Smoking Guns: #2 – Dreams behind the store

[This is the account of my second "smoking gun." It is as accurate as I can make it, a process that has included repeated interviews with the principles involved, always following Gibbs Rule Number One: Never question suspects together. Conversations are left out except when the exact words can be confirmed, or the comment was short enough that a memory approximation is reliable. Also, I've kept the descriptions as free of sensationalism as possible, in order to let the facts speak for themselves. For more information on this Smoking Gun series, please see Smoking Guns: Introduction.]

The events discussed in the previous post (Smoking Guns: #1 – The Night Fog) are barely a smoking gun. If it weren’t for the testimony of my mother, I would consider it as nothing more than an interesting case of folie à deux (and that includes the reactions of Roseann, who, after all, was in the room with us at one point and could conceivably have been influenced in some way by our behaviour.)

This is not true, however, of the next example, even though it only involves two people.

Val and I were still living in Welland, but we had discovered that the salary of a once-a-week columnist for a small town paper was surprisingly insufficient to live on. — especially with the arrival of twin babies. It was important to me, however, that I find a supplementary source of income with enough dignity that it would not interfere with my new status as a writer. It may seem shallow, but you have to remember that writing for a newspaper had been a dream of mine, and going back to the blue collar work I’d been doing in Toronto just wasn’t appealing. I had certain standards, and I’m not ashamed to admit to them — in fact, I think more people should do the same.

So anyhow, I started work as a night janitor at Zeller’s in a shopping plaza in Port Colborne. (I had my standards, but I also had a family to support, and we were all addicted to food.)

It's a Canadian Tire now, but back in the '70s, this was a Zeller's. (Image from Google Street View.)

In many ways, the job was actually a good fit. I was locked into the store at 10:00, and let out at 8:00 in the morning, so I had ten hours for a four or five hour job. I could take out books from the library during the day, and do my research at night. Then when I got home I could type up my notes, and have my column ready for Friday.

Of course, there was the small matter of not getting much sleep, but I was young, and it took several months before that caught up to me.

I think there is little doubt this guy could have escaped from the Zeller's store, even with all the doors locked.

There was one thing I didn’t like: when I say I got “locked into the store,” I mean that I literally got locked into the store. Not only were the front doors locked, but because of thefts that had been committed by some night janitors before me, the back doors were locked and chained shut. If there had been a fire, I would have been forced to throw something heavy through the large front windows, like The Chief did in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

So. A locked-in night janitor.

I mentioned in “The Night Fog” that on the second floor of the building in which we lived there were two upstairs apartments. One was ours, of course, and the other was occupied by a young couple about our age. We became friends, of a sort, and one weekend we all decided it would be fun to go to Niagara Falls. So we packed into our Pontiac Parisienne, which was roomier than their VW bug.

It was fun, but fairly uneventful.

Pontiac Parisienne -- roughly the same year and model that we had. Ours was blue. I don't remember any more than that.

A few weeks later I had a dream. It must have been the weekend, because it was actually night time (during the week I grabbed whatever sack time I could get during the day), and Val and I were both asleep. In my dream, the couple next door asked if we wanted to go to Niagara Falls, but it was getting close to the time I should be going to work. So we agreed that Val should go with them. (In the dream, the babies didn’t make an appearance.) So Val and the couple got into their Volkswagen, and offered to drive me to work. They said they would come and pick me up when it was time for me to come home. (So — right. They were going to spend all night at Niagara Falls? All I can say is that it was a dream.) They drove me to work, and the rest of my dream consisted of me doing work-related stuff. Shortly before it was time to leave, I grabbed a batch of boxes that had to be stacked up behind the store outside, and just as I was finishing, Val and our friends drove up to take me home.

As dreams went, it was strangely pedestrian and unremarkable.

In fact, the only thing worthy of note was the fact that I’d somehow dreamed that at the end of my shift, my duties included stacking boxes outside the store in the back.

It was just at the point that I saw the VW rounding the corner of the store in my dream that I woke up.

At the same moment, Val woke up beside me.

“I just had the strangest dream,” she said.

“So did I,” I said. “I dreamt that you went to Niagara Falls.”

“So did I!” she said, getting more excited. “What happened in your dream?”

At that point, in order not to contaminate any evidence, I refused to tell her another thing until she’d recounted her dream.

And this is what she told me: Our friends next door decided to go to Niagara Falls and invited us, but it was too close to the time I had to go to work…etc.

In short — exactly the same dream. The only difference was that while I was dreaming about the stuff I did at work, she was dreaming about the stuff they’d done in Niagara Falls. And at the end of her dream, she said that when they got to Zeller’s to pick me up, they drove around to the back where I was stacking boxes.

I’d been feeling progressively confident about the value of this experience as she spoke, but still thinking there could be a fairly normal explanation for it. After all, we had recently gone to Niagara Falls with our friends. It might be odd that in this case we’d dreamed that I’d had to work instead of going with them, but it was nothing that couldn’t be chalked up to coincidence. Wild coincidence, perhaps, but still coincidence.

But when she got to the end where they drove around to the back of the store to pick me up, and found me stacking boxes, I knew I had a smoking gun. Trying to explain this away with words like “coincidence” or “subconscious signals” would not be showing a commitment to rationality — it would be showing a commitment to a  deep-seated prejudice. In fact, it seemed almost like it was present solely to dispel any doubt concerning the “paranormal” aspect of the dreams.

And that’s all there is to that one. Only two witnesses, but the important thing (to me) is that I was one of them, and the events could not be explained away by any conventional means.

Next up is the third, and final smoking gun. This one is unquestionably the most dramatic of the series and involves death, and a host of witnesses.

Smoking Guns: #1 – The Night Fog

[This is the account of my first "smoking gun." It is as accurate as I can make it, a process that has included repeated interviews with the principles involved, always following Gibbs Rule Number One: Never question suspects together. Conversations are left out except when the exact words can be confirmed, or the comment was short enough that a memory approximation is reliable. Also, I've kept the descriptions as free of sensationalism as possible, in order to let the facts speak for themselves. For more information on this Smoking Gun series, please see Smoking Guns: Introduction.]

My first wife and I moved to Welland toward the end of 1974. Our apartment was long and narrow. To enter, you came in the side of the building, up a flight of stairs to a landing, which offered access to two apartments, ours and our neighbours through their kitchens. (Although our neighbours play no role in this story, they will figure rather prominently in the next.)

Above is a Google Street View shot -- which, for some reason has the store fronts blurred out. The two windows on the right of the brown building were our living room windows. The grey building on the left is the newspaper office, so you can see that when I say I walked across the street to apply as a columnist, I literally walked across the street.

Below is a floor plan of the apartment. It’s important to have a good idea of the layout in order to understand the events described here. Words are good, but in a situation like this, pictures are clearer. To the left is the entrance from the landing. The right side overlooks the street. You’ll notice an arrow, labeled “Sopping Point,” pointing to a location along the hallway very close to the entrance of the living room. That will be important later on.

Floor plan created with Floor Planner. (Not to scale -- but not far off.)

Now that the visuals are out of the way, here’s what happened.

Moving in was hot work. Val was already pregnant with the twins, and getting quite close to delivery, so I was doing it all myself. Partway through I got thirsty. Fortunately there was a convenience store just beside the shoe store below us, so I ran down, grabbed a Coke from their fridge, then ran back upstairs to continue the unpacking. I realised about an hour later that I’d neglected the commercial part of the transaction, so I ran down to pay. That was when I first met Roseanne, a very pretty young woman who worked as a clerk at the store. (The fact that I met her is important to the story. The fact that she was pretty is just an added bonus.)

We finished unpacking late that night, and as a reward sat down at the dining room table to smoke a bit of the stash we’d brought with us. It was the same stash that, a few days later, would allow me to learn to type in one night, and a few days after that, to walk across the road to the newspaper office and land a byline with the city newspaper (all of which is recounted in How I Came to do Marijuana). Good stuff, and I mention it for the sake of full disclosure, plus to show that it had nothing to do with subsequent events.

Around two in the morning, both Val and I simultaneously had a sudden, and very strong feeling that something had just come in the kitchen. We could clearly see that nothing was there, but not only did the feeling persist, it felt like whatever the intruder was, it was coming closer.

It was also scary as hell.

We couldn’t stay in the dining room any longer, so we retreated down the hall to the living room, but the feeling that it was still moving continued. About ten minutes later we felt that it had reached the point I’ve marked on the floor plan as the “Stopping Point,” and was just sitting there. I want to stress that it wasn’t as though a ghostly figure had come down the hall — whatever it was, it felt like it was still in the kitchen, the dining room, and all the way down the hall. Our impression was of something like a malevolent mist or fog — invisible, but as palpable as a night terror.

A few minutes later, we felt it retreating. About 20 minutes after it started, we were convinced it was gone.

I was impressed, but not unduly so. After all, we’d smoke some grass, and it was very easy for me to imagine that we’d simply become suggestible to each other’s reactions and fantasized the whole thing.

But then, the next night, at the same time, it happened again. And the night after that.

I can’t describe how impossible it was to stay where the “thing” was. I could no more enter the hallway when it was there than I could have entered an underground dungeon with shadows of animated skeletons moving about.

Still, you learn to live with stuff, and we adjusted the best we could.

Because of my inadvertent theft from the convenience store, we’d struck up a friendship with Roseann, and had her over one night about a week after we moved in. I’d told Val not to mention our nightly visitor to her when she arrived, and I knew she hadn’t said anything up to that point because the two of them had not spent any time together without me being present. (As time went on, that would change — but this was just a few days after moving, and she was still a very new friend.) I wanted to see if I could detect any change in Rosann’s behaviour when the “mist” made its appearance.

Whatever else you might say about the phenomenon, it was remarkably precise in its timing, and as the time grew close, I got ready to observe Roseann as closely as possible without being obvious about it. That turned out not to be as necessary as I had thought. At the very moment I felt it enter the kitchen, she sat bolt upright and said, “What the hell is that?” Val started to say something, but I stopped her. I didn’t want any contamination of Rosanne’s perceptions. Instead I asked her to tell me exactly what she felt. She described something terrifying coming in through the kitchen, through the dining room, and down the hall. Naturally, I could feel it too, and each stage of her description matched not only what I was feeling, but what Val and I had felt each night since moving in. Then Roseann said, “It’s stopped.” I asked her to tell me where. She approached the door to the hall very, very slowly, and pointed to the same Stopping Point we’d repeatedly observed. A few minutes later, she said, “It’s leaving now.”

