Author: Alan

Three Years Ago

I wrote this at Steve’s blog three years ago in the replies to his post:

Alan McLeod
[7:48 AM September 17, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.caI have found myself, like everyone else, having been staring at the TV in a daze for days. I was in the middle of a presentation at the curling rink in Summerside last Tuesday when someone came into the room to tell what was going on. I drove home at lunch and the TV has seemingly been on ever since. One thing that has happened here in New Glasgow, PEI is that there are no passenger jets overhead flying between Europe and the US east coast. Usually there are 5 to 10 in the sky at any one time. You notice the silence. I have seen two con-trails but am reliably told that it is likely a US military refueling tanker. Moncton airport apparently has about 5 US jets operating out of it now, according to a PEI air traffic controller.

I flew the flag at half mast. Most people did around here. I have thought alot about the bit of business I have done in the US on four trips in the last year and the people I have met. I thought about the road in Connecticut I drove down with Dan and Nathan after getting a bit lost one evening trying to find the sea from a place near Hartford. The road was parallel to the one we wanted as it turned out. It was fifty miles of large homes on forested lots – multi-car garages, guest houses. As we drove south cars passed us going north, going home for the night. When we hit the coast road, the commuter train station was full of people heading for what looked to us Maritimers as luxery cars, coming home from a workday in the City, in Manhattan. The next day, I bought a big Connecticut flag – like I like to wherever I travel. I flew it at half mast Sunday.

Alan McLeod
[7:56 AM September 19, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

I was interested in reading Peter’s comments as a first crisis as a Dad. The same is true for me. I have these echoes of war in the past that the 1990’s had silenced. When I was a child in suburban Ontario in the late 60’s I remember asking my mom if we were at war. We were watching Vietnam on TV. I remember having bombing dreams after Dad told me for the millionth time that when he was my age, Hitler carpet bombed his grannies house along with their whole town – Greenock, Scotland – for three days. I remember heading about the fall of Saigon on the school bus heading to junior high. I remember the fear in high school and undergrad that Ronnie R. and Leonid B. would vaporize us all. I remember in law school wondering with the rest of the team if the intermural basketball game should go on given that the US had just started bombing Bagdad. And Rwanda and Bosnia…and then nothing… No big events for eight years. Relatively speaking peace was breaking out, the UN acted in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Things were being handled. I moved into a good career, got married, got a mortgage and a couple of kids. Then the buildings fell down…Driving to work the other day I actually got a start when I saw, coming down the Brackley Road, low on the horizon a Dash Eight coming into land at the airport. I saw in my mind that building. One one hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff. On the other hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff…

Alan McLeod
[10:38 AM September 19, 2001]

A good reference but, for me, at 38, having lived my first 28 or so during the Cold war, the presence of war and the potential to be sucked into one personally was never “violence unthinkable” despite how the life of a Canadian 20-something gen’ x’er in Nova Scotia was so peaceful and fun. On top of the fears, I wrote about above, my folks moved in ’56 to avoid the Third World War believed coming due to Hungary, French-Indochina and the Suez. When I got my UK Right of Abode in 1981, my mother thought Maggie T. might draft me for the Falkins. The fear of the bomb. We were living in our own minds on borrowed time and as a result were in no rush to prepare for kids, mortgages and careers. My 20’s were different from your – perhaps until now. From the fall of the Wall until the falling of the WTC there was a period of freedom from “the bomb” that I think I will not experience for a while.

Alan McLeod [7:33 AM September 24, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

Like everyone, I am still thinking about what has happened and how things have changed since 11 September. One thing I think has changed is that irony and cynicism as a guiding principle for one’s life has been severely undermined. In North American popular culture for 20 years or so, the ability to comment upon any proposition with a tongue in cheek reort has been acceptable, almost expected and often a winning point in a conversation. David Letterman was an early adherent. We were so witty that we could turn any philosophical proposition or political stance around to show its paradoxical components and therefore its lack of integrity. Few principles could sustain the probe – wealth was bad but being a bleeding heart helping the poor is pointless emotionality; liking art was lightheaded but disliking art was neanderthalic; being involved with politics was self-interested, not being involved…well that was OK because that serves irony. The dominance of irony seems to have been swept away this month. Friends, beauty, nature, reflection are all assets we are being told to lean upon to understand the world now. Causes are largely just, protests are mute and people have gotten nicer on the highways. Will it last? Will street people have enough coin to get things to eat? Will we like our new neighbours and ask to try their strange foods? Will we stop thinking about our own inadequacies at work or home and enjoy the day?

