by Arthur Black
The crowd roared. The man snatched his wheeled suitcase and blustered off, tossing an obscene two-word curse over his shoulder.
The WestJet clerk picked up the microphone again and said sweetly, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to get in line for that, too.”
There Auto Be a Law
I think that the substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.
—Winston Churchill
I’m with the British Bulldog on this one. Oh, I rely on a gas guzzler as much as the next person and I’ve had my nether parts kneaded by enough saddles to know that going on horseback is no feasible option—but that doesn’t mean I’m in love with my car.
I believe future archaeologists will be dumbfounded when they see how thoroughly we allowed automobiles to dominate our lives. They transfigure our landscape, poison our air, dictate our habits, define our habitations, suck our natural resources dry . . . and they kill us. You think guns are dangerous? Gun fatalities account for less than one hundred Canadian deaths a year. Fatal vehicle collisions claim nearly thirty-five hundred lives annually. Put more graphically, guns kill approximately one Canadian every six days; motor vehicles kill one Canadian every four hours.
What they do to us socially is even more alarming. Marshall McLuhan predicted that mass transportation such as subways and trains was doomed in North America because, “a person’s car is the only place he can be alone and think.”
That’s what our vehicles do—they separate us. We don’t walk or stroll or—beautiful word—promenade anymore. Cars box us in. We jump in our boxes and join streams of other boxes that take us to work or to play or to shop—as often as not in boxy office towers, boxy rec centres or big box stores.
Happily, attitudes are changing. Many towns and villages—and even the tiny island I live on—are putting in pedestrian pathways and bike lanes for all those little trips that really don’t require motorized assistance.
Cities too—and no city more comprehensively than Paris, France. There, the city fathers have okayed Vélib’, a bike-sharing network that allows citizens to pick up a bicycle at one location, ride it to their destination and leave it there. They have also eliminated twenty-three thousand parking spots downtown, narrowed crosstown expressways and replaced pavement and parking lots with nearly ten acres worth of parks, floating gardens—even a flower market.
All of this in downtown Paris, which just a short time ago was characterized by honking horns, squealing tires and cursing drivers, all emanating from crawling daisy chains of cars and trucks courting terminal gridlock.
Has it changed the fabled City of Lights? Bien sûr. For one thing, you can actually see those lights now that the blue-black curtain of auto exhaust is dissipating. Car use in Paris has dropped a whopping 25 percent over the past decade. In the same time, bicycle use has doubled. One-half of all trips in Paris are now made on foot.
Vehicular diehards are aghast. They predict massive traffic jams and widespread chaos. The head of one pro-car lobby harrumphs, “We can no more eliminate cars from Paris roads than empty the Seine of water.”
Fulminate away, monsieur. Other large urban jurisdictions are moving in the same direction as Paris. Across the channel, the city of London now levies a daily sixteen-dollar “congestion charge” on all private vehicles travelling downtown. Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa have already set up bike-sharing programs; Vancouver’s working on it.
Personally, I think McLuhan was just a hair off the mark. Men don’t love their cars because they allow us to be alone. That’s what the bathroom is for. Men love their cars because it’s the last place they can be in charge. Comedian Rita Rudner says car love is the reason most men are afraid to make a commitment to a woman.
“It’s because we can’t be steered.”
Cambodia: Phoenix Rising
One of the more cynical rationalizations used by the US government for its use of drones to kill foreigners is the fact that there’s a legal precedent. The official argument goes that it’s okay to target enemies in their own countries because the US did the same thing to Cambodians during the Vietnam War.
True—but not something you’d think a country would want to brag about.
Back in the ’60s and ’70s during what became known as Henry Kissinger’s Secret War, American bombers flew 230,000 separate sorties over Cambodia, dropping more than three million tons of bombs.
It was, as a US general said at the time, “the only war in town,” since a temporary truce with Vietnam had been declared. It was also a bit like shooting fish in a barrel; the Cambodians had no air force, no anti-aircraft ordnance—no armed forces to speak of. They were mostly rice farmers. Their great crime was allowing the Viet Cong to use their country as a shortcut to South Vietnam.
Not that the Cambodians had much choice. They were as powerless against the Viet Cong as they were against the US bombers. The US military rationale was loopy at best; a bit like bombing Vancouver because it lies between Seattle and Alaska. Now the US is arguing that the thousands of innocent Cambodians who died as a result of the US pursuing North Vietnamese set a legal precedent, which makes it okay for the US to go after enemies in any neutral territory.
No one knows how many Cambodians died in the bombings, but estimates run as high as five hundred thousand. We do know that Cambodia was devastated, many of its towns reduced to rubble, the infrastructure shredded, its economy ruined.
Which made it easy for the monster known as Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge to take over the country and utterly destroy what was left of it.
