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”.
