The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci

It is no wonder that The Origin of Species, a novel by Nino Ricci, won the 2008 Governor General's award for best English-language fiction.  It features a quintessential Canadian protagonist, Alex Fratarcageli, who is so emotionally repressed and lacking in self-esteem, so passive and frozen in obsessed inactivity, that the reader occasionally wants to pick a stick and whack the pages in an attempt to get him moving - somewhere, anywhere.

Based on the title, I had expected a novel that was technical, touching on Darwin and the theory of evolution.  Instead, I found a work of fiction that delved as deeply into its main character's mind and daily life as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment focussed onto the thoughts of Raskolnikov.   Indeed, the reader knows much more about Alex than his family, his friends, or even his Freudian therapist.

Strangely enough, though Alex never seems capable of proaction, of taking any sort of control of his life, he does fall into various exotic adventures, including a trip to the Galapagos where he becomes the thrall of a demented biologist Desmond, a virtual captive on a decrepit fishing boat embarked on a surreal tour of the origins of life.  

This incident somehow frames Alex's pursuit of a doctoral thesis, complemented by his pratfalls with the various women in his life, culminating in the accidental creation of  a child. 

And yet the reader understood, much before Alex does, if he ever does, that his essential character is kind and generous.  He feels guilty over Desmond's death, despite the despicable treatment at his hands.  He is genuinely concerned for the safety of Maria, a El Salvadorean refugee, long after his lust for her body has been rejected and dissipated over time.  He becomes the admiring and helpful companion of a young woman, who has has such verve and love of life despite a sentence of Multiple Sclerosis, and watches her body waste away towards death.

Fatherhood eventually, after much dithering and introspection, provides the impetus for a seeming growth spurt of maturity.  However, it is not quite believable given all the meandering that came before.  

It was also weird to read the copious descriptions of the famous and not-so-famous landmarks and denizens of Montreal,  ascribing an paranormal flavour to the familiar scenes.

This is an emotion that pervades the novel.  The sense of familiar viewed from an objective distance, where it is easy to judge, and difficult (though not impossible) to garner empathy for its self-described pathetic hero.

L. Ian MacDonald's - shilling for his homies.

The CBC radio Homerun segment with L. Ian MacDonald sunk to an unprecedented low on Tuesday, May 19, with the columnist spreading a thick and greasy defense of his 'friend', Conrad Black.

Perhaps Mr. Black's behaviour will end up being judged non-criminal - I'll leave that up to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide on the legal matters.  

There is no doubt, however, that Mr. Black is a shining example of corporate executives unable to act in an ethical or moral fashion.  He treated a public corporation as his personal ATM - with no withdrawal limits.   He carted out boxes of files from his office after being explicitly ordered not to tamper with evidence.   He certainly would have denied this act, except for the video evidence of his malfeasance.   

L. Ian promoted the sob story that Mr. Black sold his Manhattan apartment in order to pay for his legal defence, only to have the money garnished by the government.  Unfortunately, the truth, as reported by Peter C. Newman the previous afternoon, Mr. Black's legal fees have been paid by the Chicago Sun-Times, a newspaper that the former Lord has left bereft, on the verge of bankruptcy.  

L. Ian MacDonald offers the opinion, despite his disclaimer that Mr. Black is a former employer and a friend. that poor Conrad is a victim of a grave miscarriage of justice.   The listener could do without such self-serving opinions.

The Homerun host that day offered the complement that L. Ian is the ultimate political insider.  Perhaps a better term would the ultimate political brown-noser.  

Stripmalling by Jon Paul Fiorentino

Imagine an artist wearing a black smock (stitched together from holy, old Ramones t-shirts) spattered with a palette of wild and crazy colours, having painted a canvas, the easel, the walls of the studio, the floor, ceiling, and the furniture, with a variety of genres ranging from classic, romantic, realism, impressionism, cubism, minimalism, modern, post-modern, and post-post-modern.

That is Stripmalling by Jon Paul Fiorentino, a collection of essays, narratives, footnotes, asides, and graphic art that is pulled together into a cohesive whole with a sweepingly classic post-post-modern panache.  Or is that a collective hole?  

Unlike a certain Montreal Gazette reviewer who obviously lost his sense of humour in a horrific childhood accident involving a unintentional tonsillectomy, this reader did notice the comedy lurking in the sentences.  Granted, the juvenile humour is spectacularly juvenile, and the shock-the-innocent-reader-out-0f-his-pants attempts at humour fail with resounding impact.  And the graphics are strangely disturbing - the narrator Jonny is drawn as a buff yet greasy 1950's era caricature.  And even more disappointing, there is nary a hint of any porn, not even drawn with the broadest of strokes.