Okay. That was confirmation of a sort. We hadn’t been smoking (we actually smoked very little), and I knew I hadn’t said anything to her about it. And since I was with Val 24 hours a day (no need to leave the house while writing), I knew Val hadn’t either.

I have to admit, that was pretty good confirmation that something was going on, although I had no clue what it was. But there was still some lingering doubt. Had the three of us somehow heterodyned on a subconscious level, with Val and I unwittingly leading the way? It seemed remarkably unlikely, but there was nothing to completely discount it. At that point I put it down as “excellent” evidence, but not a smoking gun.

But there was to be more.

Not long after this, it came time for us to return to Toronto. That’s where our doctor was, and we had arranged to stay over a few nights at Ian’s place when Val’s delivery time was close. Our first-born, however, was still a baby, and we didn’t want to lug her around during this whole procedure, so we arranged for Flo to come and stay in our apartment while we were in Toronto. It would also give her time to spend with her granddaughter.

The delivery didn’t go exactly as planned, but I’ve already described that particular fiasco in some detail (Want Fries With That?). We came back home (without the twins), walked in through the door, and the first words out of Flo’s mouth were, “I’m never staying in this place again! What is that?” And when I say they were the first words, I mean that literally. There was no, “So how are you doing?” No, “It’s good to see you guys again.” Just a near-hysterical declaration that she was never coming back.

I already knew what had happened, but I got her to describe it. The route it took was the same. The length of time it took to traverse the route was the same. The “Stopping Point” was the same. And the time and length of its retreat was the same. (The retreat, while not immediate, was always significantly faster than its approach.)

There was, however, one difference. Flo had done something we’d never done.

One night, while she’d been holed up in the living room to get away from the terror, the urge to pee had become too great and she simply had to go to the washroom. It was her second or third night experiencing the phenomenon, and she knew she wouldn’t be able wait it out. She said that when she finally built up the courage to go down the hall and actually entered the “presence,” she felt like the air around her had frozen.

That was the final piece of evidence I needed.  Not only had I not told her, but neither had Val. We weren’t even around, and she experienced the same thing every night she was there. Even if we had given off subconscious signals of our unease about the place, there was no way she could have picked up enough from them for the details to have matched so exactly. No “natural” explanation was possible.

Not long after this, Val and I read a book which described a ceremony for dispelling ghosts and we performed it. The “thing” never appeared again — even though I never believed it was a ghost, and don’t to this day.

And that’s the end of that story.

Possible Conclusion

Okay, this thing ended up being way too long, so I’m going to put the possible conclusion into a separate post.

Abortion put simply

Introduction

[NOTE: This article is also available for download in a relatively attractive, illustrated PDF format: Abortion put simply.]

Recently the abortion debate has reared its unattractive head again, largely inspired by the Texan “House Bill 15″ requiring pregnant women to undergo a sonogram before having an abortion. Sonograms offer extremely detailed images, making the human characteristics of the foetus far more apparent than traditional ultra-sounds. Opponents of the bill, such as Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth), claim its purpose “is to traumatize women who are seeking an abortion” (Shahid, “Sonogram abortion requirement passes in Texas Legislature“).

Those who back the bill likely agree with Sen. Davis, since they believe abortion is murder and probably figure that a woman who is about to kill a baby should experience a bit of trauma.

It’s been a field day for liberal satire, helped enormously by the look of the sonogram device — a 10″ rod inserted into the vagina. It has been dubbed “The Wand of Shame,” and in his Doonesbury comic, Gary Trudeau went a step further, likening it to rape.

This, of course, is the perfect opportunity for me to gain Brownie points by following suit, using clever phrases and withering sarcasm to ridicule any and all arguments against abortion, without regard to facts or analysis.

Instead, I’m going to lay out all the issues exactly as they stand, finishing with my opinion on the proper legal status of abortion. This won’t be short, but if you’re looking for sound bites I suggest you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Jon Stewart.

This is grown-up time.

I should warn you, what follows will sound like an attack on the left. That’s  because it is. However, both sides of the abortion issue are guilty of over-simplification and arguing from a predetermined conclusion. The major difference between the left and the right in this, as in pretty well every other issue, is one of articulation. The right is blunt and plain-spoken, making the idiocy of their pronouncements easy targets for satirists and cartoonists. The left, however, expresses itself in multisyllabic words woven into impossibly abstract and ever-shifting arguments. Refuting them is like trying to find and disprove the main thesis of Finnegan’s Wake.

This is a long essay, and I understand if anyone decides not to read it. I do, however, ask that you not read partway through and then argue the conclusion you think I’ll be making. If you’re a regular reader you might keep in mind “Injustice on Trial.” And while I know I don’t have to worry about this with my regular readers, I do ask that comments be relatively civil, that disagreements address what I’ve actually said, and that authorities cited in counter-arguments come from sources other than those of books written by long-dead members of desert tribes. Anything I consider to be inappropriate will be removed.

Although it’s long, I’ve kept it as short as possible, but  a number of technical points need to be explained, and in doing so I have quoted at length from various experts.

The essay is broken down into the following categories:

• Uncontested facts
  • Does abortion kill foetuses?
  • Are these foetuses human?
• Debatable points
  • Does a foetus have a soul?
  • Does a foetus feel pain?
  • Is the foetus a person?
  • Is abortion a step towards euthanasia of the unwanted?
• Conclusion
• Last words

________________________________________________________

Uncontested facts:

Does abortion kill foetuses?

Since there is a difference between a live foetus and a dead foetus, and since the result of abortion is a dead foetus, then obviously, yes. We are killing foetuses.

Are these foetuses human?

DNA would seem to prove conclusively that the foetus is indeed human.

Debatable points

Does a foetus have a soul?

Define soul.

We cannot even agree whether or not an adult human has a soul. Until such times as the new sonograms show a foetus wearing Ray-Bans and playing a piano, the soulfulness of foetuses must be considered unprovable and irrelevant to the discussion. The matter of “soul” is a red herring dragged across the ground by certain pro-lifers to try bewildering the pro-choice hounds (none of whom give it so much as a sniff).

Does the foetus feel pain?

Despite the deceptively simple and straightforward question, this is difficult to answer because there are both biological and  psychological considerations.

Biological

In his 2006 paper in the British Medical Journal, “Can Fetuses Feel Pain?”  Stuart Derbyshire finds that the “minimal necessary anatomical architecture to support pain processing” is in place by the seventh week of gestation. He proposes (backed by a body of consensual evidence) that no real experience of pain is yet possible because “[n]o laminar structure is evident in the thalamus or cortex, a defining feature of maturity.” Furthermore, the outer layer of neurons “has yet to receive any thalamic projections,” without which they “cannot process noxious [painful] information from the periphery.” Derbyshire’s conclusion is that it is only by the 26th week “that the biological system necessary for pain is intact and functional” (Derbyshire, “Can fetuses feel pain?”).

This, however, is only the neurological component — the infrastructure, if you will. “A proper understanding of pain,” says Derbyshire, “must account for the conceptual content that constitutes the pain experience” (ibid). In other words, at 26 weeks we know the trains are running, but have yet to determined whether anyone is actually riding them.

Psychological

Derbyshire quotes The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), which defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” and that “pain is not merely the response to noxious stimuli or disease but is a conscious experience.” The Association further qualifies pain as something that is “always subjective” and learned by each individual “through experiences related to injury in early life” (ibid). On the authority of this definition, Derbyshire argues that foetal neural systems are limited and “cannot support such cognitive, affective, and evaluative experiences, and the limited opportunity for this content to have been introduced also means that it is not possible for a fetus to experience pain” (ibid).

So, can foetuses feel pain? The scientific consensus is that the equipment for feeling pain is fully developed by the 26th week. The rest of the debate hinges upon a definition of pain that some may find questionable.

Is the foetus a “person”?

Define person.

Like “soul,” the definition of a person is exceedingly difficult and vague. Unlike soul, however, the definition of “person” is of great legal and social importance, and the ever-changing nature of this definition has affected various peoples and groups for centuries. One definition even allows it to be applied to corporations, cities, and other congregates, but this is not important to the present discussion

Of more relevance are those definitions relating to the personhood of humans in general, and whether these definitions justify bestowing personhood upon a foetus.

If a foetus is a person, then abortion is murder. The law, and our own intuitions are quite clear on that. If the foetus is a person, then abortion is killing a person, and killing a person, at least in most circumstances, is murder. It is extremely important to keep this in mind. We are not trying to win a trophy in a debate club contest; we are trying to determine whether thousands of human persons are being murdered.

Most definitions of personhood share a set of criteria: “self awareness,” “continuation of consciousness,” and “identity.” A person must be aware of himself as being distinct from the things and people around him, must experience a certain integrity of memory allowing previous moments to be linked to present moments, and must have a sense that this continuum of memory constitutes a personal identity.

A moment’s thought is enough to show that on all levels, a foetus probably fails to meet the criteria.

Unfortunately, so do coma patients, many seniors, and people who are fast asleep.

Since we have a vested interest in being able to take a quick nap in an easy chair after dinner without giving up our right to life, we modify these criteria by including “expectation.” To be a person, the entity in question must either have the qualifying traits at any given moment, or be reasonably expected to have them in the future. So a patient who has been put into a medically-induced coma is still a person, because there is the reasonable expectation that the qualifying traits will reappear upon awakening.

This now tilts the scales in the other direction. If a foetus is allowed to develop without interference, it can also reasonably be expected to assume these qualifying traits.

There is one crucial difference, however. A foetus has not yet experienced these qualifying traits, whereas the coma patient, upon awakening, will simply be picking up where he left off. This “previous experience” now creates a cusp decision on personhood. The pro-life camp, which wants to extend personhood to foetuses (some even trying to extend it to individual spermatozoa) says that previous experience of these criteria is irrelevant, and that the potential to experience them is the crucial point. The pro-choice camp, on the other hand, says that without previous experience of the criteria, there can be no expectation of a right to life.

But just as the definition of personhood before the inclusion of the “expectation clause” had the unintended consequence of making it legal to kill Uncle Jeff while he’s sleeping off his turkey dinner, the new definition with the inclusion of the “previous experience clause” has the unintended consequence of making it legal not only to kill foetuses, but also neonatals.

Or, in plain English, “new borns.”

In other words, if we accept this criterion, not only is abortion acceptable, but so is infanticide, if performed within a few weeks or months following birth.

Mary Anne Warren (1946-2010), whose writings on the subject of abortion have “been required readings in academic courses” and “are frequently cited in major publications” (Mary Anne Warren, Wikipedia) is one of the many who recognize and openly admit to this problem.

