felis_ultharus

Quiet weeks. Lots of work, lots of writing. There is an election going on, but I've been working on it a lot less than I expected.

(There's only so much a person with problems with strangers and crowds can do for an election campaign. I've hung a few signs, done a little data entry, vacuumed a campaign office - and that's it so far.)

We're once again going to the polls to see if we can dislodge he worst prime minister we've ever had. The polling stats for the different parties are roughly where they were last time, though there are so many close races that a few numbers one way or the other can make a lot of difference.

I'm really hoping that non-voters will get more engaged, or that Harper will make some misstep that finally defeats them - though given all he's already done, it's hard to imagine what that would be.

In other election news, a CBC show this morning discussed scientific evidence that people vote more based on a politician's looks than their ideas. Anyone who thinks that applies to Canada has never seen photos of our leaders.

Those who follow me on Facebook know already - the deed is done. Today I sent my novel out again to the editor who liked the premise when I sent it out the first time. I have been revising it for one year and two weeks.

Tomorrow I begin the outline of a (third) second novel. I figure it's good to several on the go. Today I'm vegging in Vana'diel - though I did more than my quota this morning, so I don't feel guilty.

I miss seeing friends, though.

What else? I just finished a scary exposé on the religious right in Canada - The Armageddon Factor by Marci McDonald. I thought I was prepared for it, but I hadn't realised how far they'd gone in taking over our judiciary, in founding a parallel education system so their kids won't be infected by Canadian values like tolerance, and are re-writing the history books so that Canada was always an evangelical nation betrayed by secularism.

And we've always been at war with Oceania. It sounds like conspiracy theory, but her credentials are solid and her sources are sound. And I've seen enough close up that I can believe what I haven't seen.

So I'm a bit more melancholy than I would normally would be on a day when I've gotten one large step closer to achieving my dream.

There's more to say than could be said about what happened in Toronto this week. It was revolting what happened to Canadian citizens on Canadian soil. I've seen police brutality close up, of course there was Quebec 2001. But never anything on this scale, never anything so blatant. And never has so much been captured on camera before for us to see.

There's so much I could link, and did on Facebook - which itself was a small fraction of the evil perpetrated there. And let's not mince words or hide behind euphemisms. This was evil. You know it by the awful feeling in your gut when you watch it.

Two things were more haunting for me than anything else - for others too, clearly, as they've gone viral. The first is Tommy Taylor's powerful account on Facebook of his arrest. The other is this moment of peaceful protesters being attacked while they sing "O Canada." This is now my favourite rendition of our national anthem, and the only one that stirs my patriotism:



Yet 73% of the country think the police did a good job. And that's way too high for the right-wing nutjobs in this nation - after all, only 39% voted for Harper.

I wondered how could anyone think that? How could that be thought after the bloodied journalists and the trapped activists singing hippie protest songs bloodied by batons? While other pictures show police standing by and looking bored while anarchists - in suspiciously new brand-name black clothing - break windows and set fire to police cars?

How could they read the descriptions of the 40-person cages full of peaceful protesters and random passersby (tourists who are never coming back here again) as they stood up for 16, 18, 24 hours with nothing more than a dixie cup or two of water and a toxic sandwich, and not be sickened?

How do they rationalize the targeting of gays, and anyone who spoke French? The lies the police told? The officer who threatened a journalist with rape? The tasering of a man with a pacemaker, the abuse of a man with cerebral palsy? How do they justify the scale - the camera panoramas that show it wasn't just "a few bad apples"?

Then I realized they didn't need to, because they didn't see it and they didn't read it. It's not in their world.

"Two solitudes" is our favourite cliché. It applies here. Not English or French, or central Canada and the rest. Not even the suited men (and one two women) in the conference and the people outside, though there it applies better. In this country, those who got the story mostly through old media and those who got it mostly through new media are the two solitudes. They got two different narratives.

Old media wasn't always awful. The Toronto Star got it right from the first days. CBC and the Globe & Mail - our two great bastions of old media - got better after day one. Even the National Post worked up some outrage.

