The Power of the Hoi Polloi

Once upon a time before he was old, the old man read a book and saw a movie called The Razor’s Edge. It was written in the first person by Somerset Maugham about a young member of the wealthy American socialite elite who had experienced the horrors of the 1914-18 Great War. After returning to the socialite scene he told his possessive fiancé he needed time to travel and find out what life was all about, urging her to join him in that pursuit. She refused. He searched for the rest of his short life. Before it ended he came near to some meaning with some fatherly guru in the high Himalayas. Periodically Maugham himself would run into his hero (strangely, shortage of money never seemed to be a problem for Maugham or his heroes) and bring the reader up to date on the fascinating adventures of the man’s search. One scene of the movie seemed to be at a social function on the French Riviera. It provided the only line of dialogue from the movie I remembered ever after, when Maugham, looking around the cocktail party scene, told his protagonist “I hate the propinquity of the hoi polloi!” From time to time since then I found occasion to steal that line for my own purposes.

            I was reminded of the scene when I got a copy of Linda the Activist’s (see my recent post Portrait of an Activist) latest letter to the Catholic Teacher’s Association. The letter compliments the Association for being among increasing numbers of “intelligent advocates … taking steps to be proactive” about the wireless-in-schools issue. She followed that up, however, to take a stab at the hoi polloi with this: “Negative public and corporate reaction is, to me, astounding, as it tells us how very far behind the majority are in their awareness of this issue, and how far we have to go.  Also, how strong an ignorant stance can be, and how powerful money is in the big scheme of things.”

In her causes Linda has never been afraid to call a spade a spade, although she certainly knows that whatever her cause, calling the ignorant opposition ignorant is unlikely to win many of them over to her side of the issue. Still, I sympathize with her feelings and admire the strength of her commitments. There must be hundreds of examples of the ignorance of the powerful and the power of money and position in today’s current events. It has been so since the early days of recorded classical history and before, even among the ancient Peloponnesian gods!  A few current examples can be cited in this issue of the Post as they come to mind.

I cannot match Linda’s certainty as to the truth of facts or the righteousness of causes. She knows my disposition, age and condition prevent even a limited career of tilting at windmills. I think she still accepts me for what I am. I have considered my brief appearance on the planet a bit of an accident of nature. Often it is been a lonely struggle for survival and a search for kinship. For my puny efforts I got an overflow of good fortune in achieving that survival well beyond expectations as to quality and duration as outlined in a memoir appropriately called A Minority of One. I still claim to live in the best of times and the best of places on earth though my examples of current stupidity make me wonder how long they will last. At no time, however, did the old man have the strength, the chutzpah, the manipulative ability, the desire for prominence or the lack of inhibitions almost every teenager in today’s world seems to have. They perhaps can sustain such ongoing struggles for change.

Still, through this medium, the old man can sometimes release his inhibitions in spite of the possibility of post-publication ridicule! For me, the most obvious examples of stupidity among the rich and powerful can be observed on CNN almost daily in this American election year. Specifically, the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in the endless primary election process are almost frightening in their competition for the right to lead the world into the next one hundred years of war and destruction. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to call each other names, to spread lies and rumours about each other and to call the current commander in chief a complete disaster and worse. It is a wonder that some even more stupid religious nut of the ultra conservative right has not found a way to assassinate Obama in spite of his tight security! The only one of the four to sound half reasonable is the old man running on a libertarian anti-war platform. I agree with the man’s ideas of personal responsibility and freedom from government intervention in every aspect of life. Unfortunately, people are not ready for such freedom. The result would be anarchy even if ever achieved. Common sense tells the old man that whatever their intentions each candidate knows in his heart that he will have no better chance of “changing Washington” than did Barack Obama after his 2008 campaign.