One of the most troubling objections to the argument presented in this article is that it may appear to justify not only abortion but infanticide as well. A newborn infant is not a great deal more personlike than a ninemonth fetus, and thus it might seem that if late-term abortion is sometimes justified, then infanticide must also be sometimes justified (Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”).

But — we really, really want to justify abortion, and so Warren valiantly attempts to work around the problem. One of her arguments is that at this stage of our societal development, we simply consider it wrong (ibid).  Ironically, this is exactly the same argument used only a few decades ago to ban abortion.

Her strongest argument is hardly more compelling.

Another reason why infanticide is usually wrong, in our society, is that if the newborn’s parents do not want it, or are unable to care for it, there are (in most cases) people who are able and eager to adopt it and to provide a good home for it. Many people wait years for the opportunity to adopt a child, and some are unable to do so even though there is every reason to believe that they would be good parents. The needless destruction of a viable infant inevitably deprives some person or persons of a source of great pleasure and satisfaction, perhaps severely impoverishing their lives. (ibid).

So to clarify: killing a newborn baby is wrong because it might deprive potential adoptive parents of their happiness, but killing a foetus is fine because…because they can’t be adopted until they’re born?

Other pro-lifers, however, are less fastidious. Michael Tooley, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and President of the American Philosophical Association (2010-11), arrives at the same conclusion concerning the justification of infanticide, but finds no compelling need to wriggle out of it.

Tooley’s arguments follow those of Warren’s (and others) in denying the characteristics of personhood to both foetuses and new-born babies.

To sum up, my argument has been that having a right to life presupposes that one is capable of desiring to continue existing as a subject of experiences and other mental states. This in turn presupposes both that one has the concept of such a continuing entity and that one believes that one is oneself such an entity. So an entity that lacks such a consciousness of itself as a continuing subject of mental states does not have a right to life (Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide“).

 Tooley then compares society’s present reluctance towards infanticide to its earlier reluctance towards masturbation and fellatio.

Infanticide is also of interest because of the strong  emotions it arouses. The typical reaction to infanticide is like the reaction to incest or cannibalism, or the reaction of previous generations to masturbation or oral sex. The response, rather than appealing to carefully formulated moral principles, is primarily visceral. When philosophers themselves respond in this way, offering no arguments, and dismissing infanticide out of hand, it is reasonable to suspect that one is dealing with a taboo rather than with a rational prohibition. I shall attempt to show that this is in fact the case (Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide“).

 Oddly enough, this aspect of the abortion debate seldom finds it way into the main stream media.

[Edited March 13, 2012, to add: Recently this issue has hit the news due to a violent public reaction to a paper written this past February. The original paper, however, was only given cursory coverage. The paper that has created this recent storm was written by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Entitled, “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” it argues that: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.” Calling it "after-birth abortion" rather than infanticide, the authors say that killing a newborn would especially be justified if it suffered disabilities not discovered in pre-birth testing, such as Downs Syndrome, which is only detected 64% of the time through such methods. "To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care" (Adams, "Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say"). I ask you to keep this last statement in mind when reading my conclusion.]

Is abortion a step towards euthanasia of the unwanted?

This is the “Slippery Slope” argument, which many liberals dismiss as a logical fallacy. To do so out-of-hand, however, is to display an amateurish understanding of logic. The slippery slope argument is not a fallacy on its own — it is only fallacious if the events hypothesized are extremely unlikely and never previously observed.

For instance, claiming that exposing a child to Bugs Bunny cartoons is a slippery slope likely leading to later criminal behaviour is fallacious. Not only is the chain of events leading to the proposed outcome extremely unlikely, but several generations of Bugs Bunny fans have grown up to be law-abiding adults. On the other hand, claiming that exposing a child to physical and emotional abuse is a slippery slope likely leading to later criminal behaviour is valid. Not only is the chain of events extremely likely, there is also ample observable evidence backing it up.

So is the slippery slope argument valid in the case of personhood and foetuses? Is it likely that denying personhood to a foetus can lead to denying personhood to other categories of people? And have we observed it in the past?

The answer is an unqualified yes.

Denying personhood to foetuses has already led to justifications for infanticide, and there is no logical reason these same arguments couldn’t be extended to the senile, severely retarded, or a number of other categories of humans.

And there is certainly no question that we’ve witnessed such things in the past — and not all that far in the past.

Eugenics was a 20th century concept denying personhood to a wide range of humans deficient in one or more characteristics. At its height it led to the Holocaust of WWII. Even without such extremes, however, over the past 60 years we’ve seen wide-scale sterilization of the mentally challenged, people of a certain colour relegated to the backs of buses, and the children of aboriginal people taken from their homes.

Conclusion

So, what should the state’s role in this be?

I have tried to lay out the arguments as objectively and fairly as I can, hiding any bias I might have so skillfully that not even the most discerning reader will have picked it up. With that in mind, I believe that the evidence and supporting arguments can lead to only one possible conclusion: We should keep the state’s frackin’ nose out of our lives!

This is an age in which we are obsessed with our rights. We want the right to free birth control, free wi-fi access, and free transportation. We want the right to work at the jobs we want, even if we are physically incapable of performing them without expensive accommodations by our employers. We want the right to make as much money as that guy over there, the right to regular pay increases regardless of economic conditions, and the right to be considered beautiful no matter how many mirrors we’ve broken by looking into them. We want our – we want our – we want our MTV.

We want these rights, we want the state to provide them, and, as the ubiquitous protest chant says, “we want them now!” And if the state refuses us these rights, we’re increasingly willing to sign petitions, organize protests, occupy public property, and even engage in violence. Worse, we are also willing to make a mockery of our claim to be rational beings. Since the acquisition of these rights depends upon convincing the state that our arguments are irrefutable, we torture logic far beyond its breaking point, vilify any sign of opposition, and wrap ourselves in such thick cloaks of self-righteousness that we become immobile.

And in the midst of all this activism for our rights, we forget one very important fact: he who dispenses our rights has the ability to rescind them.

It’s well past the time to change the conversation.

We need government. We need laws. But laws should be few and far between, and the passage of every new law should be marked by a national day of mourning. Let us, then, agree that since birth is a natural transition, recognized for millennia as being the start of a new person, it is illegal to kill a human after birth, and leave anything before that point to the discretion of  those involved. That means that if a woman is pregnant, but unwilling for one reason or another to give birth, she should be able to decide on the basis of her own rationality and morality whether she should have an abortion.

It does not mean, however, that anyone is obliged to provide it. The pro-lifers are just as serious (or boneheaded) in their beliefs and feelings as the pro-choicers, and the state has no right to force doctors who oppose abortion to perform them. It is every woman’s personal right to have an abortion, but it is not any woman’s right to demand it from a particular individual or organization.

But while the state has no business sanctioning or prohibiting such rights, it does have an obligation to protect them where necessary. Whether it’s a strongly conservative community attempting to stop a local doctor or medical centre from performing abortions, or a strongly liberal community attempting to force doctors into performing abortions against their own moral code, the state would have an obligation to step in. Aside from this, however, it has no business meddling in the reproductive matters of its citizens.

An even more sinister aspect of state-controlled abortions is that along with forcing unwilling doctors to perform abortions, it can also force unwilling women to undergo them. Undoubtedly the average person will look upon this possibility as being comfortably remote, but the hysterical nature of the environmental rhetoric is already inspiring such recommendations, and they’re coming from some of the world’s top organizations.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), an organization promoting “the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity,” prepared a report for the UN’s 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that called for “reducing population in the interest of the environment.” At the conference itself, Zhao Baige, China’s  vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission, pointed to China’s policy of forced abortion as a necessary means of controlling CO2 emissions. “”I’m not saying that what we have done is 100 percent right,” she said, “but I’m sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited” (Xing,  ”Population control called key to deal“).

State-sanctioned “rights” trample the personal rights of anyone who disagrees. As we’ve seen, the basic arguments of the pro-choice people are no more sophisticated, logical, or reasonable than those of the pro-life. In some ways they are less so. The pro-choice side is predominantly composed of progressive liberals, committed to universal rights and protection of the “weak.” In fighting for the rights of women to have abortions, they are caught in the unfortunate situation of having to deny the fundamental right of life to the unborn — who are surely the weakest of the weak. As a result, their arguments can become so convoluted that only the most partisanly-poisoned mind can fail to see the glaring inconsistencies.

We’ve already seem how their attempts at justifying abortion without simultaneously justifying infanticide have led to results that would make Ouroboros gag, but in reality, these are among the more logical of the pro-life arguments. One of Mary Anne Warren’s justifications for abortion compares unwanted pregnancy to a “space explorer” who “falls into the hands of an alien culture, whose scientists decide to create a few hundred thousand or more human beings, by breaking his body into its component cells, and using these to create fully developed human beings, with, of course, his genetic code” (Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”). But compare that to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s pro-choice argument involving a dying violinist and a kidnapped citizen.

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you (“A Defense of Abortion,” Wikipedia).

Having no state mandate one way or the other would go a long way toward creating a saner environment for the abortion debate. Without the need, or even the possibility of bringing the power of the state to bear, arguments would only have to convince the individuals involved. This, of course, wouldn’t guarantee a sudden influx of logic and objective analysis, but at least the need to ignore logic in favour of a partisan stand would be drastically eliminated — and the unintended consequences of illogical and damaging arguments would not pose a threat to the entire population.

Removing the state from the equation would also place reproductive responsibility where it belongs: with the individual. Under state-sanctioned rights, personal responsibility is always undermined. Aside from previously-mentioned infringements, there is also the constant pressure of activists to “educate” society. In order to maintain state-sanctioned rights, they must keep up the pressure on people to take advantage of these rights. Any drop-off of interest in a particular right increases the possibility of turning around one day to find that it has “softly and suddenly vanished away.” If, for instance, there was a sudden movement towards personal reproductive responsibility, resulting in a marked decline in abortions, pro-lifers would unquestionably take the opportunity to ramp up their efforts to have them banned, and the “right” to abortion would be in danger of being lost — as it has been in the past. This, of course, is why “awareness campaigns” are so important.

There is, however, another aspect of this debate that deals neither with state interference nor rights, but with human psychology: we don’t just want the right to do something, we also want the entire world to approve it.

This is often the motivation leading people to demand state control of an issue in the first place, but it is a complete abdication of responsibility. Someone uncomfortable about making a decision without 100% consensual approval is a person uncomfortable about taking responsibility. It is a common phenomenon among teenagers, such as the teenage girl who can’t decide whether she should date  a particular boy without first getting approval from all her friends.