Pol Pot was Joseph Stalin on steroids. He practised social engineering with a sledgehammer and a meat cleaver. In four devastating years, Pol Pot oversaw the gutting and abandonment of all Cambodian urban centres. Organized religion was abolished, banks were closed, private property, markets and even money was eliminated. The Khmer Rouge tore down 95 percent of the country’s Buddhist temples. Christians, Muslims, Chinese, ethnic Vietnamese and Thais were murdered on sight, as were government officials, professionals such as doctors or lawyers—indeed, all “intellectuals.” Wearing eyeglasses was enough to get you branded an “intellectual.”
Pol Pot’s so-called Democratic Kampuchea was in fact a prison-camp state. One quarter of the population—about two and a half million people—were executed, died of disease or simply starved to death.
The best thing you can say about Pol Pot and his evil horde is that they only lasted for four years. He died under house arrest, probably a suicide, in 1998. Today, Cambodia has its old name back, a thriving tourist economy and best of all, a young and healthy growing population.
Especially young. Three-quarters of living Cambodians are too young to even remember Pol Pot.
But they’ll have no trouble remembering the US bombings; it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Those millions of tons of bombs that were dropped did not all detonate. Some experts estimate that 30 percent of them still lie in the jungle waiting to explode.
And they do, with deadly regularity. There are forty thousand amputees in Cambodia today, almost all of them victims of UXOs—unexploded ordnance. There will be many more amputees for decades to come.
“History,” as Winston Churchill tartly observed, “is written by the victors.”
How true. That’s why no memorial on the face of the earth marks the passing of Pol Pot.
And Henry Kissinger, the architect of the Cambodian Secret War?
Why, he won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
A Bellyful of Bad Guys
Not to be paranoid or anything, but don’t be surprised if someday soon you’re pulled aside by a couple of grim-looking dudes dressed in bad suits and dark glasses with curly wires coming out of their ears. As they shake you down they’ll probably identify themselves as agents with the Disease Control Unit or Alien Surveillance Command or some suc
h.
It’s legit. They suspect you of harbouring and giving sustenance to alien life forms and you know what—they’re right. You, my friend, are an enabler—a host. You are the front man for dangerous, possibly life-threatening creatures which are living and breeding, rent-free, at this very moment on your person.
You’ve heard of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang? Well, this is the Hole-in-Your-Gut Gang. These nogoodniks are presently residing and conspiring in your belly button.
Interesting piece of business, the belly button—or umbilicus, as it’s properly known. It’s our only souvenir of the feeding tube—the umbilical cord—that sustained us all for the nine months we spent in our mommas’ bellies.
Nobody goes through or gets out of this life without one—except I suppose Adam and Eve if you subscribe to the Garden of Eden miniseries. All Gaia’s chillun—the placental ones anyway—got belly buttons, one to a customer. And for microscopic creepy-crawlies, what a perfectly swell condo-cum-cafeteria the average belly button is.
“Your belly button is a great place to grow up if you’re a bacterium,” says Dr. Tom Kottke of Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. “It’s warm, dark and moist—a perfect home.”
And that’s actually fortunate because not all bacteria are bad guys. Most of them, in fact, range from benign to positively healthy. Only a handful are what you’d call troublemakers, causing everything from leprosy, cholera and pneumonia all the way to ear and respiratory infections. Sounds ominous until you learn that researchers have identified more than twenty-three hundred types of human belly button bacteria so far—and most of them are as unthreatening as Anne of Green Gables at a strawberry social.
Are you an Innie or an Outie? If it’s the latter, chances are the Men in Black will let you off with a stern warning. People with protruding belly buttons don’t offer as hospitable digs for bacteria to thrive on. The odds are, however, that you’re an Innie—90 percent of humans are. And 100 percent of belly button bacteria like that just fine.
Belly button infections are not unheard of, but they’re relatively easily avoided. Simple soap and water usually does the trick.
For more stubborn cases though, there’s always the military option. Bring out the big guns, I say. Warships, if necessary. Luckily we can do this without unduly taxing the resources of the Canadian Navy. You can build your own warship at home. Just root around in the attic or closet and find that old hula hoop you never got rid of. Next, insert a series of thumbtacks into the hoop perimeter, each one pointing inwards. Finally, put that hoop around your waist, crank up your Chubby Checker eight-track and gyrate vigorously.
Hey, presto! Your very own navel destroyer.
You Wanna Bet?
Gambling is a tax on people who can’t do math.
—Anon
I am driving through the pre-dawn murk of an early summer morning en route to Pearson International Airport, a couple of hours away. I’m on a gravel road, no traffic in sight save an obese raccoon that waddles grumpily off the shoulder and into the brush as I pass.
No other signs of life, but a glow looms up over the trees on my left. I get past the trees and . . .
What
The Hell
Is That?
A neon fortress is what it is, huge and totally alien here in the Ontario hinterland. A sign in front tells me I’m passing Casino Rama and that Dolly Parton will be performing next week. My wristwatch tells me it is 6:15 in the morning. And my eyes tell me that the Casino Rama parking lot is nearly full.
Full??? At dawn????
You betchum, Lone Ranger. Casino Rama is the largest First Nations casino in Canada. It is run by and for the Chippewa of Rama First Nation and it is a right little gold mine. The facility boasts a hotel, a five-thousand-seat entertainment centre, ten restaurants and two lounges, but mostly it boasts twenty-five hundred glittering slot machines and one hundred and ten gaming tables, all dedicated to separating gullible patrons from their money.