A few more examples of what I consider ignorance in power can be seen in the Canadian political environment. I have generally supported the conservative right side of our broad spectrum in the hope of weaning an ever more demanding and dependent population from the notion that any particular government in power, federally and provincially, is somehow responsible for everything that goes wrong in the life of any individual resident. Whatever party rules, however, each insists on the righteousness of ever increasing rapidity of growth. Whatever happened to Small Is Beautiful? Harper’s new Conservative majority is no different than any of the more leftist parties. None believe it would be good to “conserve”. If global warming is accepted as a fact, we must exploit, use, extract, develop, and sell all the goodies revealed by the rapidly receding ice. Thus we must dig up all the miles of muck known as the Athabaska Tar Sands to make oil so we can supply the world with ever more pollution.  To do so we must use more and more fresh water, a resource much more precious and critical to life on the planet than the few re-usable hydrocarbons gleaned from the oil sands. Wars may well be fought this century over access to potable water.

A related Canadian example of stupidity in power has to do with the current environmental assessment hearings on the viability of the Harper government’s proposed pipeline to send the half treated oil sands product through the mountains for shipment by sea to China. After the staggering financial cost of extracting and treating the product in Alberta, the investors must have their pound of flesh whether it gets sold to Americans or Chinese. From my own less than scientific assessment, both options south and west are undesirable. Furthermore, it seems to me inevitable that the combined pipeline and tanker option will be the cause of any number of monumental environmental disasters, whatever the government eventually decides, environmental hearings notwithstanding.

All I have left to say is, Let it be in the hands of the gods and not in the hands of the hoi polloi!

Portrait of an Activist

The old man is blessed with a number of fascinating relatives. One of them is a niece called Linda. In recent years I have dubbed her The Activist. She is a mid-generation Baby Boomer born about a quarter century after the old man.

Unfortunately Linda inherited a certain determined and very private individualism and a congenital heart condition from the old man’s family. Much more fortunately she got her talent, intellect and positive personality from her father!

Linda’s mother and the old man, who was the baby of his generation, had an always loving but often disapproving-of-each-other sibling relationship. Partly that was because of their age difference. In spite of that the old man eventually gained some maturity as did the relationship, which soon included Linda’s father, the old man’s wife and then Linda herself. Linda’s father brought a new, different and rather exciting dimension to the old man and his whole family.

That persisted for some four short years until the old man decided to leave the coastal environment to begin his own struggle for upward mobility. They lost touch except for occasional visits, even after the old man decided to return to the gentle valley of his childhood in the frustrating pursuit of impossible dreams beyond his capacity. He found his older sibling still beautiful but with only a shadow of her vibrancy. Linda suddenly lost her mother to heart disease when she was just eight.

While the old man became ever more absorbed in his personal, family, professional and community struggles, Linda grew up under her father’s guidance, developed many friendships and a new generational sophistication. We saw her periodically in family group settings and while visiting her father but learned little of her complexity and achievements until the old man’s later retirement. In the meantime she had taken voice training at the university, travelled Europe by car with a friend of many years, took teacher’s training and taught school for many years. Linda had a special bent for taking up causes, certain she would make a difference and make the world a better place. Somewhere along the line, though, she was diagnosed with the heart disease that seems to affect many of the females in the old man’s family. She suffered through a number of surgeries, developed a super-sensitivity to electro-magnetic radiation and after years of disability finally accepted early retirement from the teaching profession.

For a number of years now Linda has made the anti-wireless, anti-WiFi and more recently the anti-Smart Meter causes [Linda is the one with the glasses shown in the photo above] into completely absorbing, totally demanding causes while the old man cautioned her to take it easy in what seems a losing cause in our time. Ever ready to help others, including the old man with his aging problems, Linda has not slowed down.

In early February the old man, along with many others, got e-mail notice that Linda, who lives alone, had been roused by friends sufficiently to admit them and get her to hospital. Her childhood friend of so many years was kind enough to call the old man later the next day to provide a few details.

Since then the old man has heard that after a few days of observation, Linda has returned to her home under the care of her friends and according to visitors who saw Linda during her hospital stay, Linda is her bright and cheerful self.

Through all this trauma and clan gathering, the old man has been his usual contrarian self. He has made no effort to visit, sent no flowers or get-well cards, totally intent on giving her time to heal, stay as quiet as possible, and get a clean bill of health. Then, lo and behold, a mass mailing e-mail arrived from Linda in the old man’s Inbox this morning urging him to sign another community’s anti-Smart Meter petition on behalf of Citizens for Safe Technology. Linda seems to be back at work!