Last words

We are a society that demands the removal of wi-fi from classrooms because science has not yet proven, absolutely and without a shadow of doubt, that the electromagnetic waves do not interfere with brain development. We worry about cellphones causing cancer, despite the small and inconclusive evidence of danger. We worry about noxious fumes from materials that our parents and grandparents apparently survived without harm. We increasingly push for animal rights, and promote vegetarianism to avoid killing animals for food. A growing number of people are embracing the vegan lifestyle, which shuns even eggs and milk out of its high regard for life.

Yet in complete defiance of this, we are not only willing, we are positively anxious to prove that killing a human foetus is of no more consequence than removing a tumour, despite the fact that we know only two things about it with any degree of confidence: the foetus is human and it is being killed. Everything else, all other justifications, are based on conjecture, unknowns, definitions-by-committee, and complex and labyrinthine arguments, any or all of which could be conclusively proved false by advanced instrumentation in 10, 20, or 50 years from now.

Am I pro-choice?

Yes. I am. My reasons are mine, and I have no need to have them justified by any individual or state body. But part of what informs my reasons is a sense of history combined with a natural scientific attitude. My sense of history tells me that abortion has been banned in the past, and the results were catastrophic, not only for women, but for the entire character of society. And my natural scientific attitude tells me that when an experiment returns disastrous results, there is little to be gained from repeating it. In a similar fashion, it was not difficult to deduce from our past experiments with prohibition that our present War on Drugs was doomed from the start — at enormous cost to the nation, both socially and financially.

But while I hold a pro-choice position, I do not indulge in the arrogance of believing that I’m right. I am acutely aware that my great-great grandchildren may well look back upon me with the same horror in which we regard the ancient Aztecs and their thousands of human sacrifices to the Sun God.

Both sides of the debate must stop acting like they have a lock on the truth. At the present stage of our knowledge concerning human consciousness, and what may or may not lie beneath, it is unlikely in the extreme that we have magically determined the bedrock facts of the case. Pro-choice supporters think that the foetus feels no pain, but while there is some evidence for this during the first six months of its gestation, any reasons for believing it to be true after that rest upon a tissue-thin web of assumptions held together with definitions that are mostly a matter of opinion.

It is time to bring back the concept of responsibility. Since the ’60s we’ve had an increasing selection of relatively effective and safe contraceptives. While not everyone can use them, and while they don’t always work, they still provide a means of avoiding pregnancy without resorting to abstinence. The only responsible excuse for unwanted pregnancy these days is failure of one of these methods. Aside from rape, anything other accidental pregnancy is the result of simple carelessness. This doesn’t mean that a moment of carelessness or spontaneous passion should ruin a woman’s (or a man’s) life. We are all careless, and part of being young is exploring new behaviours without thinking them through, especially when filled with a witch’s brew of hormones. It does however, mean we should understand that the consequences of this carelessness can be as serious as those of drinking and driving.

It is also time we really understood that, as Jesus said of the Sabbath, the state was made for man, not man for the state. We need to seriously rethink our increasing tendency to hand over authority for every aspect of our lives to a governing body. The role of the state is to protect our natural rights — not to grant or withdraw them. Relinquishing such matters to the state merely serves to exacerbate the problems. We need more gun control laws because of a rise in gun-related crime, but as we pass more gun control laws, gun-related crime rises. If we were to go solely by statistical correlations, we would have to conclude that gun-related crime is caused by gun control laws. In fact, nowhere is this more apparent than in Britain. In the past, gun ownership was both freely allowed and extremely rare, with gun-related crime being even rarer. Following the 1997 Firearms Act, which essentially banned private ownership of guns, gun-related crime rose 110% — although even today it remains among the lowest in the world (“Gun Politics in the United Kingdom,” Wikipedia).

Michael Moore famously accused America of having a “gun culture.” I have argued elsewhere that this isn’t true: America has a culture with guns. There is a significant difference. If America truly had a gun culture, every child would be raised with an understanding of firearms, and owning a gun would not be a mark of rebellion nor would it raise anyone’s “street cred.” Would gun crime be reduced? I don’t know, but I suspect it might; at least certain types of gun crime could conceivably drop. But whatever the outcome, we would have to face the fact that it is our responsibility, and not the state’s.

When it comes to guns, the “right to bear arms” is not the problem. The problem is a lack of knowledge and responsibility. There is a parallel in abortion. While a woman should expect the right to have an abortion without state interference, and to have the state protect her right were other citizens to interfere, the real issue is her willingness to view the matter in a knowledgeable and responsible fashion.

The constant rallying cry of the pro-choice movement is that women have the right to control their own bodies. In this I agree. But that means taking full control, and in turn that means taking responsibility. Every woman should have the right to an abortion, if she so decides. It is her responsibility. But it is also her responsibility to avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place, and should one occur, to make her decision for an abortion with full awareness of the seriousness of the consequences.

_______________________

References

A Defense of Abortion. (2012, March 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 06:06, March 22, 2012

Adams, Stephen. “Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say.”The Telegraph [London] 29 Feb. 2012, sec. Health: Telegraph.co.uk. Web. 23 Mar. 2012

Derbyshire, Stuart. “Can fetuses feel pain?” British Journal of Medicine 332 (2006): 909-912. Academia.edu. Web. 17 Mar. 2012.  [Note: Sluggish load. Click "Play" arrow and wait for document to appear.]

Gun politics in the United Kingdom. (2012, March 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 06:35, March 22, 2012.

Mary Anne Warren. (2012, February 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 02:18, March 21, 2012.

Shahid, Aliyah. “Sonogram abortion requirement passes in Texas Legislature.” Featured Articles From The New York Daily News. NY Daily News, 6 May 2011. Web. 21 Mar. 2012.

Tooley, Michael. “Abortion and Infanticide.” Philosophy and Public Affairs Vol. 2, Issue 1 (1972): Rutgers University. Web. 20 Mar. 2012.

Warren, Mary Anne. “The Moral Significance of Birth.” Hypatia 4.3 (1989): 46-65. Google Document. Web. 17 Mar. 2012.

Warren, Mary Anne. “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.” Biomedical Ethics. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1996. 434-440.

Xing, Li. “Population control called key to deal.” China Daily US Edition. China Daily, 12 Oct. 2009. Accessed Web. 21 Mar. 2012.

Related articles

• Justifying infanticide (newstatesman.com)
• Infanticide is repellent. Feeling that way doesn’t make you Glenn Beck | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)
• Babies, after-birth abortion and logic (danielpatto.com)
• Garry Trudeau insults rape victims (fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com)
• ‘Fetal Pain’ Law Advances in Georgia (newser.com)

The importance of “last times”

 

Personally, I don't see the resemblance.

The three of us formed a tight little group back in high school: Ian, George and me. “The Mod Squad,” they called us, although our little trinity contained neither blacks nor females. Still, as witticisms went, it was certainly better than some of the others we faced. “Are you gay?” one young tough sneered at me. “I’m reasonably happy,” I answered, puzzled to hear such an archaic word from someone who appeared to be an inarticulate thug.

But we weren’t gay in the “not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-that” sense. We were just good friends. Ian and George were the most important people in my life at the time. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve,” says Gordie Lachance in Stand by Me. My special friendships came in my late teens, but I understand the sentiment.

As the years became decades, Ian and I stayed in touch: sometimes weekly, sometimes missing a year or two. George, on the other hand, disappeared like a ghost in the night; a ship over the horizon; an old TV show before VCRs.

Just one long Richard joke

I ran across Mr. Thomas today, an older man who lives with his wife in my apartment building. He’s one of the most likable men I’ve ever met. Always cheerful, never a bad word about anyone, willing to stop and chat any time he sees you. And although he’s originally from another country, his English is letter-perfect.

Problem is, he’s never quite mastered our idioms.

“Hey, Frank!” he called. “How’d you like the golden shower the other day?”

See what I mean?

Shaggy Dog Story: How Eustace broke his leg

One more from the sludge pile. I’d planned on saving it for a rainy day (or an exceptionally cold one), but a recent comment made on MikeWJ’s post inspired me to put it in circulation now. I’ll tell you which comment at the end of the story.

---

Hey Jimbo, Bob, Tom. How’s about a bit of room by that stove? It’s cold ‘nuff out there to freeze the balls off’n a witch’s teat.

My leg? I was kinda hopin’ nobody would notice ‘cause I don’t want any special treatment an’ all.

Don’t get up Bob. … Oh, you wasn’t? Well, it looked to me like you was kinda thinkin’ about it and I just wanted t’tell you not to bother. Anyways, I got enough room on the end o’ this bench next to Jimbo. Now if only the pickle barrel were a tad closer – why thanks Tom, I believe I will have one.

And don’t go makin’ a big deal of my leg ‘n’ alll. It’s nothin’ more’n a broke bone and I’d just as soon that y’all ignored it, like.

What’s that? Well hell, Bob, a’course I got a red flag strapped to my foot. I may not wanna be conspicuous, but I sure’s hell don’t want some poor fool doin’ a mischief to himself ‘cause he don’t see I’m carryin’ a longer load’n usual. Where’s your sense, man? You stick a red flag on lumber when you’re haulin’ it in that foreign Jap pickup you drive, don’t ya?

Look who else Doesn’t Give a Damn

At one time or another, every blogger has had fun looking over the more unusual search terms through which visitors find our sites. I Don’t Give a Damn draws in people looking for “Jack Sparrow” (or “джек воробей” in Russian), ”getting rid of mold” (and “mould“), “virtual birth” (which can apparently also be spelled “verchual birth”), and “paris hilton guillotine” (which may have something to do with a leaked video of her giving her head, or some such).

And of course, a great many people find their way here by looking for “I don’t give a damn.”

I’d always figured they were just searching for the quote from Gone With the Wind, but the other day I got curious where my own site would fall in the results.

Here’s what I found. (Click on it for full size.)

My site has the black arrow pointing to it. I’m fifth down (counting the videos as one), which is good. But did you happen to notice who’s sharing the Google real estate with me? The name with the pink arrows pointing to it? Huh? See that?

Why, it’s Avril Lavigne.

I’ve mentioned her, haven’t I?

It turns out she sang a song called “I Don’t Give a Damn.” Who knew? (Well, other than some 20 billion teenagers.)

Now I consider Avril to be one of the most beautiful women in show business, and because there’s a similarity to my wife I can get away with it. But my admiration was purely non-musical. By way of second-hand exposure through radios in coffee shops and such, I’d discovered that I could often distinguish her voice from the rest of the female pop singers. But it was all pop, and it was all in the background, and the only song I could ever recognise all on its own was “Complicated.”

