LEFT BEHIND

This week America, and perhaps the rest of the world, remembered Katrina and the death, destruction, and utter havoc in New Orleans and the Gulf coast. There was a certain tragic wistfulness about the commemoration. From the displaced African-Americans, many of whom will never return, to the pundits who commented sadly on the enormous relief provided to the victims of the tsunami that deviated Thailand,. Indonesia and other lands bordering the Indian Ocean. There was more than enough blame to go around when the point was made: the response to Katrina was dreadfully deficient and ironically far below the aid given to other countries stricken with a natural disaster,

The most delicious irony is that Louisiana, which has an Indian-American Republican governor, will probably continue to vote for the same people who ignored them five years ago. Is there bitterness? Wouldn’t you be bitter if you realized that the Katrina flooding offered a kind of bizarre “final solution” to the presence of so many black families and to the ongoing criminality that unhappily is affected by that fact? Yes, New Orleans is one of the most dangerous and corrupt cities in America. Yes, Katrina may have “cleansed” it. Was it ethnic cleansing?

Did the government fail to come to their rescue because they would prefer a “whiter” New Orleans? What a horrible thing to imagine. Even more frightening perhaps is that Katrina was the harbinger of disasters to come, disasters associated with climate change. (I dislike using the definition “global warming” because immediately the deniers will remind us how terribly cold and snowy it was in parts of America last winter.)

There is the Darwinian approach: survival of the fittest. Of course Darwin never said those words. It was Herbert Spencer. The point is that there is no population control that can equal natural disasters. Not only because it reduces the population, but it unerringly selects the poorest and most vulnerable, the forgotten and the neglected. But that is speculation. Thomas Malthus, a British clergyman said that it was famine and plague and wars that ultimately controlled population. And today there are population theorists who say we should not intervene when there is need. That “theory” is right up there with: “Don’t worry about the economy, it will regulate itself with natural market forces.”

In fact, that hideous Objectivist Ayn Rand, messiah to Libertarians, would always let “nature take its course.” Which is another way of saying only the strong should survive.

What is not speculation is that today three hurricanes are gathering in the Atlantic. There is Pakistan inundated. There are wildfires devouring thousands of hectares of woodlands and threatening communities. There are polar bears looking for ice to walk across.

Worst of all there are the naysayers. Between them and the “will of god” crackpots, we seem to be paralyzed when it comes to taking action.

A footnote: a new survey shows that voters, at least American voters, support post-disaster aid but have no time for the tax burden of preparedness. That, even though the cost of preparedness is a fraction of the cost of help after the fact.

A TALE OF TWO EGOS

There is something almost Nietschean about two superb athletes, kings in their sports, and their downfall. Both of them existed at an almost Olympian level. Olympus was the home of The Gods. They were above ordinary limits. They were beyond human laws. (In fact, the Greeks Olympians were seen to be human, with all the human failings up to and including adultery.) But somehow, we exempt them from ordinary scrutiny. We may emit sanctimonious pronouncements like “no one is above the law,” but it isn’t so. Some really are. Worse, there are those who believe they deserve to be.

Alright the two are different but very much the same. Both were the best in their field. Both fell from grace. Both seem unable to adjust to the new reality.

A few days ago we learned that Tiger Woods got his divorce from his Swedish beauty. In subsequent days his wife told all to People magazine and Tiger himself muttered a few righteous words at the opening of a tournament. Neither one impressed me. I’m actually starting to feel sorry for them. They have no place to hide.

This week past sports writers were musing about Roger Clemens and his chances of going to jail for perjury. Jail time is substantially worse than divorce, but not emotionally. (They can’t indict Roger for the sin of having an affair with a country music singer.) Both perjury and divorce are life changing. Both, and this is the important part, reflect that their central figures, are less than invulnerable, and perhaps even more accountable than just plain folks.

Accountable. and vulnerable. It is really difficult, believe me, to barricade the doors of your life when your popularity is attracting babes like honey attracts...never mind.

Sadly, there not many people who are rooting for Clemens to get off. Even in Texas, where he was literally deified, they have turned their backs on him. He is the absolute symbol of ego-bound prominence, and an inflated sense of his own importance.
He may be one of the truly great pitchers in the history of baseball.

Notwithstanding that he seems to have used banned substances to enhance his performance, he was a super-star. He deserved applause.

But did he also deserve to become emotionally unhinged (I don’t take that lightly) by his own fame? Six Cy Young Awards will say: “You are the greatest.” But it does not allow for the excess of hubris. Roger believed that what he said had to be true because he said it. Such is the self delusion of the powerful. He was a mean guy at the mound who did not think twice about throwing a fastball at a batter’s head. His self-presumptive advantages included an infamous golf story. Lorne Rubenstein of the Globe and Mail was criticized for “unfairly:” attacking Clemens. He alleged that Roger and two of his friends showed up at one of our better golf courses and literally demand with the “do you know who I am?” proclamation, to be allowed to play free. He was denied. He left in a huff.

You can try to befuddle golf course management or hard-working sports writers, but that doesn’t mean you can do it to the United States Congress. He thought he could, being who he was. After all, six Cy Youngs!

