open letter to jason kenney from canadian council for refugees

Please read this!

8 January 2009

The Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P.
Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism
Citizenship and Immigration Canada
Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1L1

Dear Minister,

I am writing to convey to you the concerns of the Canadian Council for Refugees at some of your recent public remarks about US war resisters who have sought Canada's protection.

Firstly, we welcome the fact that you underlined, in your letter to the Toronto Sun, published 2 January 2009, that the Immigration and Refugee Board is an independent tribunal.

Given that the IRB is independent, it is highly inappropriate for you to express your opinions on how you believe IRB members should make refugee determinations. To do so gives the strong appearance of political interference. This is especially so given that reappointments are made by Cabinet: Board members might fear that if they do not follow your interpretation their chances of reappointment will be reduced. Highly publicized cases such as the war resisters are always challenging for the IRB which must live up to its obligation to make fair, impartial and politically unmotivated determinations, based on the jurisprudence and the evidence before it. Public comments such as yours only make IRB members' job more difficult and threaten claimants' right to an unbiased decision.

Whether or not the war resisters are found to meet the Convention refugee definition, the war in Iraq is contrary to international law and has been conducted in a manner that has involved extensive documented human rights abuses. Given these facts, we are surprised and dismayed to find you making disparaging remarks about these individuals and even finding fault with them simply for making a refugee claim. These are individuals who deserve our admiration for following their consciences and refusing to participate in wrongdoing, at significant cost to themselves.

We are also shocked to see you arguing that the claims made by US war resisters are leading to delays for others in the refugee claim process. This is not a credible argument given that the number of US war resisters making claims in Canada is miniscule and can have no appreciable impact on the delays faced by refugees. On the other hand, as you are aware, the failure of your government to appoint sufficient Board members has led to the creation of a huge backlog and extremely lengthy delays for refugees. Resolving the need for sufficient appointments to the IRB by Cabinet will go a very long way to shortening delays in justice for refugees; negative comments about war resisters will not.

The Canadian Council for Refugees supports all war resisters from any country who refuse to engage in armed conflict that is contrary to international humanitarian law.

We urge you to allow such war resisters to remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, if they are facing removal to a country where they would face punishment for their refusal to participate in such an armed conflict. As you know, finding a resolution in this way for the war resisters would win wide support among Canadians and would be in line with the motion adopted by Parliament in June 2008 calling for a program allowing war resisters to apply for permanent residence.

Yours sincerely,


Elizabeth McWeeny
President

My deepest thanks to Elizabeth McWeeny and the Canadian Council for Refugees. The Government prefers us weak and divided, the better to pick us off one by one. But we will stand strong in solidarity. Let Them Stay!

naomi klein: boycott, divest, sanction

In her latest column in The Nation, Naomi Klein writes:

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

She goes on to list the most common counter-arguments, and responds to each. Read it here.

kenney's comments prejudice refugee process

From CBC, emphasis mine.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's comments that U.S. military deserters living in Canada are "bogus refugee claimants" reveal the government has a prejudiced outlook on their cases, advocacy groups say.

"Everyone, including war resisters, has a right to expect their applications will be dealt with in a fair and impartial manner," Lee Zaslofsky, co-ordinator of the War Resisters Support Campaign, said in a release.

"Minister Kenney's comments show the Harper government has a blanket policy of opposition to all war resisters, which makes it nearly impossible for them to be treated on a 'case-by-case basis' as our government has been leading Canadians to believe they would."

Earlier this week, Kenney responded to a ruling by the Immigration and Refugee Board that Kimberly Rivera, reported to be the first U.S. female deserter seeking asylum in Canada, had to leave the country.

The mother of three's request to stay on humanitarian and compassionate grounds was rejected at a hearing in Mississauga, Ont. Her family has been told to leave Canada by Jan. 27.

"We're not talking about draft dodgers, we're not talking about resisters," Kenney told Canwest News earlier this week.

"We're talking about people who volunteer to serve in the armed forces of a democratic country and simply change their mind to desert. And that's fine, that's the decision they have made, but they are not refugees.

"I don't appreciate people adding to the backlog and clogging up the system whose claims are being rejected consistently 100 per cent of the time," Kenney said later on Parliament Hill, adding that they are "bogus refugee claimants."

In an open letter to Kenney, Elizabeth McWeeny, president of the Canadian Council for Refugees, wrote that it was "highly inappropriate" for Kenney to express his opinions on how he believes board members should make refugee determinations.

"To do so gives the strong appearance of political interference," she wrote. "Public comments such as yours only make IRB members’ job more difficult and threaten claimants’ right to an unbiased decision."

She also dismissed Kenney's claim that refugee claims by U.S. war resisters are leading to delays for others, saying the number is "minuscule" and will have "no appreciable impact" on delays.

Mr. Kenney, you're right about one thing: someone's making bogus claims. You're claiming that war resisters are being given fair and impartial due process - while you parade around poisoning their cases in the media.

saturday, january 10: rally for gaza

From Canadian Peace Alliance and the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War:

Rally for Gaza on Saturday!

Stop the war on Gaza NOW!
Stop the bombing. End the siege. Freedom for Palestine.

RALLY
Saturday, January 10, 11:00 a.m.
Israeli Consulate, 180 Bloor Street West (TTC: St George)

Followed by:

FREE GAZA: A TEACH-IN
Saturday, January 10, 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Steelworkers' Hall, 25 Cecil Street (south of College, east of Spadina)
Full program below

The Canadian Peace Alliance and the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War have called on all members and supporters to support existing demonstrations, or to organize their own, this Saturday, January 10 to demand that the Canadian government call for an immediate end to the massacre in Gaza.

The Toronto Coalition to Stop the War has joined with Palestine House, the Canadian Arab Federation, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, and others for this Saturday's rally in Toronto.

We know that almost 600 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed and thousands more maimed and wounded since the Israeli assault began, and many more will be killed as the humanitarian disaster worsens.

