Personhood: should all persons, including dolphin people, legally be persons?

23 Thursday Feb 2012

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The past couple days the National Post has reported that animal rights activists in the States are trying to get dolphins, and other cetaceans, to legally be called “persons” under the law. According to Emory University neuroscientist Lori Marino, “their basic needs are very much like humans–to be able to stay alive, not to be confined, to make choices and travel, and perhaps foremost to engage in social interaction.”

I laughed at this because I can’t hear the words cetacean and Marino without thinking about Ace Ventura, but her quote got me thinking. Doesn’t her criterion apply to every animal? I know dolphins are really smart, but find me an animal that prefers to die, to be confined, and to remain dormant and isolated from its own kind.

Last year I joked that one day, at the current rate magnanimous human persons bestow rights ever outward, owning a dog will be considered vile and archaic. Consider: we order them around, exert dominance by actually keeping them tethered to a chain around their neck in public, we feed them after they perform tricks, and, worst of all, if it suits us, we cut off their balls. One might say that dogs seem happy in human homes, but it’s just centuries of Stockholm syndrome. Domesticated…what a horrible euphemism for slavery.

Is SeaWorld a concentration camp? It used to be a fun place to take your kids. Ahh, the times are changing. Tasha Kheiriddin from the Post insists the problem with bestowing human rights to animals is they cannot possibly enter into the social contract: “an animal bears no responsibility, legal or otherwise, for its actions. You cannot sue a dolphin if it bites you or wrecks your boat.”

If the dolphin manages to acquire personhood under the law, while at the same time managing to avoid all obligations of the social contract, perhaps they really are smarter than humans. If I bite someone or wreck their boat I’m in trouble. Well played, cetacean.

It’s funny to consider that this discussion is taking place while in the States Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney believes corporations are people. By this he must mean that, just like with human people and with cetacean people, it is incorporations’ nature to stay alive, to not be confined, to make choices and travel, and to engage in social interaction. Well, let’s examine: no corporation wants to die, globalisation is anything but confined, decisions are made, business class is even its own travel designation, and corporations do hold social events like family barbecues and golf tournaments. So corporations are persons too. But since corporation people are made up of human people who can comprehend the social contract, they will be made to uphold it: if a corporation bites you or wrecks your boat, you can sue. Corporations are no cetaceans.

But there is a problem: according to the definition of persons that dolphins and companies have successfully met, human people no longer qualify as people. Consider: increasingly humans have become fatally overweight and cancer-prone, remain confined in office cubicles and 500 sq. foot condos, choice remains elusive as our social systems act upon us, we travel albeit on broken public transit systems and inadequate bike lanes, and anyone who’s seen the zombies on their iPhones in public agrees we are no longer a social species.

So there you have it. Dolphins and companies are people, unlike human beings.

Leafs and senators: sens players, fans, and writers are soft

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

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As the Leafs move up in the standings (last night’s aberration notwithstanding) and the Senators continue to show their true colours and lose, it seems each team’s fans are also making a parallel divergence: my last piece about the ACC needing more“fury and balls” was contrasted sharply and hilariously by Ottawa writer Wayne Scanlan in yesterday’s National Post, “who wrote about our rival needing “civility.

Scanlan takes up the cause of a “die-hard” senator fan, and season-ticket holder, who wrote to him saying she was disgusted by the behaviour of ottawa and Toronto fans, “but mostly Toronto fans.” She didn’t feel safe attending games alone, as the corridors were bedlam before and after games. “Thugs and hooligans are ruining senators games.” No. Her senators game was ruined by the senators who couldn’t handle the Leafs relentless speed, crisp and elegant passes, and bar-down snipes. If the halls were an insane asylum it was because the senators were crushed to an insane degree. 5-0! Would any die-hard fan in a rival’s building seriously keep their glee to themselves? Can this woman ask that of us?

And besides, what exactly happened? Thugs and hooligans are those who broke windows and looted stores during the G20. If there was violence at the hockey game it would surely be mentioned somewhere, as no writer excludes the main story from their story. It sounds like this fragile woman was upset Leaf fans were loud before and after trouncing her team. If the senators destroyed the Leafs in the ACC and I had to listen to their fans gloat, and no doubt they would, I’d be in despair too. But I’d blame it on the Leafs. Fans all want to cheer and brag and gloat, but it’s impossible when you lose. So while I understand perfectly well this woman’s misery, I hope she continues to suffer it for years unabated.

This “die-hard fan” should save her disgust for her team. As their losing continues she will need all the reserve she can get.