The other guy is the subject of lengthy perorations about his collapse as a golfer. Not just a descent from the top but a slide to the bottom. Tiger is now 35, still at an age when he should continue to win.

Let me try this: after 15 years of supremacy and international adulation, anyone starts to believe his own press notices.” He can mutter “This can’t be happening. Don’t they know who I am?”

My take is that unless Tiger is ready really to examine his behaviour, nothing will change. But the examination has to be sincere. He is someone who has been caught with his hand in a very luscious cookie jar. No, it must be a search for himself. One clue that he is not ready is his apparent indifference to what coaches try to tell him.

Like Roger, you can’t tell Tiger anything. They can both do their “mea culpas” but I don’t think either one is sincere. Both have fallen and after the fall is supposed top be redemption.

Unless they both still think privately, that they can beat the rap.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BOGEYMEN

Hot-button words for the “now” generation are: bacteria, chemicals, all-natural, no additives – and another dozen or so fear-words which, to me, are the evil concoctions of consumerism. A whole generation of TV addicts has become seriously neurotic.

This is not going to be yet another fogey-based screed against “kids nowadays.” What it will be I hope, is an honest look at the things we believe and more, the things we are made to believe.

Sitting in front of the TV (there’s far too much of that) I finally watched one too many commercials about the evils of bacteria. It’s a loaded word. It signals danger. It is razor-wire and electric shock rolled into one menacing form.

I had a conversation with a well-known pediatrician who is a leader in research at one of this country’s leading medical centres. I posited that many of the “allergies” and indeed, perhaps even asthma, which has reached near-epidemic proportions, can be at least partly blamed on the current addiction to slogans like “germ-free.” Nothing could sound more sensible. In fact, nothing could be more dangerously misleading.

He confirmed what most pediatricians and a large segment of the informed public believe that our need to sterilize everything in sight has led to the creation of an entire generation of kids who will not grow up with the germ-resistant antibodies we all need to survive. The people who make and market products like Lysol or Listerine don’t get it. I suspect that they really do, but marketing always trumps reality.

The doctor agreed with the currently accepted belief that exposure to bacteria is important in the development of a healthy immune system. Those commercials that characterize telephones as being rampant with microscopic organisms have frightened an entire generation of child-careful mothers. They are hypnotized by fear and surrounded by their sense of guilt that always comes with trying to be super-mom.

I reference Lysol only because their commercials are so prevalent. Any other disinfectant would do. The same goes for mouth wash which gets rid of “some” bacteria that are responsible “”often” for tooth decay. So an entire generation of frightened clean-freaks gargle away bacteria which are fundamental to good digestion and have little effect on halitosis which originates principally in the digestive system. not in the mouth as the gargle commercials would have you believe.

There is a much larger issue. It is the ability of an informed public to develop the critical skills needed to make sensible decisions. Lately there have been many articles about the apparent lack of critical skills in voters, which lead them into the trap of falling for scandal stories and mistaking rumour for truth. The shameless exploitation of Obama’s remarks about religious-freedom have morphed into “he’s a closet Muslim.” (No one is paying attention to the reality: the “mosque” is a Muslim community centre that happens to have a prayer room. The same neighbourhood houses enough topless bars to denigrate the sanctity of ground-zero.)

My favourite is still the obsession we have with bottled water. Not so long ago it was an industry that did not even exist. But because we are in terror of what comes out of the tap, we raise our children on “clean” bottled water and hardly notice that the incidence of tooth decay has risen dramatically because bottled water is not fluoridated.

Part of Looking Ahead is to examine reality in the light, not of rumour and scare-mongering, but with critical, informed, and researched opinion. But you might say that millions of people know nothing about the science of Astronomy, but are hooked on the pseudo-science of Astrology. It is these people who are helping to dumb down our society.

Like – R U ready 2 change?

BUCCANEER C APITALISM

The arguments over the sale of Potash Corporation, the world’s largest source of fertilizer, seem to be all about how much good will come with an influx of new capital to this country. Beyond the cold-blooded reality of what we still (in spite of recent cataclysmic events) call Free Market Economy, there are other more important issues. Those issues are only partly nationalistic, only partly about not selling out another Canadian resource; only partly about more and more foreign ownership; only partly about how we have been taken for a ride by promises from foreign companies – like U.S. Steel promising to keep Stelco up and running. Oh yeah! I know I know - Potash is already run by an American from an office in Chicago. That has happened and you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The issues are about the entire myth of how T & A is always good. It is what the shameless acquirers refer to as “win-win.” They are missing the fatal flaw. That flaw was nearly, and may still be, fatal to the world of so-called capital growth.

First of all, I question whether or not it is capital growth. At the heart of my anxiety is the $38.6 billion (U.S.) that the Australian mining giant is ready to pay. I haven’t seen a Potash Corporation balance sheet, but does it show an enormous overhang of punishing debt? If the deal goes through – the new company will have just that. One of the so-called “principles” of Acquisition and Takeover is that very often it is a “reverse” takeover. A smaller company, using borrowed funds, will take over a larger company, and use that company’s resources to pay down the debt. In other words, the takeover is paying for itself. It really does work, until the debt payment comes due. If you look closely at major companies that have gone bankrupt, or have asked for protection from creditors, it is because they have encumbered their company with too much debt. Two circumstances make that debt unserviceable:” the inability of the acquired company to generate enough profit to pay down the debt, and (this is the serious one) the debt markets suddenly turn sour and creditors start calling in their loans, or the loans, bonds, debentures – whatever, come due and there’s no money to pay.

