal behaviours are perpetuated, and the cost to all taxpayers go on and on and up and up. Our native Indians may have been the first immigrants to this North American land but as land masses and climates change, as populations vary, as resources are exhausted, migrations are inevitable. Must all subsequent incomers and their increasing descendants continue to pay rent to the first in perpetuity?
The “modest proposal” outlined in the Alternative Governance Model found on the Gitxsan website, seems eminently reasonable at first blush. If everyone agreed to every detail still to be worked out, the model could put an end to the perpetual costs I have complained about. Still, I scribbled a number of questions that came to mind upon reading the newspaper report. With the benefit of reading the Gitxsan proposal, a few of them are:
Who authorized the design of the model and what authority do they have to represent the Gitxsan nation? There is obviously no consensus within their membership. The proposal to revert to previous direct democracy consensus governing methods and hereditary chiefs to replace existing elected chiefs and band councils prescribed by the federal Indian Act, could result in endless lawsuits even without other considerations;
What are the constitutional problems raised by the proposal? Questions have already been raised that the Supreme Court of Canada would rule such a treaty variation unconstitutional.
What will be the true cost to Canada and British Columbia of the proposal to extend Gitxsan jurisdiction over some 33,000 square kilometres claimed as their traditional territory? The model says the Gitxsan are not interested in the concept of “treaty settlement lands”, that they have a “collective inherited interest” in the whole territory. They do offer to make revenue sharing agreements with senior governments. This proposal also raises questions about possible overlapping and conflicting land claims by other native “nations” or existing private owners.
For me the extended ownership and jurisdiction claim could be the most troublesome of the model proposals. The consensual direct democracy governance idea for the limited village population that would now be affected does not trouble me a great deal and I would applaud the abrogation of the Indian Act if the Gitxsan could reach their own consensus to deal with the vested interests of the elected chiefs and band councils.
However, senior government approval of that idea could ceate a precedent and have serious unintended consequences in Canada’s pluralistic society. Already in Canada and the States there could be countless minority groups claiming “nation” status. Stephen Harper’s government has accepted the Quebecois “people” as a nation. The “Metis Nation” can claim perhaps both indigenous and immigrant privileges. Some time ago I even got a tongue-in-cheek email joke, suggesting that Canadian Mennonites, mostly immigrants from post-revolution Russia, some of whom claim a distinct ethnicity, could claim certain independence as a “Mennonite Nation” and establish the sort of village theocracy type of governance developed with Tsarist consent in 18th and 19th century Russia. Of course there is the “Nation of Islam” group, and in Canada Muslims are already claiming a right to apply the so called Sharia Law to their religionists. We could even have claims from such abhorrent racist minorities as the “Aryan Nation”.
Existing and potential problems seem endless and yet we are likely living in the least troublesome part of the world today. So far we more often than not continue to talk, to look for compromise and avoid more deadly confrontations. And we are still living in “the best place on earth”.
Sometimes unhappily and with difficulty the old man tries to keep up with the rapidly increasing speed demanded by today’s technology. Thirty-five years ago before lumbering near-computers were in common office use and the Internet was unknown, I was still in business working long hours, doing my own bookkeeping by making handwritten entries in bulky journals and ledgers. I walked deposit books to the bank during the then still restricted hours. The manager and the teller both knew me by first name, not just by account number. And yet I had time to attend weekly Rotary Club lunches and otherwise take part in various social activities.
Today all those office chores are automated and bookkeeping can be done with a few key strokes or mouse clicks, banking can be done on the Internet with hardly any manual intervention. We should have nothing but leisure time to give profound thought to the business of improving ways of living, our relationships, of living more frugally, of requiring less money, of improving the troubled parts of our community and so on. Instead, the need and greed for money persists. Technologies are constantly changed, speeded up and otherwise “improved” to feed the bottom lines of those who sell the stuff.
The prospect of the cash-less society bankers talked about that many years ago has not become a reality, but instant transfer of data around the world is possible. We must worry about identity theft, theft of secret numbers, access to bank accounts and on and on. The old man is personally unknown at any of the institutions he deals with, and if he tries to speak on the telephone with a real person, he must first press various numbers, listen to lengthy explanations, and wait while listening to advertising or other sounds for the real person to appear and then to suffer other irritations.
