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World Series Baseball: Game ON

8:16 p.m.

What a great television! Thanks, Wendy and Bernie!

It’s the 103rd “World Series” of baseball, named not for its global reach — though the game is getting more international — but because it was initially sponsored by a long-defunct newspaper called the New York Globe. (You could look it up, and I hope you will. Going Google-free tonight.)

The participating teams are proving that baseball is a sport that is the least reliable of all the North American major sports in having its “best team” win. After all, baseball is a marathon 162-game schedule, and the playoff series can end in a shorter period than an individual engagement with another team in-season. So here we are, with the Red Sox having come from behind in the American League championship series to win. No surprise here, really. Boston is a big-money team and dominated their division most of this season. However, Colorado had to win 14 out of their last 15 games just to qualify for a tie-breaker, and they have now won eight straight post-season games to take the National League title. Whoever is hottest at the end seems to be the team to watch…

8:24 p.m.

Who gets the National Anthem for Game One of the World Series? “The Pride of Boston, and the epitome of our culture, Maestro John Williams…” At the time when he first won an Oscar for the score to Indiana Jones, he was the conductor of the Boston Pops orchestra. So we had brass in the outfield instead of some brassy blonde. I approve.

Pre-game introductions highlighted by one of baseball’s specialties, a close-up shot of Boston manager Terry Francona launching a brown spurt of tobacco juice for the edification of all. Spitting is the thing. Country ball.

Actually, no. The true highlight, and no sarcasm here, is having Boston Red Sox icon Carl Yastrzemski throw out the ceremonial first pitch. (He bounced it to the plate. But he’s still a hero from my youth. I changed my batting stance as a 10-year-old in homage to his high-held bat. The last winner of the Triple Crown, in 1967.) Quite splendiferously cool to see the visiting Rockies lined up along their dugout’s top step to watch the great Hall of Famer demonstrate his old-man arm. And he’s so central to the Red Sox team’s painful mystique, as all his greatness and all those seasons never brought him to the Series championship. They didn’t break the so-called “Curse of the Babe” — they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1492 or so and had never won the big one since until the 2004 exorcism.

8:44 p.m.

Wow, this Josh Beckett is all I’ve heard. The starting pitcher for the BoSox just threw bullets, nothing but fastballs in the high 90s to strike out three straight Rockies. Yikes. (That was 90 as in miles per hour. This may be the World Series, but we are in the Excited States of Anti-Metric Measurement.) But here comes the pride of Canada, the first Canuck to start as the pitcher of a Series game since Reggie Cleveland did in the mid-70s. Jeff Francis, a big left-hander with stuff and style.

8:50 p.m.

Wow. Runty little second baseman hits it out. Dustin Pedroia hit a big home run in the ALCS, too. Second batter Kevin Youkilis lines a double. David “Big Papi” (this reference to him is already getting annoying) Ortiz moves the runner over, and Manny Ramirez drills the first runner home. Not a good start for the Canadian.

8:58 p.m.

The black and purple/blue of the Rockies’ uniforms remind me of the cover to Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album. Those little armless vests don’t work for me at all, especially with the guys showing off their guns with polyester long-sleeved undershirts. 3-0 at the end of one inning, and the Rockies would love for the rain to turn into a monsoon. One of the many things that make baseball a distinct game: it’s outdoors, and you can’t play it properly in anything more than the lightest of rains.

9:07 p.m.

The Rockies are going to need a second time through the order, after their eight days off, to catch up with Beckett. Four straight Ks now. Whoa! Why bother throwing the curveball? It results in a double that nearly went over the massive Green Monster, the left-field wall in Boston’s Fenway Park. Nice to see a park like Fenway in the World Series, not just a boutique field designed to evoke nostalgia for the days when baseball truly was the National Pastime.

Hey, and there’s my new shortstop hero, Troy Tulowitzki, ripping a double to get the Rockies on the board. (I was a fan, still am, of Khalil Greene of the San Diego Padres, though I haven’t seen him much; but hey, he belongs to the Baha’i Faith, and the minority religionists have to stick together.) Some of his teammates have been waving fairly helplessly, but two doubles in the bottom of the first may have broken the Beckett mystique, just a little. Baseball is, perhaps more than any other team sport, such a mental exercise. You most often can’t overcome poor play with hustle, effort, all that “old college try”. In true baseball-speak, you gotta try EASIER.  

