Why I Cannot Bring Myself to Wear Flannel

The funny thing about being in Germany is that everyone treats me, a Canadian, as something rather special, even exotic.

As a Canadian, this is a profoundly unsettling experience. Maybe it's the constant taunting of drunken beer-bottle smashing Brits or navel-gazing imperialist Americans, but Canadians are more used to being respected diplomatically (well, at least until the current administration), while being snickered at culturally.

Anyway, it turns out that the Germans really think we're something special. I jokingly suggested that I should have worn a lumberjack shirt and a toque, and people thought that this would actually be a really great thing to see - a real Canadian, wearing real Canadian clothes. Also, I suggested I should have an axe - this they loved even more.

I suppose this is true - although I, like most Canadians, live in the thrall of urbanity, most of us cling to the quaint if not completely ridiculous notion that we, by virtue of being in a country with a lot of land, are somehow tied to the land in some mysterious way, even though we all pretty much are completely useless at looking after it in any meaningful way that might actually allow it to be there in oh say, 100 years. We aren't the least bit tied to the land except as consumers, and to be honest, the mythology itself is completely destructive and fraught with contradictions, but that's where we're at.

Anyway, a propos, this is my long preface to an fantastic essay at N+1 about flannel shirts. Enjoy!

What I am up to now

The War on Whatever isn't a Car

I have refrained, for the most part, from commenting on local politics, be they civic, provincial or federal, in part because my early experience as a blogger was in a political way, and I found most of these conversations to be time-consuming and pointless.

There were other reasons, mainly that I was in a job that prevented me from speaking about a lot of these things, and even though I'm out of that job, old habits die hard, and maybe I enjoy the troll-free (and I suppose, comment-free) solitude of this blog's current state.

That all being said, I would like to note to all the eternally red-faced members of "Ford Nation", the erstwhile, yet strangely anonymous supporters of our current right-wing millionaire mayor Rob Ford, that insofar as you are happy that the war on the car is over, you must be delighted to see that the war on any other mode of transportation is fully on.

I guess my own opinion on this matter is this - basically, if there are 60 people in a streetcar, and one person in a car, I believe that the car should have as difficult a time as possible to get to wherever they need to go in downtown Toronto. Rob Ford believes the opposite - he really does seem to think that if you got rid of all the streetcars and other things that get in the way of that lone driver, that magically the roads will clear up.

Except, obviously, the opposite will happen. More (unless gas prices keep rising) people will simply take their cars, and so instead of 60 people in a streetcar, you'll have 60 people in cars.
Here's some simple math for the citizens of Ford Nation - you think a single streetcar is a pain in the ass to get around as you gulp down your double double on the way to your soul-sucking job? How about 60 more cars on the road? That's like what, the length of 30 streetcars? Does this make any sense?

Now I'm sorry if this sounds patronizing, but I can't help it, it's just that this seems so obvious to me - if you take people out of public transit they still have to get to work, and they are left with two options - they either move closer to work or they drive. My guess is that many will, for lots of good reasons, choose the latter.

And what is really strange about this is that, as much as people dislike the TTC, what with all the crazy people and the jostling for a seat and the general rudeness, driving into downtown is a terrible, soul-sucking experience.

But such is the paradoxical world that we live in that, instead of many Torontonians looking at this and saying "how do we make this better for everyone", no, instead they decide that the best route is to pull everyone down with them.

All those angry, alienated people who voted for Ford, and his vaunted "respect" for taxpayers (not citizens of course), must have all peed their pants with joy finding out that, instead of using our precious, no sacred tax dollars on paying the people who pick up our garbage a good wage and good benefits, we are instead going to give our sacred tax money to the private sector, so they can turn those decently paid garbage workers into members of Ford Nation, that is, angry and alienated.

Then they too can direct their anger at their fellow workers and not at the people who actually profit off of them. All so that we don't have to worry about naughty labour getting all uppity and going on strike.

