Dictators, Episode 2

Well, with Americans having voted in Trump and Vance, I guess we'll all have a front row seat on Episode 2. 

There are many different possible scenarios going forward from here, but here is one:

On January 7, 2025, Trump chokes on a Twinkie and dies  while celebrating his inauguration; JD Vance becomes president and wins the 2028 election in a landslide. By 2050, his grandson, JD Vance III, travels to Kiev to marry Princess Anastasia (great-granddaughter of Vladimir Putin) and is anointed Holy Roman Emperor, thus bringing the Roman Catholic (now dominated by the American Evangelical right) and Orthodox branches of Christianity together after millennia apart. By 2100 the sectarian wars between the Empire and various branches of Protestantism have laid waste to most of Western Europe and the US Mid-West, while the Culture Wars are over due to New York having been flooded out by rising sea levels and California having broken off from the mainland and sunk into the Pacific following a series of massive earthquakes. (The tsunami washes up the Fraser as far as Hope, B.C., as well as wreaking havoc in Japan). In Canada in 2124, the Caquistas have joined the Empire and have taken Toronto, where they are enforcing French language laws, but the revived Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CRAP) under descendants of the illegitimate son of Pierre Poilievre and Allison Smith continues to fight back.

 Of course this is a relatively positive scenario, it could be much worse.  

How dictators use the democratic apparatus to take power - Episode 1

Many years ago, shortly after his 21st birthday, my Dad started walking from Normandy to Berlin with the US Army. It is my understanding that he carried a radio on his back, and likely came ashore in Normandy well after D-Day; while not at the front lines he nonetheless put his life at risk as part of the effort to put an end to the Nazi horrors. 

In 1973 my good friend Richard Nixon sent me a draft card. We were living in Canada by then, so I was in no immediate danger; but Dad's vehement opposition to the war in Vietnam contrasted with his military service. I set about reading as much as I could about Hitler's rise to power, starting with the classic The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William Shirer; at the time that was pretty much what could be found outside academic journals. I concluded that advocating for peace is good but sometimes you need a more forceful response.

The questions in my mind revolved around how did Hitler manage to come to power in a democracy? How did he stay in power? Were all Germans complicit in supporting him, or was it only the politicians that he bullied and the industrialists that made fortunes working for him? There was and is a huge amount of history written about the war, battles back and forth, terrain taken and lost; but many of these social history questions have not really been clearly answered. Many are only now being revealed by a new generation of historians, mainly Germans born after the war, and as these books are translated the world can find out more. 

For starters, there is now a new biography of Hitler, the first serious academic work on the topic written by a German since the mid-1930's. Volker Ullrich's two-volume biography is detailed and well worth reading; Volume 1 (published in German in 2013, in English in 2016) covers the years to 1939.

This is all now critically important in light of the last US election, and the upcoming one. The January 6, 2021 riots at the Capitol, where a mob attempted to change the results of the 2020 election, are a horrible reminder of the Beer Hall Putsch of November 8-9, 1923, where a mob incited by Hitler attempted to take control of the Bavarian parliament. The Putsch failed, of course, and Hitler went to jail where he became a martyr to the cause and wrote Mein Kampf; the legal system of the 2020's has moved much more slowly. 

Hitler learned from this that a frontal assault wouldn't work, but that he needed to work within the democratic structures of the day. It took just over 9 years before he was named Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Among the first orders of business were to abolish future elections.

Today's article in The Guardian (click here) shows further evidence of the disregard for the rule of law, if any more were needed, held by one of the nominees; the threats may seem farcical but the building up of warnings that the election, if lost, will have been rigged and force will be needed to put things right, is scary.  

So my intention is to read and report regularly between now and November 5. Two of the books in the lineup are shown in the photos below. I'm not sure how much I'll get done in the short time available, especially given other demands on my time; but if this encourages you to dig deeper on your own, I'll be happy. Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it. 

Ten (non-fiction) books to take into quarantine

Ten non-fiction books for a lockdown: A personal selection based on my own interests. 

Day 1: What Google searches say about you and about the world. People will put their darkest thoughts into a Google search box, even (especially) things they would never confide to another human being. The extent of racism in the US, what people are really doing in bed (which is most definitely NOT what they tell pollsters); it's an interesting read. But beware: in the discussion on racism, he uses the n-word (because he tracks searches using this word combined with other words, such as 'Obama'); and his discussion of sex can also be disturbing. Requires an open mind.

