First Nations people and culture

When I was little, I was scared to death of Indians (as we called them back then).  I'd never actually met one, of course.  When I was somewhat older and no longer afraid of them, they came to seem "cool" to me, the sort of thing that often happens with boys.

I eventually came to see how criminal the treatment of First Nations by North America's white communities has often been.  Take something like the potlatch.  Pacific nations had an understanding that once you get to a certain level of riches, there isn't much point in getting any richer, so you may as well give it away and get props, then start over.  This giveaway culture horrified bourgeois Victorians, and the B.C. government outlawed potlatches.  For the Indians that must have been like banning Christmas!

When I was young I was introduced to some of these issues by the TV show The Beachcombers, which had an Indian character called Jesse Jim.  In one episode a guy talking to Nick referred to Jesse as "your Indian," which did not go over well.  In another episode Jesse was angry that Relic had found an old totem pole in the woods and wanted to sell it to a motel as a tacky decoration.  And there was an episode where Jesse had to organize a potlatch, including trapping a bear.

One of the worst things we did to the First Nations was declaring them human dinosaurs.  A century ago semi-educated people viewed Indians as a "vanishing" race which would inevitably be left behind by human evolution. (This was the age of eugenics, of course.) But today Canada has more Indians than ever.  Maybe surviving is the best revenge.

Migrant workers

Goodness knows, I've never been a migrant worker.  But I've seen a famous Dorothea Lange photograph of a 1930s migrant worker with her children living in some shack.  On the mother's face you can see her worry about the uncertain prospects of providing for her kids as well as herself.  There are few responsibilities greater than motherhood!

I've also read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, both about California migrant workers in that period.  Those workers got treated pretty badly back then (and still do today, what with their exposure to dangerous pesticides and such). Californians wanted their labor, but were also afraid of them, and the police were often ruthless.

Steinbeck's a writer I like.  The Grapes of Wrath has vivid chapters about drought coming to Oklahoma and a turtle crossing a highway.  His melodrama can be a bit much, as in the Gorkyesque ending, but he's masterful at small details.  In Of Mice and Men he mentions that the farm owner and his son wore cowboy boots with heels so they'd look different from the hired men.  And in describing the contents of the workers' quarters, he mentions the magazines of cowboy stories "that they read and scoffed at and secretly believed."

I've seen John Ford's movie of The Grapes of Wrath, a superbly realistic adaptation.  Henry Fonda has a funny dancing scene in it.  Another good movie about the California migrant workers is Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory, with David Carradine as songwriter Woody Guthrie. (His migrant worker song that goes "I ain't got no home in this world any more" is a true classic.)

Funny incidents

What sort of incident do I find funny?  There was the time in the 1992 American election when President Bush Sr. called on Bill Clinton to come clear on "the character issue," and added "just as I've come clear on Iran-Contra." I found that line hilarious because  on that subject Bush hadn't come clear at all!

And there's the actual incident a few years later where Clinton spoke to an audience of high-schoolers and lectured them about "sexual responsibility"! It was "Do as I say, not as I do." Blatant hypocrisy in our leaders is something I find funny. (And don't get me started on Stephen Harper...)

And I remember a TV commercial some 30 years ago, where a young man said, "You have a computer and you don't have [lists off the popular video games of the day]? That's like having a stereo with no hit records!" So what's wrong with having a stereo with no hit records?  Some commercials are hilarious!

Mindfulness

On mindfulness, my mind draws a blank.  But it makes me think of lack of mindfulness, also known as carelessness.

I'm not usually the careless type. (My schedule tends to be well-organized.) But there was the time last year when I lost a library copy of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, a really funny book about privileged post-Civil War Americans on a steamship tour  of the Mediterranean.  I'm still wondering where I left it!

My mother was a different case.  She had a habit of leaving her purse in restaurants when we ate out, so we'd have to go back for it.  Maybe it happened just a few times, but she never forgot it.  And there was the time when she stepped on the sharp part of a rake and hurt her toe.  And the time when she took a train to Toronto and I was waiting for her in the arrival area of Union Station, but she came out the departure area.  It was hours before we met up!

Prejudice

I grew up in Sackville, N.B., which had few non-whites, so I don't have much experience with the culture of racism.  I remember that in my Grade 2 class there was a brown-skinned boy a local minister had adopted when he was a missionary in Indonesia.  At my age, it didn't occur to me to think of him as non-white.

But there are different kinds of prejudice.  People in a small town sometimes look down on a nearby village because they want to see a community with a lower status than their own.  In Sackville's case, it was the village of Midgic.  People joked about how Midgic kids were bringing lice into the schools.  There was a disused airplane runway out in the country, and it got called Midgic Airport.

I remembered this later on when I was reading Ignazio Silone's novel Fontamara, about a backward village in fascist Italy whose water supply gets cut off.  There's a scene where an enraged mob from the village confronts the people in a neighbouring town.  At first the townsfolk are afraid of them, but then someone says "Don't let them in, they'll spread lice!" and they all laugh at the villagers, who go away humiliated.  I guess it's a worldwide sentiment.

Air travel

The first time I travelled on an airplane, I was seventeen and visiting Britain and France with my parents. (It was a redeye flight across the Atlantic.) I noticed that the plane's engines had the Rolls-Royce trademark.  They showed the movie California Suite, a Neil Simon comedy about travellers in a hotel, which was the perfect movie to watch on an airplane.