However you cut it, the situation is good for the Australian company. What do they have to lose? The worst scenario (all too often the real one) is that they can’t service their enormous debt and the market has gone so cold that they can’t float a common stock issue to raise capital, much less issue new (and probably junk ) bonds to pay the debt. It doesn’t get better, like the poor sucker who keeps making the minimum payment on a credit card debt, the interest piles up.

This my friends, is called “capital growth.” It is not. It is, if you remember the Tom Wolfe book and then movie “Barbarian at the Gate” a highly leverage takeover leading to capital destruction not capital growth. You don’t add value to the economy by increasing its obligations.

Potash is a good product. The world needs it. Just ask yourself this: “If I owned something and someone came along and offered me a preposterously high price for it, would I sell, or would I ask myself: what does this guy know that I don’t?”

I offer a more sinister possibility. (This one is for the “conspiracy theory” junkies who enjoy looking for the hidden truth.) If you control the world’s largest supply of potash. what is to stop you from using this near monopoly to reduce supply and maneuver the marketplace into paying through the nose? My favourite is the huge nickel deposit at Voisey Bay in Labrador. Inco, the once-proud Canadian company, paid several billion for it. I spoke to the Federal Minister responsible and suggested that Inco was buying the mine to keep it out of production. He scoffed. Now, almost fifteen years later, how much nickel is being mined in Labrador?

Think about it.

GETTING MIRED IN MEMORIES

By definition e.g “Looking Ahead,” I should not be doing this. A phone call from my cousin prompted me. He responded to my blog wishing that I could live long enough to see how “it all comes out.” He finds a lot of comfort in reminiscing. I do too, but I told him too much reminiscing becomes a trap. You become mired in the past. The future takes a back seat to all your old war stories, your “past-improved” memories. Worst of all, it places you in the sometimes boring company of other people whose only pleasure is to look back.

Having said I wouldn’t – I am going to. My cousin and I talked about my father. I told him I had, years ago, written a piece about what my father missed by taking his own life at 41. (Reasons for that choice have never been clear to me.)

My memories of my father are mostly positive. He was my guide to growing up, or at least to learning the things you need to have a chance to grow up. He spent hours with me talking. He’d do quizzes for me to sharpen my brain. By the age of eight I knew the capitals of every country in the world; I understood geography so I could print, in my mind, a map of just about anyplace. My father gave me that.

I have already written in my blog about Mars, that it was my father who stimulated an interest in space, hence my fascination with the latest news about settlement on the Red Planet. He made me learn serious music, although I disappointed my family by not practicing. He made me read poetry, and with the sponge-like mind of an eight or nine year old, I discovered an inherent skill at memorization. (A talent I have not maintained.)

But just as I will not be around for human settlement on Mars, my father missed everything. He was an advocate of air travel, when there were a few routes traveled by DC3s, then the queen of the sky. He took me on my first airplane ride, sitting on his lap in a Tiger Moth. (He didn’t fly, he was a passenger. My cousin had the same experience – his first flight was my father’s doing.)

But he missed so much. He never saw his grandchildren. His attraction to science was enormous. He took me to the World’s Fair in New York in 1940 where I saw my first TV. He never lived to see it regular television. He never lived to see computers or cell phones or Japanese cars. He didn’t live to enjoy my success. He would have loved my sailboat.

Perhaps my tenderest memory is of him coming home from an exhausting day at his law office (exhausted because there was no business) going into the living room and taking out his violin. It was almost always the same piece: the theme music from the film “Intermezzo” with Leslie Howard and a newcomer – Ingrid Bergman. In the film the music is played by Tassy Spivakovsky. My father was no Spivakovsky. He always made it beautiful through the single line theme. Then he came to the hard stuff: double-stopping. He charged at it. He always crashed. Always.

It’s only now; with me finally back at the keyboard that I realize what was missing: he did a lot of wishing, but he lacked the discipline to work it out, slowly, one note at a time, over and over until he got it right.

He went to his grave never having played that song properly.

TO MARS WITH LOVE

The reality of “Looking Ahead” is that my time to “look" is limited. For me, and for millions like me, the reality is that we won’t be around to “see how it all comes out.” Among friends we hear the sad observation: “We’re not going to be around to see it happen.” So I muse about what climate change will do in the years ahead. I ponder the future of high speed trains in Canada. I wonder about what my great grandchildren will grow up to be. We of that age wonder about all these things. I will miss having to miss out. But it does not stop me from wondering, from speculating, from wanting it to happen, from being there when it happens.


I am not a science fiction fan, for reasons I might discuss in a future bog. The reality, not the fiction, of scientific explo0ration has always attracted me. From my father I got an early sense of space, of the planets, of virtually infinite distances. It was tempered with a bit of H.G. Wells, a great futurist who pondered space and life on Mars. Also by a short story I read in high school “The Bogey of Space.”