The Government of Canada has so far rejected calls for a ceasefire and is supporting the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza. As with the wars in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan, Stephen Harper has proven himself to be firmly in the camp of the war mongers of the outgoing Bush administration. This does not reflect the will of the majority of Canadians who want to see our country as an arbiter of peace rather than a country that supports the bombing of civilians.

Canadian Foreign Minister, Lawrence Cannon has blamed Hamas for starting this conflict by sending rockets into southern Israel, yet the facts contradict this assertion. According to Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories:

"There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4 directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom."

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has been worsening since the Israeli blockade began two years ago. International agencies, including the United Nations, have condemned the blockade which has severely limited necessities such as medical supplies and food. The Harper government has been one of the most vociferous supporters of this collective punishment and was the first government to end humanitarian aid to the Palestinians after the election of Hamas.

Since the Israeli bombing began, the crisis has worsened. More than 80 per cent of Palestinians are without needed food aid, and hospitals are operating on the thousands of wounded without anaesthetics or even basic pain killers. Electricity and communications have also been targeted resulting in isolation and deprivation for the 1.5 million people of Gaza.

The current assault on Gaza is an aggressive war that violates international humanitarian law and the Geneva Convention. Our government is now complicit in these war crimes. Canadians will not stand by while the Conservative government supports the unilateral massacre of innocent people.

Demonstrations will be held throughout Canada this week. For a full listing of events, see this website or this Facebook page.

The Toronto rally is organized and endorsed by the following organizations:

Palestine House, Canadian Arab Federation, Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario Division, Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Steelworkers Toronto Area Council, Canadian Peace Alliance, Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, Not in Our Name – Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network Toronto, Independent Jewish Voices, Yosher – Jewish Social Justice Network, Women In Solidarity with Palestine, Muslim Unity Educators for Peace and Justice, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Near East Cultural and Educational Foundation, Canadian Forum for Justice and Peace in Sri Lanka, Muslim Association of Hamilton, Canadian Druze Society, Canadian Syrian Cultural Club, Al Huda Canadian Shia Muslims Organization, Worker to Worker Canada Cuba Solidarity Network, Somali Canadian Diaspora Alliance, Science for Peace, Bayan – Canada, Bengali Student Association, McMaster Muslims for Peace and Justice, Arab Students Association at Ryerson University, and more. To endorse, please e-mail info@palestinehouse.com.

More information:

FREE GAZA: A TEACH-IN
Saturday, January 10, 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Steelworkers' Hall, 25 Cecil Street (south of College, east of Spadina)

PROGRAM

1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.: Workshops
The crisis in Gaza: History and context
- Israel, Gaza and the "war on terror"
- Gaza, Israeli Apartheid and the political economy of the Middle East
- Canada's complicity, Zionism and Islamophobia
- Media mythology: "Rebranding" Israel and covering the war

3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.: Panel
Gaza: The humanitarian crisis

4:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.: Panel
Building solidarity: Next steps

To register: E-mail your name, with subject "Free Gaza Teach-in", to faculty@caiaweb.org. Pay what you can at the door: $5 to $50 (sliding scale).

what i'm watching: the diving bell and the butterfly

This was a good month to be a renter and not a homeowner. In early December our furnace was taken off-line because of a carbon monoxide risk, and our landlord had to have a new furnace installed. Then on New Year's Eve, our oven - which never worked that well to begin with - died an ugly death. I'll never be able to finance my retirement with the sale of a home, but I was pretty happy to have someone else buy the new furnace and oven.

So last night, instead of attending the candlelight vigil for Gaza, we were waiting for our new stove to be delivered. (It never arrived.)

Instead, we watched "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", which many of you have seen and recommended. I read the book in translation many years ago, and was very interested in the movie.

If you haven't heard of it, the movie is based on Le scaphandre et le papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of French Elle magazine. Bauby, who was a bon vivant, a Paris social jet-setter, suffered a massive stroke and was in a coma for three weeks. He awoke with "locked-in syndrome". The locked-in patient is fully conscious and intelligent, but completely paralyzed.

Bauby had the use of one eye. Only that. Through blinking his eye - and with help from several dedicated, compassionate people - he wrote a book about his experience. Writing the book gave Bauby purpose and reason to live. And the book gives us a rare opportunity to share the thoughts and feelings of a person who must live locked in his own mind.

The book raises questions about what it means to be alive and how our self is formed. As someone who thinks a lot about disability, I long ago realized that our bodies are just necessary shells, and our true selves are something very separate from our physical selves. Our individual human-ness, if you will, doesn't stem from being bipedal or the ability to speak or any physical capacity. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of the best books I've read that explore those themes.

I thought director Julian Schnabel and scriptwriter Ronald Harwood did an excellent job of bringing the book to the screen. Perhaps the most striking thing about the movie is that it's faithful to the book's first-person narrative. Most of it is seen through Bauby's eye.

It's a beautiful movie, very sad, and, I think, very hopeful. Humans are so amazingly resilient and endlessly adaptable. It's easy to look at Bauby and think, who could live like that? The challenge is to enter into his journey - what he discovered inside himself, and the deep connections he made with other people.

One of the DVD extras was an interview with Julian Schnabel by Charlie Rose. I don't know if Canadians are familiar with Rose. He hosts a PBS show where he interviews people from all different fields, in extended one-on-one conversations or roundtable discussions. He's famous for asking questions that go on for five minutes while his guests struggle to get a word in edgewise. But he's also famous for probing discussions, not PR puff pieces, with writers, musicians, athletes, politicians, scientists and other interesting and influential people.

In his conversation with artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, Rose characterized the movie as being "about death", as taking place in "the netherworld between life and death". I must disagree with that. To me, Jean-Dominique Bauby was very much alive, until the day his life actually expired. His body was still, but no one existing in a netherworld could have written that book.

tell michael ignatieff we must let them stay!

Here's a riddle for you. How can you tell the difference between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff?

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

Damned if I know!

After Ignatieff's recent statement blaming Hamas for Israel's massive bombing seige of Gaza, calling Hamas a terrorist organization and Israel's actions self-defense, I see foreign policy will not be the area on which the two can be distinguished.

I know that tune well. I've heard it sung in the US all my life.