Furthermore, technology operators and governments seem to give little thought to the health and social consequences of providing instant wireless communication, which is obviously quicker, easier and cheaper for the bottom line than any improvement of land lines, and although some independent scientists have warned that exposure to such radiation is the “largest human health experiment ever undertaken without informed consent”, the unwarranted and unnecessary communications revolution goes on apace without any serious study or regulation.
Although I am obviously past the age to have the desire or strength to tilt at windmills, I am reminded of a piece I wrote as sometime editor of our Rotary newsletter back in 1974. Being able to publish The Old Man’s Post in this way is wonderful and mysterious to me, but the total effect of the rapid changes on our communities makes me long for simpler and slower times. As a reminder that the gods are undoubtedly no happier today than they were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I offer you the following short commentary I made to my Rotary Club membership 35 years ago.
Our luncheon speaker last week was erudite and enlightening on the wonders of cash-less banking and other technological marvels. I did consider his subject matter and the reaction of Rotarians to the scientific wonders he revealed worthy of comment, and perhaps a little disturbing.
It seems that Rotarians can hardly wait for the twin goblins of coaxial cable and computer to shower their many benefits upon us.
Take heed then, of the words of John Ruskin, written in the youth of the Industrial Revolution:
There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it and to and fro among the pinnacles of the crags. YOU cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash; you thought you could get it by what the Times calls Railroad Enterprise. You enterprised a railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you fools everywhere.
After a special day with a visit from a fascinating younger relation, I achieved an unusually long night of slumber. Having had nearly the prescribed eight hours with none of the regular trips to the adjoining chamber, I was obviously ready to be roused. It is in that strange mittelgeist period approaching wakefulness when this old man is never sure what unique creatures or sensations may populate his unconsciousness and leave a stream of its unreality with him when fully awake.
This time there was a rather staid young man of sincere demeanour dressed somewhat in the Edwardian manner of the early twentieth century. He claimed the name of Stirling Hepplesmith and exhibited great pride in achieving the degree of Chartered Public Accountant at the nearby Piddlington School of Business.
Hepplesmith had taken rather longer than his more brilliant contemporaries to complete the prescribed course but the Dean of Accountancy at Piddlington recommended him for what he thought a suitable position with Bishop and Bullard, Accountants, in the small New England town of Hexburg. The firm specialized in offering accounting services to Hexburg’s small retailers like restaurants, shoe repairers, bars, haberdashers, lawyers and other professionals who served Hexburg and its thriving rural area. The dean suggested that Hepplesmith, with his slow but careful attention to detail, would be suited to the conduct of the annual audits ordinarily required annually by the authorities for some of those establishments.
So it was then, that Hepplesmith’s first professional assignment was the completion of a year-end audit for Gino’s Restaurant on Main Street. He was assigned a small office between the eaterie’s kitchen and its pantry and storage room to begin examination of the set of books and statements prepared by one of Gino’s own sons. Thoroughly, as he had been taught at Piddlington, the young CPA went through every voucher, checked out the trail of receipts, reviewed all the supply purchase orders, weight records entered on deliveries, and fresh food supplies from the stock room weighed and transferred to the kitchen by the establishment’s chef; he even sought explanations from staff members for anything he questioned.
Gino’s son the bookkeeper as well as the stock room receiver and maintenance man in his dusty lane-side quarters soon found Hepplesmith with his nit-picking persistence to be tiresome and irritating. The situation came to a head when young Hepplesmith found a discrepancy! His sleuthing discovered that the restaurant’s supply of the huge local potatoes used by the chef for some of his baked dishes were always delivered by a favoured local farmer in one hundred pound sacks as signed for by the receiver. All deliveries were invoiced and paid for by the pound. Yet when the chef’s helper weighed the potatoes when transferred to the kitchen, each sack was lighter by two or three pounds! What happened to the missing potatoes?
Stirling Hepplesmith determined to get to the bottom of it. After all, at the farmer’s price of ten cents a pound the missing potatoes would amount to an extra cost of many dollars in a year’s consumption. The bookkeeper had simply charged the difference in weight to “slippage” but that did not satisfy Hepplesmith. He confronted the stock room receiver who was so aggravated he went to a full sack of potatoes and threw one large spud at the young CPA, crying, “This is what happened to your confounded potatoes!”Hepplewhite dodged the missile, which forthwith smashed against the far wall, but then demanded an explanation. It turned out the man had used up all the lost potatoes to kill a family of rats inhabiting the dark, hidden nooks and recesses at the rear of Gino’s fine eatery.