9:37 p.m.

Lots of car commercials, of course. Boy toy night at the television. There was one that had, though, more than just jolting music and chaotic camera angles. There was actually an appeal to ideals and ethics, a frontal attack on our tendency to materialist impatience. But I can’t remember what the product was. Ah. I’m sure I’ll have another chance at it. It played, after all, twice in the first half-hour of the broadcast. And it’s raining hard now in Boston. Oh, oh…

9:51 p.m.

It’s the top of the fourth inning, less than halfway through the regulation ballgame, and all the young baseball fans in North America, at least in the Eastern Time Zone, should be long gone to dreamland. And this is one of many reasons that baseball is dying out in large parts of the continent. I used to race home from school to catch the end of Series games that started in the afternoon. Money, money, money. Seven Ks for Beckett in four innings. Nice. (“K” is the baseball scorebook symbol for a strikeout. Boston fans have been provided with “K” placards by a local radio station. This being the Series, they may not require JumboTron appeals to “Make noise” and “Clap your hands!” I am ever an optimist.)

10:12 p.m.

Canada’s Pitcher just escaped the fourth inning, but there’s another crooked number on the Red Sox scoreboard. (The occasional one run doesn’t always hurt, but those bent numerals…) Francis may be done for the night, in which case he will continue one of the odd little facts that litter, even more than they always have in baseball, this number-crazy game: no Canadian has ever been the winning pitcher in a Series game. A nice little piece of conversation about Francis a couple of innings ago: born in Vancouver, named for a legendary Montreal Canadiens star (Jeff for Geoffrion, nicknamed “Boom Boom” as the hard-shooting Hab also was). And never learned to skate. So the American broadcast duo has a little fun with that, but I’m thinking What? You name AND nickname your kid after a hockey star and never let a good little athlete play the game? Not that every Canadian boy has to be a hockey head — none of my four have, although the youngest gets outdoor hockey in Canada’s cold capital’s outdoor rinks — but there’s a parental oddity there that I’d like to know more about.  

The rain has eased, and now the necessary five innings to make the game official are in the book. All Red Sox. More of those little ballcaps with the old-fashioned ‘B’ on them will be adorning male heads all over the continent.

10:40 p.m.

And my attention is wandering. Past my bedtime. But I can watch Manny Ramirez, one of the oddest-looking great athletes ever, hit. Three hits tonight. Everybody knows a hitter has to keep his head down on the ball, but he’s perfect. Wow. A flaky dude, a chaotic and sometimes even incompetent outfielder, but what a hitter. (Okay, perfect? Sorry. My error. Had he been a left-hand hitter, now then he’d be perfect.) Just detected another Howden error: Red Sox captain Jason Varitek does indeed wear the traditional knee-high knickers and tall red stockings. (I lost it in the sun.)

10:56 p.m.

12-1. Fifth inning. Another Colorado relief pitcher. I need a relief bloggist.

11:02 p.m.

The Red Sox are still up, now 13-1, and they’ve finally gotten the 3rd out of a 5th inning that seemed to have started yesterday. Cameras just caught a shot of writer Stephen King in a rain poncho, reading a magazine. You may have heard of his novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Okay, I haven’t read it either, but Gordon was a Red Sox pitcher with a fine curveball, as I recall. Naturally, he was called “Flash”. And here’s another one of those things about baseball: no sport has been written about better. There are lots of short stories, a few fine novels and tonnes of creative documentary writing about the game. It’s the only game, I used to joke — and I love baseball — that’s more interesting to talk about than to play. Almost true.

Macho guitars and turbo-charged video about a minivan from Toyota; at the end is slipped in the printed fact that it has the best fuel efficiency among grocery-getters. Not hard to see that peak oil hasn’t entirely penetrated North American consciousness. And then comes the ad for recreational gas-guzzling, the Polaris ATV.

11:26 p.m.

Wendy and Bernie just got home. They’re the guys with the three televisions, any one of which is at my disposal when my lust for sport cannot be sated by radio or on-line reports the next morning.