It goes like this:

“Da da da da da da da da so complicated.”

Susanna Hoffs. (80s much?)

To me, hearing her voice through the speakers at Tim Horton’s, Second Cup and Starbucks, she sounded something like Susanna Hoffs (of The Bangles).

Now that I knew we were such close Google neighbours, however, it seemed only prudent to pay closer attention to her music. After all, when she drops by I don’t want to have to tell her I’d never listened to a single one of her songs.

That could happen. She could drop by. Google neighbours do that.

In any event, I spent some time on YouTube and you know what? She’s really not bad.

Keep in mind, the stuff she writes and sings is pop. In my day it might have been played along with “Angel in the Morning” and the Bells’ sexy “Stay Awhile.” But her voice is nice, and I think she’s got good range.

I only sampled a dozen or so of her songs, but the one that stays with me is “I’m With You.” The opening bars of the verse are reminiscent of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” (what a voice she had), and there’s a nice lilt to the chorus.

Much of her music, of course, is aimed at empowering teenage girls — who desperately need it because getting their own way 23 hours of the day just isn’t enough. As a result it can be a bit screechy. And “angry,” in a cute-girl-doing-straight-arm-punches-while-looking-adorably-serious kind of way.

But the more I listened, the more she started to remind me of someone else: Edie Brickell.

Here’s Avril’s “Nobody’s Home.” (Sorry for the crappy video, but the decent ones are locked against being embedded.)

And here’s Edie singing her classic “Circle.” I don’t know, but I hear a similarity.

Damn. That one always gets me. In fact, that whole album does.

But this isn’t about Edie.

The biggest surprise while researching Avril was finding that she’d done the song for the end of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. It’s somewhat “anthem-ish,” but pretty good. And a stunning video.

And I can’t end this without presenting the song whose name so fortuitously put us together in cyberspace. So without further ado, here’s Avril Lavigne singing “I Don’t Give a Damn.”

Take it away, Avril.

(And again — sorry about the boring video.)

Company enough: a phenomenology of playing the blues

Robert Johnson

If misery loves company, misery has company enough
Henry David Thoreau

——————–

Rock and roll brings us together through a shared sense of place (be it physical, social, or chronological) and our power within it.

The beat did more than make him happy. It made him feel bigger, stronger, more there. When Franki Ford sang “Sea Cruise” or Eddie Cochran sang “Summertime Blues,” Richie was actually transported with joy (Stephen King, It).

It was perhaps inevitable that the activism of the ’60s — a time in which youth from disparate parts of the globe all felt a shared sense of both place and power — played out to a sound-track scored by Steppenwolf, The Who, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones. Rock and roll requires the participant to define himself as an active member of a movement, in which he experiences a feeling of potency.

The blues, on the other hand, requires the participant to define himself in terms of community.

Rock is what we are: blues is who we are. There are no politics in the blues, no revolutions to fight, and, despite its constant presence as a theme, there are no injustices to right. The blues recognises that life may be unjust, but it puts forward no call to arms. It simply recognises the human condition: a condition which can be sometimes sad, sometimes funny, and sometimes so sad it’s funny. The blues doesn’t ignore social issues, it merely sees them from a human, rather than a sociological perspective.

I worked on a levee camp and the extra gangs too
Black man is a boy, I don’t care what he can do.
I wonder when — I wonder when — I wonder when
will I get to be called a man, or do I have to wait
till I get ninety-three?
(“When Will I Get to Be Called a Man?” — Big Bill Broonzy)

The blues is not a bonfire in the town square around which we rally with fellow rebels in order to plan the overthrow of a repressive regime; it’s the candle on the front porch where we gather with fellow sufferers in order to commiserate and draw strength through companionship. Like the best forms of humour (and the most noble instincts of mankind), the blues gains its power from that which we all share. Pain — and our power to rise above it. Loneliness — and the joy of discovering other people. And, of course, pleasure — from wherever we can find it.

To Bryce, these “guitar nights,” as he called them, were opportunities allowing a much-needed social release. Due to a hare-lip, which operations had only partially corrected, he suffered from a barely-contained embarrassment whenever he spoke. Music allowed him to communicate as an equal.

Jimmy, on the other hand, was aggressively social. A kind of modern Robert Plant, he had the manner, swagger and, most importantly, the hair of a rock star — although in reality he worked at a computer repair shop.

Normally when Bryce, Jimmy and I jammed we concentrated on old pop rock tunes. Tonight, however, was to be different. I’d recently been jamming with a black blues musician named “Junior,” whom I’d met while covering the music scene for a small magazine. Bryce had thought it might be interesting if Junior came over and we tried our hands at the blues. 

So far we were still waiting for Jimmy, hadn’t played a note, and things already weren’t looking good.

From the time Junior arrived, a distinct current of one-upmanship had flowed between him and Bryce. On the surface it was friendly. “What musicians do you like? Oh really? I guess he’s all right, but he’s not as authentic as so-and-so.” And so on. For Junior it was no more than a game he played with everyone. (He’d tried it with me early on in our relationship, but when I told him my favourite group as a teenager had been the Monkees he just looked surprised and then said, “You know what? Me too,” and that was the end of it.)

For Bryce, however, this game threatened the very defence he had so painfully constructed. Not a defence of ego, but of his self. It wasn’t so much that another person’s superior musical knowledge bothered him as it was that it could be used as a weapon.

When Jimmy finally arrived, however, everything changed. We all knew and respected his guitar work, but he could be quite stubborn in his heavy metal approach. And when it came to other musicians’ failings, he could be outright contemptuous. The last time he and I had played with Junior, Jimmy had turned in a deafening rendition of “Moondance” that owed more the Megadeath than Van Morrison. And he was always offering “tips” for Bryce on playing the guitar. (He left me alone, but I suspected it was only because, like many guitarists, he was a little in awe of the violin, and had no idea that I was far more of an amateur than he thought.)

We all liked Jimmy, but both Bryce and Junior had reason for resentment, and as soon as he walked in, the alliances shifted. Junior and Bryce began talking like old friends, leaving Jimmy somewhat on the outside.

The message was clear: the watchword of the night was to be mutual respect, and if Jimmy wanted to get into one of his moods, he would be facing a united front.

We were now tuning up.

The common and simply phrased motifs covered in blues lyrics act as a lingua franca.

Nobody knows you,
When you’re down and out.
In your pocket,
Not one penny,
And as for friends
You don’t have many.
(Jimmy Cox: “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.”)

No one is a complete stranger to the indignities of life, and putting such experiences into words can help create a bond. Sometimes hearing someone speak of misfortune in a way that demands we see the reality of his experience, and the similarity to our own, can bring home to us the reality that his relationship to the world is essentially the same as ours. That he is, in fact, real in the same way we are.

As Coleridge put it, “we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets. We know that he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours.”

Such an expression need not be clever or particularly articulate, it need only be recognizable as an expression of truth. When we hear expressions which originate directly from internal states familiar to us, we are compelled to wrap the speaker into our own existence. We recognise him as “us” in another location and circumstance.

But the words are only part of the story in blues. The structure of the music itself is a mirror of our own way-of-being with other people. It is slippery, unstructured, and yet there is form, manners and patterns.

The blues presents us with a personable informality. We can sit where we wish, bitch about the day, and take a break to go to the bathroom and pick up another beer from the fridge on our way back. Few blues singers have what we would call “good” singing voices, and in many cases even their playing skills are nothing special. But this only adds to the shared experience.

When amateur rock musicians play “Smoke on the Water,” there is a general consensus that their rendition is less authentic than that of Deep Purple’s. There is no more meaningful compliment one can give than, “Wow! That sounded almost like the original!” As a result, those participating in rock and roll jams are almost always doing so from a position of weakness — or perhaps it would be more fair to say from a position of “duplication.” They are once more defining themselves in terms of a “movement” in which they are members of greater or lesser standing, and as members of that movement they are fulfilling their duty to promote its values.

Conversely, authenticity in the blues is less a case of doing it “as good as” B B King, but rather of doing it with the same involvement. There is no movement to be promoted. The blues simply provides us a community; a meeting place as comfortable as a friend’s living room. It could be said that what the blues does is to recognize R. Collingwood’s admonition that by attending to an emotion, we master it. When playing the blues, we achieve this mastery in the company of others.

As the evening progresses, rivalries fade. Status is a function of community, and we’ve reached a point far more fundamental than that. We’ve reached the very foundation of community, where the standing of its members is still unformulated and all that exists is a recognition of each other.

We’re in the middle of some piece I’ve never heard of before, but Junior says it’s called “Rollin’ & Tumblin’.” Revealing ancestral roots planted firmly in the banks of the Mississipii Delta, it’s one of those dirty-blues numbers with a slide guitar that slips around like Fred Astaire in a mud patch. Towards the end I leap obliquely up the musical monkey-bars to gain some higher ground I’ve had my eye on for a while. Once there, I’m surprised to find myself running neck and neck with Jimmy, who has arrived at the same place by a different route. We look at each other and laugh. Junior smiles. “Nice scramblin’ boys. Now walk it on down.” Still happy to be together, Jimmy and I keep each other company as we do a step-and-skip descent, our footing illuminated by the dark light of Junior’s bass. On the way we pick up Bryce and come to ground as a group.

Junior trades his bass for a lead. “We don’t wanna be workin’ that hard again right away. See how you guys feel about this one,” he says, and begins Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues.” It’s a slow piece with a laid-back boogy beat in its spine. We listen for a moment, each of us looking for his way in. Leaving Junior to take the detailed and delicate finger work, I come in high, slow, and drifting just behind the beat. Jimmy takes a similar path, staying to a lower register so as not to step on my toes, while Bryce provides a rhythm that keeps Junior’s embellishments company even as he supports Jimmy and I with a solid foundation for our dance.

As we each find our respective places in this little segment of humanity, we surround Junior like a family around the bereaved.

The blues moves as we do. It may focus on any number of things, but there is always an indeterminacy around the edges — just as there is always an indeterminacy around our own actions and motivations. The music is less a matter of form than it is an expression of what it is to be a person.

We can easily imagine Beethoven’s 9th being played to a universe devoid of people. It is as eternal and self-sufficient as the stars and planets themselves.

But if there were no people to hear the blues, the universe would be forced to invent them.

 

Smoking Guns: #1 – Night Fog – Possible Conclusion

[The following is a possible explanation (of sorts) to the events described in my last post, Smoking Guns: #1 - Night Fog. I want to stress that this isn't really an explanation, just a suggested possibility -- a suggested possibility that, itself, relies upon the paranormal.]