I noted the other day that the project Mars for 2016 (will I be here?) will be joined by some Canadian scientists. In a rush I remembered a book by Robert Zubrin called “The Case for Mars, and why we must settle the Red Planet.” Zubrin is a reputable scientist who believes that settlement on Mars is do-able and imperative. (See Stephen Hocking remark.) He believes that NASA is on the wrong track. They are held captive by their own beliefs about rocket propulsion. Zubrin believes that adding even more power to get a human-carrying rocket to Mars is folly. NASA struggles with their orthodox concept of putting enough fuel aboard to get there. It is, according to Zubrin, self-defeating. The more weight you add the more difficult the trip becomes. He questions the notion that a station can be created on the Moon to expedite travel to Mars. He is a proponent of the “slingshot” theory – using the gravitational pull of other celestial bodies to speed the rocket along. He proposes that aiming a manned rocket, not at Mars, but at an orbit around the Sun, will propel the vehicle more quickly and economically to the Red Planet.

He visualizes the establishment of a permanent settlement on Mars, using the minerals that already exist there to create oxygen, water, an entire eco-system, and by the way, new rocket fuel joust in case the space explorers want to leave. It can all be done.

I won’t be here to see it happen, but my grandchildren will. They may be among the space travelers who settle Mars. Stephen Hocking said recently that people on Earth had better find another place to live. He is not optimistic about the future of the planet.

I read the Zubrin book in 1996. I was captivated. I’ve searched my bookshelves to no avail. It has disappeared. All I have are the memories, and above it all, my own fantasies about “The Shape of Things to Come,” as written by H.G. Wells.

P.S. It was my father who put me on to H.G. Wells when I was still about eight years old. I am going to resurrect a piece I wrote once about what he has missed by dying far too young. Maybe it’s where my own apprehension, not about dying, but about “missing out” has come from.

PLAY IT SAFE - STAY SMUG

There are many answers to the question: “What is a Canadian?” Aside from the obvious, much-repeated “We are not Americans,” no one has properly defined us, even to ourselves, never mind to the rest of the world.

I look for a way to define our stubborn determination to be something we can’t define. I am always lifted up by the faint praise that Canadians are “polite.” That is really a minor virtue and is used only because it could not be said that we are universally “rude.” We are, in definitive terms, an equivocation.

Now that the issue of Canadian:”identity” has once again become fogged, I have one last defining word: “smug.” I think that pretty well nails it. When the financial crisis plunged much of the world into economic despair, Canadians smugly observed that our banks were well run and our government kept them on their best behaviour. When America compromised on a health care plan we (some of us) greeted that accomplishment with the smug reminder that the Canadian system really does work, and that even the most Conservative government would not tarnish it. (See Mulroney’s famous “sacred trust” comment.) We are smug about our relative sense of safety and gun control. And because we are so smug about our political “achievement” we elected a Conservative government that is pragmatic enough to realize that the country is still a liberal democracy.

The height of political smugness is perhaps best exemplified by our scorn for the people who could send the incompetent (to put it mildly) George W. to the White House – not once, but TWICE!! Calling him an imbecile is an insult to imbeciles.

But finally, when political push comes to election shove, we are no different that our southern neighbours. Give us a mindless, populist candidate, and we rush to his side. We need to be comforted that someone cares about what is being done with our money. It’s an ancient ploy. Convince someone that he is being robbed and he will be your hero. That fact that you are not being robbed doesn’t matter. It only matters that you believe it.

The populist candidate is at best a demagogue, at worst a liar. But in the annals of political history no one has ever refuted the “big lie” theory of success.

It is with great dismay that my favourite city (no, it is not Paris) is about to take to its bosom a new mayor who is dining out on allegations of waste and close-door scheming.

The last time we had one of those guys sitting in our mayor’s chair he boasted that he would not raise taxes. Tax-whiners flocked to his tent. (The moratorium led to decaying infrastructure that soon would come back to haunt us.) He was instrumental in losing the Olympic bid with his preposterous (all in fun?) comment about not visiting Africa because he would end up in a pot of boiling water. Result: African countries voted unanimously against our city. But even today he is still revered for his garbage collection policies and his promise not to plow snow over your driveway entrance.

We have another one and we’re making him look like a winner. He is loud-mouthed. He is no stranger to liquid refreshment and its accompanying insults. An oaf is going to City Hall.

Former mayor Phil Givens once said to me: “People don’t get what they deserve; they get what’s coming to them.” We’ve come full circle. Phil lost because he thought it was important to have the Henry Moore sculpture “The Archer” at City Hall. His opponents said he was an elitist. (No one cared that Mayor Phil bought the sculpture with private subscription.)

The same sheep-like voters who have put nitwits in the mayor’s chair are ready to do it all over again.

We have nothing, absolutely nothing – to be smug about. The barbarians are not just at the gates – they have entered the city.

MORE TOIL, MORE TROUBLE.

Maple Leaf Foods has had more than its share of trouble. The takeover of that old Canadian company came following an acrimonious parting of the two McCain brothers; founders of the worlds largest froze French fry company. That’s an old story, not worth re-visiting, except to point out that family squabbles are never good for shareholders.

Maple Leaf Foods, taken over by Michael McCain has had to absorb the losses from plant closings and the Wisteria infestation. That was bad news for shareholders.