Day 2: A very literate and well-written overview of human history, with some interesting analysis that ought to raise some discussion. He identifies several Revolutions in our history, the first being the Cognitive Revolution (about 70,000 years ago) which brought the ability to deal in abstract concepts into language. As with chimpanzees today, we probably had ways of communicating "there's a lion in the bushes" or "food is over there", but a discussion of tactics for evading that lion or tracking down that food required abstract concepts. "I'll hide here with a spear, you go scare that gazelle into coming this way". By 40,000 years ago, bands of homo sapiens were stampeding herds of animals into narrow canyons where meat and furs for a year could be obtained fairly easily, something Neanderthals never seemed to have grasped.

Day 3: There's nothing like a good spy novel. This one, by Ben MacIntyre, is even better because it is true. The basic story is how German intelligence was fooled into thinking the Allies would land in Greece and Sardinia rather than in Sicily, thus diverting defensive efforts away from the actual landing sites, but the plot line is so far out there that if it were a novel, you'd say 'yeah, right, that would never happen'. In fact Neal Stephenson used some of the more outrageous components of the story in his classic novel Cryptonomicon. And MacIntyre writes very well; see also his books on Kim Philby and other famous spy stories.

Day 4: Continuing on yesterday's theme of WWII, this overview of the bloody Winter War (1939-1940) following Russia's invasion of Finland is a classic and describes events that are probably not well known outside Finland. Those of you who have been to Finland will know that this was a defining moment for the country, which only obtained its independence from Russia in 1917. On my first trip to Finland back in about 2002, three different people said the same thing to me, in three different contexts, but all referring more or less indirectly to the Winter War: "We are a small country, we have to work together". The Finnish concept of Sisu, meaning grit or fortitude in the face of lousy odds, is well described. I first picked up this book at the airport in Helsinki on my way home in 2002, and have since purchased two other copies over time as it tends to get borrowed and not returned.

 

 

Day 5: Two, well OK three books about Everest. While I have absolutely no intention of ever going there (I had enough trouble at 11,000 feet, never mind 29,000), I have always been fascinated by people who tackle Everest and places like it. The Vendée Globe race is another incomprehensible activity, and the classic Antarctic adventures of Scott and Shackleton are always fascinating. 

Wade Davis has assembled an excellent book that combines the best of several previous books on the topic. Mallory, Irvine and their colleagues are not presented in a vacuum but in the context of their backgrounds as shell-shocked survivors of the trenches of World War I, and in the context of post-war Britain as well as manoeuvring between the Great Powers. Both characters are well drawn, but so are the people who accompanied them on their several trips before their ultimate disappearance.

  

 

The finding of Mallory's body, and the analysis of whether they were ascending when they died or had managed to summit, are covered in Davis' book, but a better source for this part of the story is presented in "Weighing the Evidence", Chapter 22 in "Last Hours on Everest" by Graham Hoyland. Hoyland, who was on the expedition that found Mallory, has written a very personal and emotional account of the impact of his Everest obsession on his family and marriage. But unlike Davis, he has summited Everest several times; and a cousin of Hoyland's father, Howard Somervell, was on the fateful 1924 expedition. These personal circumstances make his account very informative if you want to delve deeper into the topic.

 

 

Of course Krakauer's story of the commercialization of Everest, and the fact it can still be deadly, is priceless and belongs on any bookshelf devoted to Everest or the broader field of mountaineering.

Day 6: This book provides a fascinating alternative to the usual story of how the late Middle Ages became the Renaissance. One thinks of Florentine or Parisian artisans and their wealthy, well-connected patrons; but the mercantile activities around the North Sea and the Baltic are equally part of the story. I for one knew very little about the Hanseatic League or the trading activities of the Vikings. The story begins with the Frisians, living and trading among coastal marshes and dunes in what is now Belgium and Holland. The Romans didn't get it -- how can you be civilised if you haven't built any monumental cities -- and failed to root them out because their horses and carriages got mired in marshes while the Frisians disappeared on flat bottomed boats. But those same boats allowed them to trade easily; and they quickly learned about dikes and canals. Trade flourished between cities, extending well beyond the marshes to cities from Gdansk to Trondheim and the east coast of England, with little or no royal "supervision"; taxes were collected and used for port facilities, and for the establishment of early trading houses or bourses.

