The PenOpticon

It pains me to admit I haven't been able to post regularly to this space over the past few months.  It seems that life got in the way: drismal weather, ambulances and doctors; a day job that sometimes bleeds into night.  Lot's of good stuff too: long walks around town, a few birding excursions and a few good books. Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Don DeLillo's Libra. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Also finished Jared Diamond's Collapse and David Orrell's Aollo's Arrow. Now I'm picking away at The Weather Makers. Maybe it's time to dive into some cheerier reading this summer! I was in the middle of DeLillo's Libra when the Virginia Tech massacre took place and this caught my eye:

After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

Beyond the mechanics of obtaining credit cards, exercising their Second Amendment rights and photographing themselves brandishing weapons, there is little similarity between LHO and Seung-Hui Cho. It seems that every shooter must be insane in his own particular fashion.  What is clear is that Ho's victims were not "in the wrong place at the wrong time", as Bush told Virginia Tech students last week.  On the contrary, as Slinger eloquently writes in the Toronto Star, they were in precisely where they were supposed to be.  With that tired old wrong place, wrong time phrase, Bush attempted to cut off substantive debate over U.S gun ownership and registration, while also  conveniently forgetting that dozens of American children are murdered with guns every day.

Paradoxically, crime rates — including homicides involving firearms — have been dropping across North America for the past twenty years. But, at the same time, because urban population densities are increasing, the effective rate of crime in many places is also rising. Perhaps crime statistics should be given in terms of crimes per square kilometre (mile or cubit if you prefer). Some jurisdictions have been reporting crime stats in this way for some time and the U.S. National Institute of Justice, which recently held their 9th Crime Mapping Research Conference, even offers free GIS crime mapping software.

As for me, I'd rather live with the assumption that the vast majority of people are "mostly harmless" and as unarmed as I am. Better that, than a world in which everyone and anyone may be concealing a Glock or a .38 — even if they happen to be angry, isolated or insane. 'Course I'd also rather we address crime,  crowding, poverty, pollution and climate change issues by allowing populations to fall (naturally I hope!) to sustainable levels, but that's a rant for another day.

All for now. Gotta get me a few hours of hiatus.

Rants, Writing/Blogging

When I started writing this blog some ten months ago, I told myself this is just a practice area — a place away from work to play with words and ideas. I was not trying to solve the world’s problems. I was not trying to right all wrongs, though I did hope to praise the just and satirize the guilty. I expected to have few readers and sadly that expectation has been exceeded.

But I lied. O how i lied. Like Ralph Philips, a minor Looney Toons character from the fifties, I daydreamed myself into dozens of blogging adventures — ranting about Afghanistan, raving about nuclear power and roaring about the Green Party. But it turns out I have not simply been playing — I care deeply about these things and want to make the world right. Typing away in front of this computer screen, with a cup of fair trade coffee at my side, I’ve had a few Walter Mitty-like moments where I thought I was making a difference. But we all know that’s load of bull cookies (as the venerable Colonel Sherman T. Potter used to say).

The problem with world problems is that there are so damn many of them. Even if young Ralph Philips could keep the world safe, he’d spend the rest of his days playing global Whack-a-Mole, battling insurgents here, terrorists there and global warming everywhere. Even when I push the blog cart down the aisles and toss fresh issues into the basket, they often go bad on me before I have a chance to fully cook ‘em. And so I’ve ended up with a growing list of half-baked blog entries:

• Beware of Run and Cut Politicians
• The Past and Future of the David Dunlap Observatory
• Harper replaces Kyoto promises with false premises
• Afghanistan: You’ve Never Seen Everything
• The Perils of Expanding the Canadian Forces
• How the “Will of God” Cheapens Human Life
• The Nuclear Greening of Ontario?

The obvious truth is that I have neither the time nor the skill nor the patience to type the world’s problems away. But damn it, Jim — that’s what I wanna do. Type the world’s problems away. It could be worse. I grew up watching Looney Tunes and always had a soft spot for little Ralph Philips. The kid gets grounded by his mom but quickly escapes via his overactive imagination to save the world from aliens in a most spectacular way. But the reality of Ralph, according to Toonpedia is that he “never appeared in comic books, on lunch boxes, or in any other venue. He’s such a minor character, he wasn’t even with the rest of the Warner Bros. toons in Space Jam“. Hmmm… sounds a lot like me!