Which is where my puzzlement begins. Chairmen of companies are always eager, at annual meetings, to point out the increased profits of their company, and its reflection in higher dividends for shareholders. So running a company becomes nothing more than two things: pleasing the shareholders, and doling out large executive bonuses, bonusses often based, not on the actual progress of the company but on the value of the stock. (Stock market values are tricky. They do not necessarily follow the success of the business, but the cost-cutting and creative accounting that makes it look like you’ve had a good year.)

So, as if Michael McCain has not already has enough trouble with having to recall millions of dollars worth of product that may or may not be infected, but now he is confronted by Guy Boland, whose West Face Capital hedge fund has bought 10 percent of his company and is demanding that he stop spending and start giving. Ontario Teachers Pension Fund has been another big player and they need the dividends to keep their own guys happy. So the company is in turmoil and Michael McCain is on the spot. He may be forced to stop growing the company and making so far unfulfilled promises of better dividends. He could even lose his company!

It is part of the folly of public companies: they are pinned to the mat by shareholders who want dividends. It becomes very difficult to plan ahead properly, because those shareholders are looking for quarter-by-quarter profits. It is often impossible to take the long view: to determine, not what will happen in the next quarter, but what will happen in the next two or three or five years.

Just so you know, I depend for my market investments to pay the rent and put groceries on the table. I, like so many seniors, can’t look too far ahead. As the old joke goes: “We don’t even buy green bananas.” So if companies who want to plan long-term are looking for permission, dividend-dependent seniors are not where to look.

Because I am still “Looking Ahead” I like to take a longer view. I may not have many tomorrows, but most people will have. Nothing will so stifle the growth of real wealth than the reduction of capital by giving it to impatient investors. There are many successful companies that have not gone public simply because they don’t want to have to answer to dividend-lusting investors. On the other hand, if you have created a successful company, it is very tempting to go public. You get all your money back, take a huge profit, and still own controlling shares.

You have to go back and re-read what is gospel to conservative capitalists: Adam Smith’s ”The Wealth of Nations.” He has been made the saint of orthodox free enterprise. But it was also that same feisty Scotsman who warned against letting joint-stock companies getting too big and powerful. The Wall Street and Bay Street gang don’t remember, or never know that.

Real wealth does not come from playing financial musical chairs and betting for or against the future by buying derivatives. They may make money, but no real wealth is ever created.

TOIL AND TROUBLE

Everything came together for me today. I returned from three days of theatrical pleasure at the Shaw Festival and I watched Errol Flynn play Robin Hood in the 1938 film. His performance, romancing Olivia de Havilland, confronting Basil Rathbone, and thwarting Prince John (Claude Rains,)marked the beginning of a lifelong (well almost) yearning: to be Errol Flynn!

My parents, especially my mother, loved having me on stage where I could “perform.” I was a surrogate for their narcissism. As an eight year old, and for several years beyond, I studied stage. My teacher was the legendary Basya Hunter, a passionate woman of The Left who had studied with Maria Ouspenskaya of The Moscow Art Theatre.


By 1955 I had made a career in radio. I got a phone call from Basya. She was directing a production of “The Crucible” at Holy Blossom Temple and her star had come down with kidney problems less than ten days before the play was to open. She dragooned me. The role of John Proctor was, and still is, one of the great stage roles. I performed it. Sometimes at the top of my lungs. Lorne Greene took me aside, said he liked my performance, but I would have to learn to control myself.

Next a call from Herbert Whittaker, late drama critic for the Globe and Mail. He had seen my John Proctor. He was casting “Streetcar Named Desire” with an all star cast, to be shown at the summer theatre in Vineland. I was to be Stanley Kowalski. It was not until several years later I discovered what was missing. At the time I knew I was faking it, covering a lack of understanding and good direction, with all the Brando-esque bombast I could muster.

I did more summer theatre that year. For the next two years I did get some TV and stage. I even had a continuing role in the soap opera “Search for Tomorrow.” But the truth is, I lacked the talent, the narcissism and the dedication to be the actor my mentor thought I could have been.

Back to radio success. Radio morphed into a lot of television – from news to interviews, to documentaries. I was all over the screen during the 70s.

In 1978 I made a return to the stage and went from success to bankruptcy in 1983. But what I wanted most was to direct. I was finally understanding all I had been taught about subplot, and “playing the action” and avoiding negative playing. Because I was also producing, I had a tailor-made chance to direct one of my favourite plays” “The Gin Game.” I cast Dora-winner Doris Petrie and one of my favourites- Murray Westgate. My biggest challenge was to avoid the self-pitying wallowing that the male lead went through. I said to Murray: “You are not a bad guy. You are a good guy who seems to have no choice but to do things that are negative. But you can’t play it. If you want the audience to care about you, and not to detest you, you cannot allow yourself the indulgence of feeling sorry for yourself.” He was superb. She was, as she always was, enchanting.

I was a little miffed when I read a very positive review in one of the Toronto papers which said something like: “The production of Gin Game was wonderful, even though it was directed by Larry Solway.!” I spoke to the critic after and he told me he loved it. “Why,” I asked “did you damn me with that kind of faint praise?

