BEEN THERE - DONE THAT

The arrogance of youth is far outmatched by the arrogance of age. Youth believe that anything that happened before 1995 is irrelevant. Age believes that everything that ever happened is relevant. The argument rages.

Like others of my age I remember fifty, sixty, even seventy years ago. I don't have to go to the archives or dust off old newspapers - I was there. So - while I continue to stress "Looking Ahead," I will respond with the wisdom of the elderly - the ones who were there, the people who were, as they say, "on the ground" when it all happened.

Today I watched Charlie Rose on PBS talking to some economist about the present economic crisis. It was all about how much money would be needed to bail out mortgage defaulters, banks, car companies, and sundry other victims of their own foolishness.

I also read, and it is daily reading, about the huge deficits that are coming, while at the same time commenting that the patience of the countries who lend us money, is wearing thin. How long, ask the pundits, will China continue to subsidize American extravagance? My comment: it is in the interests of their own survival that they keep the money taps open.

Now for the arrogant part as I dip back into my historical memories. I was around for the Marshall Plan, a massive infusion of money from the U.S. to rebuild a shattered Europe - mostly Germany.

The reason, we were told, was that having learned the lessons that followed the Great War, we should not allow an impoverished, beaten Germany to plan revenge, but that we should rebuild.

It all sounded very altruistic, but we who understood knew that it was not. The Soviet Union represented the threat. And ironically, just as we did with Hitler's Germany, we needed a bulwark against Soviet aggression, which had already occupied everything up to a dividing line in Germany.

Now, for the scholarly among you, the real reason. Yes, there was merit in rebuilding Germany, but let us not forget that the money from the Marshall Plan had strings attached: it was to be spent in America. (There is another irony here. The country that was economically shattered by the war - England - got little help from generous America.)

If all that sounds familiar you are right. The Chinese can not afford to become impatient with American prodigality and wild consumerism. They lend America money (most countries on the Pacific Rim lend money by buying U.S. Treasuries) to keep the American economy afloat. The world';s greatest consumers are the biggest customers for the products that are churned out by Cbinese (and other Asian) factories.

So all the sanctimonious preaching about how Anericans (and to some extent Canadians) will have to curb their out-of-control spending because the lenders like China will lose their patience, remember the Marshall Plan. You take our money You spend our money back where it came from.

Unfortunately, if you are under 50 you won;t remember the events. You weren't there.

Now can we please cut out the nonsense and get on with the business of rebuilding our economy.

LIFE'S TOO SHORT

Perhaps I've just been around too long. Perhaps the fact that my patience has worn thin is a function of age. Possibly my growing cynicism about public opinion is part of a kind of mental decay. Perhaps I was always this way - cranky and critical.

I realize that I am totally sated with certain social/[political cliches. Tops on my list is the proclamation currently in vogue: belt-tightening. Politicians trying to woo support from a disenchanted public proclaim that there will be this tightening of our collective belts. Sounds great, Sounds really attractive to mindless voters who believe that all governments and all politicians are nothing but vermin who feed off their (the public's) hard-earned money. "Belt-tightening" is supposed to mean that there will no longer be lavish spending on things like the Arts or Welfare, of Education. Why, in belt-tightening times are these almost always the first things to go.

The whole evocation of "belt-tightening" has a ring of sincerity to it. It says: "We're really trying to put the pressure on the lavish spenders." It's B.S. and they know it.

You and I, and perhaps one other person, realize that belt-tightening always falls on the most vulnerable, the ones who are on the verge of unemployment, the chronic poverty that affects one in five of our children, the single mothers - etc...etc...

People of means, the rich and the near rich simply hunker down in their big homes or condos and postpone for a year a trade-in to the newest Mercedes. Belt-tightening does not impact too severely on their cruise ship holidays or their visits to their condos in sunnier places. Yet they are the first to deplore the "waste" of their hard-earned dollars at a time when the financial world seems to be tanking.

Chief among the political architects is our own Finance Minister, who champions the whole hunkering down principle and vows not to spend money on anything - thus guaranteeing him a place in the Pantheon of miserly creatures who speak only for the affluent.

And you thought you were feeling rotten before you started reading this.

I guess what troubles me most is how so many people swallow the guff that comes from above. The people of the Oshawa-Whitby-Bowmnanville area are looking doom squarely in the face as the major area employer cuts back and eliminates production of new cars and trucks. They are holding their collective breath waiting for some pronouncement from Ottawa that may save some of their jobs. They watch the American Senate and House both insisting that the Big Three spend whatever money they may get right at home in America. They are sweating. But, and this was my point: they voted for that same Jim Flaherty who sneers at them while making sanctimonious prono8uncements about weathering hard times.

So we have to blame the people who gave us the government we all deserve.

They are the same people who fall for guff like "soft on crime." They are same nitwits who actually believe that tougher sentences "send a message." Send a message - to whom???

The same guys who sent Parliament home are responsible for stoking that fire. Ironically, when a national crisis is hanging over us, the Prime Minister usually recalls Parliament for an emergency session. This guy - the :tough on crime" guy - sends them home!

Maybe i am getting too old and my patience is gone. But it seems top me that even when I was a whole lot younger I insisted, often to people who didn't, wouldn't and couldn't listen - that tougher sentences deter no one and that extreme cases make bad laws.

And that ":belt-tightening" is just another way of saying: less money for those who need it.

THE COALITION

I find the entire issue quite astonishing - that it is an issue that is.
What I find distressing is when the TV news decides to do a "streeter," asking people on the street what they think.

If you know anything about TV news you know that one of the worst jobs is to have the assignment editor send you out to do streeters. First of all, most of the people you stop on the street breeze by refusing to talk, often without even saying a word. So you have to pursue each one diligently. What you get, aside from an occasional "pearl" of wisdom, is pure rubbish. The people responding know little, if anything, about how a coalition works in the parliamentary system. They, the people in the street, have opinions backed by little information. The worst ones are the naysayers who can't wait to let us all know what crooks, cheats, opportunists, liars, and scalawags politicians are. (Try running for office and see how much fun it is to be a "crook.")

I am dismayed by the complete lack of cool from our Prime Minister. His hold on Quebec is tenuous at best, having wrecked his big chance to form a majority by angering Quebec, and one spokesman in particular, with his planned cuts to culture and the arts. It may have been enough to cost him the seats in Quebec that could have given him a majority.

Now, not content with having alienated the province, he is attacking Duceppe and the Bloc. Most Quebecois do not, at this reading, want to separate. The Bloc knows that. But Quebecers are a proud people and they will not take kindly to Harper's swings at one of theirs - even though they may not have voted for the Bloc. That Mr. Harper, is called shooting yourself in the foot.

If Parliament expresses its dissatisfaction with the job the government is doing, and can get enough votes for no confidence, the government falls.

The idle tongues that proclaim: "The Conservatives won the election" have no idea what winning is all about. They had no clear majority. It saddens me that so many people do not understand how this works. It saddens me even more when I bear a well meaning s=high school kids say to the TV camera: "Majority rules. That's what democracy is all about." When she is old enough she may read John Stewart Mill and his ideas about what he called the "tyranny of the majority." The majority has the right to govern unless they throw it away,

As for coalitions - doesn't anyone remember when after the Harris Government was put out the Conservatives under Frank Miller actually won the election. But Frank Miller did not get to be Premier. David Peterson and Bob Rae formed a coalition government.

You are entitled to an opinion - but only if you get the facts straight. Otherwise, who cares what you think?

HOW 'CIVILIZED' ARE WE?

My first reaction to the trampling death of a Wal-mart employee on "Black Friday" was one of disgust. Not just disgust with the people who mindlessly trampled someone to death, but with Wal-mart and their policies of low pay, small benefits. As Peter S. Goodman wrote in the New York Times describing the victim: "the unfortunate man who found himself working at the Valley Stream Wal-Mart at 5:00 A.M. Friday, a temp at the company emblematic of low wages and weak benefit earning his dollars by trying to police an unruly crowd worried about missing out."

Wal-Mart must pay for this death. I hope that an inquest will be far-reaching enough to examine Wal-Mart hiring practices. Of course, while you can't blame Wal-Mart, or any other retailer, for the voracious, shark-like predatory mobs for whom a bargain is worth killing - literally. But the inquest will have to determine among other things, how prepared Wal-Mart was for such a disaster. Did they hire eno0ugh employees for the occasion? Did they put extra security measures in place? Or are they in a way like the Third World construction companies that build shoddy schools that collapse and kill children? Do they skimp wherever they can? Do they "sweat" employees to keep labour costs down? And perhaps more than anything, do they market based on the reality that the consumer will let nothing stand in the way of his/her bottom feeding for the lowest prices, even if those prices are lowered on the backs of overworked, underpaid employees.

As I read the Goodman story I was struck by one notion: things like trampling people do death don't happen in America or Canada. We are just too civilized. People get trampled to death when a bridge gets overloaded in India, or when tens of thousands of people try to rush through a small opening in Mecca during Hadj. The idea that less developed countries are where things like that happen, where overloaded buses driven by incompetents fall off a cliff in Peru.

In our own special smugness we believe that we are "better."

Turns out we are not. Turns out that nothing appeals more than a bargain. We have everyday honest factory workers (many of whom are no longer employed) who have bargained for higher wages and benefits, flocking to a chain that lowers prices using lower benefits and lower wages and when there is a threat of unionizing, will close the store citing "poor performance" as an excuse.

We have a lot of choices. The poor guy who didn't know he going to die didn't have.

BUSH'S FOLLY

An important part of "Looking Ahead" is that instead of wallowing in nostalgia, you stay current and critical. In my youth I used to be told that as I got older I would become less radical. There is a Churchill quote about that. I won't bore you.