You must know what happened, of course. Stirling Hepplesmith was nothing if not thorough, complete, and always driven to do the right thing. He immediately made a written report to Hexburg’s reformist health officer. The health officer did his inspection of Gino’s Restaurant and closed the establishment pending proof of a total cleanup and renovation. Gino sued Bishop and Bullard for consequent damages, Bishop and Bullard fired Hepplesmith for incompetence, Hepplesmith sued Bishop and Bullard for wrongful dismissal and all the lawyers in Hexburg were happy for years to come.
Every once in a while, when my supply of current fiction is temporarily exhausted, I return to some old friends of years. Among them are the mid-nineteenth century stories of Charles Dickens. This time I picked up my old copy of Martin Chuzzlewit, in a very small print edition. I can find no date of publication on the title pages, but it is from The Oxford India Paper Dickens, Complete Edition With Illustrations by Cruikshank, ‘Phiz’ &c. In Seventeen Volumes that like came out in the early 1900s. I came by the book in the early nineties when I prowled through my father-in-law’s shelves after his death (with permission), and as it was a Dickens I had not previously read, I apprehended it as my own. I did the same with a few other well-thumbed classics in similar small sized thin paper editions but unfortunately there was no “Complete Edition” of the Dickens.
In the Martin Chuzzlewit I found the cartoons alone worth the price of admission, especially those done by Phiz, being Dickens himself. As in most Dickens novels reading the list of characters names and identities is endlessly amusing. Who can forget Pip, Abel Magwitch, and Jaggers in Great Expectations? It is strange, though, how often one hears of unusually appropriate monikers in our own social setting. You may even have run into law firms called something that might sound like Creep, Fee and Lien, and even Dickens couldn’t improve on the name of recently convicted investment thief, Bernie Madoff, and the cartoon of him downloaded from Google, which I hope to insert above to compare with the Phiz illustration of the odious Seth Pecksniff and his equally impossible daughters from Martin Chuzzlewit.
I think Dickens had fun writing the Chuzzlewit novel published in 1843. Though the book contains many of his social criticisms, commentaries and asides it seems to me it was a tongue-in-cheek exercise. Evil characters are excessively so and virtuous ones are sickeningly so. They are larger than life exaggerations but they get under your skin just as easily as do the characters in some of the good page-turning mystery yarns I am so addicted to. I got unreasonably irritated and impatient with the naïve, money hungry and lovesick hero, the young Martin Chuzzlewit. Still, I have read it through several times and always go right to the inevitable happy ending and vested inheritance.
In the first chapter Dickens goes on at length to set out the claims of the Chuzzlewit clan to higher social and financial status than was apparent in the Wiltshire countryside of the day. He takes the whole second chapter to bring about an introduction to one of the main villains of the book, the hypocritical so-called architect, Mr. Pecksniff, in a peculiar and amusing situation. The slow pace and long paragraphs of description would not likely be tolerated by any editor today. Dickens wrote for a slower time, when readers could appreciate language and its inherent power. Of course even then they may have wondered at times whether the author was paid by the word and deliberately dwelt on such scenes to pad their volume.
Still, many of them are very moving, touching or pertinent even today and as someone who recalls pre-electricity village life in my early days here in the FraserValley, I find his second chapter description of the end of a misty fall day in a Wiltshire village both poetic and nostalgic. Without permission I will copy a little of it here:
The wet grass sparkled in the light; the scanty patches of verdure in the hedges—where a few green twigs yet stood together bravely, resisting to the last the tyranny of nipping winds and early frosts—took heart and brightened up; the stream which had been dull and sullen all day long, broke out into a cheerful smile; the birds began to chirp and twitter on the naked boughs, as though the hopeful creatures half believed that winter had gone by, and spring had come already. The vane upon the tapering spire of the old church glistened from its lofty station in sympathy with the general gladness; and from the ivy-shaded windows such gleams of light shone back upon the glowing sky, that it seemed as if the quiet buildings were the hoarding-place of twenty summers, and all their ruddiness and warmth were stored within.