There are some things I have always wanted to be. In 1938 it was Errol Flynn. In 1982 it was to be a much better director than I was an actor. The other thing is of course, my wish that I could have been a decent musician. (Which is why I still take piano lessons long after there is any hope for anything resembling facility, never mind virtuosity.)

Full circle. The Shaw Festival is a truly grand theatrical experience. “Theatrical” is sometimes the best word for it. Everything is magically staged and costumed. Sometimes the productions are brilliantly moving. Sometimes they are not.

I have never wanted to be a critic. If I had been directing ‘An Ideal Husband,” the Oscar Wilde tragi-farce (I can’t think of a better word) I would have ruled with a very firm hand. As I watched the actors spin and cavort their way through Wilde’s incredible wit (everyone seems to be either Earnest or Algernon) I wondered where the reality had disappeared to.

Sometimes the productions depend on grandiosity before realism; on theatricality before honesty. Sometimes theatre creates a situation where brilliantly talented actors do a “turn” and cater to the audience’s need to see all the flash and foppery they paid for.

In: “An Ideal Husband” the protagonist is the very rich and successful politician Sir Robert Chiltern. He was being blackmailed into reversing his political stand on some Argentinean venture. The blackmailer knew about his hidden past: in his earlier days he compromised principle to become wealthy. By the time we meet him he has already assumed a lofty moral stance and is incorruptible. Therein lies the tale.

Therein lies the trap! From my earliest training I was told that you can’t succeed playing negativity. The audience must be on your side. They must want you to succeed; must want you to survive and prosper. In the Shaw production I simply didn’t care about Sir Robert. He allowed himself self-pity and he literally wallowed in his sorry plight. In real life perhaps it works. But in theatre it is deadly. The actor doing it is required to substitute loud vocal rage for a truly inner sense, a subtext that the audience will grasp without being yelled at. It is the skill of the director to see it and of the actor to find it. Otherwise, you have an actor who is, as I say “acting the lines,” and missing the “action.” Shaw patrons are very forgiving. They applaud loudly. But this performance did not get the standing “O” it should have. Maybe they got it all wrong. Trust the text. If it is sad it will be sad, you don’t have to “act” sad. Like telling a funny joke: you don’t have to be funny. The joke is funny. Don’t get in the way of the words.

It was easier to be ten years old and in love with Errol Flynn...

LISTEN UP STEPHEN AND BARACK.

If you are a regular reader you will recognize that I am about to ride on of my favourite hobby-horses. Your indifference could be understood. But what the hell….

I read with pleasure that Bombardier has landed a huge contract to supply Zefiro high speed rail to Italy’s Trenitalia... They were in a competition with the French company Alstom SA whose TGV trains dominate France and Germany. (Incidentally, when you ride the Paris Metro you may sit on a car which is a joint production of Bombardier and Alstom SA.)

The story I read said that Sarkozy wrote to the Italian premier urging him to buy the French bid. The article also said that Stephen Harper did not write any letters. None that we know of I suppose.

It may be that the only way you can get high speed rail built is with government participation. I know I know – the old Socialist thing. But one would hardly call Germany Socialist with a centre right government that steered clear of a lot of the fiscal stimulus programs, and opted for voluntary job-sharing.

The point here is that extreme risk-taking should not be the purview of Big Business. I understand that. They go from quarter to quarter hoping to have a constantly improving bottom line. They are not big on long-term, neither are their shareholders. High speed rail does not offer instant gratification, except perhaps to the train makers, but they too are government subsidized.

I seem to be taking the long way round. I am trying to make the point that this country, and even more the United States, must become involved in the kind of public-private enterprise that will serve the whole country, not just a gang of board-room biggies.

Canada has fared better than the U.S. We were not in so deeply. But both countries are derelict in the obligation to make things work; to make things work when private enterprise can’t or won’t. The U.S. is struggling with seemingly intractable employment while they wait for private business to pick up the slack, Ain’ t gonna happen. Obama has failed almost utterly in the need to create jobs. His failure reflects the poll-watching doomsayers who say that any more of that “socialism” will doom the Democrats in November. And enough voters seem to agree.

It may be too late for a country that views deficits in the same category as child-abuse or wife-beating. America could have stepped up with grand plans to create a totally new network of rail service – new rights-of-way, new stations, big city destinations. It is not as though America has never done it before. The network of Interstate Highways was built in the 50s during the Eisenhower administration. It was done by the people for the people. Today we can quibble that it set back the future of rail travel and ruined some urban setting by slashing a four lane super high through the centre of town. But it’s over and done with.

I could say that I beseech, I implore Obama to do what I know he can’t and won’t. He has neither the political will not the backing of his own government. Add in the machinations of the semi-nuts in the Tea Party movement, and you have a formula for economic inertia.

David Axel rod – read this. Make your guy the best thing to happen since the New Deal.

P.S. Sadly, the revisionists are out in force these days, saying the Roosevelt’s New Deal deepened the Great Depression.

WHO'S THE WINNER?

I should disqualify myself as irrelevant. The high tech craze seems to be growing, for reasons I simply can’t comprehend. Understand? Yes. But truly and actually absorb into my faltering intellect – no.