There is one issue on which the two leaders differ, at least in theory. Last year, when Ignatieff was Liberal Deputy Leader, he did support allowing Iraq War resisters to stay in Canada. Right now, we want him to reaffirm that support.

Supposedly Ignatieff now knows the Iraq War was a mistake (something even Harper has publicly admitted!), and has recanted his earlier support of the invasion. Supporting Iraq War resisters would be a concrete action he can take to stand by that revised opinion.

We are asking our supporters to email Michael Ignatieff, with a copy to MPs Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal Immigration Critic, and Jim Karygiannis, a strong supporter of war resisters in the last Parliament.

Urge them to to immediately issue a statement about the deportation order against war resister Kim Rivera and her family (husband Mario, son Christian (6) daughters Rebecca (4) and Katie (6 weeks)). Ask them to oppose the deportation order publicly and decisively.

Don't forget the other war resisters facing imminent deportation: Chris Teske, Patrick Hart and his family, Cliff Cornell, Dean Walcott.

The Liberals supported the motion of June 3, 2008, recommending that "conscientious objectors to wars not sanctioned by the UN Security Council" be allowed to stay in Canada and apply for Permanent Resident Status after two years, and calling on the Government to "cease all deportation proceedings" against such people.

Despite this, as deportation orders have been issued against many war resisters, the Liberals have been silent. We need the Liberals' support - and they need ours.

Please urge them to speak up, demand that the Harper Government comply with the House of Commons motion of June 3, 2008, state their intention of supporting a similar motion when the House reconvenes later this month.

Emails to:

Liberal Party Leader Michael Ignatieff: Ignatieff.M@parl.gc.ca
Liberal Citizenship and Immigration Critic Borys Wrzesnewskyj: Wrzesnewskyj.B@parl.gc.ca
MP Jim Karygiannis: Karygiannis.J@parl.gc.ca

Email now! Thank you!

january 19 - 24: let them stay week

If we don't raise our voices loudly and clearly, January will be Deportation Month for Iraq War resisters in Canada. Take a look at this:

Chris Teske - deportation date January 20

Cliff Cornell - deportation date January 22

Kim Rivera (along with spouse Mario, and children Christian, Rebecca and Katie) - deportation date January 27

Patrick Hart (along with spouse Jill and son Rian) - deportation deferred from January 15 to January 29

Dean Walcott - deportation deferred from January 6 to January 30

It's no coincidence that these are all stacked up before Parliament returns. And with the throne speech on January 26 and the budget on January 27, we can be sure any late-January deportations will slip under the media radar.

In addition, there are three important court dates in February and March, for Jeremy Hinzman, Joshua Key and Matt Lowell. Decisions in these cases could well affect all the resisters. It would be tragic to send people to military prisons in the US, only to learn a few weeks later that the court is deciding in their favour.

With this in mind, the War Resisters Support Campaign is asking you to join us for Let Them Stay Week.

Beginning January 19, people all over Canada will call Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney, call their MPs, write letters to local newspapers, email their friends, hand out leaflets, blog, Facebook and whatever else we can think of.

We must keep this issue visible, and make our demands clear: we want the Government of Canada to follow the will of the people. The majority of Canadians - almost two-thirds in the most recent poll - want Canada to allow war resisters to stay in Canada. That was clearly expressed in Parliament on June 3, when all three opposition parties passed a motion calling on the Government to Let Them Stay.

Harper ignored the motion, then, after shutting down Parliament, is rapidly deporting war resisters.

This is not only about the 50-odd US war resisters who have applied for refugee status in Canada. It's about democracy. It's about what kind of Canada we want to live in.

Please join us for Let Them Stay week. More details here and on Resisters.ca as they happen.

the latest deportation order

I went with the Rivera family, lawyer Alyssa Manning and some other campaigners to the centre where refugee claimants receive their final decisions. Earlier, I said this was an Immigration and Refugee Board centre, but I forgot that at this point, it's Canadian Border Services Agency. The deportation people.

The "Greater Toronto Enforcement Centre" is a brutal place. The walls are the colour of vomit, the chairs are as uncomfortable as possible and there aren't enough of them, there's one washroom, and it's hidden. There's not even a vending machine. The whole place fairly screams, "You are not welcome here".

People are told to be there at 9:00 a.m., but you're seen when they get to you. It sits in the shadow of Pearson Airport, and if you don't have a car, it's an enormous time and expense to get there. How many refugee claimants can afford to keep a car, I wonder?

Many campaigners have been up there several times when resisters were getting decisions, but the timing had never worked out for me. I was glad (so to speak) that I got to see it in person this time, and to be there for my friend Kim.

So. Kim Rivera, Iraq War veteran, peace activist, mother, wife, friend, and her beautiful family, are slated for deportation at the end of this month.

The good news is that we've been winning in the courts: stays of deportation, then leave to appeal, and in one case so far, permission to file a new application. I have to believe that Kim will get a stay, too.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney makes no pretense at impartiality, as his predecessor Diane Finley did. Kenney says the war resisters are not "real" refugees, and we've got to deport them back to the US. The Government is not supposed to intervene in Immigration and Refugee Board decisions, but this Conservative Government has no shame.

And no heart.

war resister update: kim rivera gets deportation notice

Kimberly Rivera received a negative decision this morning on her H&C and PRRA.

The Rivera family -- Kim, her husband Mario, their son Christian (age 6), and daughters Rebecca (age 4) and Katie (age 5 weeks) -- are scheduled to be deported January 27.

As Laura mentioned here, once in the US, Kim will face court martial and prison.

(more news as I get it)

gta activism on gaza crisis

I've just learned about two events to support and show solidarity with the people of Gaza, happening right here in Mississauga. (You know, the suburbs, where supposedly nothing happens and no one cares about anything but shopping?)

I know there have been several vigils and demonstrations to protest Israel's siege of Gaza, in Toronto, London and many other Canadian cities. Unfortunately for me, those demos are always on weekends, when I'm working.