Readfing more about Obama's Treasury appointments, I find more comment about how protectionism won't work. I find it interesting that Obama, more in vote-gathering mode than reality mode, suggested that the Free Trade agreements would have to be re-examined. Was he hinting at trade barriers to protect American workers? Such action would replicate precisely what countries did when the crash of 1929 happened. It stifled trade. It choked off what faint hope remained for economic recovery.

I do believe, and this was part of John Kerry's (remember him?) presidential campaign, that companies should not be given tax deductions for salaries paid to workers outside the country. If companies want to be bottom feeders and go for the lowest possible labour costs, let them do it, but don;t have the government be complicit by allowing those salaries to be expensed out.

You are wondering why I titled this posting Bush's Folly when his entire eight years have been "folly." In one of his recent speeches he warned America about protectionism. He was right. He was also being his usual duplicitous self. Maybe he is not in touch with the protectionist moves that have characterized his administration. Maybe he doesn't remember the soft wood lumber embargo. Maybe he forgets that America "protected" farmers against the inroads of Canadian pork products.
Maybe he forgot how he promoted the wasteful use of fertile farmland to grow food crops, not for food, but for ethanol. Maybe he forgeot how he protected them against foreign competition by putting a heavy tax (if I remember correctly it was something like 58 cents a gallon) on ethanol made from abundant sugar in Brazil. By the way, ethanol from sugar costs a fraction of the price to extract compared to the cost of extraction from corn. And cars in Brazil operate on ehanol, not gasoline.

So far-sighted President Obama - will you usher in a new age of independence from petroleum by using the most inexpensive ethanol you can buy? How about a trade move to enrich your poorest neighbours in the Caribbean by putting their abundance of sugar to better use? Will you begin moving toward the removal of the embargos against Cuba, where so much sugar comes from.

World trade, true world trade, not domination by the great industrtial and agricultural powers, will bring economic stability. And with more billions to Citibank, we need imagination.

RUST BELT ROMANCE

Whenever I tell anyone that I'm off to Cleveland, the reponse is "Cleveland??? Why on earth would you go to a place like Cleveland?"

I discovered Cleveland only because I have a dear friend who has lived most of his life there. Through him I see amd hear the best this forgotten city has to offer.

Yes, most people know that it has the I.M. Pei designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Most people know it has a great ball park once named Jacob's Field but now sporting a corporate name. A few people know that Cleveland also has the Frank Gehry designed Weatherhead School of Business, a rippling, flowing extravaganza of stainless steel.

But I go to Cleveland because it is a culture centre. (At this point most people wrinkle their noses and raise their eybrowws in a display of disbelief.)

Today I found one more reason to respect and admire what Cleveland does for the Arts. You do know, I hope, that Cleveland has always had one of the world's great symphony orchestras p0laying in what may be the most beautifil and acoustically perfect auditorium: Severance Hall. I was there today to hear the Clevleland Youth Orehstra whose members are from 12 to 18 and who play with a zest that one rarely hears, even from "adult" performers. Their playing is clear, clean, and tonally perfect.

They played the romantic and tear-inducing Brahms Symphony #3. Then they launched into four of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, the first of which they played with no conductor. They closed the program with the loud, demanding, cacaphonous Scythian Suite of Prokofief.

It doesn't really matter what they played. What does matter to me is that as I try to kepep "Looking Ahead" I am often confronted with despair as in"things fall apart," (you'll have to check thre literary refence for yourself,) I am redeemed from my pessimism by an experience like the Cleveland Youth Orchesatra. More than a hundred "chuldren", guided by their schools, their teachers, members of the Cleveland Symphony, and the love and care of decvoted parents, make me feel better about tomorrow.

Becuase if the title of what I write is "Looking Ahead" it is this visit to Cleveland that gives me hope.

REAL CHANGE

Obama, and the people who voted for him, were all about "change." Does that mean real change? "Sea-change? Or does it just mean a little careful tweaking so that you'd hardly notice?

The auto execs flew in to Washington. As several pundits put it, coming by private jet and carrying a tin cup. So far, there is no real sign of change. Yet the Democrats, let by house speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate chief Harry Reid, have told the Big Three to go back to the drawing board and come up with some specifics.

They won't. I am confident of that. It is their infernal refusal to recognize change going on around them. Yes, they ca blame the economic meltdown which would not have come at a worse time for them. They were unprepared for real change in the product they manufacture.

But they can do it. They must. Even the cipher in the White House, tottering to the end of his administration. knows that change is possible. Possible that is, if you see the depth of the emergency.

They did it before. When America entered the war they turned their industrial power into arms production. They became the world's arsenal. The huge Ford plant at Willow Run (taken over after the war by Henry Kaiser to build his cars) switched to turning out B24 Liberator bombers. Their production capacity was enormous.

The auto makers responded to the call to arms with change. Of course there were prodigious profits to be made, but that is almost beside the point.

The point is that when a national emergency was thrust upon them they responded.
The government did not seem to mind throwing billions of dollars in war contracts at them. But again - that is not the point.

America has shown that it can change.

It may not be 1941 with the shadow of Pearl Harbour hanging over their consciosness, but it is a shattering crisis nonetheless.

I do believe that American industry can rally. I do believe that there is a war to be won.

Can they do it?

LOOKING AHEAD???

Sometimes, according to the sages, in order to find out where you're going you have to look back and see where you've been. That's my excuse for dredging up the past in a fit of what can only be called self-indulgence. Go ahead. Indulge!

My "blog" is not setting the world on fire. There isn't even any smoke! To continue writing is a compulsion, an imperative. Does it matter than I get very little response or that when you Google my name my blog is not even mentioned.
Alas, more self-pity and I will nauseate myself. Here goes:

A few weeks ago, and I have to be careful that I don't give clues that let you identify the person, I had a conversation with a friend. The friend reminded me that she did not share my "left" views, but was in fact, a Tory, of the slightly red variety.

I consider that political bent more of a moral defect than a political opinion - but that would be intolerant of me - wouldn't it?

I tried, in a lavishly nostalgic piece to explain why I went left and stayed left. It is, I will comment, especially germane in an age when the unthinkable has happened: the neo-cons in Washington have put government to work.

Here then with a few edits, is the email I sent:
I have a problem with the marketplace orthodoxy that guys like Bush keep yammering about. He, and many of his neo-con comrades are confused. They think that capitalism and democracy always go together. The Saudi Arabians are capitalists. Would you call Saudi Arabia a democracy?

I had a great deal of time for some of the the truly pragmatic Tories we have had. Bill Davis who, and with 20/20 hind sight it was a good idea - bought a piece of Suncor. Bill Davis also put together a transportation experiment in Kingston that would have revolutionized the way we get from place to place by rail.

Peter Lougheed was another. Alberta was overflowing with oil and he set up the Heritage Fund financed by oil royalties. He used it to try to diversify the cattle/oil Alberta economy. Like Davis he was too soon with a great idea. Remember his oil seed refinery business? He got into it just at the time when there was a glut of oil seed products. The project collapsed in a sea of debt. But just think today of biofuels.

When I think of Tories I tend to think of the blue-ribbon Anglicans I grew up with. They were anti-Semitic (it was an inherent characteristic) and they were exclusionary. They also excluded Roman Catholics, along with anyone who didn't look like them.(See Country Club, Yacht Clubs, Golf Club, Resort Hotels, apartment houses on Eglinton avenue and most of Leaside etc etc.)

Perhaps a great deal of what used to be Jewish radicalism stemmed not only from social injustice, but from the marginalization of our people. That has all changed today and the Americans especially are up to their armpits in neo-con Jews. See William Kristol in the New York Times.

I suppose I clung to my radicalism for far too long. I realized, after I had run unsuccessfully in the provincial election, that the left was in an ideological straight-jacket. There is no room for pragmatism.

I is pragmatism that brings us to the present state of affairs: a Republican government holding its nose and buying shares in banks.

We shall see what affect the deeply ingrained conservatism on America has on Obama. Will he buck the hard right? Will he defy the people who vote in a close-minded bloc against stem cell research, elimination of prayer in schools, same sex marriage, and the right of a woman to choose.

My leftiness still goes back a long way. I remember Harry Truman's Taft Hartley Act which effectively put an end to growth of the union movement. I remember the so- called right-to-work legislation that really was the right-to-fire-without cause legislation. I remember things like enlightened capitalism which moved the textile industry from New England to the right-to-work southern states. Then they discovered, in a bottom feeding frenzy, that they could get it done more cheaply in Mexico. Even that was not enough. They moved to an even cheaper labour source - poor bedraggled El Salvador. Even the Salvadoreans couldn't compete because it moved again - to Honduras.

I believe that the Right has no sense of social justice and that profits always trump humanity.

Aaah - now I feel better.

LOOKING AHEAD WITHOUT HOPE

One of my staples is the complaint about not living long enough to see what wonderful things are going to happen in the next 20 years. "Looking Ahead" has chronological limits. No one lives forever, but as a cousin of mine always says: "I'm going to be the first."

So it is with a combination of exultation and regret that I read about the opportunity that lies ahead in the creation of new "people-mover" systems. The writer, quoting Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (from the 70s) wrote about how we can truly "rescue" the car makers - rescue them from themselves that is.

It has been one of my chronic beefs that when we talk about infrastructure or capital spending or job creation, we usually talk about the infrastructure we already know, highways, bridges etc.

In this blog just a week or so ago I summoned the President-0elect to think about real "change." Partner with the car companies in new technologies to build high speed trains and local transit. Partner with the struggling airlines to put them in the new age of transportation by building train stations at airports. Partner with the trucking companies to get them using "intermodal" transport - i.e. the placing of long-haul trailers on flat bed rail cars.