Though the old man and his spouse of nearly 63 years have not told her so privately, they wish to tell her in this sometimes public way that they both love her dearly and that she is proving once again that she truly is Linda the Activist with a capital “A”. No matter where they are positioned in her personal universe or whether they agree with her personal decisions or not, for them Linda will always be on the side of the angels!

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Aging Security

In his dim and distant politically active past the old man has variously supported the Conservatives (of whatever name) and the Liberals. In Canada that has really meant a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as our Socialists (of various names) have charged. In our parliamentary system my reason for the variety had more to do with what I considered necessary periodic changes in the ruling dictatorships than any real hope of changing the national trends and goals in our country’s practice of the art of the possible.

     Since the advent of the first of our species during and after the glacial periods, the developing body politic of this continent, including the part that became Canada, has been fractured. The arrival of the French, the English, the Scots and the Irish, not to mention the earlier Iberians and later Africans and Asians, encouraged more tribalism and division. Electoral policies since World War 2 have catered to that division in Canada's large national area to make it even more ungovernable that it was in the century before.

The old man has been known to rail against multiculturalism, against the codification of “rights and freedoms”, against multiple citizenship possibilities, against capital punishment, and against many of the equalizing policies that have created so many dependencies in Canada, Europe and even in the United States to the point that they exceed government ability to collect and pay their costs. The most nonsensical part of these policies is the universality aspect of them.

     In this piece the old man’s contrariness again rears its head because of the furor caused by Prime Minister Harper’s casual comments at the Davos economic forum in Switzerland that his government would have to take steps to change our pension system. I assume he did that deliberately from the European context to get the furor started at home early in his new majority mandate. If one listens to the talking heads on television and reports from pension recipients and the parliamentary opposition, it is apparent that Harper is now exercising his Machiavellian secret agenda to eviscerate the “poor” for the benefit of his banking and oil company friends. God knows what other secrets may be found out before he completes his four year majority.Perhaps even some of his back benchers are worried lest their overly-generous pensions after retirement or defeat should be tampered with?

     I say such an overhaul is long overdue! Take the Old Age Security Pension, which is sufficient to express my contrariness here. First let me confess in retrospect that throughout my working years I expected that by the time I retired all the contributions I made to the welfare programs in taxes and assessments would be exhausted by payments to those already retired, and no pensions would be available for me. However, when I did retire at nearly age 57 for health reasons, I took into account the various programs then still available including Old Age Security at age 65 for  both my wife (25 days younger than I am) and me. The monthly CPI indexed cheques have been hitting our bank account for 20 years since then!

     Now I know the government did not force me to apply for OAS when I reached 65, but at the time we felt sufficiently insecure to apply. And how many who are already millionaires at 65 do you know who fail to do so? It is also true that our stay-at-home life style and depression born frugality has stayed with us. We could manage for the rest of our limited presence here without that pension. Perhaps we could terminate the entitlement before we die but when we consider the consequences of opening that particular can of worms, we decide to leave it closed.

     There is absolutely no reason why the already wealthy should be entitled to the extra windfall. Though it may never be politically possible and will not be in Harper’s time, the old man has always believed such payments should be means tested, not universally awarded.

     Furthermore, extending the eligibility date from age 65 to age 67 is simply a matter of keeping up with the times. Life expectancy has increased more than 2 years since the age 65 retirement date was set. Most healthy individuals at age 65 would actually prefer to keep on working as long as they can and many do so even after applying for the pension entitlement. Others strike out in new and perhaps even more strenuous undertakings and sometimes start new businesses. Most of us would prefer to continue with an expertise in regular work environments and routines. There is no reason why we should not continue to contribute for two more years to make the funds available more viable for pensioners getting in line at 67.

     It is a fact that the universality principle has already been tampered with by establishing Old Age Security Supplements and other adjustments for the poor and some manner of clawing back the taxable OAS from the wealthy, though I have not looked into the status of that in current tax law. Why not simply use the tax returns to index the amount of the pension cheque at both ends of the spectrum, sending a larger amount to those below a certain proven income and sending none at all to those above a maximum proven income? Surely some computer whiz civil servant could design a program to simplify the tax form and accomplish that result.

