I step out of my building and I see the space station suspended at about 1 o’clock in the evening sky like a child's hand-made tin foil plane thwarted in mid flight by an unseen force. I am awed by its eeriness and state of suspension.
I was born during a time when the beeping sound of the Soviet sputnik struck horror and panic into the hearts of all cold warriors. Gloom, doom, anguish and misery took over the lives of these practiced masters and defenders of the free world. So complete was the paralyzing effect of this dreaded bleep! bleep! bleep! emission from the Sputnik, the verdad could no longer be in doubt: the bloody Bolsheviks had somehow emerged out of the mould around the toilet bowl and had launched space rockets! The next stage would be stationary space stations with launch pads above the free world. The fiends!
And after much hymning, hallelujahing and McCarthy-like howling, the world’s self-proclaimed freedom fighters resolved to put an end to the evil empire by injecting enormous sums of GDP and new debt into the space program. Soon after, Soviet poster-boy Yuri Gagarin went into space and circled the world, and once again the West was bested, until Neil Armstrong (Praise Allah) reversed the humiliation.
Things have changed, now. The Soviets are drying out. The Russian Air Force raises money for jet fuel by selling rides on Sukhois and MIGS (still the world's fastest supersonic fighters in the proper hands) to Russian millionaires. The multi-billion dollar, multi-national space station is now a collaborative platform for the peaceful utilization of space where weird vegetables and crystals for laser optics grow in drawers and cabinets, and bone degeneration in a zero G environment is studied in microscopic detail. Meanwhile, the latest playboy on the block, whose receding sense of the world approaches ground-zero, and who barely managed to hi-jack the White House, has cobbled together a motley crew of Afro-American toms who are conjuring up the same cold war era (which actually never really ended). Star Wars is back on the agenda, regardless of the official Canadian position on it – whatever that is.
I go back inside my house and turn on the radio and am massively attacked by the shrieky falsetto of a pre-pubescent radio-star belting out suicidal lyrics with a dance beat, of course. I kick the button off and flick on the TV where the faces from Blue Man Tubes (the off-off off-Broadway theater super-troupe), in their mawkish techno, are advertising the next Pentium with the assistance of a docile looking dog who paws-in a CD into a car stereo that growls: Who let the Dogs Out? Bow-Wow!
For relief, I plunge into our local newspaper. Marian Ackermann, the only recent Montreal Gazette theater critic deserving of praise, wrote a piece on playwright Arthur Miller. Ackermann is also a novelist and founder of theater group 1774 (or something like that). Her work is luminous and invites us to look beyond the insipid, banal, mainstream Anglo theater scene. In her eloquent critique of Mr. Miller, she notes that 85-year olds predictably delve in the past. I gulp. I always liked Arthur.
I fold over the Gazette and wander over to my son's room. He has a semi-pirate CD on. It’s a digitized re-mix of Rage, Filter, Groove Armada, Moby, Offspring and a group called Butt-Hole surfers. Ok! Pulsating drum'n bass. Why not? Wycleff now sings with Kenny Rogers. No more new-jack, trip-hop, real acid. Dub is useless, except for the Reggae Cowboys who have definitively revived some roots here. So I am delving in the past? See what I mean. Pining. All is past. I am not 85. I care for the future. For now, at least.
Montreal's ex-councillor Sam Boskey is a prolific redistributor of alternate news-rage and hard-core Hebrew humor. I find out nifty stuff from him. I multiply his rage and mine by re-forwarding. We meet occasionally at garage sales. He often no longer recognizes with whom he communicates.
Such is his list. He is a net gazer. Net-struck. So if you can’t stomach hyper-pompous Conrad Black and his obsidian counterpart in the west, the Peg’s Izzy Asper who is no-nonsense-covetous of Hollinger Inc., remember -- the net is free. Spread the word. This is where future battles will be fought and won. We must all assemble in Cochacamba next fall, in Bolivia, the follow-up to Prague, Windsor, Seattle, Washington, and LA.
I still think the Human Genome project is a fine idea. And I’m all for the use of protein-enhanced, re-usable sweet potatoes which will allow third-world farmers to be less dependent on large corporations. Guatemalans will be able to grow gigantic footballers for the NFL while East Indians supply a new and better breed of hulk to the big big WWF.
Vandana Shiva can be annoyingly obscurantist. It happens when one-agenda folks go prime-time, like the trash media in the US that declared if you didn’t support Gore, you couldn’t be a real feminist.
My best movie pick? Jarmusch's Ghost Dogs. Trip-hop, gadgets, man with a Samurai sense of honor (Forrest Whittaker) who moves with mesmerizing cool, mowing people down in the Bronx, while the old Italian dons fade away, confused by new world multi-ethnicity, and roof-top serenity and (McLuhan-efficient), medium as message pigeons. And lots of drum and bass. I would like to see a mainstream movie on Chiapas. Or the Vietnam-Colombia that is brewing. Any takers?
The world cares a pittance that five Palestinians die every day. It’s almost a non-issue. Especially among the Liberal human rights lawyers and MPs in the west and north sides of Montreal whose raison d’etre is to fight-to-the-death the Parti Quebecois over its ethnocentric nationalism. And then there’s the unacknowledged 3rd branch of government – the (God bless) the Free Press. Hardly a word about the daily deaths in Palestine, but one bombed bus and the sirens are wailing live over CNN for the entire day.
According to a report heard on Vermont National Public Radio, the CIA had penetrated the newsroom of the CNN during the Kosovo war and planted operatives among the research team that backed up Christine Amanpour. Every report of Serb massacres was doctored while the thugs of the Kosovo Liberation Army -- actually led by a former CIA goon from Bosnia -- were made to look like authentic national liberation fighters. The stats on "Allied" bombing accuracy of Serb targets were appropriately garnished just as Amanpour’s daily reports were infected with innuendo and outright distortion. Of course she is a professional journalist of the highest caliber. On the same program it was mentioned that Westinghouse and General Electric, who are the world's largest arms manufacturers, also happened to be the owners of NBC and CBS at the time of the Persian Gulf War? No wonder hardware was so erotic and concupiscent during Desert Storm.
Now about the Chinese. They ought to ‘straighten’ out their human rights record if they don’t want to lose their ‘crooked’ trading partners. Tiananmen Square is, of course, a blotch on their record? For Christmas, I received a book entitled My Century by Nobel prize winner Gunther Grass. He calls attention to the year 1901, when the British, Germans and the Japanese assembled about 1000 Chinese from a rebellious nationalist group, misnamed Boxers. [Typical of the British to mispronounce, appropriate and distort]. The real name of the group was "Like Clenched Fists." Which simply meant the group was resolved to free their country of foreign devils. So the foreigners tied the Chinese to each other by their pigtails and promptly mowed them down. Sorry! The Brits and Germans used guns while the Japs beheaded their allotted portion with swords. And where did the unheralded event take place? Tiananmen Square!
I step out for a walk. The snow is soft. The temperature has been hovering at a Canuck-steady –10 for the past ten days. The space station lies still like a huge bent-wing glider plane, its solar panels reflecting a weird glow from a setting sun. The year is 2001. An Odyssey has begun . . .