Just when I thought there was nothing more to say, here comes Ashanti singing “God Bless America” as the since-9-11 7th inning stretch song of choice. No more taking anybody out to the ballgame. Patriotism. Bowed heads. (An echo, of course, of the U.S. Air Force fly-by to punctuate “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Bowed heads and blood lust. Ooh. Did I just say that?) The extreme patriotism of Americans has always been an irritant to me, Canada having traditionally been a little quieter about our national pride (except certain hockey blowhards). We’re getting a little more vociferous, in our reserved Scottish way, and I wince about it sometimes. Our pride is not mainly based on military might, so I feel less compromised about our occasional chest-thumping. But the attachment of national glory to every single athletic contest? I mean the solemnity of l’hymne nationale before each game beyond high school. Surely this is a tradition that, if it weren’t so deep and patriotism such an American article of faith, would have long outlived its usefulness. And to add the alternative national anthem for a mid-game bit of national self-importance is sickly sweet icing upon a cake that’s past its best-before date. I wanted to paste my favourite little bumper sticker over Wendy and Bernie’s TV: God Bless ALL The Nations.

And on in relief for the Red Sox is Mike Timlin. Mike Timlin? He’s still living? He was relieving for the Blue Jays last millennium, for goodness’ sake. And speaking of great relievers, the other Canadian chucker won’t likely get off the bench for the Red Sox. Whither the Eric Gagné of old, he of the unhittable Dodgers closeouts? Hard not to be a bit suspicious about how he fuelled his earlier exploits, but maybe he’s just old. I know that feeling.

12:02 a.m.

Sheesh. Error number three for the typist. Gagné is in, but this IS, after all, a twelve-run ballgame. We’re finally in the ninth inning. We’ll soon be home. And my current favourite name just made the catch for the Sox in centre field: yes, friends, Coco Crisp is in the game as a defensive replacement.

12:07 a.m.

Big Eric closes the game with a strikeout. Yawn. Zoom, zoom, zoom. More car sales. Time to jump into my car.

Action de Grace

In English, we call it Thanksgiving. (In Canada, it’s generally the second Monday in October. Hope yours was happy. My American friends will have to wait a while for their gobble-fest, but maybe this will give you some early appetite for thinking.)

ThanksGIVING. Give thanks and then give whatever else you can. I like that the word action appears in the French name of this wonderful excuse for a long weekend, and so I made it my title. This is clearly my favourite generally celebrated holiday of the year. (Nothing beats Naw-Ruz.) It’s all about the verbs. It’s all about gratitude being something that we actively DO, and not only feel.

Live life with an attitude of gratitude. This clunky little rhyme has become a popular motto of how to live well, and it’s a good one. (The Globe and Mail’s Judith Timson called it the “platitude of gratitude” — it may have been Anthony Robbins who originated or popularized the expression — but went on in her column last weekend to show how this admitted cliché is important to health and contentment.) For the last ten years or so, the Howden Thanksgiving shindig has featured not only turkey, Chris’s broccoli casserole, and the food-like, cottage-cheese-and-jello collision we call Pink Stuff, but also a thankfulness circle. Everyone offers a few words. Some offer a few more, not that my brother was counting or anything. It gets sweeter every year, it seems.

Over and over, we were thankful for faith and caring, for friends and community and for family, behind and beneath and above all. Our numbers and our general harmony suggest that we’re a fortunate crew. What follows is no transcript, but offers some of the ways my family circle raised its many voices in gratitude…

…for all my memories of the example of my parents
…for the richness of opportunity that we enjoy in our fortunate nation
…for the strength and support of my brothers
…for the chance to get to work and laugh and just hang out with my sisters
…for my sons, who have taught me to be a better Dad
…to my wife, who teaches me to be a better person
…that people are more environmentally responsible for this beautiful planet
…for sports ‘cause I really like sports
…for memorizing scripture verses and for music
…to be in love with my husband/wife
…for my job, and for my BOSS who’s a really cool guy
…to my parents for teaching me right from wrong
…for going to the rink, where the parents know and care for each other
…for the unconditional love – and the occasional indifference! – of pets
…for my time living in a different culture in the Arctic, a place I’ll return to
…for good times in the kitchen
…for another year at school
…for the chance to keep on learning and trying new things
…for having friends in their 90s, friends in their teens, and everything in between
…for the ability to always “go home in my heart”                                               …that I live in a family where we take advantage of each other (in a good way!)