But why did a writer take up this woman’s cause? He writes, “can both sides of this Battle of Ontario clash please grow up enough to lift this debate to the high school level?” What “debate?” We hate your team, you hate ours. The players debate who is best by playing, and we respond with cheers and boos.

Scanlan is sneaky: he spends the first half of his article praising alfredsson without ever qualifying Leaf fans’ hatred. It’s disingenuous to posture like alfredsson’s booing doesn’t have origins in a catalogue of historical provocations. Yet he uses highly charged words without  ever describing what Leaf fans did wrong.

And, what’s childish is the Sens’ fans desperate grasp at symmetry, who, without a villain to offset all theirs, “mercilessly” boo Lupul, who has never done anything to deserve their ire aside from score goals.

Scanlan speculates that Leaf fans were in payback mode, avenging senator fans “behaving badly” during the all-star fantasy draft. Yes, the relentless booing, however predictable and banal, had to be innocuously redressed in the same terms–by booing back. All standard fare, and anything but surprising. But what really got Leaf fans, and what Scanlan scandalously leaves unacknowledged (omitted?) is the senator fan who suggested during the all-star fantasy draft that Lupul’s team should select Wade Belak, the ex-Leaf who was found dead in a hotel room last summer. This vile, morally indefensible outburst, more than any booing or juvenile “Leafs Suck” video created and screened by the organization, was a new low for senator fans, a group never exactly held in great esteem.

To be sure, that person was an idiot and wasn’t acting as the team’s official representative. No doubt most senator fans, Scanlan included, would distance themselves from this moron. But Scanlan’s plea for increased civility between the teams’ fans shouldn’t leave such an atrocious breach of basic decency unacknowledged. Either this is negligence or bias.

Anyway, to complain about Leaf fans cheering on their team and booing their hated rival is totally futile. Not only is this not news, but, as I argued just before reading this article, hockey arenas are the rabid hockey fan’s should natural habitat, and nobody should be told how to pray in their temple. Also revealing, while the Leafs proudly exalt “truculence, belligerence and a high threshold for pain”, die-hard senator fans submit tear filled letters about the volume of their arena’s corridors causing them high anxiety. Their writers apparently sympathize. 

The last thing I’d like is to relieve senator fans of their misery, but can they lend to us for our home games these detested Leaf fans to teach ours how to act?

That would be civil.

Leaf games are way, way too quiet. The ACC needs NOISE! FURY! BALLS!

03 Friday Feb 2012

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There’s something about the atmosphere of the Air Canada Centre during hockey games that discourages rowdiness, chirping, belligerence, and other harmless fun that used to be standard fare at Maple Leaf Gardens. Perhaps you don’t need to look much further than the names of each building to see what’s changed: one’s named after a detestable corporation and the other after the actual team it housed. “AC” is even built into the current name, suggesting its chilly atmosphere. Perhaps that’s a stretch. Maybe not.

If you colourfully voice your displeasure at the refs, or any number of the gutless pukes we routinely play against, you’re liable to arouse the ire of fans sitting next to you. But why? Aren’t we all on the same team here? Is this a hockey arena or a church? I don’t care if you’re with your child: between our collapses, refereeing travesties and the opponents’ various abominations, I freak out watching games on TV in a room by myself–I can’t be expected to suppress my rage for a perfect stranger after paying just as much as them for tickets. Kids should be introduced to real hockey fans at hockey games. Like religion: get ’em while they’re young. In fact, I am offended by silent emotionless fans. This is the detestable behaviour. If you want dignified silence take your child to Disney On Ice. Real fans should have the right of way. We have a license to be vulgar in our home arena. Up to a point. Here’s where the line is.

As a kid in the Gardens I heard a fantastic chirp aimed at one of our frictionless defenceman: “Hit ’em with your purse Murphy!” Great use of colourful language to express a point. The mild sexism was offset by the cleverness of the chirp, delivered inevitably from the nosebleeds by a drunken fan. It showed passion, if not hockey wisdom–Larry Murphy only went on to win a couple Stanley Cups with Detroit, that team who never fails to make something of our discarded players (see Ian White).

So it’s perfectly acceptable to be a boor so long as you’re drunk, somewhat clever, your voice carries conviction, or the right circumstance arises. Anyone who saw alfredsson hit Tucker from behind and score the winner of game 5 after going unimpeded to the net (that timeless demonstration of the spirit of hockey debased in full: alfredsson’s magnum opus) couldn’t have possibly been sufficiently vulgar. A crowd of Andrew Dice Clay’s might have got the right note.

Next item. If there’s a fan beside you from the wrong team and you come to severe disagreement after some beers, you should be the bigger man and avoid punching him in the face. This is pure class. It’ll wound him to the core going home having to admit that, while he suffered some chirps and other appropriate abuse, Leaf fans are fundamentally civilized.

