felis_ultharus

So I'm very politically frustrated lately. The latest evil to come from the Harper regime was a couple of a tiny clauses embedded in an innocuous amendment to the income tax act called C-10 -- a resurrection of the bill from previous session known as C-33.

This ponderous bill should have triggered some suspicion because the 568-page amendment was stuffed like a turducken with amendments to close tax loopholes for corporations. A couple of tiny, vaguely-worded amendments, though -- separated by several pages -- clarify that the Heritage Minister has the right to refuse tax credit certificates to films that do not, in her judgement, suit government policy.

I'm not at all surprised that none of the opposition parties spotted them. I missed them several times searching for them -- they're on pages 352 and 356 of this document.

This detail only came to light after the bill had made its way halfway through the Senate. If it makes it through -- and the Senate only rejects a bill very rarely -- the Heritage Minister will essentially be able to decide which films get the tax credit and which don't. And since it's pretty much impossible to make a feature film in Canada without this tax credit, that amounts to deciding what films get made and what don't.

Fundamentalist Christians are already declaring victory. The rest of us are just waiting to see what the Harper government decides is acceptable art and what isn't.

I no longer want an election for this government. I want an exorcism.

A certain amount of fatalism is building up in regard to my exams -- I've hit a level of panic that prevents me from doing anything, and that means being even less prepared for my exam on Friday.

I've been poking around Wikipedia, and discovered to my chagrin that someone has added a very glurgy and highly biased piece at the end of the article I wrote about my hometown. I haven't altered the article, because I'm too new to Wikipedia to know how to go about cleaning it up.

This is actually part of a trend -- the whole Township of Esquimalt has sunk into a collective denial after the Reena Virk killing -- which happened a block from the house I grew up in, under the bridge I walked over to school -- and Nicholas Chow Johnson's murder.

Growing up, I saw a lot more violence than that in that town. So did everyone I knew. I'd say a good 99% of it went unreported, so it's not the kind of thing you can reference in a Wikipedia article.

But I probably knew more children being beaten by their parents than I knew kids who weren't. I spent grades 3 to 10 getting brutalized by classmates, and was getting death threats for being gay by grade 12. Bullying is rampant, and gangs have steadily gotten worse, more organized, and better armed.

There's a new anti-gang project there, but it's too soon to tell if it's effective. Everyone's already declaring victory, but the root problems are still there.

The boosterism disturbs me -- when I last tried to research crime and Esquimalt for my novel, almost no one was talking about the it.

Now it seems to be discussed all over the net, but mostly as a kind of weird public relations exercise where everyone invokes it to refuse to acknowledge it exists. The tone of the conversation is vaguely panicked and a little too enthusiastic -- like a pep rally where everyone's trying to ignore that the cheerleaders are dying one by one.

Since my novel deals so heavily with violence in that town, I can imagine how it'd be received there, if it's published and noticed. Obviously not well.

But I never believed that kind of PR is useful. Nothing changes until it's understood, and the mirror of art is the most useful route to that kind of understanding.

Esquimalt's problems go way beyond what a novel could do for it -- the poverty is problem number one, but in a neo-conservative society poverty is never seen as anything other than the result of laziness. But that's a different social problem to be addressed.

Beyond the poverty, art can help. Once the basic problems of food, clothing, and shelter are satisfied, a damaged society needs to remember and to reflect to heal. Art does that best.

Besides a novel can give a place a sense of its self -- a sense of its own existence. I doubt anything I'll write will be as good as Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'Occasion (The Tin Flute). But I'd like to think I could make a small contribution that way -- to help do for Esquimalt what she did for the St-Henri neighbourhood of Montreal by dealing head-on with its problems.

Maybe, at least, if Esquimalt had a sense of itself as anything other than an oubliette, people might stay and try to build a life there -- maybe its young people wouldn't look for a sense of self in gangs, or keep their heads down and flee into the world outside.

Timothy Findley said that novels and stories were a way "of singing our way out of darkness." I really believe that. I just hope someone hears the song, and understands.