David has posted his remembrance here. I glad Steve kept his archives.

Unexpected Tribute

A very unexpected and gracious tribute to Romeo Dallaire, my personal greatest Canadian, was entered this evening as a reply to a post I made on my blog last January. Please go read it.

Update: these two articles in French indicate that there was a Senegalese intellegence officer by the name Amadou Démé in Rwanda at the time.   [My French is poor as is the Google translator so if anyone can identify more information about this, please do.]   In January 1994, he apparently uncovered arms caches of the Interhamwe (also known as the Interahamwe) militia which played a major role in the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994.   In 1994, Senegal sent a battalion-sized force to Rwanda to participate in the UN peacekeeping mission there.   Dallaire commanded that mission.

Hydrogen Scooter

I saw this on Boing and wondered what are we waiting for? A zippy machine that drinks split water and runs by reforming it and doesn’t make you look like a dork like the mythical but seemingly world-winning and innovative except if you want to do something other than drive it around a parking lot Segway.

As if a Quadrophenia would ever be written about Segway riding.

Constitutional Meltdown Comin’

Just when things in Canada were looking boring, the right-wingers, the left-wingers and the separatists have joined together to take control of the nation’s Parliment in which they hold more than half the seats but do not govern.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, New Democratic Leader Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois unveiled a laundry list of measures at a joint news conference in Ottawa, topped by a call to require votes on all opposition motions — a move that could lead to House votes on international treaties, Canadian Forces deployments and changes to marriage rules. The three leaders also said that they should be consulted by the
Governor-General if the Liberals seek the dissolution of the Parliament.

The last bit is a wee bit nutty. I’ll have to have some supper and a good
think before I pronounce on how this Kingy-Byngy power grab will play out.

Later:



“My dearest Pet, so sad the colonials have no idea of their constitutional limitations” – you sense that is what the British government really wanted to tell the Canadian Governor General Mr. Field Marshall Viscount Bynggggg (sounds nice when alternated with “bonggggggggg”) in 1926 when he had the mad idea of actually using the powers granted, surely, the nicest tyrant in the world. Essentially, he – as executive of the land – wanted to tell Parliament who he would recognize as leader of Parliament, and it was not Mr. Fruitnut Cake King the minority-wielding Prime Minister. “The Governor-General might not have acted wisely but there is no doubt that he had the right, given the circumstances, to refuse to follow King’s advice.” But, in the end, the electorate voted Mr. F.N.C. King back in, telling Viscount
Byngy-Bong and the rest of his royalist hoo-haas that the gin and tonics would have ice in them from now on, thank you very much.

So here we are, 78 years later and Mr Martin and his Liberalés are 40-odd seats short of the others and face a united opposition intending on dropping the hammer at their convenience after half-running the show for a while. Sooner or later they will go to the Governor General saying, quite rightly, that they have over 60% of the seats and 60% of the popular vote and that they have the nuttiest coalition this side of Gilligan’s Island. What is the ex-host of CBC TV’s
Take
30 to do?   Will she phone Juliette
for advice? Perhaps Elwood
Glover of Luncheon Date fame? [Note: I ate more tomato soup watching Elwood Glover than all of youse put together].

So there you have it. The opposition is not supposed to talk to the Governor General and vice-versa but if they have the run of the House of Commons could she…would she?

Ultra-Terrorismo

I too have been wondering about the expansion of the word “terrorist”¹ a lot lately and words which have fallen away…but not quite this much.

¹Note: cogent discourse of the etymology of said word welcomed. Partisan pasting to be deleted or defaced with funny looking fonts which will dispell any shred of the thin veil of validity said pasting might convey otherwise.