It was with a combination of elderly bemusement and financial disorientation that I saw this morning’s G&M piece about how high tech gadgets are selling while big ticket items like refrigerators and clothing are sagging. One person who commented: a 25 year old schoolteacher said that he has to keep up with all the latest in smart phones and other such clutterata, but his toaster doesn’t need updating. There are two possible conclusions to be drawn: that there is an entire generation brain-buzzed over gadgets, or there is an imperative not to be “left behind” – i.e. to be using last month’s cell phone when this month’s has it beaten.

I really don’t understand the current dust-up between Apple, which has already sold a staggering number of IPhones (in the millions) and Blackberry which has been the gold standard of portable telephone-foolery. Of course, I always talk about “looking ahead” but I don’t have either of these two devices.

But in another world, they are “must haves.” A good friend of mine was enthralled with the IPad. She simply had to have one. I looked at it and marveled. Yes, it is miles ahead of my old steam-driven EBook reader, and generations beyond my now ancient little computer. (I forget what they’re called, but the size is somewhere between a laptop and a digital camera.)

I do have a digital camera however. I do know how to use it. I do know how to transfer the photographs to my computer. I have even learned how to download without the agonizing distress of many minute of poking, prodding, and hunt-and-pecking my computer.

I am not appalled or outraged or disconcerted. I confess – I am, still puzzled. I know that my kids in Austin, Texas and their kids, all have or soon will have, the very latest. Our visitor Tom, from Avignon, has already proved that his cellphone takes wonderful pictures. He tramped solo through Killarney and Manitoulin, taking pictures of everything, including a huge porcupine which he though was a small bear.

I am not really saying that these things are not worth all the trouble. That’s because I am not an addict. I guess what I am trying to say is that if the economy is ever to move forward it will have to see a lot of purse-loosening. It will have to be far beyond the allure of things that click and whistle and sing and dance.

The other night Andre Laplante left the stage without taking a bow after a thundering performance of Liszt. Somewhere in the audience a cell phone went off.
Wait – I’m not longing for the good old days. I am just wondering if the good-new-days are really all that good.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME - the truth about traffic.

There is a lot of huffing and puffing going on over the Province subsidizing a “light rail system to nowhere.” The controversy swirls (controversies always “swirl” it’s journalistic cliché like tornadoes always “devastate) around the creation of a light rail system in Kitchener-Waterloo. Critics claims there is no “downtown,” the equivalent to saying “there is no there there.” The issue is not really whether or not the line is a rail link to nowhere. It is a much larger and more important issue: what does rapid transit do in the 21str century to remake urban life?

The concept of “build it and they will come” was enshrined in the movie “Field of Dreams.” It was pure Hollywood. But it was more. It was a realization, still unclear to most people that progress begins around an idea. To put it more simply: you don’t build houses then hope the city will build a road to get you there. Unless you really believe in the idea in Field of Dreams. I do. From my own rusty memory, a cautionary tale: when E.P. Taylor wanted to build Canada’s first new city, conveniently on his acreage on the middle of nowhere, he would build it only on the condition that an expressway connecting it to downtown was also built. If only we had built a subway line instead of the now famous Don Valley Parking Lot.

In “The Asphalt Nation,” a brilliant exploration of the rush to pave America and create car-imperative development and shopping malls, the author Jane Holz Kay echoes the “build it and they will come” idea. She says that developers always build at the end of the newest super highway. Unfortunately, in an urban environment far too dominated by developers who own land and have to use it, we endure relentless urban sprawl. (Toronto already has the longest commute times in North America.)

We do seem to have learned, perhaps by accident, that when you build a good transit system, people and businesses will want to be close by. Did the Spadina subway line happen because there were all those apartment buildings in the Eglinton-Marlee area, or did the buildings happen because the subway line was there? Some might argue that the development preceded the subway because the never-built Spadina Expressway was supposed to happen.

Once we realize that we cannot allow urban development to remain in the hands of land-rich developers, we will really start planning. Not to worry. The developers will follow.

If part of the new urban planning is to create densely populated areas close to facilities, the process known as creating a “critical mass” – we will start to get out of the woods.

Kitchener-Waterloo will have their light rail transit. The effect will be to turn attention away from ravaged farmland, and back to the urban centre. If they build it, people will come. The entire corridor, and the junctions at each end of the new line, will attract business and developers simply because they want to position themselves near easy transit.

If there is ever to be an end to the monstrous evacuation of city cores in favour of prime farmland, we have to adjust to the new reality. Never mind the smog and the cost of car travel. Hey – someone might even put a bicycle corridor along the same new artery. Wouldn’t that be revolutionary?

WISING UP - OR DUMBING DOWN?

One of my regular readers always writes with the authority of someone with a lot of knowledge and insight – two qualities that are rare in what is more a “dumbed-down society.” She wrote to ask if I was going to write about the mayoral contest in Toronto or George Ignatieff. I said that I didn’t have enough strong ideas about either one, except that the Toronto mayoral contest seems to be clear-cut case of everyone coming in second. As for Ignatieff, I am disappointed in his utter lack of political acumen, especially for man as learned as he is. I posit that perhaps he is too affected by what his advisers, survey results tingling in their brains, tell him to do. Which, if you will excuse my repetition, is at the heart of the point I want to make.