In addition to being classy for its own sake, shouting matches give the fans in neighbouring seats a colourful story. It enhances their overall experience and they should be grateful: there’s nothing quite like the overflow of unbridled passion expressed in mellifluous swear words. That’s authentic spirit. Polite clapping grates on my ears.

But there’s one reason that trumps all others: rowdy crowds encourage the home team. They feed off it. It makes a tangible difference in the outcome of the game, and after missing playoffs several times by a single point perhaps it cost us a shot at the Stanley Cup. Ask foreign junior teams what it’s like to enter a Canadian barn full of maniacal fans. Ask an NHL player what it’s like to play in Philly. We have on obligation towards our team to give them any advantage possible, and if there’s even a 1% chance their play will be enhanced by the fury of the vociferously hostile mob, we can’t in good conscience stay quiet. And no team ever started playing better because fans suddenly cheered when prompted by a routine video of Wendell Clark. It has to be raw, uncontrived enthusiasm to inspire a team or unnerve the opponent.

I’m not the first to say the ACC is a cold hockey building, and from what I understand soccer fans in this city bang drums and have no problem freaking out at TTC games, or whatever that team is called. Voicing unrestrained passion shouldn’t be a hard sell for a team whose slogan is “spirit is everything.”

So when confronted by an ACC patron demanding silence, whether with child or clad in a suit or normal civilian clothing, remind them that they’re acting as an agent of the opponent, and kindly direct them to this article so they can feel ashamed of their tacit anti-Leafs behaviour.  Perhaps they will reconsider their prudish attitude and begin anew, hurling obscenities at loud volume like a proper Torontonian.

Let’s take back our arena.

Constructive Scholarly Disagreement on Robertson Davies

27 Friday Jan 2012

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A contemporary conversazione between Prof. David Wright and Dr. Phil Stein, two well-respected academics, about Robertson Davies’ Deptford trilogy.

Prof. Wright: The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies is a first-rate literary masterpiece, a unique accomplishment in the annals of Canadian literature. It is a strong testament to the power of both magic and wonder. It reminds us of the vitality of sensory experience over cold rationality, and it’s a convincing argument against history as merely a subjectively reconstructed document made of paper.  The psychological insights continually bowl us over–the Jungian especially–and even the dismissals of Freud are well laid out broadsides. The dialogue sparkles and crackles like the magic of Magnus Eisengrim.

Dr. Stein: Robertson Davies has a natural place in the canon of Eurocentric, patronizing dead white male authors. But surely Davies, the world-class elitist, would have considered this a tremendous compliment.  All the psychological talk talk talk and not even one positive reference to a gay character. Only coerced child buggery. The latent homophobia was palpable. What’s the author afraid of?

Prof. Wright: Davies isn’t scared of homosexuality, he’s just more interested in the myriad ways our inner lives fall into patterns or archetypes. Especially in the trilogy’s second book, the Manticore, psychologist Dr. Von Haller applies Jungian ideas, even some Adler, to unpeel the universal consciousness and lay it bare before the reader.

Dr. Stein: Yes yes, and after examination, or even well before, what do we find? A spoiled Anglo-Saxon brat given to cavalier dismissals of prideful, small Canadian towns as parochial backwater. We find a class war monger. A parasitic capitalist and unabashed colonialist. Best of all, the whole thing takes place behind the backdrop of a splendid castle in Zurich Switzerland, gained by inheritance no less. The whole thing is a bourgeois Marxist nightmare, and we hardly need a prescient psychologist to understand the character’s pathologies. This is the great Canadian writer?

Prof. Wright: I’m afraid you’re missing the point.

Dr. Stein: Oh yes, the rural bashing was too subtle, “villages as rotten with vice…incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, masochism.” David Staunton has adult problems because growing up his servants were sooo inadequate, wah wah wah. Do you know how many people in this city live below the poverty line?

Prof. Wright: Are we going to talk about the book?

Dr. Stein: How can we, when great chunks of our population have no access to medicare?

Prof. Wright: Well, In Dr. Von Haller’s words, when your unsophisticated feeling is aroused you talk like that. I wonder, what woman inside you talks that way? Can I help you find your anima?

Dr. Stein: You’re a priggish snob.

Prof. Wright: Come come now! We’re making progress. You go through life with an awareness of others, their wants and needs. You’re a sensitive man! But your antennae is only used for negative purposes.

Dr. Stein: You think social justice is negative? Are you a monster?