But this Thursday, January 8, at 7:00, there will be a candlelight vigil at the Mississauga Civic Square at City Hall. From Palestine House:

As you know, the people of Gaza are being bombarded by a devastating onslaught from Israeli F16s, tanks and warships. Nearly 540 people have been killed and thousands injured. This massacre follows almost two years of blockade which has prevented essential supplies of food, fuel and medicines from reaching the Palestinian people in Gaza and causing untold suffering.

Palestinian civil society continues to urge solidarity in the form of a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign until Israel complies with international law. This is the time for people of conscience to take up this call from Palestine.

On Thursday, we call on all of you to join us for a Candlelight Vigil to denounce the latest Israeli crimes and to demand that the Harper government end their unconditional support for Israel.

Next week, there'll be an excellent opportunity to learn more about this crisis: Norman Finkelstein will be speaking at the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein, author and thinker on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Israel and Palestine: Roots of Conflict and Prospects for Peace

Mississauga, Ontario, Thursday, January 15, 2009, 06:00 PM

ADDRESS
U of T - Mississauga Campus
CCIT Building, Room 1080
3359 Mississauga Rd.
Mississauga ON L5L 1C6

TICKET INFO
Admission is free. Event is hosted by CJPME and UofT-Mississauga Student Association

DETAILS
Dr. Norman Finkelstein is an American professor of Political Science and one of the foremost thinkers and speakers on the Israel-Palestine conflict. His sincere, open and honest assessment of the conflict through a number of books including "The Holocaust Industry," "The Rise and Fall of Palestine," and "Beyond Chutzpah" has attracted attention throughout the world. He grew up in New York City and is the son of Holocaust survivors. He specializes in Zionism - his doctoral thesis focused on the theory of Zionism - and Jewish-related topics, and was most recently a professor of Political Science at DePaul University. In his talks in Canada, Dr. Finkelstein will also share some of the findings of his research for his upcoming book about the breakup of North American Zionism.

Dr. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics, Princeton University. Dr. Finkelstein has many articles and made many public appearances on topics relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict. For details and links to his work, essays and public appearances, please click here to consult Dr. Finkelstein's Website.

Dr. Finkelstein is the author of five books:

Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press, August 2005)

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (Verso: 2000; expanded second edition, 2003); an international bestseller, it has been translated into twenty four foreign languages Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso: 1995; expanded second edition, 2003); translated into five foreign languages

A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn) (Henry Holt: 1998); named a "notable book of 1998" by the New York Times Sunday Book Review, it has been translated into three foreign languages

The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years (University of Minnesota: 1996); translated into two foreign languages.

This notice, plus a map of the location here.

I hope to make it to both these events, so look for a report.

war resister update: matt lowell, kim rivera

I've just learned that war resister Matt Lowell has been granted leave to appeal in the negative decision on his Humanitarian & Compassionate application. Matt's lawyer, Alyssa Manning, will argue his case before the court in mid-March. If Matt and Alyssa win, Matt will be able to file a new H&C application.

Many thanks to Alyssa, who labours tirelessly on behalf of the war resisters, and David Heap, friend of wmtc, coordinator of the London War Resister Support Group, where Matt lives in London, Ontario.

We continue to win in the courts! Unfortunately, the Immigration and Refugee Board has been less promising.

Tomorrow morning, I'll join a small contingent of campaigners as we accompany war resister (and my dear friend) Kimberly Rivera, her husband Mario, their son Christian (age 6), daughter Rebecca (age 4), and daughter Katie (age 5 weeks), to the Immigration and Refugee Centre, where they will receive the final decision in their H&C and PRRA. We are hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.

"The worst" in this case means a deportation order. It would be nice to think that the Government of Canada will not toss a new mother and her children out of the country, a woman who has done nothing wrong, and who simply wants to live in peace. But based on what the IRB has told other resisters, including those with children, it is unlikely.

The Harper Government will probably send the Riveras back to the US, where Kim faces court martial and prison.

genericized brand names: use a tissue, not a kleenex

I've decided to try to get brand names out of my speech patterns. It may be only symbolic, but I'd like to rid my vocabulary of corporate marketing as much as I can. I want to call objects by their actual names, not what Procter & Gamble or 3M or Johnson & Johnson wants me to call them.

As far as I can tell, the use of genericized brand names is even more prevalent in the Canada than in the US, but it's rampant on both sides of the border.

I grew up saying "Scotch tape," but have been trying to say "clear tape" now, or just "tape", if the type of tape is understood in context.

I've never said "Kleenex" for "tissue". My family always said "tissue" so that's what I came to use.

But I do say Band-Aid and Q-tip. I haven't yet gotten the knack of "bandage" and "cotton swab," but I'm going to try. I believe in the UK they're called ear-buds or ear-sticks. Not sure what Canadians say?

I do say "photocopy," not "Xerox". But I still use "white-out" occasionally, not "correction fluid". (The brand name is spelled without the h.)

Until I looked into this, I never even knew that the words "ketchup," "aspirin," "dry ice" and "zipper" were all once trademarked. What would I use in their stead? I know Brits say "zip," but to me, that's a verb. And what on earth is "catsup"? I can't go there. So I'll give myself permission to use certain words that have filtered down into generic vocabulary. It might be arbitrary, based on how long a word has been in use, or what my grandmother said, but rather than try to remake all my speech patterns, I'll just go with these.

But I will stop calling my generic ibuprofen "Advil".

In Canada, as in the UK, people vacuum the house by doing the "hoovering". People call cream cheese "philly". For some reason, that one particularly rankles me. I always want to yell, "It's cream cheese! Call it cream cheese!" (I don't.)

I'm told that some USians, especially Southerners, grew up using "coke" as a generic name for soda or pop. I've never heard it myself, but I'm sure that would drive me crazy, too. That would be like calling a hamburger a "McDonald". Awful.

Then there are relatively recent - historically speaking - locutions like Walkman, iPod, Rollerblade and the verb Photoshop. The expression "inline skate" is common (I wrote about that once), but who ever called a Walkman a personal stereo device? Or an iPod a portable media player, no matter what the brand? It takes too long. I'll ask, "Is that Photoshopped?", not, "Did someone digitally alter that picture?"