Ok, it could be a lot worse. In recent months another Ralph Phillips made the headlines. Ralph “Buck” Phillips escaped from prison last April and played a deadly game of Whack-a-Mole with with upstate New Yorkers by popping up in dozens of towns, hiding out in state forests and shooting three New York state troopers (one fatally). He was finally caught on Sept 8th, 2006. This Ralph was 44, old enough to have watched the same fictional Ralph Phillips that many of us grew up with. Now that Ralph “Buck” Phillips is back in prison (aka grounded), I want to know how he will escape in his dreams. Or maybe I don’t. I’ll just keep typing along my own merry, deluded path.

Comm Ralph to General Staff. Comm Ralph to General Staff. Routine report. Martians captured. World Safe. Over

Rants, Writing/Blogging

I’m posting this because I kept WordPress’s default “Uncategorized” category and have noticed Google has indexed a number of non-existent “Uncategorized” posts. So, instead of returning a 404 “page not found” message, let those searches return this Uncategorized Post.

This post has no category. Perhaps it is categorically imperative that at least one post not be categorized. After all, where would we be if everything could be neatly pigeon-holed with no ambiguity or confusion? Isn’t the “order” that many of us take for granted a meaningless construct, unless the real possibility for chaos exists? Perhaps that’s one of the real reasons for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and a thousand other hotspots). By creating chaos and anarchy in other parts of the world, our own small corner is bound to seem that much more orderly and rational. It’s all just a matter of contrasts, right?

So this Uncategorized Post becomes a kind of emblematic expression of the frustration and confusion, an uncategorized rage against a million injustices that are almost always felt, but rarely expressed. We all want easy answers and easy stability — easy payments with $0 money down — so we continue to mug this planet, to consume it like wildfire, and to breed like cancer. I could rail against sonic booms over Gaza City, the immorality of food eating contests, killing for sport, dying for other people’s business interests and empty patriotism. I could scream bloody murder because money can always be found to widen a road or build a new highway, while the coffers are almost bare for public transit. I could complain bitterly that too many developers are given a free ride to subdivide and ruin vast tracts of natural habitat while politicians plan for unbridled growth.

O, I could rant and rave, I could. But not today. What would be the point? After all — this is just an Uncategorized Post. And besides, it seems the Daylilies are in bloom. If I can just shut the hell up for a few minutes, maybe we can hear them. Sonic blooms.

Uncategorized, Writing/Blogging

The cover story of the June’ issue of Harper’s belongs to Art Spiegelman. The Pulitzer prizing-winning cartoonist casts a critical over the Danish “cartoon war” — a debacle which resulted in more than a hundred deaths, more than 800 injuries and too many “F” words: fires Fatwahs, editorial firings and the fettering of free speech — not to mention an expensive boycott of Danish products throughout much of the Arab world. As Spiegelman so dryly put it:

I’m sure the Danish cartoonists involved would all agree that it was a mistake to enter the “Draw the Prophet and win a prize” talent contest, but they at least managed to demonstrate the capacity of cartoons to bring urgent issues into high relief.

Spiegelman takes time to rap the knuckles of North American newspapers, both for refusing to run any of the infamous cartoons and for not drawing more attention to the fact that al Jazeera and other non-U.S. television networks regularly broadcast images of torture. He complains that many college students have seen neither the Danish cartoons nor the torture imagery that is being broadcast outside of North America.

The meat of the article, however, consists of a detailed — and somewhat raucous — critique of the offending material. Of course, this provides an excuse to republish the actual cartoons (though they are not exactly hard to find on the net) and leads to Spiegelman’s biggest complaint: most of the cartoons have nothing to say and are pedestrian in their execution. The cartoons do not “speak truth to power”, but simply “afflict the afflicted” — just like traditional hate literature.

Spiegelman is clear in his view that jarring — and offensive — cartoons have an important role to play in the world, but at the same time he argues they should not be taken too seriously. His astute deconstruction of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons should be enough to rob them of any sting they may have had. Although, not a signatory of the “MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism“, Spiegelman’s critique is an elegant, peaceful illustration of how that group hopes to defuse the “totalitarian global threat: Islamism”.