Even those tokens of the season which emphatically whispered of the coming winter, graced the landscape, and, for the moment, tinged its livelier features with no oppressiveair of sadness. The fallen leaves, with which the ground was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance, and subduing all harsh sounds of distant feet and wheels, created a repose in gentle unison with the light scattering of seed hither and thither by the distant husbandman, and with the noiseless passage of the plough as it turned up the rich brown earth, and wrought a graceful pattern in the stubbled fields. On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels; others, stripped of all their garniture, stood, each the centre of its little heap of bright red leaves, watching their slow decay; others again, still wearing theirs, had them all crunched and crackled up, as though they had been burnt; about the stems of some were piled, in ruddy mounds, the apples they had borne that year; while others (hardly evergreens this class)showed somewhat stern and gloomy in their vigour, as charged by nature with the admonition that it is not to her more sensitive and joyous favourites she grants the longest term of life. Still athwart their darker boughs, the sunbeams struck out paths of deeper gold; and the red light, mantling in among their swarthy branches, used them as foils to set its brightness off, and aid the lustre of the dying day.
A moment, and its glory was no more, the sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.
An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to it moaning music. The withering leaves no longer quiet, hurried to and fro in search of shelter from its chill pursuit; the labourer unyoked his horses, and with head bent down, trudged briskly home beside them; and from the cottage windows lights began to glance and wink upon the darkening fields.
In today’s rushing world to somewhere, we demand briefer fare from our authors. I just recently introduced myself to a series of mystery novels set on the central California coast, by Barry Siegel, whom I consider one of the better of the current crop of mystery authors. In his 2002 novel, Lines of Defense, he introduces the whole novel and its setting with the following lead paragraph:
In La Graciosa, ten miles from the sea, the most luminous summer evening can still suggest winter’s chill. The central plaza’s park benches, its bear statue, the winding creek, even the asistencia itself can abruptly vanish behind a low, thick wall of fog. Cars crawl then, blinking futile headlights. Pedestrians step with care, searching for familiar landmarks. Muffled voices blend with the smell of kelp. Invisible feet crunch on gravel.
His characters are introduced and the action begins in the very next line. That is sticking to essentials. Brief descriptions of the county settings are pursued with the action as required. Nothing like Dickens, is it? Still, the old classics are still with us, having survived for centuries, and this Dickens will yet give you days of enjoyment if you tear yourself away for a few hours at a time from the tube and cyberspace. I hope you will.
Back in November of 1982 and still in 1984 I wrote essays arguing against the passage of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the spring of 1982. I had railed against it since Trudeau’s proposal of such a codification of rights first came out. After nearly thirty years of watching it in operation I still feel our tribes of lawyers have benefited more than our citizens from its application.
The critique of the document in my 1982 essay concerned the insistence on the equality clause of the Charter that so many outspoken feminists had insisted upon. Enforcement of that clause by the courts made it almost inevitable that individual rights to the strangest of behavioural quirks would be supported and sexual equality would result in legalization of same-sex marriage as now available in Canada. I felt then, before it had been tested by the courts, that such codified rights would do a disservice to both men and women. I argued that the image of women as subjugated people was misleading, that females of our species were generally stronger in nature (especially with physically active protective males), more aesthetically pleasing, smarter than men, longer living and likely responsible for whatever civilizing influence had persisted over the ages. I put the case that if the feminists were successful in drafting their gender into the competitive dog-eat-dog male world and gained dominance therein, they would rue the day and weaken their dominance. About all they could say then is “Well, it’s our turn!”
When I casually observe the effects of the Charter in those nearly thirty years, I must wonder how many in our population today, even those less inhibited than I by Depression Era standards, can say that relationships between the sexes or family life generally have improved because of this enforced Charter “equality”. Here are just a few noticeable trends that still offend my conservative sensibilities:
Although women continue to complain that statistically they are paid less than men for doing the same work, the current recession points out the dominance of women in the workplace. Apparently Canada now has more employed women than men. If you watch television regularly the dominance of women in jobs once male dominated has become very noticeable, especially in the last decade or so, particularly on the CBC network. Except for fixtures like Peter Mansbridge, its chief news anchorman, almost all the on-screen faces one sees daily are women. Even the reporting foreign correspondents seem female dominated. The same phenomenon can be observed on the American PBS network and on CNN. Is it economics, or are the ladies simply smarter, better looking and better at the job than guys?