Day 7: More on the Vikings. To illustrate how far the Vikings roamed, it is enough to point out that the Mongolian and Icelandic ponies are genetically very closely related. Vikings served in the Varangian guards and as mercenaries in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Middle East, having crossed from Moscow to rivers such as the Volga that empty into the Caspian Sea. Looking west, a small group made it to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and wintered over at least once. But they weren't just rampaging barbarians, and this book gives you a more balanced view.

Day 8: A fascinating history of Central Asia, the crossroads of the world straddling the so-called Silk Roads, from the Arab invasion of 680 to the Mongol invasion of 1220. (The chapter on the years between Chinggis and Tamerlane is somewhat brief). Traders met here from all over Eurasia, bringing goods for trade but also ideas and religions into what was for a time a multi-cultural, multi-lingual melting pot.

In particular, the scientific understanding developed by Central Asians of Persian descent is absolutely stunning. After the Arab conquest, most scientists in Central Asia wrote in Arabic, and we think of the results as being of Arab origin, but in fact it is mostly Persian. And the so-called Arab numerals in use today, complete with the concept of zero, came to us from India via Central Asia and just happened to reach Europe in texts written in Arabic.

One example will suffice. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (Abū Rayḥān Bērōnī) was born in what is now Uzbekistan in about 973. He developed early concepts in spherical trigonometry which he used to estimate the diameter of the Earth; he also plotted longitude and latitude of all the cities he had visited on a globe, and concluded that the known inhabited Earth represented only a third of the surface; he then posited that the processes leading to the creation of the Eurasian landmass must operate elsewhere, and that there must therefore be another continent out there somewhere. And if this continent is at the same latitudes as Eurasia, then it must be inhabited. Of course the Vikings were proving this proposition by actually going there at about the same time.

Biruni is known to have written at least 145 other books, most of which have not survived, but references to his work demonstrate the range of his interests. Most of the cities of Central Asia, such as Merv, Balkh, Bukhara or Gurganj, have fared equally poorly, with the failure of irrigation systems following invasions and the fact that a lot of it was built with mud bricks rather than granite or marble.

The fall of the scientifically literate Central Asian societies is ascribed to several causes. The Mongol invasion didn't help; and the fact that one of the major rulers of the time had the audacity to have Chinggis' ambassadors executed made things worse. (Chinggis wouldn't let something like that go without totally disproportionate punishment, and the damage done was much greater than that done by the preceding nomadic invasions that tended to happen with monotonous regularity every few decades). But the rise of extremist religious factions that frowned on rational investigations of the physical world was a big part of the decline; the argument was that since the Koran clearly provides all needed information about the world and is of divine provenance, rational scientific discovery is not only undesirable but actually heretical as it can be seen to question the veracity of the book.

Central Asia had been a crossroads of ideas and religions as well as trade but by Tamerlane's time that had ended; and the scientific Renaissance picked up, after a pause, in the West. One Christopher Columbus, in fact, depended on estimates of the Earth's diameter obtained from these Persian polymaths; but he made an error in converting units and was off by a large amount. Fortunately he made landfall about when he expected to...

 

 

Day 9. Two biographies of Genghis (now spelled Chinggis) show the story of Central Asia from the other side of the nomad's arrows. Widely seen as bloodthirsty barbarians, it is clear their PR department wasn't very well staffed. And without denying the waste they laid across Central Asia, these books provide a more balanced view. They were a bit like the Borg: agree to assimilation and all will be fine; but resist and your city will be razed. And it appeared that issues around race or religion were minor, with no one group targeted (unless of course the leader had rashly executed Mongol ambassadors in a show of misguided defiance). Regardless, Genghis stitched together the largest land empire the world has ever known; he was the first among nomadic invaders to recognise the importance of writing if only to account for the distribution of loot to his armies. His lack of a proper succession plan meant that it crumbled within a generation or two, with his grandson Kublai becoming the first of the Yuan dynasty in China and other descendants squabbling over Central Asia. Today Chinggis is revered in Mongolia, where the main international airport is Chinggis Khaan International.

And that's it! OK, it was a dozen books, not ten; so sue me.