And when I was eighteen I took a small turboprop plane from Moncton to Halifax.  In the course of the flight, I got an aerial view of my hometown Sackville, N.B., as we flew over it.  It looked flatter than I expected.

My scariest experience on a plane happened when I was returning from Japan and flying over the Pacific Ocean.  We ran into some major turbulence, which made me start wondering what keeps any plane in the air.  I also remember the time I was flying over the Great Plains and saw a thunderhead cloud whose shape reminded me of Godzilla.

If you ask me, we should be getting people off of planes and back onto trains.  We hear about subsidies for Amtrak, yet Washington gives much bigger subsidies to the airlines.  Such a high volume of air travel inevitably led to the security net wearing thin, resulting in 9/11.

I've never flown in a helicopter or a balloon.

Stories My Parents Told Me

My mother told me once about this girl she knew when she was little called Annie.  Annie swore a lot, and on one occasion Mother said to her, "If you keep swearing like that they won't let you into heaven!" Annie replied, "Don't worry about me, I'll climb over the fence!" Some time later Annie died.  I hope she made it over the fence.

She also told me about this married man who had a mistress, and one day they were overheard in conversation.  She was trying to get him to buy her a new coat, and said, "Look at me in this coat I'm wearing!  I look terrible in it!" He said, "You look good to me, dear." And the story got out, so people started repeating "You look good to me, dear," and it all ended badly.  Mother never like it when people overheard our business.

Mother had a lot of stories like that.

TV news

I remember watching the CBC new show The National back in the 1970s when Lloyd Robertson was the anchor. (They'd start by spelling out the title with this computer-like music.) Later it was taken over by Knowlton Nash, whom my grandfather nicknamed "Old Picklepuss." But I don't watch it much these days.  I grew up in the Maritimes, and back then the CTV news didn't come on till midnight!

I used to watch reporting shows like 60 Minutes, but that show I haven't watched in recent years:  too many of its reports are sloppy and tendentious. (British TV has way better reporting shows.) I've also lost interest in CNN.  And I've never been able to watch Fox News at all.  Something about its whole tone puts me off instantly.  That network also started the practice of running a nonstop headline crawl at the bottom of the screen, which I've always found annoying.

These days I prefer to read my news, in The Globe and Mail or online.

How smart am I?

Ecce Homo is the last book Friedrich Nietzsche wrote before cracking up.  Its chapter titles include "Why I Am So Clever" and "Why I Write Such Great Books."

Well, how smart am I?  I certainly have a high I.Q. (I was in Mensa briefly, and the entrance exam was a piece of cake for me.) Like my sister, I can do cryptic crossword puzzles.  But sometimes all that seems unimportant.  I know a lot about things like history and geography and mathematics.  Yet someone like William Shakespeare seemed to know everything about life!  Compared to him, what do I know?

Toni Morrison says, "People never forget how you made them feel."  I certainly remember all the times when I ended up feeling stupid.  Like the moment in my childhood when I put a Popsicle in the back pocket of my pants and it melted.  When I told my mother about it years later she couldn't believe that I'd done something that dumb!  But there it is.

Another thing I remember from when I was little was the time when a boy pulled out his coat sleeve beyond the end of his hand and showed me the opening, saying "Look at the TV in here!" I actually looked, and of course his fist came out. (I think I fell for that more than once.) I guess I was pretty dumb back then.

Which reminds me of an episode of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, in which Hobbes asked "How did you get all the way out here with both of your legs in one leg of your pants?" and Calvin said "I fell down a lot."

The worst advice I ever took

I don't want to think too much about bad advice I got. (I'm more concerned with the bad advice I gave.) There was the time when I was ten and absent from school and my mother suddenly got the idea that I should bicycle down to the track and meet my brother and sister who were at their school's sports day.  The last thing I wanted was to be seen biking around town during school hours, and I tried to say no.  But then she got angry, and I had to go unwillingly and hope I wouldn't be seen.

Of course, I was seen.  Shortly afterward, in school, the teacher said to me in front of the class, "Instead of riding your bike, you ought to come to school." For some time after, kids kept saying to me, "Don't cry, Jamie, Mommy will always let you ride your bike instead of going to school!" I didn't talk about it at the time, because I was deeply ashamed of the whole business.

What bothers me is that Mother let a whim turn into a fixation so instantly.  It isn't like there was some urgent function that I served by doing what she wanted; she just had a vague idea that this was the kind of thing I should be doing.  And there was nothing I could say, because she saw what she wanted to see.  It's bad enough to make your own mistakes without being forced to make other people's mistakes too!

Classical music

I'm a fan of classical music.  I used to play piano when I was young, and discovered a lot of composers that way.  We had an LP called A Child's Introduction to the Great Composers, with thirty short selections from Bach to Bartok, arranged by Mitch Miller.  We bought a whole lot of classical LPs, and Deutsche Grammophon tended to be the best. (We had a whole series with titles like Bach's Greatest Hits, Beethoven's Greatest Hits, etc.)

One branch of classical music I especially like is opera.  When I was little we had the three-LP album Royal Family of the Opera.  My favorite cut was Nikolai Ghiaurov singing "Le Veau d'Or" from Gounod's Faust.