This may be more difficult than I thought.

wmtc endorses redneck mommy for best canadian blog

As I mentioned, we move to canada is a finalist for Best Canadian Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards. It's very flattering to be included in any best-of poll, but that's as far as I'll go with this one.

In my estimation, of the blogs on this short list of Canadian blogs, the best is Attack of the Redneck Mommy. On her beautifully designed blog, Tanis Miller writes with wit and eloquence about love, loss, family, and everything else that comprise our lives. She's very good, and of the choices, I'd most want her to represent Canada.

There are also several blogs on that list that I don't want to represent Canada, if you get my drift. Several progressive bloggers are teaming up - forming a coalition, if you will - to endorse Redneck Mommy. One progressive blogger who declined to participate said, among other things, that we are fostering right-wing style competitiveness. I'm hard pressed to see how bowing out of a race and asking readers to vote for someone else fosters competitiveness. But each to her own.

I'm voting for Redneck Mommy, and I hope you will, too. Put it this way: if you would have voted for wmtc, please vote for Attack of the Redneck Mommy instead. Please visit her blog for voting links.

greenwald: x is good when done by us and evil when done to us

Excellent reading from Glenn Greenwald.

There are few concepts more elastic and subject to exploitation than "Terrorism," the all-purpose justifying and fear-mongering term. But if it means anything, it means exactly the mindset which Goldfarb is expressing: slaughtering innocent civilians in order to "send a message," to "deter" political actors by making them fear that continuing on the same course will result in the deaths of civilians and -- best of all, from the Terrorist's perspective -- even their own children and other family members.

To the Terrorist, by definition, that innocent civilians and even children are killed isn't a regrettable cost of taking military action. It's not a cost at all. It's a benefit. It has strategic value. Goldfarb explicitly says this: "to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause."

That, of course, is the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings. And it's the logic that leads infinitely weak and deranged people like Goldfarb and Peretz to find value in the killing of innocent Palestinians, including -- one might say, at least in Goldfarb's case: especially -- children.

. . . .

I can't express how many emails I've received in the last week from people identifying themselves as "liberals" (and, overwhelmingly, American Jews); telling me that they agree with my views in almost all areas other than Israel; and then self-righteously insisting that I imagine what it's like to live in Southern Israel with incoming rocket fire from Hamas, as though that will change my views on the Israel/Gaza war. Obviously, it's not difficult to imagine the understandable rage that Israelis feel when learning of another attack on Israeli civilians, in exactly the way that American rage over the 9/11 attacks was understandable. But just as that American anger didn't justify anything and everything that followed, the fact that there are indefensible attacks on Israeli civilians doesn't render the (far more lethal) attacks on Gaza either wise or just -- as numerous Jewish residents of Sderot themselves are courageously arguing in opposing the Israeli attack.

More to the point: for those who insist that others put themselves in the position of a resident of Sderot -- as though that will, by itself, prove the justifiability of the Israeli attack -- the idea literally never occurs to them that they ought to imagine what it's like to live under foreign occupation for 4 decades (and, despite the 2005 "withdrawal from Gaza," Israel continues to occupy and expand its settlements on Palestinian land and to control and severely restrict many key aspects of Gazan life). No thought is given to what it is like, what emotions it generates, what horrible acts start to appear justifiable, when you have a hostile foreign army control your borders and airspace and internal affairs for 40 years, one which builds walls around you, imposes the most intensely humiliating conditions on your daily life, blockades your land so that you're barred from exiting and prevented from accessing basic nutrition and medical needs for your children to the point where a substantial portion of the underage population suffers from stunted growth.

So extreme is their emotional identification with one side (Israel) that it literally never occurs to them to give any thought to any of that, to imagine what it's like to live in those circumstances. Nor does this thought occur to them:

I was trained from an early age to view this group as my group, to identify with them emotionally, culturally, religiously. Maybe that -- and not an objective assessment of these events -- is why I continuously side with that group and see everything from its perspective and justify whatever it does, why I find the Dick Cheney/Weekly Standard/neoconservative worldview repellent in every situation except when it comes to Israel, when I suddenly find it wise and vigorously embrace it.

Those who defend American actions in every case, or who find justification in attacks on Israeli civilians, or who find simplistic moral clarity in a whole range of other complex and protracted disputes where all sides share infinite blame, are often guilty of the same refusal/inability to at least try to minimize this sort of ingrained tribalistic blindness.

The whole essay, with links, is here.

I am intimately familiar with the attitude of many (not all!) US Jews that Greenwald writes about: my father was one. He was very progressive, a lifelong socialist. But when it came to Israel, he was a jingoistic dittohead. And I'm quoting him there! He freely admit this blind spot, but he never examined it, and he never backed away from it.

People say, oh, it's complicated, this Jewish response to Israel. It's emotional. It's deep. It's hard to explain.

But in reality, it's not complicated. It's simplistic. The North American Jewish support of Israel's bombing of Gaza are no more complicated than a bumper sticker that says "These Colors Don't Run" and "If You Don't Stand Behind Our Troops, Then Stand In Front Of Them".

Anyway, here's Glenn Greenwald, he explains it much better than me.

what i'm reading: the shock doctrine

I segued right from 1491 to The Shock Doctrine.

I actually wasn't going to read this book. I read several extended excerpts in Harper's (I blogged about it here and here) and some other places. As much as I love Naomi Klein, I thought I already knew the book's basic premise and arguments, so I could skip it.

Allan bought it when it came out in paperback, and it's been sitting on the shelf.

Then the other day I was about to leave for some errands, when I realized I needed something to read to while waiting for my roots to turn blond. I was running late and I grabbed the first book I saw that I hadn't already read. There's an image for ya: I read things like The Shock Doctrine at the hair salon. Why the hell not.

Well, I started it and I can't put it down. Except I have to continually put it down because parts are so deeply disturbing, that I must mentally walk away and catch my breath. But I keep coming back.

You've probably already read it, but if you haven't, don't be as foolish as I almost was.

one out of every four homeless people in the u.s. is a veteran

From Adam Glantz, author of The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans, published on Common Dreams. Emphasis mine, but please read the whole essay.