Prof. Wright: You’re projecting your pet cause on whatever comes before you. A distortion, no matter how compassionate its origin, is a distortion nonetheless. Reducing a writer, a vast thinker like Davies, to existing only on your fetishized level is false: You can’t read a piece of art with the critical lens you’d apply to a Marxist pamphlet.

Dr. Stein: “Critical lens”…the pomposity of the learned! Education is a great shield against experience.  

Prof. Wright: I know you’re quoting Davies there, confirming you’ve actually read the book, making your brutal interpretation yet more enigmatic and perverse, but I’m not apologizing for my education. And your sneer seems out of place for a man holding a doctorate.

Dr. Stein: Distract all you want. How are you missing the focus on class structures?

Prof. Wright: Hardly any book can avoid mentioning class concern, but it’s not what spurned the writing. You’re applying inorganic criterion. You’re judging apples using the standards you’d apply to judge oranges. This is literature, not politics. You’re in the wrong field, sir.

Dr. Stein: Now I’ve spent my life moving in the wrong direction?

Prof. Wright: I can’t get through to this guy. It’s hopeless. There’s nothing more I can do.

Dr. Stein: Egoist!

A small but important change to NHL statistics

13 Friday Jan 2012

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I propose the need to change one aspect of NHL statistics in a small but important way that I don’t think anybody has previously considered. I write here in the unlikely hope that this humble message in a bottle reaches the shore of some influential NHL type.

Currently, if team A receives a power play, only to take a penalty five seconds later (as happens after face offs), no team really enjoys a man advantage, yet stats will indicate that both teams failed to score on a power play opportunity. Each team is 0-1 on the PP. This is wrong.

Also, if team A, in that same game let’s say, receives a power play in the game’s final seconds (as happens in those silly, harmless scrums during lopsided games where a losing team, hopeless for 59 minutes, suddenly finds their courage and “makes a statement”), they might have a ten second power play, yet the stats won’t bear this out. They may be 0-2 now, despite only having well under a minute of power play time. Also, the other team must not get 2 minutes of credit for ten seconds of penalty killing.

On the flip side, if team A fails to score on a five minute man advantage, the stats do not distinguish between this glorious opportunity and the severely abbreviated power plays mentioned above. One is five minutes, one may be five seconds, but they both count as 0-1. This is obviously not the same failure. This is very misleading.

This may seem insignificant, but consider how central statistics are to general managers and coaches in baseball and football. In hockey, it’s said you win or lose with special teams, so we ought to know precisely how they’re faring. Despite how much emphasis is put on a team’s power play, league-wide percentages seem kind of negligible: only 4.5% separates the first from the tenth best power play, and only 3.5% separates the eleventh best from the twentieth. You would expect a wider disparity, as anyone who watches hockey knows that whoever beats their opponent on special teams has a far from negligible advantage. This truth very well might be borne out in the statistics if only they were more accurate.

The solution requires a discussion. All fully served two minute power plays, or those resulting in a goal, should be recorded as before, but interrupted power plays should be tallied up at the end of the game and rounded to the nearest two minutes. Example: if a team has a 45 and a 30 second power play in the same game, and fails to score on each, it should count as going 0-1. As of now, it would register 0-2, even though this time doesn’t even add up to the length of one full power play, let alone two.

On the other hand, a 30 second power play alone would register as 0-0 on the PP; while it seems wrong to round it down out of existence, this is more accurate than calling it a full two minute power play. The injustice of not putting a brief power play on the record is offset by no longer giving full credit to the other team for killing an abbreviated penalty.

Five minute penalties should perhaps count as more than one power play, or at least must categorized differently because more than one goal can be scored during it. Whatever the solution here, and in all these examples, these PP stats should be changed.

The ramifications for the way NHL teams are assessed could be considerable, and even if the increased accuracy is only slightly beneficial it is still worth adjusting. Statistics should always aspire to be more accurate whenever possible, and there are currently some glaring problems. 

I hope that someone reading this finds it a worthy idea and is in a position to take it up. In this most unlikely event, my sincerest thanks!

NHL hockey: give me back some pre-lockout rules!

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

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NHL hockey has improved since the lockout due to the fast young talent that’s allowed to skate now that clutching and grabbing have diminished and two-line passes are allowed.  With this, the league rewarded speed, vision, offence and defence, and made life harder for brutish slugs. Very good! But all the other post lockout changes have cheapened hockey because they represented nothing more than undignified pandering to Americans, who incidentally rank the great sport of hockey below circuitous driving and arena football.