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A Puzzling Problem

The old man is troubled! As one of his usual rituals designed to keep the “little grey cells” functioning, the old man has been working crossword puzzles for many years. In more recent years after working on simpler theme puzzles, he started working the Herald Tribune’s more difficult Challenging Puzzles books, which normally begin with the easier daily puzzles, then graduate to increasingly longer and more obscure subject matter in the Sunday Morning, Sunday Brunch, and Super Sunday puzzles.

Each puzzle lists solving times for Ace, Sharp, and Good solvers, none of which I seem able to achieve as yet, nor have I been able to solve completely all the Super Sunday puzzles without looking up the answers for a few vacancies that seem insoluble before I lose interest. I have persuaded myself that the reason is not my stupidity but the leisurely, unfocused manner of completion between bites of breakfast and drinks of coffee, sometimes while watching the morning news. My failure to become an Ace did not disturb me. That was not the problem.

Then, a week or so ago, I reached one of the last ten or so of the Super Sundays nearing the end of the 70 puzzles in the book. I though I had done well enough considering that the clues included some very obscure novelists, artists, rock groups and so on, none of which have been part of my experience. I found the new start difficult but eventually I achieved what I considered were likely correct answers. However, one clue for a long vertical word combination or phrase left me totally confused. The clue, as I recall it, was “Having the quality of being empty.” The answer, as I remembered it a number of puzzles later, took up all or nearly all of the 23 or so vertical spaces beginning with space 3 or 4 of horizontal line 1. Although I had missed many of the cross letters of the first 4 or 5 horizontal lines, I did fill in many of the lower ones but still I made very little sense of what was to be the “quality of being empty”. Eventually I just guessed at and filled in a word that spelled out something like “unininitionalabilitation”, which was still obviously not correct as it did not satisfy the requirements of all the involved horizontal words. Finally I looked up the answer at the back of the book. It turned out to be something like, “inanitionalabilitation”, which reminded me of have sometime in my experience seen the word “inanition” which I then found definitions for in Webster. The remainder of the compound word I figured was the puzzle writer’s made up addition having to do with “having the quality of”. Having then completed the puzzle to my satisfaction after finishing my breakfast coffee, I discussed the uniqueness of the compound word with my wife and both of us wondered at the gall of the puzzle writer to include such an impractical word in the puzzle.

That whole described event is still not the old man’s problem. The difficulty lies in the fact that several days, perhaps a week after the event, I was unable to find any evidence that the event ever took place. What happened? Was the whole thing one of my half asleep early morning fantasy events? Was it all a real dream? Was it something that happened many puzzle books ago? Did it happen to me in another lifetime? Or are the synapses in the frontal cortex of my brain no longer properly synchronized? Is the event actually a symptom of some form of dementia? You see, that short period after the event, the memory of the strange made up word stayed with me. I decided to go back to that recently completed puzzle to confirm the exact wording of the clue, and the completed word I filled into the puzzle with many inked corrections in evidence, just to see if I could make up a sentence using that word. I could find neither. I spent hours, days in fact, scouring that puzzle book from beginning to end. I scanned through almost every clue in the book, examined the face of the completed puzzles and the answer pages too! I can find no such clue, no such filled in puzzle, no such answer at the back of the book. My wife remembers no such conversation with me. She has even helped me go through the book itself in case I missed it in my repeated scans.

I have tried to forget the puzzling problem by finishing the last three Super Sunday puzzles. I have one left to do. Will the problem then go away? Or will it continue to disturb me, as being just another indication that the old man is indeed getting old?

A 2011 Christmas

The old man pleads age, health, failing grey cells and other distractions that led to disinclination as the cause of his abbreviated snail mail card list this year. He and the old lady, the light of his life, have for many years observed the Christmas tradition mainly by sending cards and notes to those who are important to us. This year we started late as usual, responded to the few already received and left the rest to the old man as they came to him.