Philip Aylesford as drawn by one of the group members.

In 1972, the Toronto Society of Psychical Research embarked upon an experiment to see if they could conjure up a ghost.

Let me be clear about this — their aim was not to contact a ghost, but to conjure one up out of their imaginations. The idea was to see if the various phenomena associated with spiritualism could be attributed to the mind alone.

To this end, they assembled a group of people who neither claimed nor showed any special psychic abilities. Led by Dr. A.R.G Owen, whose day job was with the Department For Preventative Medicine and Biostatistics at the University of Toronto, but who also investigated purported cases of poltergeist activity, the group then set about creating a fictitious background for their ghost. “It was essential to their purpose,” said Dr. Owen, “that Philip be a totally fictitious character. Not merely a figment of the imagination but clearly and obviously so, with a biography full of historical errors.”

The result was Philip Aylesford, an aristocrat married to a cold, unloving wife. When he fell in love with a beautiful gypsy, his wife had her accused of witchcraft and she was burned at the stake. Shortly thereafter, Philip committed suicide out of remorse. One of the group members drew a portrait, so that they could envision their creation better.

For several months the group got together on a weekly basis and conducted “séances” to contact the spirit of Philip. Eventually they convinced themselves they could feel a “vibration” in the table around which they sat. Shortly afterwards they started hearing knocks, which they used as a “yes” and “no” code for questions and answers.

And then the table started moving.

There were several filmings of their experiment, including one for the CBC, at which 50 spectators were also present. A book was written about the experiment, Conjuring up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis, which details the events. About ten years ago I managed to contact the main cameraman, who graciously gave me a video of his footage.

It was both astounding, and disappointing.

The astounding part was the amount of activity. The table didn’t just rise up — it tilted, swerved, and scooted across the room.

The disappointing aspect came from looking at it with a magician’s eyes. There isn’t a single frame in which the entire table can be seen while in motion. There are too many camera cuts. The angles are often irritating, in that they allow people and objects to block the view.

None of which is to say that it was faked. After all, there was a crowd of people watching the CBC demonstration, and even though you couldn’t always see the entire table when you want to, the camera does move around and you can see parts of the table that were hidden a moment earlier. It’s difficult to conceive how such a phenomenon could be faked, but then, it’s difficult to conceive how anyone could place an English penny and a dollar coin in his hand, close it, and without any other movement, open up his hand again it to reveal nothing but the dollar coin, which is then passed around for inspection. Yet I’ve done that myself on numerous occasions.

The “Philip” experiment was conducted by two other groups who created their own fictional ghosts and reported that they experienced similar results. At a social gathering at which various members from the groups got together, someone jokingly called out, “Is anyone there,” and received a loud knock on the wall. They asked if it was Father Christmas, and then proceeded to have a discussion with Santa Claus.

I presume by now you can see where I’m going with this.

If, and it’s a mighty big “if,” it’s possible for a group of people to conjure up a fictional ghost, is it possible that Val and I conjured up the “spirit” in our apartment? Our first “encounter’ with it would be completely unremarkable from an objective viewpoint, since not only was the experience completely subjective, but we had admittedly smoked some very nice weed prior to it. Perhaps we imagined it at first, but then somehow caused our imagined entity to take on a kind of life of its own. There was certainly nothing from the apartment’s past to suggest that anything of note had ever happened there, and the area we lived was about as normal as you could get. No secret Indian graveyards, no buildings that had once housed the criminally insane. Just a second floor apartment built sometime in the 1930s or ’40s in a small town. Furthermore, for such a sinister presence (and we can all swear to the palpable fear it inspired), it was surprisingly cooperative about leaving. One quick ceremony from a book, and it was gone.

If I have a theory concerning this incident, it would have to be that we had unwittingly created our own “Philip.” A lousy theory, I admit, since I’m not entirely convinced that the Philip phenomena were authentic.

Still, it’s the best I’ve got.

Related articles

• Domestic Abuser: ‘Ghost’ Beat Wife (newsfromthespiritworld.wordpress.com)
• The River: Ghost Busted! (tv.com)
• The Curious Case of the Hull Poltergeist (solascendans.com)

Smoking Guns: Introduction

[Note to visitors from Comics Curmudgeon -- despite the title, these posts will have nothing to do with either Judge Parker or Rex Morgan, MD. Sorry about that.]

Two incidents in my childhood had truly profound effects upon me. The first was the night Death stood at the foot of my bed.

I was about six or seven years old. He was in a black robe with a hood. I don’t remember if there was a scythe. Either way, the identification was apparent. Batman doesn’t become any less identifiable without his cape, and Superman certainly can’t be disguised simply by putting on a pair of glas … oh. Right. Well, still. you get my point.

I knew it was just the shadow of some clothes hung on the bedpost (probably). It didn’t matter, though. It wasn’t the figure, but the meaning, and that meaning was true regardless of whether I was looking at a mythical personification of mortality or a pile of dirty laundry: I was going to die. It was inevitable. From then on, this knowledge was never far from my mind.  What was the point to life when it inevitably ended in defeat? Years later, while reading the Dragonlance novels, I felt a deep kinship with the character of Raistlin, a mage who who saw only death whenever he looked at people.

The other incident of import was when my mother blew her hand off. (Don’t worry. She got better.)

It was around the same time, probably the same year. Flo — my mother — was lighting firecrackers on our front yard (it would have been either Dominion Day or Victoria Day) when one blew up in her hand.

I searched and searched for an image of the colouring rolls like I had when I was a kid, but this is the closest I could get.

Several days later, we were on the front porch. I was colouring on a colouring roll — which was like a colouring book, except it wasn’t a book, it was a roll of paper with pictures on it like a colouring book.  Flo and her mother were discussing the incident, wondering whether the firecracker had been upside down, or if the fuse had simply been too short. After a few minutes of desultory conversation about it, my grandmother said, “Well, I guess we’ll never know.”

And that’s when the black hole opened up.

There were some things I desperately needed to know, and prime among them was whether there was more to life than our physical existence, because (as the careful reader may remember) I was going to die!

These two events shaped pretty well everything in my life from that point on.

Rather naturally I took an interest in the occult, but unlike virtually everyone else I met with similar interests, I was after absolute proof. I had no desire to fool myself with false “evidence” just to make myself feel better — I wanted something incontrovertible. “Weird” or “uncanny” simply wouldn’t do. I was after “smoking guns.”

For instance. While I was in high school, I joined The Process. Every weekend Ian and I would go into Toronto from Malton to help out with whatever needed doing. As we were leaving to go home one night, we discovered we didn’t have the money for transit fare, which meant we’d be hitchhiking. Not unusual. We did it a lot. We mentioned this to Brother Cyrus as we were leaving. He stood there for a moment and then said: “You will go up to Bloor Street and turn right. You will get picked up by the third car. After that you’ll get a ride in the fourth car that passes, which will take you home.”

We told him he was wrong because if we were hitchhiking home, we’d be going up to Bloor Street and turning left, not right. Nevertheless, Cyrus remained adamant about his “prediction.”

On our way up Yonge, however, we discovered that we had missed some change in our pockets, and it turned out we had enough for the subway. When we got to Bloor we turned right to go to the subway station and made a joke about it. When the train arrived we realised we were entering the third car. At the end of the line, we had to start hitchhiking because all the buses had stopped running. With Cyrus’s prediction in mind we counted the cars — not very frequent at that time of night. As the fourth car zoomed past we laughed, determined that when we saw Cyrus again we’d kid him on being wrong.

And then the car stopped, backed up, and the driver asked if we wanted a lift. We were actually relieved when it turned out he was only going half-way to Malton, since it would finally disprove Cyrus’s prediction. Except, just as he was getting to his turn off he said, “Oh, what the hell, I may as well take you the rest of the way.”

And so it turned out that everything Cyrus had told us was correct.

My point is that as strange as this incident may have been, it was most certainly not a “smoking gun.” Too many variables. Too much room for interpretation and coincidence.

Here’s another one.

Still in high school, during the summer, I was at a friend’s place in his swimming pool. Ian was there, along with George and a couple of others. All of a sudden I got the strongest feeling that my mother needed to talk to me. I got out of the pool, and they asked where I was going. “Flo wants to talk to me,” I told them. “I have to call her.” They followed me into the house to watch me make the call. As soon as she came on the line, Flo said, “Oh, I was just trying to figure out how to get in touch with you.” I no longer remember what the message was, neither does she, but that incident became part of our group legend.

Again– although odd, and perhaps even evocative, it is far too subject to coincidence. It was not incontrovertible evidence. (The same is true, incidentally, of the Zombie incident.)

In short, it was not a smoking gun.

I have only three of those, but because of their nature, they have at least shown me that any belief concerning a purely materialistic determinism is insufficient as an explanation of life.

And that’s what the next three posts will be about: my three smoking guns.

They’ll also be much shorter.

Digging through boxes

My wife, whom I'm calling "Samantha" in this blog. And the reason Avril Lavigne has nothing to fear from me.

I’ve been cleaning out the locker lately. It acts as a safe haven for things we don’t have room for, but can’t quite get rid of. We’ve had it a long time, and some of the stuff in there I haven’t seen for decades.

Stuff like the Zube Tube, which we picked up at the CNE around 1989.

The Zube Tube, according to its manufacturers, is “The Ultimate Cosmic Sound Machine.” It consists of a cardboard tube with a wire spring stretched down the centre from one end to the other. A small hole in the side allows the user to pluck the spring. Doing this while speaking into one end of the tube makes your voice all weird and alien. This is perfect for saying things like, “Surrender, Earthlings!” You can also shake the tube, producing a weird metallic “zinging” sound, which is exactly what you want when sending sub-space messages to the Space Patrol.

From the manufacturer's website: Fun for all ages – children and adults. Chosen as one of the BEST TOYS by Parents Magazine, Creative Child Magazine and Dr. Toy! No electronics or batteries! Creates an amazing array of "out-of-this-world" sounds!

Sadly, not everything is as useful as the Zube Tube. Half the locker is taken up by our disassembled King-size, four-poster, captain’s water bed. We bought it when we had an exceptionally large apartment, but since then, every bedroom we’ve had has been too small.

The rest of the locker is filled with boxes of papers. In descending order of of bulk, these consist of (1) stories and articles stretching back to my days with the Tribune, (2) drawings, and (3) photos.

The photos are a welcome find. Before I got a cellphone camera two years ago, we seldom had a reliable way of taking pictures, so there are very few photos of our earlier days together. Running across another small stash has been a godsend.