A poet wrote: i thank you god for most this amazing / day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes… I’m grateful for this beginning to an odd sweet sonnet from e.e. cummings, one that I recited when a second marriage opened up the windows on a stuffy life. I’m glad to have, touch wood, overcome the ankle pain that had made even the simplest act of near-athleticism seem like a pole vault with no pole; my Thanksgiving run was a 10-k canter along leafy, mist-laden country roads. I’m blessed by the lives and affections of my bride and boys, whose movements inspire and inform my own. One week after I failed to mention UNESCO’s World Teachers’ Day, I am ever more grateful for all who have taught me. And for words, of course, and especially for words like these of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, a good start to any old day (or a New one!): O compassionate God! Thanks be to Thee for Thou hast awakened and made me conscious. Thou hast given me a seeing eye and favoured me with a hearing ear…

An old-fashioned definition of a gentleman says that he goes out of his way to make others comfortable. This is loving kindness, really, and all of us can do it. Love is not a feeling, I was once taught, but an action, doing for others what they most need (and as we would be done by). Feeling gratitude, it says here, is doing for ourselves what is best for us. And then we can go beyond feeling and give back, an action that testifies to our own good fortune and spreads it around. Thanksgiving is a brief festival, but it should infect our whole year. There is a lot of gratitude to be done. Action de Grâce, indeed.

Why Did We Need to Know? TMI After Blacksburg

3:53 a.m.

Thank God for exhaustion, or I wouldn’t have gotten the hours of sleep that I did. A long hot bath helped, though there isn’t enough soap and water to clean out my head. A heavy dose of bed-time narrative – imagine Kurt Vonnegut as escape fiction! – and I was finally able to knock myself out. And then my little boy called in the night: I’m thirsty, it’s too dark, something. And now I can’t get that other voice out of my head, that fully grown, lip-quivering boy at the perfect storm of petulance, his self-loathing narcissism gone murderous.

If you haven’t seen the Virginia Tech murderer’s rant, my counsel is to avoid it. It is toxic. And no, I did not take my own advice. I couldn’t not watch. Get right inside the mind of a mass killer! Step right up, folks, and see the Wounded Boy! Hurry, hurry, hurry! It’s Actual Footage! Live! Inside the heart of darkness! Tell your friends, invite your enemies, forward this everywhere! And please, don’t forget to patronize our sponsors… When I wrote about Dawson College and the shooting there on that bitter day last fall, I refused to name the shooter, just as I do when I reflect on the earlier Montreal Massacre. How quaint, how fussy that now seems when NBC News has decided to air the ravings of the Blacksburg killer. NBC itself is BIG NEWS today! So, by extension, is the Globe and Mail and all the other TV, print and online media that have dutifully obeyed the pre-death wishes of that catastrophically maladjusted man-child in Virginia. (No, I won’t name him, either. I crave the conquest of barren hillsides. I fight battles out of time. I’m an idiot, but I do what I can.)

I am stunned by what I saw. I am bewildered that I could click on a bit of text and bring the sickness, the disgusting narcissism of raging injury right into my house, right into my heart. (“Create in me a pure heart, O my God, and renew a tranquil conscience within me, O my hope…” Pray and pray.) I wonder at the decision-making process of the major media. WAS there any? Well, DUH, of course we run it!! We’ll never have a scoop this loaded again! The number of jolts this provides to the planet is beyond counting. We will watch and watch again, a lurid and haunted fascination. We don’t know what’s good for us.

So while the commentators (like me) prattle about “copy-cat killings”, now the Manual for Impotent Men is available free, in deathly colour. It’s the school for scandalous action. And now YOU can get the revenge you deserve! It WORKS, kids! When the revenge fantasies don’t work anymore, try reality! The guy’s a hero now. He has a constituency. He’s the patron saint of Glock masturbation. He has been given exactly the public exaltation that he lusted for in his pornographically petulant dreams. We nourish this madness. We feed upon it. It is unbelievable. It is this week’s sign of apocalypse, if we needed one.

No doubt there will be pious invocations of the public’s right to know, the sober responsibility of the broadcaster and the journalist. But this is the ultimate sell-out. NBC has hit a jackpot, and they’ll keep pulling that slot machine’s crank. Vonnegut couldn’t have invented a humour so bitterly black, where mass murder and mass media join hands and celebrate the power of rage and heartbreak. In Canada, the families of slain and dishonoured girls fought long and achingly, at an emotional cost we can’t imagine, to restrain access to the ugly evidence in the Bernardo trial. Can you imagine now how the families of the Virginia Tech innocents are feeling, knowing that this filth is number one with an on-line bullet? Can you imagine their decision, to watch or not? I pray that they don’t, but what if they do?