Ironically, it is the last section of the novel, a workshopped 'screenplay' with inanely scribbled comments that pricked this reviewer's funny bone in the most effective manner.  Leave 'em wanting more, Jonny...  Is it genius or just in(bred)genius?  Perhaps we'll never know.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is another angry-young man novel, similar in concept (if not in realisation) to Cockroach by 

Rawi Hage. However, there are two principal differences that set this novel apart from the uniformly hostile offering by Hage.

The narrator of White Tiger, Balram Halwai, tells his story with a voice that ranges from murderous rage to sunny optimism,

infused with a delightfully black sense of humour that lifts the tale out of its moribund details. In complement, the setting of the

novel, modern India with all its warts and exotic mysteries and social complexities, is portrayed in vivid and philosophical detail,

brought to life as a character in itself, becoming the antagonist to the narrator, a well-spring of contempt and devotion and

ultimate success. While the narrator's voice did not seem completely consistent throughout the novel, and his 'growth' as a man

is convenient and morally suspect, the triumph of the novel is its exploration of the India as experienced by the servant caste, 

its overriding thesis that the common man is kept in place by social convention, corruption and familial devotion, accompanied 

by a justified fear of reprisal.

Hancock

Hancock is a movie starring a mostly unshaven Will Smith about an amnesiac super-hero with alcohol and anger-management issues who discovers his kryptonite is a gorgeous blonde who is now married to his new PR agent but is really his immortal super-hero mate except for the fact they lose their powers around each other and tend to get almost killed over and over again, is filled with sophomoric attempts at humour, some of it based on sad jokes revolving around the sexual functioning of a superhero that have been floating around forever, has a plot that's non-sensical, incomprehensible and full of holes, populated with caricatures, and basically verges on accidental parody.

Don't you want to see it too?

Over-stimulation?

One of the mantras of the 'politically conservative' movement is that the government should not intervene in the economy.  

It just doesn't work, they say, the government can't really impact the marketplace in a significant fashion.

Of course, they also say "Let the market run itself, let it be efficient and the whole of society will get richer."  Or at least, "we" will.

The result of the latter ideology is now plain to see.  The deregulation of the financial markets has let to a housing bubble, multiple bankruptcies, a mortgage crisis, a credit crunch, a massive recession and the loss of trillions of dollars in the worth of pensions funds and other savings all over the world.

If the need for regulation and government oversight is not obvious now, it will never be.  The housing bubble led to massive profits, with the accompanying massive salaries and bonuses for the people who 'made' those profits.  They invented new ways to sell debt, and at the same time, new ways to disguise bad debt. 

I don't believe for a second that they didn't see the crash coming.  They took the money and held their noses, averted their eyes, buried their ethical and moral compasses.  

No one else was looking.  That has to change.

I also have to comment on the wailing in the financial community over the fact that they can't reap the same bonuses as before, especially from government bailout money.  They won't be able to retain their 'talent'.  Well, since that's the same talent that sunk the ship in the first place, I say good riddance.  Let the talent find something else to do, perhaps even try to produce something of real value.  

Now back to the first statement.  Government intervention doesn't work.  Yes, just like government regulation isn't necessary.    Right.

Of course, the bailout money for the banks was unseemly, especially in light of those salaries and bonuses.  But the market economy is based on confidence, and lettting the banks fail would have crushed that confidence completely, I suppose.  

The bailouts of GM and Chrysler were harder to swallow.  Capitalism after all is supposed to punish failure, not reward it.

However, it is difficult to blame the Obama administration for the intervention at the time.  Confidence was extremely fragile at the time.  It seems now the early bailouts for the car companies were simple a way to bide time, to prepare the American public for the news that these two institutions would have to go bankrupt, sooner or later.

As for the Obama economic stimulation package, there was little choice as well.

One can criticize the details, wasteful spending, silly projects, etc.  but Obama was constrained by two major points.

1.  The package needed to be big.  A smaller monetary amount would have been like trying to dig a tunnel with a spoon.

2.  He needed to act fast.  It is not possible to micro-manage each item in the package, nor to achieve the consensus of congress and the senate on each item.

Certainly, there will be abuses of all that money.  And future generations will pay.

But that is the fault of those who created the crisis.  The deregulators.  The tax-cutters.  The war-starters.  The morally bankrupt. 

History will judge the effectiveness of Obama's efforts to pull America out of this abyss.  But one certainly cannot question his resolve.

Social Democracy vs. Social Liberty

There was an interesting article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine  relating the author's (Russell Shorto) experience living in the Netherlands.  Its focus wasn't on liberal drug policy, but rather how Going Dutch (or being immersed in a socialist democracy) impacted his inculcated American belief system.