I read with delight that several states have voted for propositions that make sense. In California the voters have authorized the government to build a high speed "jet train?" to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I want to take a page from the innovation of the Interstate Highways system put in place by President Eisenhower. He did not simply widen existing roads, which only adds to sprawl and congestion. He built new roads over virgin territory. Unfortunately, it became what is known as the "paving of American," and included slashing cities in half with interstate routes.

But the new rail system, the building of which will supply millions of jobs, and add a new dimension to the failing car business, will go through virgin territory, or as the recent article said, down the media strips of existing interstate highways.

I know that Mr. Harper, who believes in less government, (?) doesn't think we should run a deficit. But now that the G20 has somehow given licence to him, and other countries, to run a deficit in order for the world economy to survive, maybe he will take dramatic action.

The talk about a high speed train between Windsor and Quebec drones on. It is unimaginative. It uses the existing right-of-way.

My suggestion is that we build a completely new system that links Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal in a high speed triangle.

Anyway, I probably won't be here to see it happen - or not happen - as the case will probably be.

WHAT KIND OF THEISM?

A friend of mine recently declared to me that he had gone from being an atheist to an anti-theist. He has transcended merely not believing, and has progressed to being intolerant of religion and all who embrace it. Any religion- he is an equal opportunity cynic.

I’m on his side.

If I weren’t before, then surely the claim by that nationally famous nincompoop from Alaska has pushed me over the edge. Imagine – this woman – who made it to state governor actually believes she has a shot at the Republican presidential nomination for 2012. Only, that is, if her Maker opens a door for her, a door of opportunity, which she will cheerfully and obediently (after all – her Lord proclaimed it) walk through it.

But it is all too easy to sever whatever flimsy link there was to the Divine has been broken by a nitwit.

I cringe every time I see people praying for something – a candlelight vigil – as if somehow there is a Diving Being who will grant them their wish, The wishes are often about finding a lost loved one, who usually turns up dead in some forest, or a terminal cancer patient who drifts inevitably toward death in spite of fervent praying by the family, plus every total stranger who hears about the dying person, and grief junkies to the end, fall on their knees in supplication for her to live.
She dies. But their faith is undimmed.

Recently, one of my dearest friends died. She was too beautiful to die. She was too smiling and lovely to die. She was too talented to die. I commented to someone, who I knew was a “believer” that it makes you wonder how the Divine could let it happen. He responded: “But we do not know what’s on the other side.”

I guess that’s at the heart of it. The notion that, in our own preposterously self-denying way, we can’t believe that we will actually die, turn to dust, and just plain disappear. The only trace of our presence will be what we have left behind – children, a great book, a musical composition.

When I listen to a Mozart symphony I don’t think it is foolish Wolfgang speaking to me from beyond the grave. All I know is that he wrote it down and we still have it. It is what he left for us. It is not divine or spectrally scary – it is dots on a page.

I went to see Bill Maher’s Religulous, hoping for a defining moment for all atheists. What I got was a man who couldn’t decide between being profound and being funny, A man, who obviously has abandoned his Catholic beliefs, but who still atavistically, clings to the possibility that there is something out there. His fallback was always “I don’t know.”

Well I know. There does not have to be a God for me to sit here and write. There does not have to be a God for me to want to play the piano. There does not have to be a God who I can blame for the stock market crash.

One of Toronto’s most listened-to broadcaster/writers, Gordon Sinclair, almost daily reminded us of his scorn for religion and any notion of an all-caring, all-seeing God. His public laughed and thought of him as a “character.” I found that when I said the same things I was branded a dangerous fool.

For me, there does not have to be God. The stuff about “no atheists in foxholes” is pure rubbish. Even if it were true, someone with death staring them in the face is not likely to be mentally competent.

I say: get up off your knees and start making your life what you can make it. But we will not. Like the poor devils in Alcoholics Anonymous, who have given themselves over to a higher power, they have abdicated personal responsi8bility for who they are and what they are.

And we think suicide bombers are demented!

HOW MUCH CHANGE?

The fatal flaw in Barack Obama’s promise of “change” lies in the mindset of most Americans that the marketplace, like Adam Smith’s:”invisible hand” will make everything right. Unless Obama can change the deeply ingrained mindset in “the world’s greatest democracy,” his best-intentioned “change” will be thwarted.

Why the stubbornness? Even the sub-prime mortgage crisis did not change the basics of the American view of life and reality. Sure, it has scared millions into a state where they no longer are buying clothes or cars or houses. A cataclysmic event seems to throttles their initiative. The utter panic that followed 9/11 with enemies lurking around every corner and terrorists were hiding Under every bed – all but paralyzed commerce. Airplanes stopped flying and airline companies headed for bankruptcy protection.

It is no wonder then, that the current financial chaos has throttled them – and us!
It has even choked the banks. The federal money they are getting, which was supposed to return calm to the credit markets, has been used, not to lend to people to buy cars or houses, but to improve the balance sheets of the bank. So far, the government, even as part-owners of major banks, seems powerless to make them release the capital into the lending stream.

So what “change” has amounted to – so far – is, as the old metaphor expresses, like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
It seems to me that ideology rules supreme. It seems to me that “change” is always kept within the parameters of the market economy and as they love to call it – capitalist democracy. In the case of the recent economic catastrophe, the definition is something of an oxymoron, since there was nothing “democratic” about the way the greedy gorged themselves at the table of sub prime mortgages and obscene bonuses.

Obama is talking fiscal stimulus. To the Bushies, that meant an extra thousand dollars to every American to go out and spend. That was pump-priming of the worst kind.

If America is to return to basics they must, and so must we all, recognize that when Adam Smith preached wealth creation, he did not mean that overnight your house doubled in value. That’s not new wealth.

Obama is talking “fiscal stimulus.” He seems to mean spending money on infrastructure to put people back to work, not unlike the public works projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal. (But it will have to be much broader to work. Even Roosevelt could not restore the economy. It took a war to do that.)

Start with the Obama promise to subsidize the creation of new automobile technology, and less dependence on oil by using newer technologies: wind, solar, biomass, clean coal, and yes – nuclear. The impediment to that is that in a profit-sensitive economy, the high cost of alternative power will only be acceptable as long as conventional fuel prices remain high. Now that the oil price has plummeted, it will be back in favour. Profit trumps good intentions.

Obama hints at “infrastructure” investments. To me that means public money will be spent on things that private capital does not do: transit systems, bridges, water works, and the environment.

The fact has never been clearer: government must do what private capital will not: invest in the future whether or not it is conventionally bottom-line profitable. We do not nor should we, operate solely for short-term profit at the expense of the environment, and as we have seen, economic stability..

Will America stumble, believing as they do, that the marketplace is still king and that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will make everything right? It will be difficult for Obama to tell America that their insurance-run, profit-based health care system is obsolete. Even he, with his ideas about change, will not dare offend America by taking health care out of the hands of insurance companies. His promise is to provide virtual universal health care but to use the existing framework of private capital insurance companies.

There is iron determination in the belief that only private does it right and that government is good at nothing – with the possible exception of making war.I’m beating the horse that died with the $700 billion dollar bailout and the socialization of major banks.

Can the new president move to “save” the car industry? Yes – he must. But at the same time he must ask for a piece of the action. Americans will have to get used to the idea that Washington is a partner in making Chevrolets. If he does give them the money to stay afloat, can he also demand even more than new technology to create gas-less cars? Can he perhaps put GM and Ford and Chrysler into the business of creating a mass transit system to run America’s new high speed railway system – a significant public works initiative that will put millions to work, reduce dependency on the infernal combustion engine and finally bring American transportation into the 21st century. And the new high speed trains will run on electricity.

He can partner with airline companies to bring them into the transit business. He can build, as they have in major European airports, train stations at air terminals.
With revived railroad, he can, with tax incentives, promote an intermodal system that takes heavy long-haul transport trucks off the highways and puts them on railway flat cars. It is already being done, but not enough to make a significant difference.

Remember too, and there are economic models to prove the point: building highways is far more expensive and less labour intensive than building railways.

For America this could be the dawning of a new reality. Out of chaos comes change. Out of desperation comes sanity. That’s nothing new. We have long believed that “necessity is the Mother of Invention.”
Can Obama be the great innovator – the inventor the country needs?

WEIGHING IN ON RACISM

This will not be about the presidential election. It will be about a totally unvarnished look at the innate bigotry of people who profess to know better but still make judgments based on some kind of racial notion. It is the old I-told-you-so school of bigotry, in which a professed tolerator shows his/her true colours – in spite of themselves.

With Obama clearly in my mind (isn’t it in everyone’s?) I engaged in a dinner table conversation with two older and we hope, wiser physicians. People of character, but sadly for me, like many- if not most – members of that profession starkly right-wing. Not that there are not thousands of that group who give of themselves in causes for social and medical justice – I apologize to them for what seems to be a generalization.

We all remember the outflux (is there such a word) of angry doctors from England during the time of the NHS. We all remember the strike by doctors in Saskatchewan when Tommy Douglas created what would become a national treasure – our own national health act.

But about racism: a civilized discussion about the virtues and failures of the American health system. Liberals like me always comment on stuff like – infant mortality – the U.S. is something like 17th on a world list. My dinner-table friends commented, not without truth, that if you factored our black Americans, the number would be closer to the top.

In Canada we have our own “factor-out” statistics. Crime heads the list. People suggest that if you factored out young Jamaican men from crime statistics, we would appear to be a lot safer. In the Prairies, if you factor out the aboriginals the prison population gores down dramatically.