Most failed absolutely, though. Just a guy breaking a window and a couple of burning police cars. That was the story. While we new media types saw the unedited footage of bloodied innocents and unprovoked assaults, for most old media it was just a story of hooligans captured.

We say that we "consume" old media and "use" new media. But that's simplistic. Both get used, both get consumed. But who does the using, and who the consuming?

The old media moguls make a big show of using new media. They can tweet, they can post to YouTube, they can set up a Facebook account. But they still imagine themselves as the talkers, with others as listeners. They still aren't listeners themselves, which was painfully obvious on the CBC's and Globe's first day of coverage - until journalists they knew were hit. They still don't believe that non-journalists have something worth saying.

I think the violence and horror will probably be one of the defining moments of our generation. That may sound bombastic, but ask someone who was a teen or twentysomething in the Sixties how many hippies they knew - the answer is probably zero, though they now define the era.

But I also think this will be one of the moments where we look back and say, "That was a nail in the coffin of old media." It was one of those moments we called "watershed" when we can easily visualize a gradual change.

No, I won't be cutting this one. I don't want this one to be optional.

About a decade ago, I paid a visit to the Allan Memorial Institute - a psychiatric hospital where a friend of mine was being kept against his will. His parents had him committed. We snuck in to perform a Pagan ritual to mark the beginning of spring, which involved sneaking a ceremonial sword called an athame into his room. We made a little bit of sacred space in that ugly spot.

For anyone who's never seen the Allan Memorial, it's an imposing, grim building. It's a stone mansion up on a hill whose original owner named it Ravenscrag. It looks like the kind of building that would be haunted in a Gothic novel.

I didn't know anything about the building's history then. I'd never heard about MKUltra, and the now well-documented "Sleep Room" experiments. But if Naomi Klein is right, much of the uglier aspects of the modern world was born in that mansion on a hill in Montreal.

( Review of The Shock Doctrine continues )

In short, highly recommended.

In more personal news, I know I need a vacation when I almost use the word "embiggens" in a student's English report card.

Anyone worried about the religious right in the US (or elsewhere) - or who's ever wondered where America's frequently evil foreign policy comes from - should read this old interview with Jeff Sharlet, the journalist who's done more than anyone to expose the activities of a Christian fundamentalist group known simply as The Family.

These are the same people who are responsible for the extreme anti-gay initiatives in Uganda right now.

It makes me wonder if Stephen Harper has connections to the family. Anyone who doesn't think Christianism hasn't deeply infiltrated Canada should read this article I put up here last year.

This is stuff everyone should know.

It's been a good week. montrealais is back from Europe. Tickets to Tori arrived in the mail -- thank you em_fish! Elections Canada is on my back about Ts someone else forgot to cross, but I think that's going to work out.

Writing is on schedule, too. My goal is to send this monster out no later than the first week of September. I was kind of wonder if those who have a copy of version six had a chance to read it yet..? If not, it's fine. I was just curious.

Also, every Canadian or Canadian aspirant needs to listen to this podcast. It's about Canada, and the First Nations, and who we are. And it's classic Saul -- brilliant ideas in plain English, with humour and with no punches pulled.

In case Canadians were wondering what their government was up to lately when they're not removing pay equity legislation or trying to put an end to environmental assessments, I can tell you. Well, the answer is Stephen Harper has been making appointments.

This year, he made Darryl Reid, ex-head of Focus on the Family -- one of Canada's nastiest anti-gay and anti-feminist organizations -- his top advisor in the PMO.

Last October he appointed Gary Goodyear as the country's Minister of Science and Technology. This year, rumours started circulating that he was, in fact, a creationist. When the question was put to him directly, Goodyear dodged it, and instead talked how he was a Christian and sceptical of some areas of mainstream science.

Goodyear's appointment comes with a round of cutbacks to the sciences, at a time when we're desperately trying to get the information we need to fight global warming. Not surprising from a man who probably thinks the earth is only 6000 years old.