Seven discs to take into quarantine

Last spring I was challenged by a friend on Facebook to list seven discs for a pandemic. Looking back, I don't see any good reason to change my mind here. 

Seven favourite discs, Day 1: Hope by Hugh Masekela. Recorded live in a Washington DC club in 1994 when Mandela was still in jail and Masekela didn't dare go home. Gorgeous trumpet and flugelhorn, Western jazz layered on to African rhythms, all superb music in support of strong political content. I love Frank Zappa but sometimes the political content got in the way of the music... not a problem here. This includes Masekela's only top 40 hit, Grazin' in the Grass, an instrumental trumpet number that ironically displaced a Herb Alpert number from the #1 spot. And the last track, Stimela, about migrant workers from all across Southern Africa taking the steam train (stimela) to work in the mines of Johannesburg, is the most heartbreaking railway song I've ever heard. Totally infectious. (My kids are probably thoroughly sick of it by now).

 

 

 

Seven favourite discs, Day 2: Ry Cooder and Corridos Famosos, live in San Francisco, 2011. Cooder is well known for backing obscure artists (the Buena Vista Social Club series of discs, Cuban guitarist Manuel Galbán on Mambo Sinuendo, Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré on Niafunké, among many others) and for his trenchant political commentary (My Name is Buddy). This disc sees him up front with a Latin band backing him, instead of being in the background. Great stuff! And it even has a decent accordion version (!) of Wolly Bully (!!). Bet you never thought I'd say anything even remotely like that.

 

Seven favourite discs, Day 3: N'Awlinz Dis Dat or D'Udda, by Dr John. It's hard to pick just one disc by the good Doctor. Every disc is a veritable gumbo, sort of a funky jazz blues soul Creole Cajun Voodoo swamp rock fusion thing. Each disc starts with a solid funk base but continued with a different main ingredient. (Remember Right Time, Wrong Place?) But he has put out two discs dedicated to his musical sources in New Orleans. Some may prefer the earlier Goin' Back to New Orleans, but this one covers the gamut and includes guest appearances by Mavis Staples, BB King, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Cyrille Neville and his brothers, and even Willie Nelson and Snooks Eaglin. It covers the whole range: foggy string-laden Quatre Parishe, creepy Marie Laveau, soulful Lay My Burden Down, a proper dirge-like version of When the Saints Go Marching In (straight off Bourbon Street), the list goes on. Superb. 

 

Seven favourite discs, Day 4: Black Ivory Soul, by Angélique Kidjo. Kidjo has a tremendous voice and pushes a solid West African dance vibe on most of her discs. (She also does gorgeous versions of Gimme Shelter and Voodoo Chile, both of which could have been the "original" version). On this disc she crosses the Atlantic from her home in Benin to work with the Brasilian Bahia community to wonderful effect. Think The Girl From Ipanema cranked up to, say, 6, but still a lot more subtle than her other offerings; and she ends with a version of Ces Petits Riens that sounds as if it had been written by João Gilberto. A gorgeous example of trans-Atlantic collaboration that doesn't involve the US or Western Europe. And I suspect my kids are completely sick of this disc as well.

Seven favourite discs, Day 5: Jazz Party, Duke Ellington. It's hard to pick one Duke Ellington disc. This one is perhaps atypical, although Duke experimented at lot more than people give him credit for. Two tracks are perhaps more traditional, written for jazz orchestra and tympani section (Malletoba Spank, Tymperturbably Blue), and take full advantage of the timbre of all the different instruments. The rest of it is a bit of a jam session and thus looser than the usual Ellington effort. You can see the band is having a riot. Toot Suite has six parts, each written for a specific soloist, and culminates with Ready Go!, a blistering 8 minutes of Paul Gonsalves' sax propelled by the rest of the band egging him on. The last piece, called Hello Little Girl, illustrates the breadth of the jazz format: starting off as a slightly loungy piano trio (with Jimmy Jones, not Duke, on piano), it becomes a swing band as the horns lean in, then suddenly it's a Kansas City blues piece as Jimmy Rushing shouts the lyrics. Dizzy Gillespie turns up and presto! it's a bebop number. (The first couple of bars of Dizzy's contribution are marred because he was too far from a microphone, and one can imagine a tech scrambling to get him a mike). The song wraps up with all the different strands woven together. Brilliant! Beautiful music as always from Duke, but in a somewhat more relaxed, unrehearsed setting. The title says it all.