All of these statistical gymnastics are true. What is also true is that we repeat what we have always done: we marginalize the unfortunate. We also criticize the poor for being poor. We criticize single mothers for being single. We arrange the arithmetic of society in such a way that we can find convenient scapegoats for our own failures.
“It’s not us – it’s them.” That may be true unless you just happen to believe that a humane society is judged by how it treats the least of us.

To all the libertarian supporters of Ayn Rand’s grotesque Objectivism – I wish you luck and success. By the way, if things do get really tough and you have no more scapegoats to blame, a friendly government will pick up the tab. My goodness – didn’t they just do that??

the bunker mantality of retirees.

I know that Sherry Cooper is a “star” economist. When she speaks, people listen. BMO should be proud to have her. She is always good for a headline. In fact, if you ask any media producer in radio or TV who is at the top of their Rolodex on economics (do they still use those clumsy things?) you can be sure her name will be at or near the top of the list.
I am, along with all the other quaking retired-on-investments people, an avid reader of Report on Business. Today I was attracted to a story about how to retire. And of course, there was the author of “The New Retirement: How it will Change Our Future,” the one and only Sherry Cooper. To people like her, retirement is all about the time in your life when you no longer work; the time of life when you go south and spend all your time with other creaky old folks pretending to be engaged by taking courses in self-improvement.
The fact is – she thinks retirement is a semi vegetative state in which you are concerned only about how much things cost and can you afford any of them.
So Report on Business quotes her saying: “generally, retirees want to downsize.That usually means, within Canada, moving to a smaller city or town that is within a 60 to 90 minute drive.”
I am thunderstruck. I know that my wife and I should downsize. We did. We sold our house several years ago and live in a lovely 1730 square foot downtown apartment. “(It’s a condo, but we rent. Who at our age, wants to “own” anything.”)
I should add that we violate what was always a rule for “older folks:” don’t increase your possessions. Don’t buy a lot of stuff. Part of keeping you is to keeping buying “stuff. We buy new stuff to hang on our walls. We buy new art glass. We buy new kitchen stuff so I can cook better.
To hear just like her, retirement is all about crawling into a comfortable cocoon. Does it matter that you have grown up in a major city with great restaurant, theatre, museums, galleries and shopping all within walking distance? Does it matter that it may cost a little more? At the heart of her argument is the notion that your prime interest in retirement is to preserve your money by moving to a small town where there may be – if you’re lucky – one movie theatre and a Pizza Hut.
I will get heat from people who move to the chic places like Port Perry or Port Hope. But that’s another argument.
My biggest complaint is that growing older should be a time when you “pull in your horns” and become obsessed with keeping your capital intact.
And as for that 60 to 90 minute drive – it doesn’t happen. Once you are pleasantly ensconced among other seniors waiting for their next rousing game of lawn bowling, you become more and more immobilized.
And I have even talked about some of those grim little “retirement communities” that developers put together in the middle of nowhere, or within a 20 minute drive of a small town you wouldn’t want to live in.
Sherry – wait until you retire.
(For those who don’t know – I am co-author of the book “Don’t Be Blindsided By Retirement” – which looks at life beyond making sure you have enough money.)

A LEFTOVER LEFTY

Karl Marx and/or Lenin said that “Capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.”
But on the other hand historians agree that Roosevelt saved Free Enterprise.
And Tommy Douglas referred to Free Enterprise as neither free nor enterprising.
Such are the memories of an aging lefty, out of touch with today’s political realities, seduced perhaps by a portfolio of capitalist securities that guarantee a decent descent into the near-oblivion of getting older.
When I lived in a decent house in Forest Hill Village, owned a spacious 48 foot sailing yacht, and yet struggled to pay our bills, friends referred to me as an affluent Socialist.
I was neither affluent nor was I a hard-line socialist calling for everything from class warfare to bank nationalization to an end to marketplace orthodoxy.
I bore you with all this only to precede the obvious statement: the world, as we all know it, has turned upside down.
The “me-first” generation, the Y generation, and the baby-boomers have all come after all those experiences of my own path through life and a career and a degree of satisfaction.
But now – lo and behold, Hank Paulson, Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury holding his nose and nationalizing the banks. Rather sheepishly I thought, he announced that most Americans hated the idea, but it was necessary,
Does “the end justifies the means” seem to ring out in its dialectic smugness?
Now I observe. I not longer contribute editorially. I pay my taxes and keep my mouth shut.
It is several years since I abandoned my long association with the political left, who have ensnared themselves in a ideological web that permits nothing but “principles” and fails to deal with reality – preferring instead to continue their relentless class warfare,
I am what Layton is not, but perhaps what Treasury Secretary Paulson is: a pragmatist.
The delicious irony that the most free market orthodoxy has had to put government to work; has been obliged, in spite of the nonsense of their less-government ideology, been forced to do what government must do: become the last resort and guardian of all we hold dear.
I was a little stunned to discover that the arch-ideologue and believer in monetary control – Alan Greenspan was once an Ayn Rand follower! Horrid. Everything that smacks of a kind of vicious determinism or what we used to call Darwinian economics happened on his watch.
The dust may settle soon, but the ineluctable truth is that the forces of monetary and fiscal conservatism have folded their cards and succumbed to reality.
Whether or not it work remains to be seen.
My ancient lefty bones feel warmer.

BDY VS BRAIN

You wouldn’t expect to have an awakening (I hesitate to call it a revelation or an epiphany) in the hill country of Texas – but I did. Visiting my daughter and her husband, and our three grandsons in Austin, I stumbled across a book that promises a “6 step age-defying program!” (Exclamation point mine.).

There is not a lot to do, so my wife and I fall back on our obsession: crossword puzzles. We read a lot, and I bought an electronic keyboard so I could practice every day. In other words, we continue to exercise our brains.
Let me back up. One of the axioms for a happy retirement is fitness – fitness of body and fitness of mind. If that sounds like the beginning of a Sunday homily – you’ll have to forgive me.

In my book “Don’t Be Blindsided by Retirement” I remind you that taking physical stock of yourself is imperative. A visit to your doctor for a complete evaluation of your body (you’’ have to go elsewhere for your mind) is essential. It is simply “taking stock.”
But just as important of course, is fitness of mind. It has long been believed that you can ward off or at least retard, the mental dysfunction that accompanies aging with mental exercise – hence the crosswords and the piano lessons and the reading...

I go through dozens of puzzles every day from the almost unlimited collection of New York Times puzzle books. The daily puzzles are smaller and start on Monday with an easy one but by Saturday are so difficult you are close to despair. But you solder on, lubricating the brain. You hope.

Barnes and Noble have the best selection. That is where is stumbled across “Crosswords to Keep Your Brain Young, edited by Will Storz with advice from Majid Fatuhi M.D. PhD.of the Lifebridge Health Brain and Spine Institute at Harvard.
Wow! Proof at last that I can push back brain decay with puzzles. But the good doctors has much more to say from mnemonics to brain and vocabulary exercise.

He reminds us that “each of the 100 billion cells in the human brain has the capacity to grow. The brain’s capacity is endless.” He really gets to me with this: “It was once assumed that learning was limited to children. New studies indicate that indeed old dogs can learn new tricks.” You can, he says “soak up new skills.”

Nothing is more perilous to me at least, that the trip into memory loss. When I sat down to write this piece, I had to stop and ask my wife (who always comes up with the answers) what the word for sudden revelation – like Paul on the road to Damascus – and of course she snapped it out like a twenty year old,

I still have more Doctor Fatuhi to read and he will tell me how to expand my range of knowledge, increase my vocabulary, and remember people’s names.

Which should bring me to a funny ending. My career as a gag writer (I’m serious) is over.

Harping on Bad Habits.

I seem to always go looking for trouble – even where there is none. Such is the life of a maverick. (Since Sarah Palin’s preposterous rise to fame, the word “maverick” is having a re-birth.)

I counsel others to think, to do, to act, to vibrate with anticipation of every new day. I however, find that more and more, the palliative quality of TV is too seductive to resist. I can become a passive receptor, content to lie back and let someone entertain, divert, or amuse me.

Having made my case for slothfulness, I can proceed to my point: cooking, or more specifically, the presence of ancient bromides in the fine art of cooking.

Watching one of my favourites – The Food Network, I am uplifted by the artistry of Anna Olsen, blondly glittering her way into the inner depths of my gustatory psyche. (Wow! Talk about flights of poetic fancy!)

The point – wait for it – it’s coming. She is busy concocting something delectable when she says: “Nothing like home cookin’.” I am startled. If I had a cook like Olsen in my home I would never go out to eat again.

The point here is not the beautiful Mrs. Olsen, but the notion somehow that home-cooking is the be-all-and-end all. The expression keeps cropping up on other cooking shows like Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. The best of the fine food in a small town diner is that it is: home cookin'! It is not!

Besides, I have a special antipathy toward home cooking. It’s right up there with other aphorisms and bromides like “No place like a small town and no people like small town people.” You can, if you wish, substitute “country-folk” for “small town.

I bow to Flannery O”Connor, during whose short life, targeted the notions of “good ole country folk” and their apparently inherent goodness, trustworthiness, and reliability.

Back again to Home Cooking.
I don’t know about you but I have eaten in some homes where the food was so dull and pedestrian it was nearly an insult. Not every mother is a good cook. Not every home-cooking kitchen is paradise. Some of the food is awful. It has been coasting for years on its unwarranted reputation.

Near me, in the St. Lawrence Market area of Toronto is the Saturday-only Farmer’s Market, where all the good things of country living are sold. It is where I, believing in the inherent virtues of country- folk cookin” bought a corn bread.
It was the driest, most totally tasteless thing I had ever eaten. It reminded me of the other “country-cookin”” fable – the one where you xtop by a farm house on the way back from the cottage to buy some home-made pie. It is often good but it is also often terrible – crust like wet cardboard, and fruit overcooked.
In all fairness, I have experienced some great stuff too – like the pieces at the big War worth competition that brings mothers’ food to the masses.
But by and large, we have been seduced because we want to be. We really do want to believe that home is not only where the heart is, but it’s where the cooking is down-home good.