In competing with men on the sexual activity front, one suspects a trend toward female dominance and male emasculation. Why else would North American males be spending millions of dollars on Viagra pills and their chemical competitors, now so freely advertised. The use of these sex enhancing drugs is increasing by leaps and bounds especially with the advent of new brands such as Cialis and Levitra. A recent report indicates some 5 million users in the States. Unlike some well published fundamentalist American women, I do not attribute the trend in weaker male productivity to a well-financed international enemy conspiracy but only to the everlasting search for affluence in our North American (and European) ever more liberal consumer society.
The continuing push for equality in traditional male activities such as sports, logging, and the military does nothing to persuade me of an improvement in the feminine mystique. It is simply bringing such women down a peg to the violent and often reckless tendencies of men, and the sight of young women having achieved equality in the armed forces leaving small children behind to join the armed men deployed in Afghanistan still angers me.
I submit the battle of the sexes is an unnecessary engagement in confrontation. All we need is a mutual recognition of the individual humanity of every person, male and female or other. The Charter equality clause has not and will not bring that about. The constitutional mandate simply stresses a pre-existing inequality in our system of justice to no effect. It officially recognizes an end of the traditional grouping of women with men in our particular civilization. Though many would preserve that tradition, political and economic pressures that accompany this kind of feminism now force ever more women into competition not only with men, but with each other. Such “equality” bodes ill for women and for our civilization.
TO: U. S. President Barack Obama
FROM: The Old Man (in Canada)
As I write just a year has passed since your election victory in 2008. Now as I watch the news coverage of your Asian trip you seem changed from the ebullient personality of your campaign. You appear gray, stressed out, irritable, and I am sorry to say, somewhat unsure of yourself.
I take it as a given that the presidency of the United States is an impossible job. Yet you and so many others seek the power and prestige of that office. What promises must be made to reach there? The public promises are known, of course, for they are delivered ad infinitum, until enough people believe “yes we can” accomplish whatever you promised that each person believes in his interest, and vote you into office. Most, however, forget the “we” part. Once they voted, it did not matter that you reminded them repeatedly during the campaign that it would not be easy and would require their participation and continued support. You would also need the recalcitrant support of a majority of Representatives and Senators. Yet all supporters expected you to do it alone.
Those are the public promises. They raised expectations you could not fulfill. But how many private promises must be made to the power brokers, the big money raisers, the office seekers, the political establishment figures? From President Washington’s time I believe every president has had to deal with them and with so many conflicting opinions from those picked to advise the chosen one, the momentum is soon lost. When that original momentum is gone, real change rarely happens. Even FDR lost his momentum in the first year.
I get the impression that all Presidents have similar experiences. Once in the White House you are virtual prisoners of your own Secret Service staff, and given the obvious anger and the stupid accusations expressed by so many violent sounding people now, I suspect you are even more closely guarded by that staff than were previous incumbents.
No doubt you have an over-abundance of “information” and “expert advice” from generals, diplomats and spies in dealing with foreign affairs as well as from economists and other domestic careerists to pursue your intended program at home. They are at your beck and call but each, I believe, has a vested interest and pressure from others to seek decisions in their favour.
Such conflicting positions cannot always be reconciled by compromise. What would happen I wonder if you listened to “just the facts” and the various suggestions as to how and why and when without too much repetition from each conflicting opinion, then analyzed whatever the situation and decided on something you simply thought was right even if that was considered revolutionary by all your conflicting advisers?
Put the case of your public promise as candidate to close GuantanamoBay. Certainly it was never just a matter of making a decision to close the prison, which John McCain also said he would do, then signing an executive order and delegating the job to an official. What was really needed was to change the rather nebulous status assigned to the people held as prisoners. Surely they must be released, dealt with under international law as alleged terrorists or prisoners of war, or tried as criminals by their own countries, or as alleged criminals under American law. George Bush would no doubt have closed the base had anyone really known how to deal with them. I doubt if even proposed military tribunal members had any notion about the intended end result. Surely no further useful information could be obtained from any of them after so many years. In the end no matter what is decided will result in angry criticism from all sides as does your Attorney General’s decision to have some trials in New York.
