Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Those Poor Yanks
You know who I feel most sorry for in this whole global financial crisis business?
The average American middle class taxpayers.
It's bad enough they are always on the hook for defence spending, some of which is of course loony but much of which (like the NORAD defence grid) is valid but not cost-shared fairly by the other countries who benefit from it.
Now, we've got the whole world economy allegedly on the brink and once again the Yanks are going to end up holding the bag on it.
Yes, yes, Bush is an idiot, Wal-Mart is a blight on the modern urban landscape, Hollywood is mostly tripe and there's all sorts of other American companies up to shenanigans here and there.
But obviously the average American on the street isn't evil and nefarious. They're just regular folks - paying their mortgages, eying a new TV, saving up for vacation. Yet they're always the ones whose pockets get picked whenever there's trouble in the world. Doesn't seem fair somehow.
It would be nice at least if someone took the bother to thank them once in awhile. So...
Thanks, Yanks. You're good neighbours and allies, no matter what people say about you.
posted by Mentok @ 3:45 p.m.,
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Monday, September 29, 2008
My Weekend With Buddha
OK, enough of the politics for a bit. Let's try a less controversial topic... religion!
Weekend before last, I went on my first Buddhist meditation retreat. I have to say I really wasn't looking forward to it. Like everybody, I regard my weekends as precious so I didn't much like the idea of sacrificing one. But it was something I felt I had to do to earn 'street cred' with my local Buddhist community. So I approached the thing like a trip to the dentist: as a duty, as something unpleasant that was good for me that I would just have to endure.
I'm pleased to report that I was totally wrong.
From the moment I stepped across the threshold of the retreat centre, I could tell it was going to be a great experience. There was just a vibe, a sort of serene excitement (if that makes any sense) that filled the air.
It was a non-residential retreat, meaning that you got to go home at night. The retreat was led by Sharda Rogell from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. She's a very good teacher and meditation leader. She was sensitive to the fact that there were many beginners in the room, so she broke up the sessions into digestible chunks.
The routine for the two days was a cycle of activities broken into roughly half-hour chunks: sitting meditation, walking meditation, dharma talks, discussions and interactive exercises.
Sitting meditation can be very mentally painful because you are constantly battling the contending forces of overactive thoughts and sleepiness. Yet I was amazed how much progress I made even after one day and, by the second day, I actually found myself looking forward to the sitting sessions.
When it came to the dharma talks, Sharda initially showed a great talent for explaining complex Buddhist concepts in simple, practical terms. Unfortunately, she eventually fell prey to that sickness that seems to afflict most Buddhist teachers: excessive use of Pali, the dead language in which the Buddhist scriptures were written. It frankly pisses me off when people put on airs by using an obscure foreign word to describe a concept that could just as easily be expressed in plain English. For example, many of the talks focused on the nature of "dukkha" which means suffering - and that's all it means; there is no other nuance to the word, so why not just say "suffering"? I found this to be a distraction but I got over it.
Another flaw in Sharda's approach is that she's a big-time feminist and continually injects that agenda into dharma discussions. I found that uncomfortable and frankly inappropriate. As it is, North American Buddhism attracts more females than males by a 3-to-1 margin, so statements like "we need to emphasize the feminine aspect more in our spirtuality" are kind of goofy in that context, if you ask me.
Another distraction was that many retreatants seemed to have, um, emotional issues of one sort or another: recently divorced, struggling with past abuse issues, dealing with death, illness or loss of some sort. These people were using the retreat as an alternative to therapy, which is perfectly fine except it wasn't what I'd signed up for. I've heard that some retreats stream fucked-up and non-fucked-up retreatants into different sessions; I can definitely see the value of such a practice. I was interested in focusing on mental discipline and discussing Buddist concepts, but it was hard to do that when the Q&A sessions were continually dominated by people blubbering about their troubles. (As you can see, my compassion still needs some work.)
But all of these are really minor quibbles. All in all, it was a tremendous experience. I came out of it feeling almost supernaturally cleansed and strengthened. Where I had previously dreaded the idea of a retreat, I'm now eagerly looking forward to doing it at least once or twice a year.
So I highly recommend it.
posted by Mentok @ 11:12 a.m.,
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Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The Ricochet Effect
I thought I'd carry on with the election theme a bit by sharing some of my insider views of various election strategies. They say that politics, like sausages, is something one should never watch being made. I'm hoping that, by exposing a bit of the sausage works, people can make more informed dietary choices, shall we say.