I will try not to watch again. My eyes are raw and my gut hurts, but I’m like a billion others. I want to understand. (Ah, noble intentions. Or maybe I just want to say, Didja see? Didja see? Maybe I just want to peek into that corner we all know is off limits. It’s psychological pornography, and we get to justify it with all kinds of righteous reasons. Didn’t NBC?) But I do want to be able to sleep. Macbeth comes to mind. (I’ll name the Scottish play, but I won’t name the Blacksburg bastard. And yet I hear he had hardworking parents. Dry cleaners. Out, out damned spot!) Do you remember the aftermath of murder in the play?

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth doth murder sleep,’ – the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds…

It’s 5:03 a.m. I’ll try sleep again, but even writing doesn’t seem too cathartic right now. We will all sleep again. (Pray for the sleep of the bereaved families. And I hope, too vengefully, that somewhere news executives are losing a few nights of their own.)

A Long Look Back at Longboat

For a certain slice of the sport-loving public, Africa doesn’t immediately summon mental images of devastation by AIDS, ethnic strife, desertification or hunger. For devotees of distance running on road and track, Africans are the graceful, superbly fit athletes who dominate their sport in an almost unimaginable way. Moroccan, Ethiopian and, to an astonishing degree, Kenyan runners are the perennial champions of the most ancient and elemental athletic contests of them all. Never should we minimize the traumas of that deeply abused continent, but it is good to see Africans as winners and heroes.

Yesterday, at the Boston Marathon, Kenyan Robert Cheruiyot won for the third time. His countrymen came second through fourth, and have won the classic race fifteen of the last seventeen years. I became a fan of Kenyan running during the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, at each of which Kipchoge Keino won a silver and a gold medal on the track, from 1500 metres to the steeplechase. (And while we’re only a couple of days from remembering Jackie Robinson, here’s another brilliant athlete who is even a greater man. Please click here for more on Keino.)

So, go, Africans, go, but that isn’t even what I wanted to write about today. For me, and for a lot of Canadians, especially the down-home friends on the Six Nations reserve, the Boston Marathon yesterday was most importantly the 100th anniversary of the record-setting run of the great Tom Longboat. (There was a very fine Longboat tribute by James Christie in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. Highly recommended.)

Though he ran so long ago, now, Longboat’s career arc is a fairly familiar one to us. It was all the more so in the days when an athlete’s already brief career was an insistently amateur one: to be an Olympian, or to defend his Boston Marathon victory, there was to be no salary, no endorsements. There were severe competitive restrictions for those who “sullied” their sport by accepting prize money. Indeed Longboat, still young and having trained largely on his own, was not welcome on Heartbreak Hill in 1908 because he had made a few dollars with his feet. His fall from grace was also accelerated by the enduring racism and privation experienced by Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. We love to kick our stars when they fall, and Longboat took an especially spirited beating. (Published references to him, even when he was winning, are, by today’s lights, cringe-worthy in their ignorance and stereotyping.) Longboat was a source of enormous national pride when he was winning and was ignored, or openly despised, when he no longer was. His reputation, badly damaged in early- and mid-century, is being redeemed, thanks largely to the efforts of a more contemporary running man, the quiet Canadian hero of sport and equality, Bruce Kidd. Kidd’s 1992 biography offers a modern and more sympathetic view of the Onondaga athlete.

I loved the Globe’s photo. There’s Tom Longboat in knee-length khaki shorts with a black leather belt and black high-top shoes. It is a picture, though, of a body made for running. The legs are thin and unusually long, the shoulders broad and well-muscled for a distance runner, perhaps because of the lacrosse and other tough sports that he loved to play. And it’s a familiar face, somehow. I went to high school in Caledonia, just after the graduation of more local Six Nations running legends named Anderson or Bomberry. But we all knew about Longboat, in a hazy sort of way. Some reports referred to him as the “Caledonia Cyclone”, as one of his earliest successes came in a race at the town fair, but he wasn’t from town.