It is now Christmas Eve. It strikes me that this medium might catch the attention of a few that I missed on my list, some we will still send private notes to, as well as others who were on my list, and everyone else who may happen upon The Old Man's Post. Perhaps you would allow me to add a special note or two:

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  To a thoughtful church couple from the past: Thank you for again remembering us with your Christmas Reflections, which we received just yesterday. Please know that we share with you the "momentous dimension" of your personal sorrow. A brief but more private response is on the way.




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  To the old man's activist niece, Linda: But we can print your "virtual card", feel it and display it--if we had a mantel. As for your "Christmas Memory" of Peter, I think we might have received his 1957 silk-screened card in Regina and if we did Shirley still has it squirreled away somewhere. I cannot believe the Patience and skill involved. He wasn't doing that process when he often "baby-sat" this somewhat self-centred and pompous 21 year-old wannabe college kid in his home studio, patiently explaining and demonstrating his detailed preparation while he went about his work, listening to me, listening to the old 78's and sometimes humming along. We are especially grateful this year for your thoughtful Christmas Greetings!




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  To the old man's Pennsylvania cousin who still lives in Bethlehem: Thanks for sharing your age seven Christmas 1952, Ron. Before you consider the need to atone for your failure to share with them your family Christmas time of warmth, wonder and joy with less fortunate pals of the day you should ask yourself this. Where are they now? Your opportunity to be a childhood hero to your friends is gone, cousin. Besides, no matter their family situations then, they very likely rose above the dysfunctional families and lack of resources and did very well. At the same time, I look at what was your mother's situation at her age seven in 1922, just 30 years earlier. Her family may not have been dysfunctional that year but it had no resources at all to speak of. They spent that Christmas in a European refugee camp on their flight from oppression. She did fine in spite of, or because of that and created that family warmth for you in those next 30 years. I won't bore you with my own age 7 Christmas 1934 not far from where I sit right now. ..... Thanks for your greetings, Ron! By the time you complete your contemplated move in 2012, Shirley and I will complete 85 years of our lives and 62 years of marriage. We are still hoping for better health to come. We are, however, already into Shakespeare's sixth age having shifted this year into "the lean and slipper'd pantaloon". (From "As You Like It", the "All the world's a stage" speech). May you enjoy all your "interesting times" to come and never slip into "sedate deportment".

Unfortunately, that exhausts the old man's stamina this Christmas Eve, though I hope to copy this special issue of the Post" directly to others who know by now they missed his list. To each may I say:

May your Christmas be bright,

May it bring your heart's delight,

May next year be full of light

and each day end just right!

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Colourful Reflections Re-Visited

The old man is a creature of Canada’s west coast. Reared and in his early years restricted in large part to the Fraser Valley, the realities of the rest of Canada were largely unknown. Though he had briefly explored the washboard gravel of Canada’s cross country highway in the forties through the Fraser Canyon and east as far as Armstrong with the family Model A, the wonders of the Rockies and the Prairies were yet to be discovered.
So when my favourite Facebook “friend” from Saskatchewan admired my colours in the last issue of the Post and complained about the cold, the snow and the drab foliage of his town, I decided to show him at left above, the change to BC drab just five days later.
The comparisons reminded me of my first experience of the Prairies when I took a job in the oil patch there after completing my schooling in 1952. My wife and I travelled coach class by CPR and arrived exhausted and dishevelled at the Revelstoke stop by morning in time to see the glories of the Rockies. As we left Banff and rode through the foothills into Calgary I had my first experience of what, at first, looked like a barren and empty land. The western Alberta ranch country reminded me of the sagebrush country I had seen in the forties around Kamloops. Approaching Calgary the horizon stretched out to encompass flatter grass lands and periodic grain fields being readied for planting. That was my first view of “the prairies”.
My seven years on the prairies gave me a certain hypnotic attachment to the romance of the big open sky. I found the excitement and electricity of sudden storms, the mystery of the cloud formations at dusk, and the boredom of mile after mile of flat, dusty road as I drove through the barren looking countryside. I experienced the loneliness across the vast night plain interrupted only by a lone hunting hawk flashing through the headlights until all at once the lights of a town or city twinkled in the distance. That sensation then reminded me nostalgically of leaning dreamily over the deck railing on one of the Union Steamship vessels late at night as the captain guided it toward the cluster of lights along the waterfront of a small port along the inland passage of BC.
The Prairies are different now, of course. Still, in the fifties we found the people of the plains more purposeful and alive than the people at the coast, and usually less worried looking. My lovely Fraser Valley environment sometimes breeds lethargy when compared to the vibrancy found on the prairies. Enjoy the vibrancy, kids!