As a result, in lieu of writing a blog post, I’m going to simply present a few items we’ve rediscovered while digging through boxes.

Photos

Hamilton Christmas

We only lived in Hamilton for a year, but our Christmas there turned out unexpectedly nice. Initially we weren’t going to get a tree, but then someone cut down the tree in their front yard and left on the side of the road, so we salvaged it. That wasn’t easy, considering we didn’t have a car and had to lug it several blocks before maneuvering it up the fire escape into our apartment. Still, it was worth it. The tree was slightly too tall for the room, so it kind of bent over at the top, but it had a wonderfully interesting “swoosh” to the branches, unlike the normal, cone-shaped tree.

This, of course, is Samantha contemplating one of the presents. While most of the ornaments that can be seen here are official Christmas ornaments, I think a few are from our first Christmas.

Our start together was a bit rough, since it involved me becoming suddenly unemployed (from a profession I’ve not yet admitted to in this blog — but probably will in the coming days). As a result, we had very little to live on and often had to improvise our entertainments. (A few cold cuts and half-stale bread are quite palatable when turned into a romantic picnic in High Park — the only kind of picnic I’ve ever really liked.) For our first Christmas, Samantha used items from around the studio to decorate our tree. It turned out beautiful. There are photos, and I’ve even found them in the locker, but they’re so dark they won’t show up, damn it.

Neither Sam nor I can remember what was in that blue box. I’m sure it’s still around somewhere, but we haven’t seen it for a long time.

The Gray Cat

Here Samantha is holding “The Gray Cat.” We got him during our “Studio Days,” as we call our first years together when we lived in a studio near High Park. After getting a new kitten, we had trouble naming him. I called him Luang Tzu, Samantha called him Pussywillow, and Flo called him Lamont (after Lamont Cranston, “The Shadow”). In the end, he just became “The Gray Cat.”

Sam looks oddly sad in this picture, although to the best of my knowledge there was nothing particularly bad happening, and it’s unlikely I would have been snapping pictures if there had been. Still, I feel like a gas station attendant is waiting just out of frame to step forward and tell her, “There’s a storm coming.” To which, of course, she will reply, “I know.”

(Okay, enough geek movie references.)

The ad agency

These are the two women with whom I shared light flirtations throughout my time at the ad agency. That’s “Nadira” on the left, and “Charlene” on the right. I believe this photo was taken the day we went out after work to see a movie, taking along Charlene’s young son and daughter.

The young daughter, at whom I’m looking somewhat askance in this photo, was the cause of an amusing incident shortly after our movie night. Charlene invited Sam and I over for dinner, and when we arrived at her apartment, her daughter answered the door and happily ushered me in. When she saw Sam behind me, however, she said, “Who’s she?”

“That’s Samantha,” her mother told her, “Frank’s wife.”

“No!” yelled the little girl. “You can’t come in!” Whereupon she physically shoved Sam back out into the hallway and slammed the door.

Charlene was a little embarrassed, but we managed to get her daughter to allow Samantha in and the rest of the evening went well. After a time, the girl even came to grudgingly like Sam.

Along with my two sweethearts, Nadira and Charlene, there were two other women working in the data entry department next to my office: “Kory,” and “Lydia.” This photo is of Kory, who kept to herself a lot, although she enjoyed the hijinks that went on around her (of which there were plenty in an ad agency back then). Lydia was far more outgoing, but avoided cameras. On the other hand, Sam and I often went to her place, where I’d spend the night on my violin, jamming with her husband and his friends, while everyone else sat around and talked. One of these sessions is described in my post, “Company enough: A phenomenology of playing the blues.”

Sketches

Repose

From the date, which appears to be April 12, 1989, this must have been done when we shared an apartment with our friend, Richard, on Vesta Drive, just above Eglinton off Bathurst Street. I would have been working at the ad agency, and all thoughts of commercial art were long gone, but I went through a phase of occasionally getting out the pens, pencils and pastels. I haven’t seen this one in over 30 years, and certainly don’t remember drawing it.

Normally I view my old drawings with great embarrassment, but you know, looking at this one now I really have to say — why the hell did I draw her head so small?!

Repast

This disproportioned mess comes from our studio days near High Park. The year is hard to make out, but it can’t have been later than ’85. There was a tavern in the mall at the corner of Bloor and Dundas West called “The Crossroads Tavern.” I think I was only in it twice, but on one occasion I must have done this sketch. There’s a torn-out page in the sketchbook next to it. A note on an adjoining page explains that the missing page contained another sketch I did while at the tavern. This one was of a woman who had given me a “much-needed cigarette.” I guess I tore out the sketch and gave it to her. No memory of it, though.

And yes, it appears that I’ve combined my initials into a tiny sketch of a teddy bear or something in the bottom right corner. I assure you, that was not at all typical and I have no idea why I might have done something like that.

Now imagine this picture eight long by four feet high

This one is from the ’70s, back when I was painting really bad murals. It’s a full colour preliminary sketch of a mural I did for some institution or other. It’s been shellacked and the paper is very brittle now. The edges are cracked, but since the scanner is smaller than the paper, they don’t show up here.

Princess

While I may have been the official (albeit failed) commercial artist, Sam has also done her fair share of sketching from time to time, and generally with a much lighter touch than I manage to achieve. This portrait probably comes from the later ’80s, judging by the sketchbook I found it in. We have no idea whether it’s taken from life, a photo, or her imagination.

And that’s it for now.

Wow! This is so, so much easier than having to actually craft a post, with all that thinking and stuff.

V8 Juice and Canadian unity

For the first several years, my articles on advertising (of which “Chicken art and Canadian Politics” was an example) were written under an assumed name. Of course, Frank Lee MeiDere is also an assumed name, but this was yet a different assumed name, and I only used it because I was the assignment editor, and it didn’t seem right to have the assignment editor also writing a column on advertising — especially when the column often treated advertising in an unflattering and satirical fashion.

Anyhow, in digging out the Chicken Art piece, I ran across “V8 Juice and Canadian Unity,” which ties in V8 Juice with Catwoman, lesbian strip clubs, and the national unity crisis Canada was undergoing at the time (1994).

Since reposting old material is way, way easier than writing new stuff (especially when job searching), I’m copping out and and reposting.

Unlike the previous post, however, there is nothing here that needs explaining to non-Canadian readers — aside from the fact that Canada has several seasons including winter, hockey, and Quebec-threatening-to-separate-from-the-rest-of-the-country.

In 1994, we happened to be going through that Quebec one again.

__________________________________

Lucien Bouchard (Image via Wikipedia)

Anglophone Canadians trembled recently when Lucien Bouchard revealed that a Quebec separation would pave the way for America to invade and annex Western Canada.

And while the Bloc Quebecois Leader later denied making such statements (by arguing “I would be crazy. Am I crazy? Am I crazy? Do I look crazy?“), his skilled rhetoric came too late to quell Anglo anxieties.

I make this observation after having seen not one, but three French-only V8 advertisements in the Wellesley/Yonge/Church streets area: an obvious bid to placate French-speaking vegetable juice drinkers.

The area chosen for this campaign is a common site for bold and experimental advertising. The wall painting of Cat Woman at Yonge and Wellesley attracted a great deal of attention, and TTC ridership increased at Church and Wellesley when the transit shelter there posted a nicely photographed ad for Toronto’s only lesbian strip club.

With such a tradition of liberality it’s no wonder that this area would be chosen for the latest “My Canada Includes More Than Your Canada” campaign.

Unites Canadians and cures gout. (Image via Wikipedia)

The posters, which hang outside a couple of convenience stores, show two people, each drinking a bottle of V8. Underneath is the phrase, “V8 est a notre gout,” which I believe means, “V8 prevents gout” I am, however, unable to confirm this, as my translator isn’t talking to me until she determines whether or not Bouchard is, in fact, crazy.

Nevertheless, such a translation makes sense as a ploy to hold onto Quebec. Rich French cooking has been known to cause gout; V8 prevents gout. Subtextually, what the ads are saying is that no matter what Quebec wishes to dish up, we’ll eat it.

At the top of the ad is the word “Sante!” which probably is French for “Sanity.” What clearer message could we send to Quebec as a plea for Canadian unity? Protesters will storm Ottawa chanting: “My Canada includes Sanity!” and “V8 prevents gout!”

It’s this kind of unambiguous sloganeering that has served so well in forcing carefully planned political action in the past.

Nor should we, as do some, take lightly the threat of separation. While many commentators have pointed out various problems that could arise should Quebec choose independence, M. Bouchard has openly stated what the rest of us have hardly dared even think: that with Quebec gone there would be nothing to prevent an American invasion. Surely even the most politically naive have known that the only reason the United States has not already invaded Canada is because of their natural reluctance to get saddled with  Quebec nationalists.

And so it is with many thanks that we salute V8′s selfless effort to do its part in keeping Canada together. I’d like to end with one of those rousing French slogans, but I just called my translator and she still hasn’t determined Bouchard’s mental stability.

Some mysteries may never be solved.

Jessica Simpson, Demi Moore, and me

Well, I did my best.

Unsatisfied with the quality of WordPress’s choices for their daily “Freshly Pressed” feature, I decided to write a post guaranteed to get selected, and thereby rake in a massive traffic boost. After careful scientific analysis, I determined that successful posts fell into six categories:

1. Food
2. Travel to exotic locales
3. Photography
4. Parenting
5. The journey to becoming a writer
6. Lists

So, my post included a recipe on making Shredded Wheat, photos taken with my cellphone camera of our our trip to exotic Niagara-on-the-Lake (20 minutes from where we live), advice on parenting, advice on the journey to becoming a writer, and lists.

I posted the night before last, then waited for my hundreds and hundreds of hits.

And what did I get yesterday?

Hundreds and hundreds of hits.

Seriously. Hundreds and hundreds. Where I generally get between 15 to 25 hits a day, yesterday I got 814. That’s better than a 3100% increase. I not only got more hits than any other day in the history of this blog, I got more hits than I get for most months.

And it turns out that it’s all because of Jessica Simpson.

Whom I’ve never once mentioned.

Avril Lavigne. A Google neighbour.

I’ve spoken of such influential women as Jana Parizkova (Member of Czech Parliament, and Pollster for the Public Affairs Party) and Jenny McCarthy (Playboy model and medical expert on vaccines). I’ve talked about movie stars such as  Michelle Pfeiffer, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frances Arden (Fred’s maid in the 1953 version of A Christmas Carol). And I’ve mentioned Big Bang Theory‘s Kaley Cuoco, Glee‘s Jane Lynch, and Firefly‘s wonderfully bizarre and talented Summer Lau.