Years later, teaching and coaching in that same school, I had a young Longboat on my basketball team. Reading a frustrated account of a Canadian sportswriter trying to interview the tight-lipped Tom, I couldn’t help but remember coaching young Todd – a relative, I’d guess from the Globe photo, though I was never able to find out – and feeling good whenever he was sufficiently at ease to smile. I don’t know if I ever got a complete sentence out of him, and I never knew exactly where he lived. He wasn’t an outstanding basketball player, but he ran his guts out and rebounded hard against far bigger guys. Our school didn’t do much with track and field, so I don’t know how well Todd had inherited the running gene. He was tough, I know that, but here’s another Longboat I need to find out more about.

So here we are, 100 years after one of the greatest victories in the history of Canadian sport, remembering with greater justice and comprehension the career of a magnificent athlete. It’s far too late for Tom Longboat, of course, who died in 1948, but idealism compels me to wonder out loud: where are the young native athletes who can be inspired, as the youth of Kenya were by Keino, by the legend of “Cogwagee”? History knows him as Tom Longboat, a young Onondaga man who ran the rural miles of Grand River country and made himself the best in the world. I hope that we shall see the likes of him again.

In Praise of Taxes

Thanks to the Princess of Quitealot, I just rediscovered a favourite column that I thought I’d lost track of. It came just in time, because here in Ottawa, the city is going through its annual budget wrangle, this time under the leadership of a Mayor who promised to ban tax increases. Meanwhile, the dollar buys less and many fine social programs are on the chopping block, not to mention the rising costs of policing and an aging infrastructure that, like every city, Ottawa has in abundance and will someday have to pay for…

It all has me muttering about politicians, particularly the stripe whose popularity is mainly based on an appeal to our greed and sense of entitlement. You worked hard for that money and if you elect us we’re going to put an insignificant but apparently sweet portion of it back in your pocket. After all, why should you care about anyone else? Besides, government stinks, and that’s why I’m running for it. Um, so it’ll, ah, stink lots less or something. Drives me nuts, but I know who they’re talking to. There’s no shortage of folks complaining about having to pay taxes. I’ve heard so much grousing about not getting anything from all the taxes we pay, and I don’t even get out of the house that much.

Anyhow, my bride found me exactly what I was looking for, an answer to all those death-and-taxes and woe-is-me whiners. I’m with the hard-working immigrant Canadian – he was an entrepreneur, and good at it – who told me, “Hey, if I’m paying taxes, that means I’m making some money. And it also means that I can give something back to a country that has given me so much.” You go, guy. The rant in question came from a 2004 article by Heather Mallick in the Globe and Mail. (And where have you gone, Ms. Mallick?* I couldn’t always agree with her, but she was opinionated and strong and often funny. She likely still is.)

She argues that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and that we should consider that price a privilege; after all, the opposite of civilization is no picnic. Here’s part of what Mallick wrote in 2004, seeing the effect that Stephen Harper was beginning to have on Canadian popular thought. (Mr. Harper had become Conservative Party leader after having led the anti-taxation National Citizens’ Coalition.) I’ll spare you most of her partisan commentary, but here’s a précis of her column:

 How I dislike that remark about the only sure thing being death and taxes. Death is a hateful dragnet, except when it’s a blessed release. But Canadian taxes are great….I’m a fan of civilization and, you see, taxes enable civilization. To put it another way, taxes grease the skids of living well.

Other people say loudly, endlessly, tediously that they hate taxes…. Mr. Harper has many obsessions, but his main one is taxes….To him, taxes are tapeworms — “double, double, toil and taxes,” as Shakespeare’s witches didn’t put it — sneaking into your home to steal all that is good….

This is absurd. I pay taxes. I love taxes. When you work, the government yanks them off your paycheque…The government uses it to do all the stuff I’d rather not think about….[T]ruly, the word “tax” trails clouds of glory. Taxes ease our daily lives in ways we take for granted.