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The Colours of November

The colours of November shown here represent the ending of another cycle in the wonderful world of nature here on Canada’s south-western Pacific coast. In other ways they represent the continuing cycle of the terrible world of politics. Here at home, November brings the bi-annual cycle of urban and rural municipal and regional district politics. In the States November is the month of many national and state elections in what appears to have become a continuing cycle of campaigning for power or raising money by political professionals. There is no obvious connection between the two, you say? But we find civic elections here at the coast in Canada dominated by local versions of New York’s Occupy Wall Street protest movement. That has become, at least for now, an international protest movement inevitably linked to the upcoming American November 2012 presidential and congressional elections.
Almost exactly two years ago, the old man published his then reflections on the state of Canadian and American politics. Obama had been president less than a year then. Since then we have seen many natural, economic and political disasters, especially in the States but with global effect. Has anything really changed since then in the way our Western democracies govern their societies? In part I reflected those two years ago:

In the States President Obama too is becoming a toothless tiger as ruler of the White House. No matter what his good intentions as a candidate, he is still a prisoner of the system. On domestic and economic matters he must rely on advisors he chose, all establishment figures in finance, public relations and politics, and pushed one way and another, he must opt for a decision, usually a compromise, which he must then try to sell to the body politic. As he nears the end of his first year in office, it is unlikely that anything approaching a successful health plan will take effect. Many of his economic and finance advisors are products of the banks and organizations who caused the near Depression in the first place, and as yet there is no indication that his government will come up with any way of bringing Wall Street under any reasonable control.

Today, Obama’s health plan, which the Republicans have vowed to squash, is scheduled for testing by the U.S. Supreme Court, with numerous States questioning its constitutionality. The recession, though declared over some time ago, seems to be over only for the Wall Street banks and investment houses bailed out by the government to prevent a depression. Joblessness continues disastrously high. Foreclosures are going on apace. Homelessness is getting worse. European economics are in deep trouble. The Middle East is in turmoil. The American national debt has just exceeded 15 trillion dollars. The many Republican presidential candidates, most of them revealing their total ignorance of practical affairs, think nothing of advocating pre-emptive military action against Iran for pursuing its nuclear program.
The insanity goes on, much as it has done from the beginning. Right now, I am in the process of reading Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil. In many respects the left-wing protest groups ranging from Wobblies to Bolsheviks to Anarchists of countless variety, each group sure it had the only answer and fighting with the others while oil capitalists were making Harding president, were doing the same thing in 1920 as the many uncoordinated groups forming the Occupy Wall Street protesters are doing today. Will they turn out to be just as useless?
Who knows? If all the veterans returning from the many distant countries left damaged and unemployed join their ranks, they might affect the body politic as did the anti-war protesters of the sixties. Would that improve the welfare of America’s 300 million plus population? I doubt it. What it could do, if successful, is change the life of what has been the individualistic American’s dream to become a capitalist, to one of dependence on the social collective. In the end such a collective is bound to live well beyond its means through years of consumption, only to find grief that comes when the piper must be paid. That is really the case with social welfare Europe as it gropes for answers today.
The old man has no answer. Our politicians and economists have no answer. Our species has obviously not evolved into cooperative individuals. I’m afraid we will always consist of the haves and have-nots, the leaders and followers, the good and the bad, the wise and the stupid, and nowadays the many that just want to consume and have a good time, and let tomorrow or the government look after the rest.
In the meantime, let the old man continue to enjoy the disaster-free colours of nature in my pleasant part of the universe for as long as I have left.

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