Currently you are still looking at the proposed troop increase in Afghanistan. In the long run it will be impossible to keep that region in the American sphere of influence. Alexander the Great may have conquered the region but even his influence did not last and independent tribalism has prevailed ever since. I doubt if fifty years of occupation by American troops and the influence of American consumerism will forever change that fundamental.
Furthermore, as a Canadian I have a great deal of trouble finding justification for the presence of armed United States military forces in some 175 countries around the world. That was the number announced during the baseball World Series to which the games were broadcast for the benefit of the troops.
As to your Health Plan schlimazel, it seems to me it has been so messed up by members of Congress, that the thousand plus pages of proposed statute will never be enacted. The Canada Health Act contains some 23 sections of appropriate length. Our plan is, of course, operated by provincial governments under their respective Medical Services statutes and both federal and provincial statutes are supplemented by regulations, agreements and so on. Even our single-payer plan is complex, but surely the long initiating statute will do nothing but result in never-ending litigation and expense. What everyone will have to face, of course, is that privately or publicly insured health care will not cover everything. Inevitably some procedures and drugs will be rationed and either free marketers or government will do so arbitrarily.
Mr. President, your window of opportunity is nearly gone. Some of your most ardent former supporters, foreign and domestic, including The Economist magazine, have turned to severe criticism as your good intentions and public promises are month by month overwhelmed and pre-empted by the immediate demands of each day and the still worsening economy you inherited. Let me be just another minor voice to urge you to base decisions on what you deem right and just and “damn the torpedoes”, to discount the voice of the lobbyists, to announce your decisions to Americans and to persuade them to force the legislators to enact suitable statutes.
Honesty is the best policy! That moral theme was dinned into me from the beginning of school attendance. From an even earlier age, from the time I was a babe in arms, the sinfulness of telling lies became an even more powerful reason for the primary importance of telling the truth. My parents were strong evangelical Christians and believed literally in the written words of the Bible, though now as I read the Ten Commandments I see only a prohibition against bearing false testimony against your neighbour. There is not a commandment saying, “Thou shalt not lie.”
I always believed in the importance, and yes, the practical benefits of truth telling, and I still do. My constant policy since I was very young has been full disclosure and truth telling and accepting responsibility for my own failings. In spite of that I am sure there were times as a child or even in later years, when I evaded the truth out of weakness and fear of punishment or other undesirable consequences. Telling lies did when I was a child, and in the end always does, I think, invite punishment if discovered.
It is impossible, I think, to have a properly functioning family or community if we cannot trust the word of our relatives, our neighbours, our business associates, our politicians—everyone we constantly have dealings with. Perhaps that is why our community, world-wide, in early times, in great Empires, and today, does not function properly.
So it is moral truth I am here concerned with. If any fundamental rules of ethics existed for any civilized society apart from the rules established by various religions, the first among them should be: Always tell the truth!
Surely we must begin development of such a rule by teaching children at an early age that it is in their self-interest to avoid the endless entanglements falsehoods inevitably cause. One of the better ways to motivate such behaviour is by example. Children must be able to trust the word of their care-giving adults. A sure way to undermine that trust, it seems to me, is to threaten children with consequences that never occur. I have seen such idle control mechanisms often used in families, and I have been guilty of them myself, but surely such idle threats are themselves a type of lying, and give children a bad example. I must say it is easier to criticize such behaviour by other parents than to avoid it personally.
For nearly twenty-five years I was a member of the Chilliwack Rotary Club. Rotary International is a worldwide service club of business and professional people. Rotary’s motto was Service Above Self and members were instilled with the principles of Rotary International. Club founders believed that not only was it the duty of community leaders like Rotarians, to serve their communities, locally, nationally and internationally, it was also good business. A major guide to help members achieve even greater success in both service and business was Rotary’s Four Way Test. It was required reading and periodically members unexpectedly had to recite the four questions of the test at club meetings. New members received a copy of the test printed on a small plastic desk stand, along with their nametags and other paraphernalia. Mine still graces a shelf in my library after these many years away from Rotary. One side of the stand lists the test questions: Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
In debates about the possibility of strictly applying these standards questions of justice, friendship and benefit were less difficult than the question of insisting on absolute truth. Furthermore, it was not always that easy to decide whether or not it was the truth in specific situations.
For example, application of the Four-Way Test in our justice system is always a problem. Take the very simple situation of a person charged with a crime. In the common law an accused is always innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In the result, many accused persons entering a plea in our criminal courts, say they are not guilty, even if they are.