When it turns out that whatever company we give this money to ends up shafting its workers, or asking for more money, and it all winds up costing more (as it always does), Rob Ford, like his brethren, will just shrug his shoulders and remind people about how it somehow saved tax dollars, even if what saving dollars meant was really sacrificing the people who clean up your mess, day in, day out.

But our city has decided that these people aren't worth it, and so we have sold them off, just as we will now dismantle what little progress was made toward making downtown as uncomfortable for motorists as possible, because this would have meant the many were being served at the expense of the few, and not as it now stands, which is the other way around.

An Open Question

So in the bizarro world of Canadian politics, does Osama bin Laden's death mean that the Conservatives will get more seats today?

My guess is yes, or at least people will discuss it as a factor. You heard it here fist!

Ha!

From a Star article:

“Those here who remember the Liberal-NDP arrangement in the 1970s, remember how it took a generation to dig ourselves back out,” Harper said, referring to the minority government from 1972-74 led by then Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau with the support of David Lewis's New Democrats."

This is amazing to me. Here's a guy who was found in contempt of Parliament, and who has plunged Canada into 1970's-style defecits for uh, similar reasons, and he's asking people to remember 40 years ago how bad things were.

Except they weren't.

Strange

I said to someone a few days ago that what was happening in this federal election was starting to look a lot like Bob Rae's election in 1990.

It seems that this might actually be the case. I don't really know what to say except that nothing makes any sense! But maybe I should also say sorry for accusing Canadians of hating democracy, because their annoyance with politics seems to be turning into a desire to elect the one person who has been fairly positive during the campaign.

The question is whether or not Canadians actually know what the NDP stand for beyond "positivity". My guess is that, like Bob Rae in 1990, things could get very negative very quickly. But there's still a week left!

An Easter Tradition

For 10 years now...really wonderful stuff.

Canadians hate Democracy

At least that's how this reads to me. I mean, we have here a populace deeply frustrated and annoyed by elections. The fact that people have to go and spend 15 minutes voting seems to be such a terrible, difficult act, that they are prepared to reward the Conservatives for being in contempt of Parliament.

Ironically, it seems that their contempt reflects the contempt of enough Canadians to justify their re-election.

Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt

I was reading the last act of Faust II today (again), and I think I finally get it. I mean, kind of. There is so much here that really got to me this time, maybe because I'm a year older today. And I feel little need to editorialize here, I will let Goethe again speak for himself.

After so many lines where it seems that Faust is this remote figure, whose motivations often seem strange, he says the following near the end, before he dies:

I have run through the world, grabbed at
My lusts and dragged them by the hair
And left them lying when I wanted more,
And what I escaped I let them go.
All I have done is lust and do
And want again and so stormed through
My life with power; at first mightily great
But wisely now, now I deliberate.
I know the round earth well enough
And what's beyond, the view of it's blocked off.
The man's a fool who ogles over there
And dreams his kind inhabit the upper air.
Let him stand still and look around him here,
This world speaks to the man who stands four-square.
Why wander off into eternity?
He makes the things he knows his property.
So let him journey through his earthly day;
However haunted, still go on his way,
Onwards, to happiness and torment,
And never satisfied by any moment.

(From the 2009 Penguin translation of Faust II by David Constantine)

Resolutions

I made a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions this year.

One of the good reasons for making more than one is that you have more chances to actually succeed, which motivates doing more of them. Sounds counterintuitive, but it's true.

So far, I've only kept one of my resolutions, which was to quit my job. Yeah, I know that doesn't really sound like a resolution, but it was.

However, a lot of the other resolutions where the kinds of resolutions that are more things that I can look back at the end of this year and say, OK, I actually did that stuff. And for those, about half of them are well on their way to completion.

The rest, well...some of them were "if this happens then I can do this" resolutions. Does that make sense? Like if I had kept my job there would be some resolutions that would be flat out impossible? They are contingent on other things.

So yes, I am patting myself on the back a little, but ever mindful that something horrible could happen tomorrow that will throw them all off.

Actually, something horrible has happened. But I don't think I will blog about that for a while.

But at least I am blogging, right? Right? Hello?