The NHL wanted to give teams incentive to play reckless pond hockey in overtime, that fertile ground for exciting highlights, so they decided to award a team one point for losing in OT. It’s wrong that this cheap perspective has altered our game. Like an ageing Hollywood star going under the knife to once more look appealing, the NHL underwent plastic surgery to change its face to look sexier for Americans. One result is the unnatural traces of botox found embedded in the standings, warping their appearance. Consider: Florida is currently third in the East and if playoffs began today they’d have home ice advantage, but remove their eight points awarded for losing in overtime, and adjust everyone else’s, and they’d be out of a playoff position! Teams are making playoffs by losing games at the right time. The NHL slyly acknowledged this and reversed the bad optics years ago by changing the term “overtime loss” to “regulation tie.” Currently, something in the stats is synthetic, and doesn’t look right. I look at the standings and see Joan Rivers.

The NHL’s contrived and sleazy infusion of excitement, as represented by three point games, might not only be fatal to teams (the Leafs missed the playoffs in 2007 because the team ahead succeeded in losing more in overtime), but it actually makes the hockey less exciting. I give a huge sigh of relief when the game finally reaches overtime and a point is safely deposited in the bank. Shouldn’t this tension be prolonged? The real exciting time is just before OT, when there’s a chance to win and lose two points.  Anyway, improvement was never necessary, as overtime was always the best part of a game. Now the NHL’s exciting solution to a non-existent problem has created a new problem which I hope gets redressed one day. Like economic inflation, precious points are being printed out of thin air and handed out for failure. Put us back on the gold standard, please.

The shootout, though exciting, is nothing but a trashy sacrifice of the spirit of the game (that elusive thing!) that disproportionately rewards one- dimensional offensive players and only privileges one singular aspect of the sport.  As Canadians who revere skilled players who also back check we should understand this. Abolish shootouts! It’s wrong that those wise and nobly built defensive teams, of which the Leafs are tragically not, can’t use their biggest asset in the game’s deciding moments. One point should be awarded to each team for a tie. Hockey is fundamentally a team game, and must remain so.

Not that any of this is currently in any mainstream discussion, so fixated is everybody, quite reasonably, on the players’ brains, but it’s problematic that a team might win the Stanley Cup after worming their way into the playoffs on the strength of accumulating a high number of OT losses. Our most exalted trophy deserves better.

I hope these issues get taken up one day.

Political language: combing for clichés

06 Friday Jan 2012

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No politician is free of platitudes, but some seem more blatantly devoid of meaning than others.  As someone who cares about the meaning of words, hollow-speak of any kind offends me, and I have a hard time looking past the breathtaking abuse words suffer at the hands of federal politicians publishing in national newspapers.

In today’s National Post, Sheila Copps amply demonstrates that she is just another Liberal lemming, continuing the parties’ predictable script that, adjusted only in the wake of defeat, has been changed in word but not in essence.  But my main contention is her constant violation of Orwell’s rules of good writing.

First, she explains the Latin root of the word “manifesto,” as deriving from manifestus, “clear or readily apparent.” As a political writer and a heavyweight politician running for presidency of the Liberals, such a violation of Orwell’s caution against using foreign language is inadvisable, yet she seems to dwell, soak and luxuriate in it, setting the tone for the horrors to come. Anyway, is there a worse way to begin a piece about evolving to modern times than invoking Latin etymology?

No Liberal today can begin a speech without addressing the parties’ recent demise. Next, a self-righteous assessment of what went wrong is followed in turn by a way forward invariably laden with the same hubris-ridden entitlement that caused their defeat in the first place. Of this, Copps’ is guilty.

A Liberal who believes “we have been dining out for too long on former glories” can’t also write in the same article “the values of our beautiful Canada were shaped by the Liberal party. Canada is a Liberal country.”  These statements are incompatible: she professes to understand that the meal is over, yet she can’t stop stuffing her face.

Here is a prolix sentence trying to assume grandeur by using needlessly puffed-up words: “We must use technology to continually interconnect so that we operate as a unified organization to protect the values of all reasonable Canadians.”

Without changing the meaning, this could read: “We must use technology effectively to connect with Canadians.” Hardly a profound or impressive statement in an age defined by social media, though her assumption that only Liberal Canadians are “reasonable” is typically patronizing, condescending, and more evidence of hubris.

Copps hands out clichés like Halloween candy with the expectation we will eat them up just as readily, but, just like devouring too much candy, consuming her hackneyed speech in one sitting sickens my stomach. The offences bleed one into another. Addressing and redressing each example of brutal writing requires an elephantine effort that’s unnecessary. The point is clear.