 

Seven favourite discs, Day 6: Robert Charlebois and Louise Forrestier. If you are of a certain age and grew up in Québec, you've heard this, if not the entire disc then certainly the single Lindberg. My Dad the English professor turned me on to this ... For the rest of you: Lyrics, of politics and love, by famous Quebec poets and singers; killer backing vocals by Louise Forrestier; Le Nouveau Jazz Libre du Québec supporting it all. A gem -- every time I put it on it's 1968 again. (I've still got Dad's vinyl copy with the lyrics printed on a separate sheet inside). And my son, born in 1990, had heard it when I dug it out for the first time about 20 years ago.

 

  

Seven favourite discs, Day 7: Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis. 'Nuff said.

 

 

So what are your seven (or ten) desert island discs? 

My Dearly Departed Significant Other: recent sightings and other thoughts

In April 2015 I wrote about a dream I had of Mary. (It is posted elsewhere in this blog). She was facing the light and was heading off, without me, and without her sweater. Some time ago, perhaps a year or more now, I had another dream of her, which I thought I should document here as we approach the 7th anniversary of her passing. Seven years already! Time flies. 

In this dream I was walking, alone, in a European city, in a neighbourhood consisting of tall older buildings on narrow streets lining canals. (I had recently returned from a trip to Amsterdam, which bears a striking resemblance to this dream city). It was night, but the city was lit up for a festival of some kind, and the narrow streets were crowded with people drinking and singing and dancing. Where the streets widened into plazas in front of churches or municipal buildings, there were food kiosks and bandstands, streamers and lanterns, jewelry and knick-knack vendors.

I wandered around one such plaza, surrounded by people in wild costumes and extravagant makeup. There was a lot of background noise, made up of laughter and singing and music. The crowd was at that density where sometimes you can find yourself in a dense group, then suddenly you are briefly in the open. I moved with the currents, seeking more open areas. As one such lead opened up in the crowd, I spotted Mary on the other side of the plaza. 

She was wearing what looked, from a distance, like a full body tattoo covering one side of her body, from her toes to the roots of her hair. The tattoo was of a tree, her feet the roots and with colourful birds and playful squirrels partly hidden behind leaves and branches; her hair was spiky and green and mimicked the crown of the tree. The tattoo on her face was of a brightly coloured peacock looking out from the foliage. The other side of her body was dressed in a very nondescript monochrome fashion, with her head shaved on that side. 

She saw me, gave me a big smile and a wave; then the crowd closed in again and she was gone. 

Seems to me she was having a great time. Certainly the wild appearance is something she would have done in life. And it also seems to me that she wanted me not to worry about her but to get on with my life; we'll meet again eventually, but not yet. 

...

Recently I also thought back to the service we held in her memory in the spring of 2014. Friends and relatives told stories and sang songs; Rolf (the Buddhist monk we knew through friends) kept things going. I was pretty numb and when Rolf suggested I say a few words, initially I didn't know where to start, as I hadn't been able to prepare anything. 

But as I stood up I thought that each of us has a special gift, a superpower that, to the holder, seems so easy and intuitive that it is difficult to understand that others might find it frightfully difficult. One thinks of musicians who have a skill to start with; for some of us no amount of training or courses or practice will make us into a concert pianist. (Case in point: I am listening to Glenn Gould's rendering of the Well-Tempered Clavier as I type this). 

Mary's superpower was the ability to listen to children and teenagers, especially ones in trouble, in such a way that they wanted to confide in her; and to speak with them in such a way they wanted to listen and understand. She used this empathetic skill in conversations with our children but also with our nieces and nephews and other children lucky enough to meet her; and this was the secret to her success as a social worker in the field of youth protection. 

So in my comments to the assembled group, I recall speaking to my children, my nieces and nephews and their partners, and asking them to remember how Mary interacted with them as they were growing up, dealing with the various challenges that children face and that we as adults tend to forget. I asked them, as they become adults and have children of their own, to try to adopt some of Mary's approaches; while you may never be a Glenn Gould, the objective should be to be able to chunk out a few chords from Mary's songbook. In this way we can hope to spread some of Mary's gift of empathy and child-like understanding wider, which can only be good for the world.