My advice: stay away from anything billed as “home cooking”, and stop lying around watching TV.

HOPES, DREAMS, AND DELUSIONS

When you are growing older and long past the traditional age of retirement, there is still a spark – a belief that somehow you will resume some kind of a career. It is not, for some, as the saying gores: a snare and a delusion. It is reality. I have two friends – one two years older who still heads an important organization for monitoring the media. The other, is perhaps better known because he remains – at just four months younger than I – an iconic (wow I am getting tired of that word) journalistic figure on TV News. And of course, there is Mike Wallace, who continued to work on “60 Minutes: well into his nineties.

I remember meeting with John Knight, president of Knight-Ridder newspapers and when I met him, still working after two Pulitzer Prizes. He remained as editor-in-chief of the Miami Herald. Interviewing him in 1976 I commented that it must be a distraction to sit in his office, surrounded by pictures of himself and Presidents, to look out on the beautiful palm-fringed scene and the causeway leading to Key Biscayne. “Once you get used to the view – it’s just another place to work,” was his reply.

I commented, lightly I thought, that he was “well into his eighties.”
He bristled. “I am not well into my eighties. I’m only 82.
These men are unique. It would be folly of any elderly (nut still ambitious) man to try to emulate their success and their vocational longevity.

Folly.

Yet, here I go again. The other day I had lunch with a young entertainment-business lawyer whose father, a cinematographer had worked with me in my palmier days.
He asked me what I would like to do. Do?? I’m lucky to be sitting there talking to a successful man who was less than half my age.
“I’m serious,” he said. Would you like to get back into “the business?”
There is not room for me – I’m the wrong demographic”
“Nonsense, there are many people who still admire and remember you.”
Flattery always works.

I agreed that perhaps, just perhaps if he could get the funding for a pilot, I might be persuaded to put a show together.
We talked a bit. He suggested travel. I suggested Home Exchange.
Why not? Let’s put together a pilot of a typical home exchange, complete with the two exchangers – I would be one of them of course – visiting each other. There would be footage of me the exchanger, fitting into the neighborhood, making new friends, shopping for food, finding the best boulangerie and seeing the sights.
Sometimes, and I have said this before, you and the person you exchange with get together. There is usually overlap at either end of the trip.
Do I have the stamina to do it? Does the audience have any interest in seeing an octogenarian and his wife trudging around a small city in Holland, or visiting the zoo in Lisbon that is directly behind the place where we are staying? Perhaps we could meet the people, like Ricardo in Lisbon who showed us ancient Celtic monoliths in the middle of nowhere or Trees and Dick who made sure we visited Delft and also saw “The Pearl Earring” at the museum in The Hague.

Maybe I could do it. Maybe I can still crank it up.

Apologies

I have no one to blame but my proof-reader - me! Sorry for the goofs. I was reminded that Lord Jim was (of course) Conrad and the Amis book was "Lucky Jim." And for the other nit-0pickers, my comment about "test-messaging. I'm sure you realize I meant text-messaging.

AGING AND IMPATIENCE

AGING AND IMPATIENCE

One of the hazards of growing older is that when you read momentous announcements of things to come – you know you won’t be there to see them. Just as I won’t be around to see my grandchildren go to university, I will be long gone when the City of Toronto does something about the development of the 800 hectares of land in the central waterfront – land that could create public and commercial space, and add to the downtown critical mass of residential housing. Think of it – another ten or fifteen or twenty thousand people living downtown and leaving their cars parked.
The prediction is that the billions required to get going on this will mean that we won’t see it all for another twenty-five years, when I will be 105!
What really bothers me is not just the inability to get things done ( for those of us who remember the endless haggling of the railway lands, it’s déjà vu all over again,.) it is the monumental failure of people to conceive, to think, to act, on a massive issue.
Alas for me. There was a time when I could say all this and cultivate ideas in a few hundred thousand listeners. Now I shout words down a deep well echoing only the sadness I feel at being powerless.
Mark Kolke (of Mark Musings) has asked me for more material like my reminiscences about Kingsley Amis. He is not alone. Old friends (and fans) continue to tell me I have to create a memoir based on all the people I have met through the years.
The problem becomes insoluble. On the one hand I want to more forward (or as the blog says – Look Ahead) and stimulate new ideas and perhaps some change. No way. What they all seem to want is memories. I have them and I treasure them.
But who wants to be “remembered,” when you really want to be a force for change?
It is up to all of us closing in on our final years to stay relevant and active and persuasive. Funny, the Chinese (and look at what they achieve) hold the elderly in high esteem and look for their advice in decision-making..
Is it Confucianism? Is it reality?
I want to be here for the good stuff. I want to help make it happen.

I’M GETTING REALLY ANGRY!

My impatience is showing – and I’m not happy about it.

I cannot contain my irritation that while I was sitting around doing next to nothing – a whole generation had grown up around me – a generation of test-messagers, a generation who stand in line at midnight to buy the new I-Phone so they can be part of “where it’s at!” Hurrah!! \

But I accept it all, understanding that what I feel is part legitimate disdain, but a larger part jealousy. Yes, I am impatient with them because I can’t be impatient with myself. But let me leave all that psychobabble of projection to other armchair would-be shrinks.

I surrender. I accept your right to spend your money foolishly. I accept that you have to create a culture that is yours – not one that is mine, old, dusty and irrelevant.

What I can not tolerate is that you have become part of a dumbed-down generation, dependent on television, not only for your view of the world, but of the priorities and obligations that are part of our lives.

To wit: a few days ago, watching CBC TV news (remembering with regret that once that august organization was a shining light of enlightenment – and if not enlightenment – at least a certain standard of excellence when it came to the English language.

No longer.

We are all, including the young commentators, newspeople, announces, and talk-show hosts, the victims of education via American television.

Why else would I hear this young woman, speaking on the CBC, abandon the once-cherished Canadian (and English) linguistic tradition of how to pronounce the article “the” when it preceded a noun with a vowel. .Remember, we would say “thee edge.”
On CBC she said, having heard it on U.S. TV which long ago abandoned correctness in favour of inner-city jargon. So it is now customary to say “thuh edge.”
My daughter-in-law, who is a school teacher said that some of her students were startled that she added an “n” to the article “a” so than she said “an edge” and not “a edge.” The kids were mystified.

The CBC woman further irritated my by referring to Ralph Klein as the former “pre-meer” of Alberta. In fact, the august (but not for long) CBC is full of promos announcing the “premeer” of new Fall programs Strictly an Americanism, based not on a legitimate reality, but on illiteracy and disregard for the beauties of Shakespeare’s English.

But the vocal critics of language misuse, of solecisms, of bad grammar, of comic-book based literary standards, insist that the language is a dynamic, growing,. Changing thing.

I agree. But change based on new realities is acceptable. Change based on giving dignity to illiteracy – is not.

But hell, when I was in public school our teachers insisted that we pronounce the word “clerk” as “clark.” I didn’t.

HUBBUB IS NOT HUMDRUM.

For more than 41 years my wife and I lived in a pleasant, four-bedroom home in a “near”suburb of Toronto – Fores5t Hill. It was what you did. It was where you raised your kids. Never mind that it imposed on them a homogeneity that was all at once racial, religious and income-related. It felt safe.

You have to move downtown to realize what a trap that ersatz security is.

I am writing this remembering a conversation I had more than 30 years ago with Kingsley Amis, who will be remembered for “Lord Jim” whether he wrote another book or not.

I had just finished “Ending Up, a wickedly clever, witty, darkly-humorous book about a group of elderly people living together in one house. It was fun to the point of being wicked, with characters like a retired army colonel who lived with his loyal batman (who may also have been his sweetheart.)

I asked Amis why he continued to live in North London. With all the money he has made and the royalties that would pour in, why would he continue to live where he had to pay7 burdensome taxes? Why not move to some secluded palm-fringed island?

He to me he lived where he did because he was always with people. He could go to his “local” and be with people who talked and who argued. It was this yeasty atmosphere that kept his creative juices boiling. (My words – not his.)

He said that if he moved to that pal-fringed island he would write one book about living on that island and that would be it. {Period. End of Amis the novelist,

(I you Google his name you may be astonished at how prolific he was. Most people know and treasure Lord Jim, but that was just the beginning.)

Back to my own choices sharply reminiscent of what Amis said to me. So when I moved from the humdrum to the hubbub it was perhaps to keep some juices lowing. Living downtown where people congregate, where at night club-goers can be heard in the streets, where there are more restaurants per square foot than I place I have been to, where people jostle and push for space; where there is contention, and if not contention, not complacency.

I should have made me a better writer. It helped Kingsley Amis.

Memories

MEMORIES

Fred Astaire singing "S’wonderful" to Audrey Hepburn in Daddy Longlegs and I nearly lost it. What flooded in on me were more than memories, they were chronicles, a catalogue of where I’d been and what I’d done. The trap of getting older is to weep for what used to be.

Turner Classic Movies should be out-of-bounds for anyone over the age of 60. I’m convinced that this wallowing in the past is counterproductive. It adds to the years which become a burden more than a bounty.

And I do like to think of my own past as something of a bounty. It is the spring from which flows much more than memories. From it flows what I hope are new ideas, new horizons, new challenges.