Roy Lee Brantley shivers in the cold December morning as he waits in line for food outside the Ark of Refuge mission, which sits amid warehouses and artists lofts a stone's throw from the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco.

Brantley's beard is long, white and unkempt. The African-American man's skin wrinkled beyond his 62 years. He lives in squalor in a dingy residential hotel room with the bathroom down the hall. In some ways, his current situation marks an improvement. "I've slept in parks," he says, "and on the sidewalk. Now at least I have a room."

Like the hundreds of others in line for food, Brantley has worn the military uniform. Most, like Brantley, carry their service IDs and red, white and blue cards from the Department of Veterans Affairs in their wallets or around their necks. In 1967, he deployed to Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army. By the time he left the military five years later, Brantley had attained the rank of sergeant and been decorated for his valor and for the wounds he sustained in combat.

"I risked my life for this democracy and got a Bronze Star," he says. "I shed blood for this country and got the Purple Heart after a mortar blast sent shrapnel into my face and leg. But when I came back home from Vietnam I was having problems. I tried to hurt my wife because she was Filipino. Every time I looked at her I thought I was in Vietnam again. So we broke up."

In 1973, Brantley filed a disability claim with the federal government for mental wounds sustained in combat overseas. Over the years, the Department of Veterans Affairs has denied his claim five separate times. "You go over there and risk your life for America and your mind's all messed up, America should take care of you, right," he says, knowing that for him and the other veterans in line for free food that promise has not been kept.

On any given night 200,000 U.S. veterans sleep homeless on the streets of America. One out of every four people - and one out of every three men - sleeping in a car, in front of a shop door, or under a freeway overpass has worn a military uniform. Some like Brantley have been on the streets for years. Others are young and women returning home wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, quickly slipping through the cracks.

For each of these homeless veterans, America's promise to "Support the Troops" ended the moment he or she took off the uniform and tried to make the difficult transition to civilian life. There, they encountered a hostile and cumbersome bureaucracy set up by the Department of Veterans Affairs. In a best-case scenario, a wounded veteran must wait six months to hear back from the VA. Those who appeal a denial have to wait an average of four and a half years for their answer. In the six months leading up to March 31st of this year, nearly 1,500 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claims would be approved by the government.

There are patriotic Americans trying to solve this problem. Last month, two veterans' organizations, Vietnam Veterans of America and Veterans of Modern Warfare, filed suit in federal court demanding the government decide disability claims brought by wounded soldiers within three months. Predictably, however, the VA is trying to block the effort. On December 17, their lawyers convinced Reggie Walton, a judge appointed by President Bush, who ruled that imposing a quicker deadline for payment of benefits was a task for Congress and the president - not the courts.

President-elect Barack Obama has the power to end this national disgrace. He has the power to ensure to streamline the VA bureaucracy so it helps rather than fights those who have been wounded in the line of duty. He can ensure that this latest generation of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan does not receive the bum rap the Vietnam generation got. Let 2008 be the last year thousands of homeless veterans stand in line for free food during the holiday season. Let it be the last year hundreds of thousands sleep homeless on the street.

the only thing wrong with this title is the question mark

A new book asks a question we all know the answer to.

Is George W. Bush a war criminal for deliberately violating the Geneva Conventions? Can he be prosecuted when he leaves office on January 20, 2009? The answers are found in Michael Haas's George W. Bush, War Criminal? The Bush Administration's Liability for 269 War Crimes, which documents 269 war crimes and assesses the culpability of Bush and his administration.

The author, Michael Haas, has written more than thirty books, most recently International Human Rights: A Comprehensive Introduction (2008). A well-known political scientist, he played a key role in stopping American funding of the Khmer Rouge. His book exposing Singapore's many human rights violations is banned in that authoritarian country.

The Foreword to the book is written by former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz.

The following chapters delineate 269 war crimes:

1) A President Without a Good Lawyer
President George W. Bush is ambitious but not a lawyer, so he relies on legal advice. The attorneys on which he has relied have been widely criticized as lacking the competence and wisdom to provide sound advice. Bush has preferred to "kick ass" (in his words) rather than listen to the legal fine points.

2) Crimes of Aggression
The concept of "just war" developed from the writings of Saint Augustine and others into international agreements prohibiting aggressive war. The primary war crime is to wage war without UN approval. There are five other crimes against peace, including propaganda for war, all violated by Bush.

3) Crimes Committed in the Conduct of War
Abraham Lincoln promulgated a code of warfare that served as a basis for the Red Cross Convention, the Hague Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, Bush and his commanding generals have allowed 36 violations of these and other international agreements.

4) Crimes Committed in the Treatment of Prisoners
Although General Tommy Franks ordered troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to follow the Geneva Conventions whenever they encountered enemy personnel, he was quickly countermanded by Bush. The “gloves came off,” and thousands were improperly treated. Some 175 war crimes have been committed, many captured on film, within American-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo—and in secret prisons.

5) Crimes Committed in the Postwar Occupations
Whereas the postwar military occupation of Afghanistan was brief, the expected scenario for postwar Iraq did not materialize. Iraq was governed by L. Paul Bremer, who claimed direct authority from President Bush in proclaiming "I am the law," and another 52 war crimes have been committed.

6) Tribunals for War Crimes Prosecution
American and international law provides the basis for lawsuits, but sitting presidents cannot be brought to court on criminal offenses. Some cases have already been filed in Europe. This chapter will indicate which tribunals have been and could be used for trials as well as the statutory and treaty basis. Penalties under the law are identified.

7) The Bush Administrations' War Crimes Liability
President Bush is directly responsible for some but not every war crime identified in the analysis, so an assessment is made of his culpability for each specific violation as well as members of his Cabinet, top military brass, field commanders, and field personnel. The ramifications of both suing and not suing Bush are complex. Arguments pro and con are reviewed. A truth commission is proposed.

The blog is here: USWarCrimes.com.

1491: excerpts part 3

Here's one last group of excerpts from 1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Earlier posts here, here and here.