Today I watch the next generation of children; and I am pleased with how they are turning out. Mary's approach to child-rearing is living on in her children, her nieces and nephews and their partners. 

At the ceremony I asked my brother to sing a song that he wrote with his partner. It is called "The Path You Leave Behind"; it is described as a non-denominational gospel number. It is wonderful to see that the path Mary forged continues to be trodden, and I hope this will continue through future generations as well. Meanwhile I am happy that she has found the quirky kind of space where she will thrive.

Ten books to take into quarantine

Strange times we live in. Will the world come back to "normal", as it did (sort of) after 9/11? Or are we headed to some new world of unknown form? Hard to say. But meanwhile Facebook friends have been busy suggesting Seven Favourite Discs, or Ten Favourite Books. So here are my picks for ten books to take into quarantine, with text expanded from the short blurb I posted on Facebook. What are your favourite books?



Day 1: Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges.Seventeen little gems. This copy is the very one I discovered on my parent's bookshelves in about 1965. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. (There are some subpar translations out there).



Day 2: If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino. This falls in the "If you liked Borges, you'll like this" category. Entertaining, allegorical and subtle. You'll get used to the second person writing, wherein the author talks directly to you, the reader, about this new book you've just encountered at the local bookshop. You're sure to like it, it's by that famous Italian author Italo Calvino. At the beginning of Chapter 2, "you have now read about thirty pages and you're becoming caught up in the story." Self-referential and post-modern in a way only the Simpsons have managed at the mass media level, but with much higher literary values. No cowabungas here. Translated by William Weaver.



Day 3: Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. Absurdities of the whole conspiracy theorist thing. Eco can be a bit of a showoff, flinging about literary allusions to everyone from Shakespeare to Borges with wild abandon. Another of his novels was littered with references to Borges, and while I felt smart having noticed them, I realised there were probably references to ten or twenty more authors that I had missed. But cut him some slack and dive into this hilarious review of Knights Templar, Rosicrucians and all the wingnuts surrounding them today. You won't regret it. Translated by William Weaver, who also translated my copy of Calvino.

Day 4: A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick.  It's hard to pick just one book of his, partly because I haven't read them all (he was nothing if not prolific). This one was made into a superb movie of the same name, and I picked it partly because his other movie, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is better known to the public. (That movie was called Blade Runner). While this might seem like a major shift from previous suggestions, Dick's brand of darkly allegorical and dystopic surrealism reminds me of Eco, Calvino or Borges. Thing is, a lot of Dick's allegories have come to pass in one way or another.

Day 5: Protector, by Larry Niven. Yes, Ringworld is more famous (and is a cracking good story to boot) but Protector shows Niven at his best: Phssthpok is an alien who is completely internally consistent but, well, completely alien. Also, the space battle sequence respects concepts of travel at relativistic speeds and conservation of momentum, and thus takes place over several months. The lack of sizzle makes it hard to convert something like that into a Star Wars movie, but this is how it would play out in the absence of an FTL drive (Faster Than Light, for the uninitiated).



Day 6: Journey Into Fear by Eric Ambler. Many of Ambler's lead characters are Joe Anyone caught up in something they didn't ask for and for which they are not prepared or equipped. In this thriller written in 1940, a bookish British munitions expert with a PhD in ballistics travels to Istanbul to advise the Turkish military on upgrading their naval guns. On the way home it becomes obvious someone wants him dead. Very well done, and very Hitchkockian, although the movie was made by someone else. Sadly Ambler is mostly out of print these days, so if you see anything by him, grab it. He was an excellent writer. 

On a personal note: In another of his prewar books in the same vein, a young engineer gets a job with a munitions firm. Asked why he's doing it when it all will only be used to slaughter his compatriots in the fairly near future, he says something along the lines of if I don't do it, someone else will, and I need the job. That line was on my mind as I picked a career path after getting my engineering degree.



Day 7: The IPCRESS File, by Len Deighton. This book features superb writing and provides a lovely antidote to Ian Fleming's James Bond franchise: the unnamed protagonist works out of a seedy office suite on the third floor of a building surrounded by strip clubs. When he rips his trousers climbing a fence, he worries his expense claim, which is already three months late since he changed department, won't cover it. When he needs backup, he gets an aging private eye driving a Ford Anglia. But the plot and pacing are excellent. Deighton wrote three sequels, of which Funeral in Berlin is the best.