I may even have mentioned singer Avril Lavigne once or twice, whose photo I’ve include above for identification purposes.

But Jessica Simpson? Nope. Never.

My wife. My personal combination of Avril and Jessica.

Jessica puzzling over the difference between fish and fowl.

That’s not to say I don’t like her. I think she’s sweet. I’ve never paid much attention to her, mind you, but I did see one episode of her reality TV show. It was the one in which she was eating Chicken of the Sea™ tuna and asked her husband if it was chicken or tuna. Everybody, including her husband, made fun of her, but I didn’t. My wife, despite her university education and amazing ability for logical analysis (or possibly even because of it), is prone to making equally gullible comments, so Jessica’s question just served to endear her to me.

Still, the fact remained that the name Jessica Simpson has never, until this post, appeared in my blog.

So how could she be sending all this traffic my way?

Jessica Simpson in her more innocent days.

Well, it’s a bit complicated. I had no idea why all these people were suddenly showing up at my blog (not one of whom so much as left a comment. Huh!). Making matters even more confusing was the fact that almost all of them were going straight to a post I did a year ago on the thriving baby industry in the virtual world of Second Life (“Second Life: The miracle of virtual birth“). Upon examining my statistics more closely, however, I discovered that all these hits were the result of people searching for the photo of a nude, pregnant Demi Moore from the cover of Vanity Fair – which I had used as a graphic for the post.

“Well,” I thought, “that explains it.”

And then I thought, “Wait a minute. No it doesn’t! Why are all these people looking for that old photo of Demi Moore?”

Sure, I get the occasional hit for that, but it’s at the rate of one or two a week — certainly not several hundred in one day.

Jessica Simpson 2012. Demi Moore 1991. Bad ideas never get old.

So I did a Google news search on “Demi Moore pregnant photo” and discovered that Jessica Simpson, as The Houston Chronicle explains it, “is doing the nude and pregnant Demi Moore thing.“

This, apparently, is such big news, that thousands of people are busily searching the internet for photos of both the Jessica Simpson image and the Demi Moore image (probably for comparison purposes).

And that’s why yesterday, on a blog that routinely gets under 30 visits a day, I got 814 hits.

814.

Oh — and that post I did? The one guaranteed to get on the Freshly Pressed page and bring hundreds and hundreds of hits?

Eight.

Eight people have read it.

Yep. I know what I’m doing, all right.

Related articles

• Jessica Simpson’s Not The Only Celeb That’s Revealed Everything (kymx.radio.com)

Six pieces of advice for parenting while cooking in exotic locations during a photoshoot on the journey to becoming a writer — all in list form!

This is a photo I took of food. The recipe is to pour boiling water on Shredded Wheat, drain the water, then add milk, a sprinkle of salt, and about a two cups of sugar. (If you're watching your weight, cut back on the sprinkle of salt.)

WordPress has a feature called “Freshly Pressed” in which 19 posts are published on the WordPress front page. These posts are meant to represent the “best” of all WordPress bloggers.

That certainly seemed to be true when I first noticed them a couple of years ago. They were diverse, well written, and frequently over 1,000 words long.

And then, quite suddenly, everything changed, and they became predictable, amateurish, and short. But what really ticked me off was seeing one Freshly Pressed post that consisted solely of the default “Hello World” page that comes with every new WordPress account.

I mean, seriously? This is “the best”?

If this kind of crap can get Freshly Pressed, why not my kind of crap?

I’ve been looking at them more closely lately, and realized that the posts now featured on WordPress’s “Freshly Pressed” page all seem to fall into one or more of six categories:

1. Food
2. Travel to exotic locales
3. Photography
4. Parenting
5. The journey to becoming a writer
6. Lists

So I decided to write a post incorporating all six categories.

There are, however,a few problems with this plan. Six problems, to be precise:

1. My parenting days are well behind me.
2. I hate traveling (and travelers).
3. I can’t cook anything other than scrambled eggs and duck l’orange (I am a man of few, but diverse, talents).
4. The only camera I have is my cell phone, which has no aesthetic sense
5. I’m a failed writer, and seven years of failing to teach the skill to college students proves it.
6. I don’t do lists.

So it’s possible my experiment won’t work.

This is a photo I took of the exotic Ice Wine Festival in the exotic locale of Niagara-on-the-Lake, where we traveled to from our home 20 minutes away. We met many exotic natives and learned their exotic ways. We also ate some of their exotic food. Exotic. Exotic.

Still, for what it’s worth here’s the post that may well land me on that most coveted page in WordPress: Freshly Pressed.

1. Parenting: If you’re a parent, you’re an adult. Advice: Quit whining and act like one.
2. Cooking: Food is really great when you’re hungry. When you’re not hungry, there are other things to do. Advice: Do them.
3. Travel: Lao Tzu said, “The more you travel, the less you know.” That’s because many people who don’t travel are able to converse about ideas, music, movies, and a host of other subjects. People who do travel, however, often seem incapable of conversing about anything other than travel. Advice: Get a life.
4. Photography: You know how there are all these jokes about people who pull out the family album every time a visitor comes over? There’s a reason for those jokes. Advice: Put the album away.
5. The journey to becoming a writer: Becoming a writer is, indeed, a journey, and grammar and punctuation should be your traveling companions. Advice: Shut up!
6. Lists: Lists can be very effective for conveying concise information. Advice: Don’t mistake lists for actual writing. Also? Never, ever have more than one list in a post.

Thank you. (590 words)

Chicken art and Canadian politics

At the end of “When Pookas attack,” I intended to link to an article I did back in 1997 called “Chicken art and Canadian unity” –  a review on Rob Thompson’s art performance piece in which he protested treatment of commercially-bred chickens by putting two people in a cage for a week.

But then I discovered that I had never posted it here.

I don’t know how I could have been so remiss. It’s actually one of my favourites. But I’ve searched and searched, and as far as I can see, it is nowhere to be found on I Don’t Give a Damn.

So I’m posting it now.

While the basics of Thompson’s performance art are made fairly clear in the text, there are a few referencesthat non-Canadian readers may not understand.

Stornoway (Image via Wikipedia)

Stornoway: In Canadian federal elections, we don’t actually elect the prime minister, we elect the party, the leader of which becomes the prime minister and moves into 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa. The party that comes in second is declared the official Opposition, and its leader moves into  541 Acacia Avenue — a house better known as Stornoway. When Preston Manning became Leader of the Opposition in 1997, he originally declared he would sell Stornoway or turn it into a Bingo hall to help pay off the national debt.

Of course, he did neither.

Jean Chretien (Image via Wikipedia)

Talking to the homeless: Around the same period, the prime minister, Jean Chretien, told a gathering of high school students that he often conversed with a homeless man near 24 Sussex Drive. When reporters failed to find the man, and began asking questions about how he could talk to anyone with the security detail that constantly surrounded him, Chretien was forced to admit that the story wasn’t true.

 Parizeau and Bouchard: These were a couple of Quebec politicians from the time. Their outrageous and often incoherent statements are sadly missed.

I think everything else is self-explanatory. I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I enjoyed writing it.

___________________________________

Eric Wolf and Pam Meldrum in their chicken cage.

Considering the spate of controversy surrounding Rob Thompson’s recent performance-art in Ottawa, a naive observer could be forgiven the impression that caging two people for a week is somehow “strange” or “peculiar.”

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite those critics who doubt the validity of Thompson’s art, he is in fact following a long tradition of avant-garde aesthetes, not the least of whom was the late, great Rudolf Schwarzkogler who amputated various portions of his body until he ran out of material and died.

Leaving aside philosophical concerns regarding performance-art — such as whether it should be considered “late-modern” or “postmodern” (particularly in view of Ihab Hassan’s carefully reasoned 1980 article, “The Question of Postmodernism,” in which he concludes that he really isn’t sure) — there is still the matter of its remarkable allure and powerful effect.

Rudolf Schwarzkogler with fish.

Indeed, if Thompson’s recent piece is to be condemned for anything, it should be condemned, not for being too radical, but for being too mainstream. Performance-art has become such a common method of propagating an idea that, regardless of its proper dialectic position within modernity, it should at least lose its status as a “subordinate” or “alternative” art form.

And Canada has contributed more than its share of talent to the field. Few would argue that the most successful Canadian performance-artists in recent years are Parizeau and Bouchard who combine the comedic talents of Laurel and Hardy with the political sophistication of Abbot and Costello. But many others, albeit less spectacularly, have displayed their own form of artistic genius.

Consider, for instance, the recent meditation on public vs. private housing. No debate could have raised awareness in quite the same fashion as Preston Manning’s performance piece entitled “Stornoway.” And art critics will long remember Jean Chretien’s innovative 1996 piece, “I Talk to the Homeless,” which so poignantly highlighted the distressing, and mostly ignored, tragedy of mental illness brought on by serving too long in an elected office.

It is precisely this ability to drive home important messages without benefit of rational thought that makes performance-art so valuable. Rob Thompson could hardly have chosen a more suitable method to highlight the living conditions of commercially bred chickens than by paying two people $5000 each to sit in a cage for a week.

Having conceded the validity of his project, however, we are not then compelled to overlook its few, but glaring, weaknesses.

In the first place, his indexical symbology would have been more accurate had he placed two women in the cage rather than a man and a woman, since hens, by and large, tend to be female. By mixing his gender-related imagery, he not only compromises the overall integrity of his work, but also destroys the otherwise natural connotations that could have been developed vis a vis the broader canvas of women’s issues.

Nor should he have allowed Eric Wolf and Pam Meldrum (the “chickens”) to speak. A more demanding artistic standard would have restricted their articulation to clucks — although an argument could have been made for Eric Wolf, as the rooster, to occasionally crow.

Still, despite these, and other lapses in the execution of his work, Thompson’s piece succeeded in its overall effect. Not only did it create a visually disturbing image concerning the main issue of fowl-slavery, but when we remember that over 80 people applied for the position of “chicken,” it also vividly carried a strong subtextual message concerning the effects of mass unemployment.

Other good news is that Thompson may have inspired an artistic response. According to recent reports, an unidentified commercial chicken farmer living in the Niagara Peninsula is thinking of producing his own performance piece dramatizing the plight of free-range chickens. In this work, up to twenty people will spend their nights perched on wooden rods. During the day, of course, they will strut around a dirt yard eating food from the ground with their mouths.

Works like these will assure Canada of its proper place in the artistic pecking order.