Until about 200 million years ago Eurasia and the Americas were lashed together in a single landmass that geologists call Pangaea. Pangaea broke into pieces, sending the continents drifting like barges across the ocean floor. For millions of years, the separate fragments of Pangaea had almost no communication. Evolution set their species spinning off on separate trajectories, and the flora and fauna of each land diverged so far from each other that the astounded Columbus remarked that "all the trees were as different from ours as day from night, and so the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and all things."

Columbus was the first to see the yawning biological gap between Europe and the Americas. He was also one of the last to see it in pure form: his visit, as Alfred Crosby put it, initiated the process of knitting together the seams of Pangaea. Ever since 1492, the hemispheres have become more and more alike, as people mix the world's organisms into a global stew. Thus bananas and coffee, two African crops, become the principal agricultural exports of Central America; maize and manioc, domesticated in Mesoamerica and Amazonia respectively, return the favor by becoming staples in tropical Africa. Meanwhile, plantations of rubber trees, an Amazon native, undulate across Malaysian hillsides; peppers and tomatoes from Mesoamerica form the culinary backbones of Thailand and Italy; Andean potatoes lead Ireland to feast and famine; and apples, native to the Middle East, appear in markets from Manaus to Manila to Manhattan. Back in 1972, Crosby invented a term for this biological ferment: the Columbian Exchange.

By knitting together the seams of Pangaea, Columbus set off an ecological explosion of a magnitude unseen since the Ice Ages. Some species were shocked into decline (most prominent among them Homo sapiens, which in the century and a half after Columbus lost a fifth of its number, mainly to disease).

. . . .


When the newcomers moved west, they were preceded by a wave of disease and then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp down, and it was followed by many aftershocks. "The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," wrote historian Stephen Pyne, "it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.

By 1800 the hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If "forest primeval" means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the nineteenth century than in the seventeenth. The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.

At the end of 1491, Mann offers a theory that may surprise many people. He postulates that European settlers to what is now the US were influenced culturally by the native peoples they encountered.

According to Haudenosaunee [the indigenous name for the six nations that make up what Europeans call the Iroquois League] tradition, the alliance was founded centuries before Europeans arrived. Non-Indian researchers long treated this claim to antiquity with skepticism. The league, in their view, was inherently fragile and fissiparous; if it had been founded a thousand years ago, it would have broken up well before the Pilgrims. And there was little archaeological evidence that the league had existed for many centuries. But both traditional lore and contemporary astronomical calculations suggest that Haudenosaunee dates back to between 1090 and 1150 A.D.

The former date was calculated by Seneca historian Paula Underwood, who based her estimate on the tally of generations in oral records. The latter came from historian Mann and her Toledo colleague, astronomer Jerry Fields. The Five Nations recorded the succession of council members with a combination of pegs and carved images on long wooden cylinders called Condolence Canes. (Iroquois pictographs could convey sophisticated ideas, but functioned more as a mnemonic aid than a true writing system. The symbols were not conventionalized — that is, one person could not easily read a document composed by another.)

According to Mohawk historian Jake Swamp, 145 Tododahos spoke for the league between its founding and 1995, when Mann and Fields made their calculation. With this figure in hand, Mann and Fields calculated the average tenure of more than three hundred other lifetime appointments, including popes, European kings and queens, and U.S. Supreme Court justices. Multiplying the average by the number of Tododahos, the two researchers estimated that the alliance was probably founded in the middle of the twelfth century.

To check this estimate, Mann and Fields turned to astronomical tables. Before 1600, the last total solar eclipse observable in upstate New York occurred on August 31, 1142. If Mann and Fields are correct, this was the date on which Tododaho accepted the alliance. The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth. Only Iceland's Althing, founded in 930 A.D., is older.

. . . .

Here, though, most historians have stopped. They have seen the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking societies they encountered in the Northeast as too different from British societies to have exerted lasting changes on them. How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? My suggestion that the Haudenosaunee could have had an impact on the American character is "naive," according to Alan Taylor, because it "minimizes the cultural divide consensual natives from coercive colonists." Perhaps so, but then skeptics must explain how the cultural divide between Indians and Spaniards, who did deeply influence each other, could have been so much smaller.

(The historian Francis Jennings has wondered how "Iroquois propagandists," as he calls them, can cite Benjamin Franklin's words as I did, given his oft-expressed "contempt for 'ignorant savages'...but people believe what they want to believe in the face of logic and evidence." The argument is baffling; it is like claiming that African-Americans had no impact on European-American culture, because the latter was racist and systematically oppressed the former.)

To Europeans, Indians were living demonstrations of wholly novel ways of being human — exemplary cases that were mulled over, though rarely understood completely, by countless Europeans. Colonists and stay-at-homes, intellectuals and commoners, all struggled to understand, according to the sociologist-historian Denys Delage, of Laval University in Quebec, "the very existence of these egalitarian societies, so different in their structure and social relationships than those of Europe." Montaigne, Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine were among the writers who mulled over the differences between native and European ways of life; some pondered Indian criticism of European societies. The result, Delage explained, was to promote a new attitude of "cultural relativism" that in turn fed Enlightenment era debates "about the republican form of government, the rearing of children, and the ideals of freedom, equality, brotherhood, and the right to happiness."

Cultural influence is difficult to pin down in documents and concrete actions. Nevertheless it exists. In 1630 John Winthrop led what was then the largest party of would-be colonists from Britain — some seven hundred people — to Massachusetts, where they founded the city of Boston. As the expedition was under way, the deeply religious Winthrop explained his vision of what the new colony should become: "a city upon a hill." The city would be ruled by the principles of the Pilgrim's God. Among these principles: the Supreme Deity loves each person equally, but He did not intend them to play equal roles in society:

GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission.

Winthrop's ideal community, that is, was not a place of equal opportunity, nor a place where social distinctions were erased; the "mean" circumstances of the poor were "in all times" part of God's plan, and could not be greatly changed (if poor people got too far behind, the rich were supposed to help them). The social ideal was responsible adherence to religiously inspired authority, not democratic self-rule.