Day 8: Cocaine Nights, by J.G. Ballard. Some of you will know of my fondness for Ballard. For more, see my blog post (here) and scroll to the bottom.



Day 9: Two books by Bernard Atxaga. Yes, I am cheating a bit here, but bear with me. Basque literature is very lean, given the language is spoken by very few people, and that it was actively suppressed by many Spanish governments, Franco's being only the most recent one. I have seen statements along the lines of only 100 novels (or books) have been written in Basque in the last four centuries. Regardless, these two books are very rare translations of very rare books, and were translated to English in two stages: from Basque to Spanish by Asun Garikano and the author, and from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.

The first one, Obabakoak, introduces the Basque back country in a series of linked short stories set in the town of Obaba. (According to Wikipedia, the title tranlsates roughly as "individuals and things of Obaba"). The writing is gentle, ironic and not a little fatalistic.

 

The Accordionist's Son is a coming of age novel. Lordy how I hate those words on the cover of a book! Usually I'll run the other way when I see them. But this one is very good and also provides some understanding of the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Fascist era on small-town Basque country, which is rugged, remote and difficult to travel even today, especially on the Spanish side of the border.

 

Day 10: A Man called Ove, by Fredrik Backman. Translated by Henning Koch. A very touching story that somehow launched itself off the shelf and into my arms in a local bookstore earlier this spring. Ove is the perfect curmudgeon, and you can see the fondness people around him have for him even if they are only seen through his eyes. Very touching.

So there you have it. 10 (OK, 11) books covering a range of styles and genres. Let's see yours.

The Canadian health care system works better than the US system

As a normally polite Canadian, I am royally ticked off and I’m gonna have to deliver a rant. (Sorry).

I am thoroughly fed up with uninformed American (and Russian) trolls loosely flinging unsubstantiated and factually incorrect statements about the Canadian health care system all over the InterWeb, just because they have a political axe to grind. So let me give it to you straight, in ALL CAPS because that seems to be the only way some folks might take notice:

THE CANADIAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM WORKS.

Is it perfect? No. No system is ever perfect. But here’s another point: 

NO CANADIAN EVER WENT BANKRUPT BECAUSE OF A HEALTH CARE ISSUE. 

In the US there is some argument about the exact number, because most people who declare bankruptcy have multiple sources of debt, but one study suggested that medical expenses or loss of work related to illness contributed to 65% of all bankruptcies in the US last year. (Click here and here.) That’s 65% of 750,489 bankruptcies, or just under 500,000 cases in 2018. And yes, I am quoting the Washington Post, which some may say is fake news, mainly because the article is critical of Bernie’s loose throwing around of facts, but hey! At least I am providing a source for my information, unlike the trolls. Get the facts first, then you can argue.

So what makes me an expert, you ask? Sadly, personal experience. My wife, may she rest in peace, required multiple back surgeries to insert two steel rods to support her spine, which was collapsing due to advanced scoliosis. Later in life she was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer, which required 2 years of chemo and radio therapy as well as several surgeries. Cost to us: Nada. Zip. ZEE-RO. OK, I may have paid for parking at the hospital now and then. But it didn’t prevent us from paying the mortgage or sending the kids to school. (Now there’s a topic for another rant.)

Yes, the cancer killed her. (Six years ago this week, thanks for asking). But this outcome is no reflection on the quality of the care; it is my understanding that American women are also dying of breast cancer. Give me a minute and I’ll dig up comparative stats on that, too, if you are too dense or stupid or unwilling to do so yourself. 

So if you have an opinion but don’t know WTF you are talking about, you have a few options. You can use the Internet or other public sources to obtain some facts, and accept that these facts may change your opinion. You can blather on regardless, revealing yourself to be a troll who will regurgitate just about anything fed to you if it meets your prejudices.

Or you can STFU. May I politely suggest that STFU is a reasonable first step. 

OK, the rant is over. I feel better now. (Sorry about that). 

UPDATE 2020-03-16: An American friend reposted this on his Facebook page, which led to sometimes heated debate over something like 100 posts... I might clean it up and remove names and copy it here. Stay tuned!