There is a very clever political tactic that has been around a good long time but has found renewed subtlety and effectiveness in recent times. I like to call it the Ricochet Effect, although I'm sure other spin doctors have fancier names for it.
The idea of it is that, in order to draw off your opponent's fire, you set up an irresistibly distracting target that is heavily shielded but effectively meaningless. Not only will your opponent waste a bunch of ammunition shooting at the pointless target but some of his own bullets will bounce back and injure him.
In Canadian politics, the left employed this tactic for ages and ages through an election tactic that even won its own nickname: Medi-Scare. For decades like clockwork in every federal and provincial election the Liberals and NDP would put out ads saying "if the Conservatives get in, they will destroy our cherished Canadian Medicare system." The Conservatives, who can often be the biggest suckers in the world, would dutifully trot out and say "no, no, we would never do that. We love Medicare. In fact, we'd make it better." But their loud protests would only make voters more suspicious and in any case this would distract the Tories from talking about the things they wanted to talk about.
In the current US and Canadian elections, this tactic has become much more subtle, but the shoe is on the other foot. Now its the left mindlessly firing shots at pointless targets while the right remains calmly disciplined.
In the US, its the Democrats completely unbalanced reaction to Sarah Palin. I'm not a big fan of hers either but, really, the partisan attacks on her have been over the top. The preposterous implication in many of the attacks is that somehow Sarah Palin isn't really a woman and her candidacy is not really a victory for women's rights because she's not a Democrat. This rather obvious hypocrisy will sit poorly with non-partisan voters and that's exactly what the Republicans are counting on. In any case, the more press time Palin gets - good or bad - the more it serves to shift the focus and drain the celebrity status from Obama. My advice to US Democrats: quit taking the bait, ya big sillies. Stop talking about Palin.
In Canada, Conservative Stephen Harper, ever the brilliant strategian, has come up with an even subtler way to use the Ricochet Effect. Despite NDP accusations that the Tories are "the party of big business", the Tories for years have been making a concerted effort to reposition themselves as The Party of the Middle Class. If they succeed, this will ensure them long tenures in government for decades to come. They will, as the Canadian catch phrase goes, become the new "natural governing party", if they can get a broad enough swath of the middle class committed to voting for them.
They already have much of the middle class under their tent. In this campaign, they are making a special effort to rope in blue-collar middle class voters. To this end they've constructed a stalking horse around arts funding. The Tories haven't actually cut arts funding on a net basis, but they made a point of cutting funding to some specific programs regarded as sacred cows by the arts community with the conscious intent of making the artie types angry.
Now, you see, the arts community is full of nothing but lefties who are never going to vote for the Tories anyway, so it costs the Tories nothing to alienate them. On the other hand, the Tories' blue-collar target voters are people whose ideas of culture probably begin and end with professional wrestling and country music and who have a philistine cynicism about their tax dollars being spent on ballet and obscure Quebecois art films.
The NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc have all whipped themselves into a lather about "arts cuts", to the point of staging public protests about them. Despite being skilled politicians themselves, these partisans appear blissfully unaware that they are playing precisely into the Tories strategy - a strategy which arch Tory backroom boy Doug Finley actually described in detail for the Globe and Mail some weeks back. Every time Joe Steelworker sees on TV a bunch of hippies and college professors screaming about arts cuts, he starts to think more seriously about voting Tory for perhaps the first time in his life.
Wee-chew! Wee-chew! "Aaagh, my foot!"
So, as the old saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute. I guess my overall advice to voters is: Ignore distractions. Any cause celebre raised in the midst of a campaign is likely to be bullshit, so just tune it out and try to focus on the issues that mean something to you.
posted by Mentok @ 10:14 a.m.,
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Monday, September 15, 2008
Lies, lies, lies
It's election time in both Canada and the US this fall. I've worked in that business, still do a little bit and, when I'm being strictly honest with myself, there are still some moments when I enjoy the electoral process.
But, most of the time, I'm just really tired of it. It's the lies that get to me. I hope I'm not shocking anyone, but there is quite a bit of untruth floating about during elections. Not just the lies, though. The hatefulness too. That really gets to me.
I just wish the voters weren't such suckers for it. Because that's why political parties do it, you know. They do it because it works. Most political hacks, in my experience, are ex-debate club geeks who, if they had their druthers, would rather win debates through deft skill at rhetoric, logic and argument. But nobody pays attention to that shit, so the propaganda writers have to use whatever blunt clubs they have available.