We really do live in an era of consumer-driven reality. If the developer who builds brain-numbing cookie-cutter subdivisions can say: I give the public what it wants,” it is a sad commentary on critical judgement. But it is not just the unwashed masses (I don’t mean to sound patronizing) who slavishly follow trends – it is often our most exalted leaders who are simply not “leaders” but followers. If the game is to ingratiate yourself with a non-thinking voter, then jumping at current poll-driven trends is the clearest evidence. Does anyone recognize that millions are spent with lobbyists to “help” the voters make up their own minds? Surely you jest!

It has become orthodox dogma that deficits are bad. David Axelrod, Obama's most inside insider, is supposed to have told his boss that “Polls tell us the American people are worried about deficits.” So when the G20 met, the U.S. President signed on the deficit reduction “truth.” All with an eye on the mid-term election where the Democrats are going to get a spanking. It would be far more difficult to have tried to explain to people (and most voters on both sides of the border are like this) in 30 words are less, why deficits are not bad. The fact is, the deficit–haters, like all of the orthodox Right, have no trouble defining the evils of deficits with nonsense like:”Our grandchildren will bear the weight of all that debt. That should not be our legacy to them.” Not one of them suggests that equally our legacy to them should not be today's lost generation where high unemployment, pessimism and despair are rampant; where the only way unemployment was going to abate was if Big Business started hiring. Memories of the widespread suffering of the Great Depression are far more real and tragic than the supposed “burden” of debt which may or may not face the coming generation.

Behind all this is the reality that people have stopped thinking. Deficit-fighting has proven once again to be good politics. The fact that the most visible paradox is that it is the most vulnerable who suffer when we continue to protect a system that has already put is in great peril.

What I want to say about it is simple: a great leader is one who can inspire and inform the voter; who can, without using imaginary and emotional arguments, can persuade them that with continuing deficits we can beat the gloom.

Unnoticed of course is the other reality: when we have the money we don’t save it. It comes down to the individual worker who is characteristically one paycheck away from going on welfare. We do not understand, and don’t want to understand, that the nonsense of political strategy is to buy the vote with tax cuts. It is those very cuts that put the coming generation (if we really do care about them) with the results of our stupid, mindless prodigality. No government in my memory has ever said it wants to grow surpluses by withholding vote-grabbing tax cuts. Politically it sounds good: George Bush’s famous:” Ordinary folks know better than government what to do with their money.” They don’t. No fault of theirs (or mine.) We are raised to believe in The Dream, that an abundance of plenty is limitless and only when the tap is turned off do we get angry, but at all the wrong people.

Which is precisely why politicians run and hide when anyone suggests that deficits are necessary when times are tough, but the corollary to that is: when times are good, don’t give the money away – you might need it. There is always a rainy day.

LAWS AND "SCOFFLAWS"

In my sometimes fruitless quest to improve my “mastery” of the French language, I look for French equivalents of English words. Travelling with Tom, Henri and Michele’s grandson who is visiting with us from Avignon, I ask him if there is a French word for “scofflaw.”

We had been listening to the radio and heard about the new law of zero tolerance for young drivers using alcohol. On the same program a behaviour expert said that people tend to obey laws. He also said that in other jurisdictions similar legislation has produced between 9 and 25% reduction in youth driving with even a trace of alcohol.

It is difficult to try to explain what scofflaw means. Not enough to say it means “scoffing at the law.” Tom is puzzled but we come up with something. More interesting is the view about “people being obedient to laws.” Of course, it is presumed that most people are. It is also presumed, not without cynicism, that if there were no law we could not depend on the good sense of all people to make the right decision for themselves.

That’s the part that bothers me most. In a civil society we honour rule of law. But even more important, we honour the inherent sense of right and wrong, or more correctly for me: the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. (The right/wrong dualism always gives me a problem because it has no room for anything except absolutes. But that’s another subject.)

The scofflaw, I explained to Tom, is someone who is either above the law or believes he can get away without being caught. I always quote Oliver Goldsmith who said: “A true judge of a man’s character is what he will do if he knows he can get away with it.”

I really do deplore the reality that too many people, if they proceed without the hindrance of enforcement will break the law. Intelligent criminals (how’s that for an oxymoron?) will commit crimes with a low resolution rate, knowing that they will probably not be caught. The fatal flaw is that not getting caught emboldens them so they keep committing the same crime, until inevitably they are caught.

At a far simpler level: this city is full of what are euphemistically called “traffic calming” methods, systems that will deter speeding on residential streets. Everyone knows that residential streets are an essential part of peaceful urban life. So why has it been necessary to put in speed bumps to slow people down? Would they be, without those impediments, scofflaws who use the street where you live as an expressway? And my city, I’m sure yours too, has become a rabbit warren of “do not enter” streets and confusing one-way streets, only to keep traffic off local roads and restrict them to the arterial roads, which as we all know, are chronically gridlocked. I resent not being able to use a public thoroughfare simply because, and rightly so, the local residents hate what speeders do on their streets.

I still don’t have the word for scofflaw. And I still would hope that sanity, conscience, and consideration might one day replace many laws that arise only because without them. people wouldn’t know how to behave.

P.S I detest the expression “nanny state” used by the libertarians and fellow "less government" addicts who think every rule is an intrusion. That’s a topic for another time.