 They pay for traffic lights, sewers, garbage pickup, nicely dressed diplomats so we don’t show up at the G8 in golfing shorts, ferries, fish in general, nuclear power plant inspection, protecting the provincial flower (“Leave that wild rose alone, ma’am”), libraries, white-coated people who spring into action when you contract flesh-eating disease, building codes, schools, dangerous-toy advisories, keeping cable companies in line, clean air, truck inspections for airborne wheels, loan forgiveness, autopsies, campgrounds, divorce, licence plates so you can track the guy on the cellphone in his Humvee who hit you, fluoridation, teacher training, privacy, universities, fair elections, fire trucks, child guardianship, hazardous-waste control, name changes, hostels, museums, protocol (see golfing shorts), trees, zoning, high-tech passports, standards in general, notaries public, noise control, organ donation, human rights, disability, drainage, bingo permits, boating safety, French-language services, neighbour encroachment, aboriginal business aid, art galleries, adoption, jury duty, cemeteries, soil quality, spills response, tattoo parlour inspection, bank deposit insurance, street lighting, commercial ship registry, victim assistance (“there, there”), social insurance numbers, joint rescue (water and land, nothing to do with knees), aerial mapping, pesticide disapproval and savings bonds.

Without taxes, you would have to do all of the above yourself…. Fine, cut my taxes, and I’ll pick a task. I’ll take “spills response” and use recycled paper towels. Oh, you say the spill covers 2,000 hectares and it’s sticky, oily and toxic? I thought you meant coffee. Somebody call the feds. I’m a taxpayer!

Here in Canada, we believe in the public good, as in “good for all the public.” We don’t believe in private affluence and public squalor. We like to balance those two things.

Whenever you get upset by taxation, egged on by HelmetHead [Harper], think of an ill-considered purchase. Then figure out what that cash could have contributed to, had it been in government hands. A gleaming new hip for my mother? An extra season of Da Vinci’s Inquest? An ice rink for kids on the reserve?

Paying taxes is a means to a good end. Can we do it with a lighter heart, please?

(* Good ol’ Wikipedia informs me that Ms. Mallick is writing a book, and still knocking out columns for Chatelaine and writing commentaries on the CBC website.)

The Earth is Bipolar (but we all have to live here)

‘Twas the night before Valentine’s, and most guys were frantic,
It’s so hard to recall how to be faux romantic…

VD is a harsh little pocket of cynicism for me, despite having a smart and attractive date every year. Thanks for allowing that wee poetic vent, but that’s SO not what I want to talk about. I’m actually thinking about IDEALS. Most of us seem to agree on what they are: that the whole world could know the peace that we enjoy; that our children might inherit a cleaner, flourishing natural environment; that the whole human species might realize its inner sister-and-brotherhood; that kindness rule, that all are befriended and feel useful, and God bless all the nations…

As humanity gropes erratically toward these sorts of goals – and we are – the confusion can be overwhelming. I’ve learned to distinguish, though it’s rarely crystal clear, two simultaneous processes at work in the world. One is destructive, and appears designed to undermine any hope we might have of achieving our social ideals. The other, sometimes harder to see because Fox News doesn’t report it, is a process that builds resolutely toward our collective dreams. I’ve run across two news stories that perfectly illustrate these processes. The world is bipolar, in more ways than one.

First is an astoundingly scary set of numbers, recounted in an article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail by Lawrence Martin, about the level of defence spending by the American government. It would be ridiculous if it wasn’t so dreadful. To a man with a hammer, it is said, every problem looks like a nail. To a fear-obsessed nation with trillions invested in the machinery of war, international problems appear solvable by force. (Shock and Awe. Remember? Wow.) The piece isn’t linkable for free, so a brief excerpt follows:

“Overwhelming” won’t do. “Staggering” doesn’t quite cut it. The United States now spends more [$622 billion annually, doubled in the Bush II years] on military might than all the other countries put together. Its nearest rivals, Russia and China, spend less than $100-billion each. Put them on a racetrack with the Americans and you get the picture: The Russians and the Chinese are lapped by the guys in stars and stripes more than six times over.

That still isn’t enough, it seems. When you’re equipped with the greatest arsenal ever known and you’re taken down by a bunch of goat herders with pen-knives, you have to forever prove your manhood — even if the new tonnage in armour is barely relevant to the fight. Of course, it wasn’t lack of U.S. military power that resulted in the 9/11 calamity. It was lack of intelligence. Nevertheless, the terror hit has given the green light to the runaway military industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower warned about. Boeing needs the money…

This week’s sign that hopefulness is possible is not (surprise!) such a loud, vulgar and pricey proposition. It’s a bit of environmental optimism that arises from an amazing development in tiny, poor Niger. Along with Kenyan 2004 Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai and her tree-planting miracle-in-progress, this is one of those stories that we don’t hear often enough. This is a revolutionary encounter of the inspiring kind. It was on the New York Times front page, and you may read it here.