And, you know, none of them are any better or worse than the other. Don't kid yourself. If you think one guy is the devil and another guy is a saint, you think that way because you've allowed yourself to be programmed. Some propaganda craftsman somewhere many months or even years ago put together a power-point show describing how his crew was going to drive the voters perceptions. So congratulations for being a sucker. Sorry to be so harsh, but that's the truth of it.
There are no white knights. There are no devils. Just a bunch of monkeys who will never be quite as clever as they think they are.
The Futility of All Human Endeavour, my favourite Threepenny Opera tune, although I prefer the translation that goes:
For the task assigned them
Men aren't smart enough or sly
Any rogue can blind them
With a clever lie.
On that cheery note, please do get out and vote, no matter what your political leanings. As ugly as electoral politics is, it's still better than the alternatives.
posted by Mentok @ 10:34 p.m.,
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Thursday, September 04, 2008
Movie Review: Hamlet 2
I was quite disappointed with this film. I fully expected from the trailers that it would be a hilarious if vulgar comedy. It turned out to have all the qualities of one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that goes on too long. At an hour and a half long, this movie was pretty much exactly one hour too long.
The premise, I expect, is well known: a high school drama department, facing extinction, makes a last ditch effort to gain an audience by staging a campy, offensive, outrageous musical sequel to Hamlet - quite a trick considering that almost all of the characters are dead by the end of the first play.
The sequel, which involves Hamlet stealing Albert Einstein's time machine and recruiting Jesus Christ and Hillary Clinton to help him prevent all the tragic events of the first play, is in fact very funny. I still have the centrepiece tune, "Rock Me Sexy Jesus", stuck in my head. ("Immaculate conception really makes my day; But the dude's got lats that make me feel gay.") I would pay big money Broadway ticket prices to see a full length version of the play.
Unfortunately, the movie spends only the last half-hour on the play itself. The remainder of the film is spent on the build-up - a tiresome, cliche-ridden classroom drama so boring as to defy description.
In the first 2/3 of the movie, I smiled (not laughed, smiled) only twice. The first time was when the main character, a pretentious frustrated actor cum drama teacher (Steve Coogan) faced down his arch nemesis, the theatre critic - a 12 year old boy who writes reviews for the school newspaper.
The second time was when the movie reached that ever-so-predictable crossroads common to all classroom dramas: the teacher, facing backlash at home and from the community, is about to give up but the students step up to assure him that he is needed and has changed their lives; as cliched as that scene was, I loved how the students described the teacher's accomplishment: "You showed us that it doesn't matter how much talent we lack, as long as we have enthusiasm!"
But that's it. That's all the funnies for the first hour. Director Andrew Fleming seems to have thought that endless scenes of Coogan flailing about on rollerskates and generally acting awkward were somehow uproariously funny, but they really aren't
My advice: wait until this comes out on DVD, then scene-select to the beginning of the play. You won't miss a thing.
posted by Mentok @ 12:16 p.m.,
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Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Dear Dalai Lama...
How's it going? Did you catch any of the Olympics? How about that women's beach volleyball, eh? I see Tibet didn't enter a team for that, probably due to the absence of beaches or shoreline of any description in Tibet, as well as the lack of political independence to enter their own teams.
Which brings me to my main point. As you know, I am increasingly supportive of your efforts to secure freedom from those nasty stinkin' commies. Over the weekend, I had a brainstorm about how you could achieve this in a completely non-violent manner.
It all revolves around the fact that, within Tibetan society, you are the legal reincarnation of every previous Dalai Lama. Now, I'm not going to get into any sort of philosophical argument about literal vs. figurative interpretations of the concept of reincarnation within Buddhism. What matters is by law the Dalai Lama is the legal heir to all previous Dalai Lama.
So here's how the plan goes:
1. Deposit $1,000 in a Swiss bank account.
2. Wait 200 years (approx. 3 lifetimes)
3. Use the accumulated compound interest to buy China.
Won't they have egg on their face!
Now, of course, there are potential pitfalls. There could be a catastrophic banking failure. Switzerland could get invaded. But it's not as though you are snoozing this whole time; in theory, you'll be on the job monitoring the plan the whole time except for a few of those interregnum years.
So, there's the plan. I urge you to get on it right away. For someone like you, 200 years probably goes by pretty quick. Remember that time you wanted to go meet Napoleon but you kept putting it off? I bet you wish you hadn't procrastinated now, eh?
Anyway, no need to thank me. I send this along just for the good karma.
Keep well.
Your friend,
Mentok the Mindtaker
posted by Mentok @ 10:29 a.m.,
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