Copps ends where she begins, with one final Orwellian violation: “winners never quit and quitters never win.” If it were me, I’d conclude with something lucid and powerful.  This common aphorism is irrelevant and vague. It can mean different things. Does she mean that the Liberals lost last May because the quit? No. Presumably, she means she will work tenaciously to get into power–hardly a unique trait in politics, the natural home and breeding grounds for cut-throat opportunists. She doesn’t say what she means. Unlike her Latin definition of manifestus, her conclusion, and everything else, is anything but “clear or readily apparent.”

Post Script:

Every party and politician is guilty of using similar barbarous language. I oppose it everywhere. I hope to alert my very small, noble readership to the dangers of this pernicious breed of writing, not to denounce Liberals in general, though in this case it’s hard to do one and not the other.  Copps was the unfortunate victim of this entry because I happened to fall upon her article today and the mood struck me.

ORWELL’S 6 RULES OF WRITING:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use a passive voice where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

–From, “Politics and the English Language”

A complete history of music in under 500 words

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

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As a devoted historian I went to great lengths to untangle a long, complicated mess of history in order to compile a narrative that’s easy to understand, but, first and foremost, factually accurate.

THE HISTORY OF MUSIC:

Before Bach there was no music.  This seriously hampered the soundtracks of movies.  Bach’s music required specially commissioned music halls and churches with perfect acoustics.  For hundreds of years, Italians sang Opera and various European composers arranged notes this way and that.

This lasted until Black slaves sang while being exploited in fields, paving the way for blues, jazz, and rock & roll. This was by far the most positive thing to come out of slavery, though some countries that got rich may disagree.  At about the same time, deep in the backwoods of various small American towns, hillbillies played guitars, banjos, and had sex with their immediate relatives.  Elvis was a revelation because he showed White people could sing like Black people, even if they couldn’t yet drink from the same water fountains.  Then, psychedelic drugs rendered Black music trippy enough and sufficiently different to be considered not really Black music anymore.

Strangely, glam rock took off at the same time as heavy metal. Wardrobes were weird.  Then, musicians traded instruments for turntables, and the machine that used to play music started creating it.  Rap was a perfect medium for protesting and lamenting the sad state of affairs in Black America. White people ate it up in droves.  Simultaneously, grunge became the perfect medium for White people to vent about all the hardships suffered by the unoppressed.  Seattle became internationally renowned for rain, coffee, and angst.

The internet allowed everyone everywhere to hear everything, and we haven’t seen a distinct style of music since.  Modern bands are accurately described with paradoxical composite adjectives: “They’re a soul, poppy, jam band, with blues roots and an old-school urban, rural, new-wave feel.”

Sexy music videos brought in money, so the highest paid musicians no longer burdened themselves with bothersome time-consuming things like writing songs, singing, or playing their own music.  Auto tune could put a goat in perfect pitch. Computers liberated musicians from those old historical obstacles like money, instruments, and talent.  Rhythms and melodic samples could be found ready-made for click and drag stitching together. Yes, music has evolved to great heights where being a musician no longer requires being a musician. And all this on little speakers that fit inside our ears.

We went from Bach to this.

(An exhaustive list of bibliographical sources available upon request.)

This article is also published on Vivoscene.com, a home for me and other music writers.

We are the last pre and post internet generation. Be scared!

05 Monday Dec 2011

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’84 babies, plus or minus a couple years, were the first to grow up with internet but the last to remember life without it. This perspective will be unavailable to future generations. Every generations believes they’re nothing like the previous one, but now it’s true.  Technology is like an avalanche covering everything, so the consequences will be widespread and unpredictable, and not all good. There’s a mentality that’s slipping and there’s no turning back.

It’s hard to sum up concretely, but it has to do with the “boys will be boys” climate that pervaded basically until I was a boy. Not just “boys,” but life will be life. Let it go. You can’t control everything. My guess is 50 years ago, on average, people matured earlier, had longer attention spans, were more articulate, more inclined towards saving money than spending, and reflexively took responsibility for themselves and their actions. Generations used to entail a span of decades. Grandfather-father-son. Perhaps there’s a new generation every 10 years.

The school outlawing “hard” balls during recess after a mother got hit in the head illustrates what I mean. It’s not just the NHL taking head shots and concussions seriously.  I hope soccer mom is OK, but in the name of safety they’ve also eliminated any threat of exercise and fun. Before the 80s I don’t think it ever would have occurred to a mother to outlaw playing with balls during recess. Something has changed. Technology.

Technology, especially the internet, makes society feel entitled: we feel empowered because in real time we talk and see people across the world, book trips, order food to our door, access unprecedented amounts of literature, watch TV and movies from all eras, receive news complete with video from anywhere in the world. And all immediately. We are gods, albeit immensely distracted ones. Those who remember a life before internet can hardly believe our new power, but it’s just a mundane fact of life for those born into a world of fibre optic cables and iPads.