Alas, it was everything I remember coming from people long gone. From Astaire with Rogers – "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," "All my Eggs in One Basket." With Gene Kelly resurrecting old Gershwin songs. Even an old black and white kinescope of the Oscar Levant show where Levant races through "Lady Be Good" and Astaire puffs and pants to keep up the tempo.

And they are all gone. All of them but me – and you..

As a watched I wondered what anyone of the 20-something or 30-something group would think. Did they care? Was it utterly irrelevant? Did they really want to see Judy and Fred doing their two tramp song and dance from "Easter Parade?"

I don’t think so. To them it is what all of the fogeys are about. To them it does not have the ring of rock “n roll. But to that generation, Disco is yesterday.

So I teared up a little. I sang along. I remembered being ten years old when Rogers and Astaire went "Flying Down To Rio." I remember being a teenager when Fred did that horrible movie about being in the army and played opposite the devastatingly beautiful Rita Hayworth.

I was grown up with a small family when he did "Silk Stockings" with Cyd Charisse.

So what’s all the fuss about? Is this kind of nostalgia self-defeating? Does it give me an alternative to “Looking Ahead” – which is what my blog is supposed to be all about.

Dunno.

Who's to Blame

WHO’S TO BLAME?

For every person who declares, not without a heavy dose of self-righteousness “People should learn to be responsible for their behaviour,” there are some of us who think otherwise.

The case of the four carefree kids who drove into the water in Muskoka a few weeks ago, is still with us. Not because three of the four are dead, the girl having miraculously escaped, but because of the unanswered question. “Who served these kids the drinks?”

It has taken several weeks, but now the father of one of the dead kids has come pleading for government action to curtail this kind of behaviour. He has a record, from the restaurant or club bill, that the four of them consumed 31 drinks in about three hours. That’s more than seven drinks each!

This is where the righteous among us declare that responsibility rests with the kids themselves, or with anyone too foolish to drink and then drive.

This is also where I, bleeding heart liberal that I continue to be, believe that blame should be laid with the servers who fed them the drinks, and with the establishment that let it happen. This is nothing new. Even though the Liquor Licence Act spells out quite unequivocally that (and these are my words) the establishment is responsible for being sure that they do not serve alcohol to anyone they suspect has had too much to drink.

It may be that I will be gagged on this issue if and when there is a case against the establishment that sold them the drinks. They can be found guilty under what the law describes as “standard of care.”

Why does it happen? Because the wait-person has a “live one” and as long as they keep drinking the tips will; get bigger. Or the management that makes it part of every training manual to be sure that the wait staff pushes the product.

The mayhem that we have in our downtown club area is a classic example of the rampant selling of too much to drink. The chaos in the streets, sometimes with fatal results stem from the effects of too much alcohol, often mixed with too much testosterone.

The Liquor License Board can’t do much about testosterone, but they can enforce their own laws so that establishments, when they empty as closing time, do not disgorge hordes of dangerous (to themselves and others) drunks.

And in the case of the three who died, it was just a harmless afternoon of the kind of fun young drinkers get into. Was the alcohol responsible for the drowning deaths?

I would not like to be the proprietor or the server at that Lake Joseph establishment.
I hope they are dealt with severely, and maybe a message will be sent to proprietors and wait staff that they are at least partially responsible for their patrons leaving and killing themselves. Yes, people should be responsible for their own behaviour, but alcohol has a way of dulling judgement.

About incentive

Thanks to Mark Kolke and his blog "frameyourmessage.com, I am going to get back into action.I apologize to regular readers for allowing my posted items to become obsolete and irrelvant.

But, after all, that is what happens to people of my age - and also - to many who are much younger and should know better.

I have warned myself, to no avail, that unless I maintain a structure, I will lapse into indifference and sloth - both of which are supposed to be the prerogatives of those who have "paid their dues." I do not want to lie fallow, waiting for The Muse to strike me.

What Mark has reprinted in his blog is my comment about incentives. I realize that without a deadline to meet or an editor waiting for me to produce, or a boss who has me chained to a desk, I have no tangible incentive to keep at it. The only incentive has to be the one I generate myself, out of the imperative that says I must. I must remain relevant. I must remain motivated I must nourish my own incentives.

So, my dear friends, if you find yourselves watching just a little too much TV, or (as I did last week on two occasions) not getting out of my bathrobe all day, and of delaying the things you should do but keep putting off - then gather round.

I commented to Mark that two articles I had written, one of home exchange for the Toronto Star, and another on my love of my home city in spite of all the negative cassandras who think that we are boring compared to Chicago - two pieces that remain unpublished. The Star because I am waiting. The Toronto piece, because I have been too lazy to edit, rewrite and tweak.

This will be the first of many pieces as I hope this sudden burst of energy does not leave me flattened.

I trust you will share and/or cheer for - my resolution.

There is fury everywhere over the skyrocketing cost of fuel. High gasoline prices are an enormous burden on everyone. For those who have no choice but to drive, for commerce that is under inflationary pressure, for airlines which must downsize while adding huge fuel surcharges - the crisis reaches into every corner of our economy.

What is missing is a reality check. What is missing is resolve by motorists and commercial carriers to look for alternatives. It is too late to switch from the car to transit, because most cities have virtually no viable transit system - especially in American cities and particularly in their sprawling suburbs. There are exceptions: Toronto, Montreal, Washington, San Francisco, New York and Chicago. Even in cities where the suystem is rudimentary there has been an increase in ridership. But remember, Americans invented the expression "loser cruiser" to describe local bus service.

What is missing is any initiative by government. They see themselves as powerless in an atmosphere dominated by big oil, by the simple economics of supply and demand, and by the part played by speculators. (Those so-called speculators, in my view, are simply people trying to protect their capital as the U.S. dollar continues to fade. Previously the "hedge" was gold - now is it oil.)

Why do we have a few pious fuel-saver drivers giving tips on how to use less fuel? Why do we not have government reducing (and strictly policiing) speed limits? Richard Nixon, of all people, lowered speed limits to 55 m.p.h. in the face of the first energy crisis.

Why have trucking companies not curtailed their long distance hauling by going inter-modal - putting their trailers on railway flat cars? Could it be that the folly of just-in-time deliveries, which keep thousands of trucks rolling, has fuelled tha problem?

Why have governments not entered into public/private agreements to build alternative travel systems?

Why have the major car manufactuers, who long ago promised a quick turnaround when a model change was demanded, still unable to cope?

Why have we totally ignored the compressed air engine invented more than ten years ago by a French engineer and now in service running buses in South Africa?

Of course the rising price of crude was inevitable. Developing countries are building the same kind of car-dependent infrastructure that we built years ago and has now laid us low. We are still obessessed with highway building. It was once said about President Reagan that he viewed highway construction as an "investment" and rail construction as a "subsidy."

We have no one to blame but ourselves, which is small comfort to any of us. The reality is, regardless of who's to blame, that we are saddled with the one of the most burdensome demand on our finances that we have ever had to endure.
Unfortunately for all of us, we are exactly like government. We attack them for the failure to think ahead. We are just as guilty.
In a "free" society, you cannot compel citizens to do anything they don't want to do. That's at the centre of current laissez faire political thought.
How about this: the government imposes gas rationing, and as in the past there will be two classes of driver: one for whom the car is an absolute necessity, and the other for whom the car is a convenience. Limiting fuel supplies to the latter group might reduce the ridiculous one-car-one-driver situation your see among commuters and oblige drivers to either pool or take whatever transit system is available.
To the lament "If I take transit it takes me an hour longer to get where I'm going" - I reply - get out of bed an hour earlier.
Or is it too late to wake up?

THIS IS MY TORONTO.
When one of my exchange partners arrives in Toronto we have a day or two of orientation before I fly off to their home in Sweden or Scotland or New Zealand. Out the front door of our apartment and east one block to the dazzling Santiago Calatrava atrium in BCE Place. From there a short walk to the little park with its gathering of noontime office workers and the whimsical sculptures and the elaborate bas relief adornments on the old Bank of Commerce Building. I love showing it off to visitors. They are startled because what they have heard is that Toronto is nice and clean and friendly, but dull.
So the news that tourists in Toronto are “less satisfied” that they had been in past years was all that the let’s-all-hate-Toronto newspaper pundits need to launch another attack on the city I live in and love. All they needed was a new statistic and their self-anointed criticism of our city begins anew.
To paraphrase some of the more Cassandra-like sky-is falling pundits, the streets are crowded with panhandlers, the new garbage containers are monsters, the food and hotels are expensive, and you simply can’t find the waterfront. (I am paraphrasing Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail.)
I am fed up with the endless comparisons to Chicago, where the Mies van der Rohe apartment buildings face but do not block the lake.
I love Chicago. Not for its waterfront, which I don’t think is as varied as ours, but for its truly American architecture, it’s used-to-be jazz clubs , and its Viagra corner where rich middle aged guys in Lamborghinis go to pick up beautiful young women.
But this is Toronto. Our cityscape is an archetypical cityscape. Drive into town from the west along the Gardiner. At night especially, you are greeted by the dazzling array of condos and office building on both sides of the expressway.
The critics obsess that it is a “wall of ugly condos.” (True enough some are ugly, but in Chicago not all apartment buildings are by Mies van der Rohe.
Toronto-phobia at its best derides our “ruining” lakefront. (In fact they are referring to the Harbourfront, the lakefront is not behind the “wall” of condos.)
Waterfront: there are several. There is the promenade that runs between the buildings and the water. Thousands of tourists can walk and admire the expanse of the bay, or take a tour of the island lagoons. There are concerts and events and a wonderful gallery and all the variety of restaurant and street foods any tourists loves.
The fact that tens of thousands of people choose to live in the Harbourfront area is a testimony to its attractiveness.
So you want a lake view - according to the critics, we come in a bad second to Chicago. Have these gloom-spreaders ever walked the eastern beaches from Ashbridges Bay to Balmy Beach? Have they walked from the western gap (for the Toronto bashers information, that’s where the hated Island airport is, you can find it if you leave your snug little condos.) along the Sunnyside walk which takes them, past the western beaches and to the exquisite suspension bridge across the Humber river, then to the walk past new condos and Ontario Place and to the shores of Humber Bay.
Chicago does not have these vistas. They do have if you the a Chicago river cruises. What you get on a lakeside walk is a view of water, unless you stop off at Lincoln Park and go to the zoo.