His first reaction was incredulity at the tax rate.  51 percent of his salary taken by the government was unfair, wasteful, almost communist.  He gets by this emotional signpost by realizing that, when the full tax rate in the USA is calculated, federal + state + municipal, a similar number will arrive.

The difference is not in the numbers, really.  Both countries also have modern economies, firmly based (for good or bad) on Capitalism and Global Trade (though one country is much larger of course).

The main difference is in the political mindset of the two countries and their peoples.  Social Democracy vs. Social Liberty.

It is interesting how this evolved in the Netherlands.  This is a land reclaimed from the sea.  Everyone needs to pump out water to stay above the water line, to stay alive.  This is a quintessential collectivist venture.  All have to cooperate to make it work (efficiently or not, it is essential).  This spirit of collectivism has permeated the political ideology of the Dutch.  If something is worth doing, the state should be responsible.  That only makes sense to the Dutch.

In contrast, the American political ideology was borne out of a wild, frontier state.  This has fed its obsession with gun culture, as well as nurturing a constant tension between the freedom of the individual vs. the control of the government.  It has spawned philosophical movements like Ayn Rand's Objectivism and political movements such as Libertarianism.  These right-of-right ideologies hold that the proper role of government should be to provide Defense and Security.  

There is no doubt that this emphasis of individual freedom (built right into the U.S. Constitution) has helped promote a culture of entrepreneurship, innovation and productivity.  The myth of the American dream, that anyone can succeed with hard work and perseverance, has been repeated so often, it's hard to resist.  

When there is no social safety net, one has no choice but to work hard.  The fallacy of this mythology is stark and obvious, yet ignored all the same.

The reality that American society is divided between the have and the have-nots.  The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the divide is ever-widening - a direct consequence of an ideology applied despite its dire consequences.  

Let's list of few of these perturbed policies:

1.  Unregulate the economy, let the market rule efficiently.  

Let's review the results.  The economy heaves in waves, one bubble after another, the well-positioned take the profits, the obscene salaries, the more-obscene bonuses, then scurry away as the bubble (internet, housing, etc.) collapses.  See Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, AIG, GM, Chrysler, etc.  Notice how efficient and profitable corporations are when there are few rules.  Notice how their quick and effective decisions turn things around.  Notice how quickly they go begging for public money when those decisions go bad.

2.  Cut taxes for the rich - the famous Reaganomic trickle-down effect.

Of course, this helps creates the aforementioned bubbles, along with humongous government deficits.  Money trickles down for a while, until the crash, when it has to be regurgitated back up.  Meanwhile, the middle class and below are encouraged to rack up more debt, buy more stuff, to keep the economy humming along.

3.  Never, ever, touch that military spending.

The U.S. is the world's superpower, the benevolent policeman who brings democracy and security to the world.  At least, when its oil supply is not threatened.  Military spending is the major factor behind its incredible government deficits, which of course limit its ability to provide other services, like universal health care, to its citizens.  But the U.S. must retain its mighty military.  Certainly, one understands that the politicians want this - who wouldn't want to wield that kind of power.  But it is curious that a nation built on individual freedom is at the same time so fervently nationalistic - another kind of collectivist venture - though perhaps lacking some elements of social empathy.

In contrast, the social democracy of the Netherlands is focused on providing services to its citizens, from socialized medical services to free education to subsidized child care to mandatory vacation and vacation pay supplements for all.  

This seems absurd to the American psyche - why should I pay for someone else's vacation! 

The theory is that these government policies will allow all its citizens to be happier, well-adjusted and ultimately more productive.

Perhaps this theory is absurd, but it is more humane than the supposed American approach - work hard and stay healthy or you'll lose your job, your medical coverage and your house.

The author of the Going Dutch article concludes that the collectivist system in the Netherlands works well because of the homogenous nature of its population.  To be sure, this country has its issues with integrating immigrants.  And perhaps, as the author mentions, there are a couple of examples of creative iconoclasts that have struggled against the uniformity of this society and eventually left the country to succeed.   However, the Dutch have a thriving artistic community - somehow these artists have found a way to challenge conformity from within.

Somehow, I think the author missed the real difference between the American and Dutch socio-political systems.  The difference is empathy. 

The Dutch collectivist bent is all about providing a social network, where most people can thrive.  The economy remains market-based, capitalist in its core, but tampered by the ethics (re. regulatory bodies) of its society.  Ideology and efficiency take a back seat to fairness and equity.  It doesn’t spend an unwieldy portion of its GDP on its military.

Of course, the Netherlands will never be a superpower.  But perhaps the world’s remaining superpower could learn a little from this little state.