At the same time, over at the Immigration and Refugee Board -- the one-person show notorious for its treatment of gays and lesbians seeking refugee status -- Harper has just appointed one of the country's leading homophobes, Mr. "The Church's Free Speech is Under Attack From Gay Activists" Doug Cryer.

Meanwhile, Stockwell Day -- the government's loudest fundamentalist and vocal creationist -- has been moved from his Public Security portfolio to Minister for International Trade. I guess his plan to protect Canada in the event of a dinosaur attack is fully in place, as well as measures to prevent any terrorist interference in the Rapture.

He now has the authority to cut off trade relations with Malbolgia and Caina, and work toward establishing them with the Primum Mobile and Empyrean.

Politics

Well, it's been quite a week. Harper's bought himself some time, but at a massive cost of credibility. Ontario's economy is getting worse and Quebeckers are disillusioned. You don't take power in this country without the two most-populated provinces.

It's too sdoon to tell for sure, but I'm trying to keep optimistic. The Liberals are trying to push Dion off the plank faster than before, for having committed the sin of poor video editing and failure to hire a decent courrier service. I really hope that decent judgement prevails on their part, or that Michael Ignatieff suddenly shaves his head, renounces the world, and runs off to a Buddhist monastery in Laos or something like that.

Meanwhile, Martha Hall-Findlay said on CBC's The House that this last week Conservatives have been offering highly-illegal bribes to Liberals to get them to cross the floor.

If the Liberals don't pull a David Emerson en masse, and don't chicken out, Harper's lost. And if they do, it's hard not to imagine the Liberal Party getting wiped out in favour of the NDP next election. They'd have no money, no trust from the public, no common principle to rally around. In some ways, this really is their last chance.

Poor Dion. I feel sorry for the guy -- he was the best of the three presented at the last Liberal leadership convention. And frankly, I wonder if the pundits have it backwards and he prevented an even greater collapse of the Liberal Party than would've happened under Ignatieff or Rae.

So, yeah -- in political news, the government might fall on Monday.

The reason? The Harper government decided to do what did all last session -- throw nauseating things like banning government worker strikes and starving the opposition parties for cash -- into a budget. They figured that since a budget is a confidence motion and voting against causes the government to fall, they could force the Liberals to go along.

They badly miscalculated, though. See, the NDP and Bloc would have voted against it anyway, but they finally pushed the Liberals too far. Voting for the budget would be an act of suicide for the Liberal Party.

So what happens now? Either Harper backs down, or the government falls. Normally that means an election, but since we just had it, our governor general can use one of her "reserve powers," and give the opposition parties the chance to form a coalition.

So on Monday, we could have a new prime minister. Or an election. Or maybe Harper will learn how to back down and eat crow, but I suspect that's the least likely of all possibilities.

So today's the eve of the American election. I guess that means that obsession will be over for me, but Quebec's government is expected to call a general election tomorrow.

After that, there won't be an election for me to obsess over until the Montreal elections in late 2009, unless one level of government falls in the meantime.

Obama's grandmother died yesterday. The fact that creepy Republicans conspiracy theorists are coming out of the wordwork and screaming that Obama killed her to cover up something related to his birth certificate just makes me like them even less -- and I didn't think that was possible.

John McCain, meanwhile, was born in a place that isn't even American territory anymore (Panama Canal Zone) and you don't see anyone trying to get him disqualified.

Meanwhile, many blogs and newspapers are carrying a story in their man-bites-dog sections about a witch doctor neighbour of Obama's other grandmother who cast the bones to predict and Obama victory.

Kenya and witches have been coming up a lot this election -- even more than lipstick on pitbulls and pigs. First it was Sarah Palin belonging to a witch-hunting church, and crediting her Alaska gubernatorial victory to a prayer from Kenyan witch hunter Thomas Muthee. Their church claims to fight witchcraft with miraculous effects brought about by prayer.

I wonder if Muthee and Radima have ever met? Probably not, but it would be interesting. Maybe the American election should be determined by an anime-style, apocalyptic battle of magic between the two.

Hell, it makes about as much sense as the electoral college system.