Back to my exchangers and their quick tour. Going east from my front door we stop at St. Lawrence Market, once named by Conde Nast as one of the twenty best markets in the world. We head south to the Esplanade and walk east along a tree-lined allee reminiscent of Paris. At the end of the Esplanade is the Distillery District, with galleries, a great coffee house, a brewery, an award-winning theatre and a number of fine restaurants. I always take them through one of the finest glass galleries anywhere – the Sandra Ainsley gallery, where the world’s finest art glass makers, including Dale Chihooly, are on display.
In no time at all my visitors learn how to use our transit system The whole city is there for them: Bloor and its fashion neighbourhoods on Yorkville and Cumberland, the Royal Ontario Museum with its new crystal cubes designed by Daniel Liebeskind, one of the best displays of pre-Columbian art at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics. (I have to remember that meso-Amnericans do not like to have their art referred to as from the time before Columbus “discovered” America.).
The same subway and trolley system takes them to Chinatown and Kensington Market, Greek Town, or the “Strada” St. Clair west or the south Asian village around Pape and Gerrard. Funny how the naysayers forget that we are still one of the most, if not the most, multi-cultural city in the world..
The complaint that everything is expensive simply means you don’t know where to go. True -in my neighbouthood there are restaurants where for dinner, if you can get a reservation without booking weeks in advance, you will have to offer up your firstborn to pay for dinner, there are even more restaurants where you can eat well for twenty to thirty dollars.
I really am tired of the snide-self-loathing “critics” who have used the “satisfaction” figures to prove what they have always believed, that Toronto, as a destination, sucks!
Well, how many of you self-styled mavens of tourism have walked the streets and spoken to tourists and have made sure they got the help and advice they need.
I often visit the sidewalk pub on the Esplanade that sells 400 different beers. There is usually a tourist sitting close by. I engage them. I ask them what they have seen. One German couple, said they were looking for the famous Victorian buildings. In fact, after the entire downtown burned down in the early 1900s, new construction gave us rows of wonderful buildings like the south side of Front or just one block north, the Colborne street buildings, lit up at night.
Alas, living in Toronto, at least for some people, carries with it the obligation to wish you were somewhere else.
Too bad.

Many of you were interested in Home Exchange. Here is an article I have written which may be published in the Star Travel section.
HOME EXCHANGE - the way to go..

The first obvious benefit of home exchange is you don’t pay for costly hotel accommodation, and you won’t have to eat every meal at a restaurant. But the real advantage is that you become part of a neighbourhood with its own shops, supermarkets, and – as in our Paris exchange – the best boulangerie.

Downside:: you are on your own (except when you are met at the airport by your exchangers,) – no convenient bus pick-up or tour guide pampering. You are on your own in a strange city armed with nothing but a guide book.. What can happen? How about this:

“Here we are – this is the zoo,” announced the exasperated Lisbon cab driver.

“You can’t let us out here,” I protested.

except when you are met by your exchangers, except when you are met by your exchangers, “The address you gave me is not even in Lisbon, it’s in the suburbs” he replied angrily.

“But my friend in Lisbon said he lived behind the zoo,” I said.

“So you’re here,” replied the now furious cabbie.

The upside: new friends: Alberto, mathematics teacher and aspiring artist, with the elusive address in Lisbon. Trees and Dick in The Hague. Henri and Michele in Paris, Debby and Lu in Hengelo, Ken and Caroline in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mary in Brussels, Gianni in Treviso, Leonard and Anne in Auckland, and Mike and Pam in Aberdeen.

Where there is “overlap” we pick each other up at the airport, then home for a jet-lagged nap and a meal, and. a brief orientation tour of the neighbourhood.

. How is it done? We belong to two major home exchange organizations. You have access to all the listings on the website. Ours are HomeLink and Intervac, two of the biggest, but you can find more by googling Home Exchange.

If you have an apartment in a prime location like Paris, London, Rome or maybe Barcelona, offers pour in..

We solicit, sending dozens of Emails to preferred locations. We travel only in “shoulder months – never in summer – so we miss many potential exchanges. Many listings are for people with families who want July or August. exchanges.

Another question: “Don’t you worry that strangers will come to your home and do damage?” I remind them that we are also in their home and living with their possessions. So far, not so much as a glass has been broken and usually the place is left as neat and clean as when we left.

What really matters is that we make friends. On our way to Venice we stopped for a couple of days in Amsterdam. We invited Trees and Dick in The Hague join us for dinner. Her Email response: “We will be at Schipol airport (arrival time 7:30 a.m.) to take you to out house for a couple of days. You didn’t see Vermeer’s :”The Girl With The Pearl Earring,” and you didn’t get to Delft.“ Two days later they drove us back to our Amsterdam hotel. They did it again two years later picking us up, staying in Amsterdam then driving us all the way across Holland to Hengelo.

Pretty little Hengelo just across the border from Munster in German was a treat and devoid of tourists. Here’s where another feature of home exchange saves money. Debby and Lu offered a car exchange – not unusual if the exchange is in a small town or the countryside. We were able to tour the back roads and discover an unpublicized part of Holland which just happened to include one of the world’s great art parks, with a collection of Van Gogh’s bigger than the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Debby and Lu of course used our car to tour but not in the city.

In New Zealand, our stay was in an elegant big house in Auckland. The only way top see New Zealand is to tour – we used their car, and they used ours.

Just one note about the ”elegant” house. Some people complain that they will only exchange for something that is comparable to your home. So if you have tennis courts and a swimming pool, your exchanger should have them too. Forget it. Better you should stay at George V in Paris. You’d hate the cozy little stuio we stay in.

We’ve stayed in everything from a tiny house in a small town in Belgium, to the Treviso “villa” with the marble floors and winding wrought iron staircase.
In Lisbon Alberto’s atelier was, in a word – cozy. If your inclination is toward five star luxury. Forget home exchange. We want the experience and the visit and the neighbourhood and the people.

Our former Paris exchangers Henri and Michele maintain a very chic studio apartment in the Port Maillot area with a permanent home in Chantilly. We have an open invitation to stay whenever we want. He is a designer, artist and photographer. The home in Chantilly is breathtaking combination of fun and high-tech design. He picked us up at Charles de Gaulle and after waiting patiently for more than an hour for lost luggage. drove us to Chantilly for an elegant al fresco lunch, then all the way back into Paris to their apartment.

In Charlotte Ken and Caroline “hosted” us. They offered to vacate or we could share the space. We had our own bedroom and bath in a big house with two charming hosts. Every morning, Caroline would have fresh oatmeal and coffee waiting.,

In Treviso., Gianni met us art the airport and took us to his elegant marble-floored villa in Treviso, about a 15 minute train ride from Venice.) He lives our of town in his country home. One sunny afternoon we spent picnicking on his property complete with chilled bottles of Proscco.

Mike and Pam from Aberdeen stayed with us last summer after a holiday in Muskoka. They repaid us with eight days of Scottish hospitality. They drove to see all the castles. We visited the Whisky Trail. One night when I decided I had to cook we went to the supermarket. He wouldn’t let me pay.

Try getting any of these experiences through a travel agent.

By the way, the Lisbon stand-off worked out? Finally we agreed that he should drive us to the suburban address. Enroute, a nagging thought. : I had envelope with Alberto’s key in it. I opened it. The correct address was there.

Yes, he did live behind the zoo.

When one day starts to feel like the day before; when you find yourself obsessing about what to have for dinner; when you are "filling time" watching TV and can't remember the name of an actor - you wonder what was so great about reaching 80 relatively unscathed.
I mention "filling time" because that is, I think, one of the most insidious elements of growing older. You think you are following the advice to "keep yourself occupied," when in fact you are simply filling in time. Before you know it the day is gone and you can now fret about what to have for breakfast tomorrow and what day is tomorrow?
If all this sounds familiar to you, it has become an everyday experience for me, the self-anointed guru of staying focussed and maintaining a productive routine.
After nearly six weeks of illness, pain, hospital confinement, and the limitations of movement imposed by hip surgery, I am coming out the other side.
I even remembered the name:Gene Hackman. But that is another story.
I am taking hold again. Now I am going to be in control of my day. Now I can take some of my own advice and stay involved.
I have a friend, a bit younger than I, who filled his day playing bridge at a club but has had it evaporate with the death of partners. I ask him what he does to stay focussed, to maintain a schedule - he says that he reads the Globe and Mail from cover to cover and by that time it is time for lunch. Not good enough.
In my most productive years I awoke to the need to absorb the news from as many sources as possible before going to work. I would write opinions, short opinion essays. It kept e busy. What's more, it made me relevant. I have said before, and it is in my book "Blindsided by Retirement" that feeling irrelevant is toxic. Having something to say but nowhere to say it is frustrating. I would quote Archimedes announcing: "Give me a place to stand and I can move the world."
I lost my place to stand, but I did not lose my obligation to be relevant, even if only to myself, some old colleagues, and my family.