No shortage of either. Casino Rama perches on the geographical forehead of the Greater Toronto Area, close to flush urban centres like Barrie, Lindsay and Midland. Literally millions of potential customers live within a bus ride of Casino Rama. Not surprisingly, the owners run free shuttle buses pretty much around the clock.
It’s a pattern that’s repeating itself around North America. The Mdewakanton Sioux of northern Minnesota used to be an impoverished and hopeless band of American Indian survivors existing on government handouts. Now they have Mystic Lake Casino, proceeds from which have financed a community and fitness centre, a hotel and an RV park.
The tribe has done so well it’s been able to hand out more than half a billion dollars in loans and outright grants to other tribes for economic development. They even made enough from the casino to donate fifteen million dollars to the University of Minnesota for scholarships and a new stadium.
The Sioux have also set aside money to return to their roots, restoring wetlands to promote waterfowl, fish and wild rice plantings. They’ve put in organic gardens and planted fruit trees. And they’ve started an apiary to harvest honey.
But their most lucrative honey-making beehive is the glitzy Mystic Lake Casino, which attracts thousands of customers (overwhelmingly white) each week to lay their money down and watch it disappear.
It’s quite a turnaround. Just a few hundred years ago First Nations people of North America lived in all the abundance they could handle. Then came the white man who, by judicious application of whisky, guns, syphilis and lawyers, changed all that.
In 1626 some European sharpie showered a band of East Coast Indians with sixty Dutch guilders’ worth of trinkets, beads and hatchets. The Indians had no concept of land ownership, but they accepted the gifts. Later, they learned they’d just sold Manhattan Island.
Chief Dan George put it more succinctly: “At first we had the land and the white man had the Bible. Now we have the Bible and the white man has the land.”
The great irony is, First Nations people through agencies like Mystic Lake Casino and Casino Rama are slowly buying their land back.
And they’re using the White Man’s money to do it.
Comox Women Rock!
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
—Irina Dunn
A lot of rock fans are positive that the group U2 invented that phrase. Others will beat you over the head with a bicycle pump insisting that Gloria Steinem deserves the credit. Actually, it was an Australian writer by the name of Irina Dunn, but attribution doesn’t really matter; it’s the sentiment that counts. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. A Victoria cop takes down her would-be murderer even after he all but hacks off half her hand and stabs her in the neck. “Ninety percent of my officers would have died in that attack,” says police chief Jamie Graham. Not Constable Lane Douglas-Hunt. She’s back on duty as I write.
A woman named Alexandra Morton leads the campaign to get Norwegian fish farms out of our coastal waters; a woman named Elizabeth May leads the campaign to keep an oil pipeline to China out of our mountains and rivers and valleys. Six of our provincial premiers are women. Lots of Canadian women in leadership roles these days; no fish or bicycles need apply.
Still it was instructive to take a drive up Vancouver Island to the Comox Valley to deliver a keynote speech to the CVWBN. This stands for Comox Valley Womens’ Business Network, a group of more than seventy local women entrepreneurs representing every profession from real estate to investment counselling, as well as bookkeeping, graphics, advertising, public relations—you name it, they do it, and they get together once a month to network, have dinner together and listen to an after-dinner speaker such as, well, that bald guy from Salt Spring.
As an observer it was fascinating for me. I couldn’t get over how vibrant and sizzly the evening was, compared to a lot of guy get-togethers I’ve sat through. The businesswomen of Co
mox Valley really meet when they meet. It happened to be International Women’s Day when I was their guest, and every woman stood up and said a few words about why she was glad to be a woman. I can’t imagine even suggesting such a departure at any of the male-dominated get-togethers I attend.
The question I keep getting since I came back is: “So if the Comox Valley Women’s Business Network is so powerful, how come they asked a man to be their guest speaker?”
I think the answer’s pretty obvious. They’re beyond that petty gender crap. If somebody’s got something to say, it really doesn’t matter how they’re wired.
When Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel, a reporter asked her how it felt to be a woman prime minister. Golda shrugged and said, “I don’t know; I’ve never been a man prime minister.”
A Walk on the Wild Side
A few words about traffic jams. First, understand that I come from a Gulf Island that has (I’m being generous here) four, maybe five thousand cars, trucks, bicycles, skateboards, unicycles and other wheeled means of conveyance, all told. I have just returned from Vietnam. From Ho Chi Minh City, a.k.a. Saigon, which according to my guidebook contains some four million motorbikes. Not counting cars, taxis, buses, rickshaws, trucks or tuk-tuks. Just . . . motorbikes. Four million.
A traffic jam on Salt Spring occurs whenever two good old boys travelling in pickups in opposite directions on the same road, espy one another and stop for a chat through their driver-side windows while the traffic on both sides backs up behind them. We islanders seldom honk at the good old boys. We know they’ll be done soon enough and traffic will resume.