Technology leads to narcissism gone-wild, compounded by marketing campaigns and devices which relentlessly cater to self importance: they’re called “I” pods; playlists rearrange albums to suit our preferences; everyone has a platform to broadcast their “status” to a waiting audience; the “you” in YouTube is us.  We are constantly told to exalt ourselves. If something harms us, it’s wrong and we should outlaw it.

This constant inundation erodes not only critical thinking, but the effectiveness of what used to be reliable institutions–school and news. Education makes things worse by over emphasizing the internet and neglecting the pillars of Western education. Yes, little Johnny’s mind is modern and rapid, as evinced by his innate mastery of social media (writing incoherently and posting vulgar pictures for friends and strangers), but maybe he’d learn more about the human condition after seeing how Odysseus mastered himself through Athena’s grace and Zeus’s justice.  Is there an app for that?  Modern times and serious books have parted company for good, but the head first slide into philistinism isn’t just the teacher’s fault. We were just following curriculums! It’s at a deeper level. That technology provides more access to literature is irrelevant here: if nobody’s reading it may as well be unavailable.

Our news institutions that ought to guard the knowledge are just as prone to change, with mixed results. The Maclean’s special issue from November 14 featured stories in “augmented reality.”  Scan your smartphone over stories with an AR logo to get cool bonus features. Fair enough.

But Toronto Standard ran a worrying article recently about online news sources who, in a hurry to get the scoop, publish first, fact check later.  An article with the same web address can present different facts from one day to the next, with only a vague note indicating a revision, not what’s been changed.  This happens “everywhere,” from the CBC to the New York Times. It didn’t happen in ink.

John Macfarlane, editor of the Walrus, writes in January/February’s issue (currently unavailable online) that “the quality of workmanship in North American newsrooms…is declining.  The reasons…include a generation of journalists who know how to tell a story and little else.” He also says media credibility everywhere is undermined since the Murdoch scandal. “If the press is to continue its independence, it must be seen to be monitoring its own behaviour, vigorously and fairly.”  He doesn’t explicitly state technology is responsible for both, as it’s defined the generation doing the declining work and enabled the cell phone/e-mail hacking, but it’s true. That technology can be wonderful isn’t the point. There are serious drawbacks.

How the internet has changed growing up is the subject of December’s Toronto Life cover story, “the Secret Life of 13-year-old girls” by Alexandra Molotkow.  Sadly (and ironically) it’s unavailable online. Molotkow’s voice is conversational but not colloquial, intelligent but unpretentious. Ruthlessly honest, and funny too. Her article is largely about her experience with internet sex, but she notes the bigger point: “the internet unshackled us from our milieus.”  It was liberating for her, but incomprehensible to every previous generation. There’s never been such a chasm between people, even those close in age. As TL editor Sarah Fulford points out, “I’m only a dozen years older than Molotkow, but her relationship to chat rooms and web journals and texting is so foreign to me we might as well be from different generations.” Indeed.

Those born in the late 90s and early 2000s will look at 80s babies the way we view those from the 40s and 50s. “I was alive before the internet.” Translation: “In my day, we walked 10 miles to school in snow this high, and we didn’t have no boots neither.”

The underlying things we take for granted have permanently altered. Teenagers with cell phones will never again feel the liberation of being out of reach from their parents. Depraved behaviour at parties, or by police, isn’t only captured on camera, but potentially circulated online. We can get around in any city with Google maps. There’s too many to name.

Imagine when the last pre-internet person dies. If the sensibilities, habits, traditions from our collective past only exist on screen for concerned historians, but inhabited by nobody, it’s hard to predict what things will look like. This is worrying. Like democracy, the internet is wonderful, powerful and permanent, but it’s what we make of it. And it’s what we keep from before.

So, when people ask why I don’t do every modern thing ever, maybe there’s a reason besides I’m cheap. Maybe.

Republican morons: all just different shades of disgrace

28 Monday Nov 2011

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Even staunch Republicans can’t deny that the leaders on offer today have never been more pathetic. They are not merely poor or bad, they are abysmal. It’s beyond embarrassing, and if it were my country I’d be ashamed that such abjectly inadequate people could be taken seriously at all, let alone be poised for a Presidential race.  Such a thing could only take place in an anti-intellectual climate that celebrates stupidity. It’s hard to describe without it sounding like exaggeration. British writer Martin Amis published a terrific collection of his journalism on a cross-section of American topics in the 80s called the Moronic Inferno, a perfect phrase for the climate that enables such monstrously stupid politicians.  We expect left-wing media to attack Republicans, but it should be noted whenever the right does. The Canadian right has stepped forward in this regard.