Without going into the legal niceties of that procedure, the chances are that in a large majority of cases brought before a judge, the “not guilty” plea is a lie. Accused, defence lawyer, prosecutor and judge all know the plea is most likely to be a lie, but if any one of them even suggested such a thing, the man would be deprived of what is called “due process.” Everyone knows the procedure fails that Four-Way Test yet in the interest of preserving the safeguards developed against abuses once rampant in the various systems of criminal justice, we bend over backwards in favour of a person accused of crime. Just think of the cost to our justice system of every accused person insisting that every element of the alleged crime be proven. Yet in these days of almost automatic legal aid for every accused person, the alleged criminal incurs no cost by taking advantage of every possible element of that due process. And believe me, today many an accused is more knowledgeable and experienced in exercising his right to counsel and due process than some of the junior legal aid counsel who represent him in court.
In the days of my own criminal law practice I sometimes advised an accused that the weight of the case against him made it unlikely that the cost of a full defence could be justified, suggesting a guilty plea and argument to mitigate penalties could be beneficial in a properly charged offence even though judges are also unpredictable. I felt waiver of full process was not the same as waiver of due process. That process was usually closer to the truth and in the best interest of all concerned including the accused, as a fairer sentence usually ensued. It provided the justice the accused deserved, speeded up the process, saved everyone money and came closer to meeting the Four-Way Test in almost all cases.
In another area, marital infidelity or other breaches of accepted sexual morality often result in offences against the truth. Absolute truth and trustworthiness between spouses is essential to a successful family relationship, yet I am somewhat ambivalent about the wisdom of full disclosure to spouses of even the most innocent flirtation by the other. Spouses of both genders today often lead separate lives in business or profession for substantial portions of each day. In those other lives, uniquely close relationships between associates in those other worlds are easily formed. Sometimes they inadvertently result in “feelings” that could be thought of as treasonous to the spousal relationship. What is the essential truth in that situation? If the so-called guilty spouse blabs every detail of his other world to his family partner, that partner may conclude a hurtful breach of faith has happened. Consequences unintended by anyone could result. They could be terminal to an otherwise solid family relationship and ruin the lives of spouses, children, parents and friends. Does truth and trust always require full disclosure to be fair in that situation? I wonder.
I am left then, with a need to live by the truth when the avoidance of truth becomes ever more common in an increasingly secular society. In the rural and small town communities of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth Centuries, old Western religious values made it more difficult to conceal falsehoods. Major agreements could be sealed with a handshake, for a breach would easily become known and bring down the wrath of the community on the offender. Since then those earlier groupings have dispersed into an increasingly urbanized and fragmented society. Religious sanctions can no longer be taught to children in schools for fear of offending one or other of the many diverse religions to be found in our cities. The rearing and training of the next generation is left more and more to strangers, government support workers, television and the computer. Where then will we find the community to provide the essential ethical values without which a civilization cannot endure?
American and Canadian politicians and government agencies give a great deal of lip service to the question of values. Unfortunately there seems to be little consensus in our diverse cultural structure about what those values ought to be. In 1915, in the midst of the First World War, Sigmund Freud published his Thoughts On War And Death. I agree with the statement he made in that paper, when he said: “… our conscience is not the infallible judge that ethical teachers are wont to declare it, but in its origins is [dread of the community] and nothing else. When the community has no rebuke to make, there is an end of all suppression of the baser passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery, and barbarity so incompatible with their civilization that one would have held them to be impossible.”
The answer to our conundrum may well lie in the development of a new supplemental secular religion of humanity. Good deeds and positive values are not restricted to the practitioners of traditional religions. Despite often-conflicting passions among our diverse religions, I have noted there is general agreement among them on core ethical values including truth and honesty. I think every major religion subscribes to some version of what Christians call the Golden Rule.
In the twenty-first century, perhaps well-intentioned urban secularists will commune with the diverse cultural traditions in North America and come up with a compendium of such core values. Once such a standard is generally taught and accepted in every social grouping, our diverse cultural community would have a new common standard; it might again have “a rebuke to make” and thereby “suppress the baser passions” of its population even without the intervention of the politicians and their legislation. The time may be here for a new set of Ten Commandments.
