An Advisory

Things will probably continue to be slow around here until at least May, unless I, out of a sense of self-destructiveness, decide that regular blogging is more important than the other things I should be doing.

Alternatively, it might start again because I actually desperately need to be writing something.

Toronto's Best Mexican Food!

Is supposedly in Parkdale, at a restaurant run by someone who spent a year cooking Mexican food at a really good Mexican restaurant in Chicago, and also worked at the Black Hoof, where they slice meat better than anyone else in the city.

Now maybe I'm just cynical, but it seems odd that in a city as big and diverse as Toronto, that the best Mexican restaurant here really means "best Mexican restaurant owned and operated by white people for white people to not feel like they are at an "ethnic" restaurant".

The charitable person should be asking me why I think someone from Mexico has to be better at cooking Mexican food, but that's not really my point, rather that this restaurant is designed for a group of people who fail to see what a ridiculously overblown statement that is.

For the Safety of All!

Well, it seems that the Occupy protests are "wrapping up" now, by which I mean that people who imagined the possibility of a participatory, deliberative and caring society, are being forcibly disabused of that notion, mostly by state force.

This way, they can go back to being part of a society that, after the massive police occupation that was the Toronto G20, went and voted the embodiment of that occupation into power as Mayor.

This image to me, from Occupy Wall Street, really encapsulates similar attitudes here in Toronto, as well as the pure joy a lot of people I know seemed to get from hearing that the protesters last year at the G20 were being kettled, beaten and arrested:

I mean, there you have it, an enraged cop, fist clenched, and a cowering protester. Rejoice my friends, you can rest easy now, knowing that small parks that you never spent any time in have now been forcibly liberated for the safety of all! You can just see the look on his face, his righteous anger in helping ensure that you don't have to think about why they don't have a clear, succinct message, or television ads explaining things to you.

I cannot recall if I've said it on this blog before, but Canadians, with the exception of Quebecois, are a colonial people, who have little appetite for the kind of democracy that the Occupy movement signified, one that expected something of its citizens, an active engagement in the world and how it is run.

I mean, this is a province that overwhelmingly rejected a more proportional form of government in favour of our useless first part the post system. I was a civil servant at the time, and remember speaking with other bureaucrats, people who worked in government everyday, who were going to vote against it because it seemed like it was going to be "too complicated" for them. It's not just that they didn't understand it, it's that they couldn't be bothered to even try to understand it, like it was wasting their time. Democracy, that is.

I can only hope that this might change one day, but today, of all days, does not seem like that one day.

One Day

One day, not only will I write again, in the way I imagine I used to write, but I will also want to write again.

That day is not today, but it feels much closer. There's no special reason for this, nor any special event. Just the desire to write again, no longer deep in the ground, but just beneath the surface.

This space, which has gone from arts, to philosophy, to German, and lately, uh, to Rob Ford, has been nothing but a good thing for me, and I see no reason why it should stop, unless the people at blogger decide that I should begin to pay large sums of money for the privilege.

So although the posting is sparse, the end is nowhere year. This space is no longer a project with an end date.

Shifting Priorities

For some reason, I was thinking about the whole thing that happened back in the 1960's, when the Americans put a bunch of men on the moon and the Soviets did other cool stuff like that.

As a child, I grew up thinking that by the time I was an adult, we would be able to travel to the moon. I mean, at the rate things were going, back in the 1970's, this seemed plausible.

So why is it that we live in a society where my cell phone has more computing power than Apollo 11, but we can not only no longer afford to put people in space, but we can't even really pay for schools and roads anymore, mainly because people would prefer to own their own mini bar fridges.

I say this because, as far as I can tell, even super wealthy western nations back in the 1960's were still, relatively speaking, quite a lot poorer than those same societies today. Except now there's no money for anything ever.

Am I the only person who thinks that this makes no sense at all? The expression "if they could put a man on the moon" meant that the technological achievement of the moon missions was so mind-blowingly amazing that it implied that we could pretty much do anything.

Now it sounds like something some right-wing gasbag would use as an example of government wasteful spending.