The National Post did a segment Saturday where eleven writers named their pick for Republican candidates, followed by a brief explanation. They mostly sounded jaded and hopeless, as if they were picking which gun they’d use to shoot themselves in the head.  My two favourite NP writers, George Jonas and Robert Fulford, opted for “none of the above.”  Beyond pessimism, Jonas suggested politicians should be drafted since anyone who believes they possess all it takes to run a country is a lunatic, and should be disqualified on these grounds alone.  Fulford said it’s the worst lineup of potential candidates he’s seen in his lifetime.

This week’s Maclean’s discussed Republicans in an article titled “American Idiots.”  It proposes that perhaps becoming a presidential candidate is no longer solely a political objective, but a financial one. Presidential candidates are assured of fame. Politics is merely branding.  This perspective explains why Herman Cain was so stunningly unprepared to answer basic questions about Libya. Even more revealing was his explanation for the gaffe: “I got all this stuff twirling around in my head.” This should disqualify him off the bat: thinking is a non-negotiable job requirement for the leader of the free world.

The article notes that the New York Times looked at Cain’s calendar of campaign events and found that “19 of the 31 days of October were blank.”  Commentators suggest his campaign is fake, just a publicity stunt masquerading as politics. Maybe this is true, maybe not: what’s the bigger disgrace? For a serious political campaign to be so stunningly amateur as to be mistaken for a joke is pathetic, but is it worse or better than using the most serious office in the country for such shameless pursuit of profit? Instead of work on his campaign, the devastatingly prudent thing to do, Cain promoted his book. This is a scandal! It used to be that if you wanted to gain money, fame and notoriety from the President’s office you didn’t try to become the President. A blowjob sufficed.

But this isn’t a dictator ruthlessly inserting himself.  This is democracy. Pathetically, Cain actually has voluntary support, making Americans complicit. The bigger problem is that Cain is not out of place beside Gingrich, Bachmann, Perry, Palin, and Trump, and too many voters are OK with this.

In Ancient Greece, citizens not only voted for politicians, but could vote to ostracize for ten years any politician who they felt was a threat to the state.  While there’d be no politicians left in Greece today if this were still practiced, it would allow the US to filter politicians who perniciously hijack the political system to get rich. Although, it is shameful that this can’t be entrusted to the voters good sense. But Presidential candidates must all be devoted, capable politicians who know about the world and care about the country. Does this really need to be said? It’s a bizarre, scary world when this statement is not overwhelmingly self-evident, but it cannot be overstated.  This is a race for President of the United States, not high school.

But even ostracizing politicians is a band-aid solution if the climate of stupidity which enables them doesn’t change. Otherwise, a new moron will rise.  Any aspect of culture, media, or even advertising which actively or passively encourages or takes advantage of people’s stupidity is guilty of contributing to fanning the flames of the moronic inferno.  This should not be considered an “elitist” view, a term stupid people use as a shield. And anyway, movies like Dumb and Dumber, intelligence only lacquered in low IQ, aren’t the target of my criticism.  I’m talking about Fox News and everything else that trades the collective IQ of the country for ratings and money. I am not so naive to believe this will ever stop. Indeed, money at all costs is practically the country’s guiding principle.  Perhaps Obama recognized this essential hopelessness and won on a slogan of “hope.”

I fear the media get a kick out of bashing Republicans so much that a part of them is glad they’re there. Bad for politics, good for journalism. But this isn’t funny. This is a deplorable state of affairs that jeopardizes the country, and even the world. Millions of Americans understand this and helplessly watch their country sink into a bog. The focus of concerned, responsible adults should be on rising up; laughter just makes the sinking more enjoyable.

Democracy isn’t inherently good or bad, as Jonas reminds us in an earlier NP article from last week: “democracy is only a method of succession.” It fails without a body of intelligent, discerning and informed citizens. The Maclean’s article suggests that Mitt Romney, “the only serious Republican candidate,” is stuck at 21% support since he fails to make attention grabbing gaffes. He alienates his voters by refusing to behave like a vulgar spectacle on a reality TV show. This is his obstacle.

I was seriously disappointed in American intelligence after the show Arrested Development got cancelled (though intelligent Americans created it), but politics is important.  Countries need more than one plausible political party. The States has only two parties, but one is pathologically immature and obstinately refuses to care about the good of the country. I love the United States. This isn’t disappointing, or funny. This is terrifying.