Buzz Hargrove has made a pact with the devil. To save jobs and perhaps prolong the death throes of the Canadian auto industry, he conceded to the Ford Motor Company that his members would not ask for a wage increase, and to sustain the faltering auto giant, would reduce the value of certain benefits.
When GM announced the layoff of one full shift at the Oshawa truck plant, the entire Durham region groaned. Buzz suggested that somehow there should have been job sharing instead of layoffs.
The whole idea of shortening the work week to give more workers a job has foundered. In fact, part of Sarkozy's victory, a triumph for the Right, is his pledge to "put people back to work." What he means is that for the sake of productivity, France should not continue with its short work week and start sweating its workers. (My words not his.)
The other question is, would the GM workers, most of whom voted for Jim Flaherty and the Conservatives, be self-sacrificing enough to give some of their work time to keep their fellow workers employed? Clearly they would not.
But the idea has its merits. Of course, the Federal government, through Employment Insurance, would be obliged to "top up" the earning somewhat. Everyone would take a hit but the long term benefits would be enhanced prosperity.
I am not so naive as to believe that there is such benevolence that workers and government would give. Frank Stronach who wants to build an electric car, has told the auto industry it has to cut wages.
Unfortunately it is Big Business that holds that ruling hand. Their decision to out source, to look for low wage labour markets, is inimical to the maintenance of healthy living standard for all our workers.
They are, and will continue to be, a disposable commodity.

I have been trying fruitlessly for the last couple of days to make my Blog behave. Before I went for my hip replacement I sent off a "see-you-soon" which was automatically posted to all Google group members. I am back now, after a harrowing month where the hip operation went fine but the next day everything went downhill. Complications? You would not believe. After fighting through suspected lung clot, failure of pancreas and kidneys, not to mention gall bladder in turmoil - I endured several days running an almost fatally high fever in ICU. After three weeks in hospital they got things under control and sent me to rehab. Unfortunately, although I can move around with the aid of a walker, I am still terribly weak from my hospital ordeal.
I shall be myself sooner than later and we can resume Looking Ahead.
I am not a fatalist. I do not believe in "what goes around.." or that somehow by some divine force I get punished for doing well. I do not believe that my joyful piece on turning 80 has led in any way to my current problems. Coincidence. Chaos-believers, and Existentolists will agree.

For all of you who have waited anxiously to hear the outcome of my hip replacement (March 25) I apologize for not getting back to you.
The hip replacement was a complete success. However, following the operation, complications set in - totally unrelated to the hip surgery.
I will not go into all the gory details, suffice to say that I am lucky to be here.
One month after the hip surgery, and after three weeks in hospital, including several days in ICU,
I am finally able to communicate.
I will be creating new (and I hope interesting) items for your perusal, criticism, and confrontation.
I am glad to be alive.
Larry

new hip

I go into St. Mike's tomorrow to have a new hip made. I will be out of touch for a while. I hope you all miss me. By the way, there have been very few comments on my postings. Is it because you can't find them or just that you have nothing to say. Log in to larrysolway.blogspot.com
By the way, if anyone is getting unwanted Emails connected to the Google group let me know and I'll cut them off.
I think of all that could happen while I'm hors de combat. My wife could run off with someone else.
Barak Obama could finally nail Hillary by getting down to her level.
Someone will bring it to the attention of that hawk John McCain that American lives are being lost in increasing numbers, not to mention the Iraqis who, just for being there, are getting killed.
Apologies again for the misprints. If I knew how to delete or edit - I would.
The next item you see will be my proposed article on Home Exchange. It's the only way to travel.
WhileI am lying on my bed of paid I will give more thought to beiong productive and involved when retired. A lot of it is in my book Blind Sided By Retirement. It is supposed to be available at Chapters. If not, Amazon is listing it.
Meanwhile - ciao for now.

Home Coopkin'

HOME HOME COOKIN’ AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE – maybe it never was.

Among our most cherished myths, right up there with motherhood and apple pie is “there’s nothin’ like good ole home cookin’,” Take the corn bread I bought last week. It was “home made.” I got it at a farmer’s market. Between those two verities – home made, and rural, you can’t go wrong. There is thankfully – nothing like it. That corn bread was drier than the desert sands and as tasteless as week old porridge. I get better results at home with corn bread mix from the supermarket.

Which illustrates another myth: “Country-good.” Somehow, if it comes from some bucolic board-and-batten farmhouse with Victorian gingerbread along the roof line, it has to be good. Not only is the food good, but it comes from “honest law-abiding folks. They are always usually God-fearing but it would be nasty to castigate them for that “virtue.”

Short story virtuoso Flannery O’Connor wrote wickedly about her Georgia redneck neighbours. In “Good Country People,” the very smug Mrs. Hopewell declared to an itinerant Bible salesman who presented himself as “just plain country folk,” “Country people are the salt of the earth,” declared Mrs. Hopewell. The salesman turned out to be an unprincipled con man. In all her writing O’Connor’s country folks are more decent than city folk. They are honest and true. They are uncorrupted. But somehow they always get into trouble.

(Flannery is worth a read. She was a devout Roman Catholic living in Georgia and her targets were the “God-fearin” Southern Baptists whom she saw as corrupted by their own religiosity and misplaced pride in themselves and other country folks.)

In major cities (and a few minor ones because little towns like to cuddle up to the notion that small towns are nicer places) there is always a Farmer’s Market. Thousands of urban sophisticates, hoping perhaps that some of the old home verities about country life will rub off on our Gucci clad Rolex wearing bodies – flock to buy stuff that is good for us. “Good” because it is organic, has no pesticide or fungicides, no chemical interventions and was grown with nothing but good old “natural” horse dung. That some of us end up with E coli infections from the natural fertilizer doesn’t seem to matter. (But that is another story.)

The Farmer’s Market and Country Folk mythology goes to the heart of our reality. In popular culture we esteem good-ole-country folk. John Denver’s hymn to hay is “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” He got rich from it and I don’t think he spent a lot of time down on the farm just a-pickin' away. It is a sad irony that he died not in some tractor rollover while plowing the back forty but in his own high priced, high flying expensive airplane. I mean no disrespect to Denver.

The “Farmer’s” Market may actually have some real farmers in it, people who arrive in their mud-spattered pickup trucks some time before dawn. But, like Flea Markets – where the vendors are romantically conceived to be people who have emptied their attics (it is important that they be farmhouse attics) and found that there was a Stradivarius beneath the dust – which some wise-ass city guy picks up for eighteen dollars and rushes off to the Antiques Road show where he discovers that: the violin is actually worth eighteen dollars. At most Flea Markets the sellers are merchants or jobbers. At most Farmer’s Market many of the people are also merchants.

The myth is also concocted from one part of a longing for what we lovingly remember as “the good ole days,” and another part folklore we were supposed to have heard from our pioneer grandparents. Images there of people crossing the prairies in Conestoga wagons led by John Wayne. Another Hollywood concoction because those Hollywood moguls came from little “shtetls” villages in the Pale of Settlement and their contribution to North American culture, was to invent values they thought were real and down-to-earth.

Our gustatory myths are right up there with white picket fences, which were really a construction made by Hollywood for Andy Hardy movies, and Norman Rockwell magazine covers, which purport to be the genuine thing – real life at home with real folks.

It’s not all mythology though. People in small towns perpetuate the myth that: small towns are more friendly and open and welcoming than the big city." (Which is true unless you are a newcomer in which case you may has well have arrived from Mars for the suspicious looks you get, and the exclusion from the inner circle of small town life.)

All of us have eaten homemade food. We are obliged to be polite, even to gush a little about how good it is as we choke down under-seasoned, overcooked, bland-tasting vittles, declining second helpings by pretending we are stuffed. In less decorous times, a hearty belch announced total satisfaction.. The truth is: it is all part of a grand conspiracy, a homespun Saturday Evening Post cover with good old Mom in her gingham apron spinning out kitchen miracles. Her little boy is always red-headed with freckles.

Perhaps then it goes without further examination to say that ”country cookin” is honest and good and decent, not to mention God-fearin' and Presbyterian. (Insert your own choice from Evangelical Lutheran, Total Immersion Baptist, or some other good old-time religion.) Not to insult any one belief, but it has been my experience that very few atheists or Episcopalians sell homemade pies at the roadside. I know certainly of no Chassidim who do either.

We are all dupes in the country-is-better culture. Driving through the rural countryside on the way to or from the cottage you pass by a roadside farm stand and there is a crude hand-lettered sign (they always have to be crude and hand-lettered so there is no suggestion of city-slickery.) The sign proclaims: “Home made pie.” Must be good.

A close companion to “homemade” is “fresh from the farm kitchen.” Perhaps we are seduced by the charm of the green grass, bird-chirping, smell of fresh hay, sunnydale-acres look of the countryside as we drive the back roads. “Look, there is a quaint, hand-lettered sign announcing “farm fresh baked goods. Apple pies like mother used to make.” (Some mothers couldn’t cook but that’s another myth.).I’ve stopped by and let myself be greeted by someone who pretends to be :”just plain folks” while actually hiding a Phd in advanced agronomy from MIT.

How can I resist? I buy a pie. Still hot. By the time the pie gets home it has morphed into a sticky thing with a crust like wet cardboard and slices of apple that are reminiscent more of road kill than tree ripened. O.K. – I exaggerate.

I suppose we have to have myths to make life bearable. I suppose we have to believe that there must be more to life that the urban zoo with its noise and pollution and ceaseless striving and gridlocked traffic and crime and high rent and unbearable chic.

It is perhaps simply because all of us who are urban-corrupted, exhaust-fume-inhaling,
chic and cool and totally with it – sometimes want to pretend, to play make-believe, to be restored by the notion that all is not commerce and acquisitions. Like kids from the high rise jungle becoming folk singers protesting about how commercial everything has become.

The successful ones have a Maseratti parked out back.