Too Soon?

This is pretty damn "meta", but this piece by Brian Leiter on how the mouth breathing part of the Internet went nuts over Paul Krugman's September 11th post is so funny and trenchant that I feel the need to share it.

I worry though. By posting something here that says there's something funny about September 11th in some opaque, obscure way, am I violating some rule about how September 11 must be thought about? Only time and trolls will tell.

Live with Two Sales Taxes or Die

This story could be seen as sour grapes on the part of the BC Liberals after the referendum rejection of the HST, but it's not like they were hiding the fact that it would cost billions of dollars to go back to having, uh, two separate sales taxes. (By the way, I would love it if someone could explain to me the anger surrounding the HST in BC! Thanks!) But anyway, bravo to those British Columbians who decided those billions of tax dollars were worth it, just to stick it to a government that, uh, they pay taxes to...(sorry, it's really hard to not sound patronizing here, and it's the Internet, so it sounds even worse)

But hey, it's not like we here in Toronto are any better. Last year, many Torontonians were really, really pissed off about the fact that we don't pay our garbage collectors minimum wage, so to punish them(selves), we elected Rob Ford. How's that working out for us now? About the same as BC owing the federal government $2 billion for nothing.

Rob Ford's War on the Poor - Part I

Here's a particularly disgusting bit of news from the City of Toronto website. While looking at the site to see when I could register my son for swimming lessons, I found this.

The long and short of it is that if you are in an area specifically marked as poor, you will be charged more for services. Rob Ford cut taxes on home and car owners so that poor people could pay more to exercise at a community centre.

With the whole dustup between the Ford brothers and Margaret Atwood, I was (unsurprisingly for me) seeing Ford as continuing an assault on education and the social ideal of a well-educated population. But a friend of mine pointed something out that gave me pause - Rob Ford's real target is the poor.

That this is a class issue is something that Canadians are especially reluctant to talk about. The attacks on public transit, the tax cuts he has made and the user fee increases are all in one direction, all these things are calculated to reverse any progressivity in our society in favour of a pay what you can because you can kind of attitude.

Part of the problem with this is that most people in the centre or the left, also kind of hate the poor, or at least have drunk enough of the neo-con koolaid to believe that poor people are there through some fault of their own, just like being born in an upper-middle class household with access to education and services had nothing to do with one's success.

But maybe we need to just start calling a spade a spade and start asking Rob Ford and his cadre why they hate poor people so much and why they want to punish them so that people who own property don't have to pay more taxes?

Hooray.

Reading about the various levels of the US government reaching a deal to avert the destruction of the global financial markets at the expense of, it seems, everyone who lives in the US except for the very wealthy, the "celebrations" that people are talking about remind me of the people who voted NDP and celebrated their rise to official opposition....in a majority conservative government.

This is really Remarkable

This hits rather close to home, except that I, at the same age, made a decision to stick around, despite how much I felt it was the wrong thing to do, even if my decision to stay was grounded in all the right reasons.

But his overall sense about the fact that you don't need people policing you when the office culture does a remarkable job of policing itself, to its own intellectual and public detriment, was something I spent a lot of time watching and railing against.

It is no small irony that the thing I am probably most proud of, from the perspective of my former career, is the same thing that did me in. People, especially those in a media-like atmosphere, love to talk about change, but when confronted with something that is truly outside their scope, something where they cannot control the middlebrow message that sounds good (to both their bosses as well as the public) but literally means nothing, innovation gets thrown out the window and is replaced with fear.

Getting out of an environment where people change their minds completely because someone above them told them to change it has been, to say the least, very good for me. That being said, years of being in that environment have taken their toll on my own thinking about the world and my own goals and desires.

This isn't to say that I wish that, at 24, I hadn't decided to try my hand at the civil service, but rather that, at 37, I can still accomplish all those things I had wanted to back then, perhaps even more successfully, given the benefit of hindsight and experience. But the attitudes that surrounded me for years have had an insidious way of stifling my own thoughts for a long time now, and maybe beginning to talk about it will be a way to move past that.