The reality turned out to be different. Instead of creating Winthrop's vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New England town meeting — a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin Galloway observes, that "displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained." To me, it seems unlikely that the surrounding Indian example had nothing to do with the change.

Accepting that indigenous societies influenced American culture opens up fascinating new questions. To begin with, it is possible that native societies could also have exercised a malign influence (this is why the subject is not necessarily "pious" or "romantic primitivism," as the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has complained). Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, "colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe" and "the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways." There, too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives; involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer.

On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies occurs in Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split slave states from free. The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with geography — southeastern climate and soil favor plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists' preference for slavery presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds. But can one readily dismiss the different Indian societies who lived in these places? And if not, to what extent are contemporary American conflicts over race the playing out, at least in part, of a cultural divide that came into being hundreds of years before Columbus?

1491: excerpts part 2

More from 1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Earlier posts here and here.

In 1994 Ruth Shady Solis, of the National University of San Marcos in Lima, began working fourteen miles inland from Aspero, at a site known as Caral. From the sandy soil emerged an imposing, 150-acre array of earthworks: six large platform mounds, one sixty feet tall and five hundred feet on a side; two round, sunken ceremonial plazas; half a dozen complexes of mounds and platforms; big stone buildings with residential apartments.

Haas and Creamer worked with the project in 2000 and helped establish Caral's antiquity: it was founded before 2600 B.C. While Shady continued work on Caral, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz split off to investigate the Pitivilca, the next river to the north, and the Fortaleza, just north of the Pitivilca. They found, Haas told me, "major urban centers on a par with Caral in terms of monumental architecture, ceremonial structures, and residential architecture. And some of them were older."

Examination of Huaricanga and the surrounding communities is far from complete — Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz published their first findings in December 2004. They found evidence of people living inland from the coast as early as 9210 B.C. But the oldest date securely associated with a city is about 3500 B.C., at Huaricanga. (There are hints of earlier dates.) Other urban sites followed apace: Caballete in 3100 B.C., Porvenir and Upaca in 2700 B.C. Taken individually, none of the twenty-five Norte Chico cities rivaled Sumer's cities in size, but the totality was bigger than Sumer. Egypt's pyramids were larger, but they were built centuries later.

I asked Haas and Creamer where a race of alien visitors in, say, 3000 B.C. would have landed if they were searching for earth's most sophisticated society.

"I hate questions like that," Haas said, because they ask scientists to engage in the dubious enterprise of ranking cultures against each other on a scale.

"Wouldn't it depend on what the aliens thought was sophisticated?" Creamer asked. "I mean, who knows what they would think."

I asked them to indulge me.

"I know what you're getting at," Haas said, reluctantly. "In 3000 B.C. your aliens would have had a very limited number of options on the menu. And one of those options would have been the Norte Chico."

Because human beings rarely volunteer to spend their days loading baskets with heavy rocks to build public monuments, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz argued that these cities must have had a centralized government that instigated and directed the work. In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects to perform heavy labor. It was humankind's second experiment with government.

* * * *

It has long been taught that civilizations arose around large-scale agriculture; because the oldest known civilizations did, it was postulated that all ancient civilizations developed along a similar path. It goes something like this. Foraging (hunter-gatherer) societies develop agriculture, which leads to a huge increase in the available food supply. More food leads to a huge increase in population. Society grows and stratifies. The elite organize the peasantry to work on large-scale public works projects, like irrigation systems, which in turn lead to more food, and more people.

Early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China all developed with farming as the common cornerstone. But in Peru, farming was an afterthought. Thus it was believed Peru had no great early civilizations.

But an alternate theory has developed, referred to as the Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilizations, or MFAC. It proposes that there was little substinence agriculture around early Andean societies because those cultures were built around fishing, and that subsequent Peruvian cultures, including the Inca, originated not in the Andes but around the great coastal fisheries.

Mann describes MFAC as "a brick through the window of archaeological theory... Archaeologists had always believed that in fundamental respects all human societies everywhere were alike, no matter how different they might appear on the surface." The MFAC hypothesis was "radical and unwelcome" - but the evidence for it is massive, and cannot be dismissed.

Further evidence both for and against the MFAC hypothesis emerged in the mid-1990s, with Shady's pathbreaking work on the Supe River. (Aspero, one recalls, sat at the river's mouth.) Shady's team uncovered seventeen riverside settlements, the second-biggest of which was Caral. In her view, monumental buildings implied a large resident population, but again there were plenty of anchovy bones and little evidence that locals farmed anything but cotton. To Moseley, the fish bones suggested that the ample protein on the coast allowed people to go inland and build irrigation networks to produce the cotton needed to expand fishing production. The need for nets, in Haas's view, gave the inland cities the whip hand — Norte Chico was based on farming, like all other complex societies, although not on farming for food. Besides, he says, so many more people lived along the four rivers than on the shore that they had to have been dominant. Moseley believes that Aspero, which has never been fully excavated, is older than the other cities, and set the template for them. "For archaeology," deFrance said, "what may be important" in the end is not the scope of the society "but where it emerged from and the food supply. You can't eat cotton."

Evidence one way or the other may emerge if Moseley and Shady, as planned, return to Aspero. If they are correct, and Aspero turns out to be substantially older than now thought, it might win the title of the world's oldest city — the place where human civilization began. "Maybe we might actually stop people calling it the 'New World,'" Moseley joked.

There is also enormous disagreement among scientists of how the Mesoamericans developed maize. To call maize a staple crop is to undersell it. It was the foundation on which Mesoamerican society was based; it was life itself. But maize - as I learned from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel was not found in nature and then domesticated, as the world's other staple crops - rice, wheat and barley - were. Maize was a completely human invention. How that occurred is hotly debated, and Mann walks you through the various theories. Then he reminds you that for our purposes, which theory is correct doesn't matter.

From the historian's point of view, the difference between the two models is unimportant. In both, Indians took the first steps toward modern maize in southern Mexico, probably in the highlands, more than six thousand years ago. Both argue that modern maize was the outcome of a bold act of conscious biological manipulation — "arguably man's first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering," Nina V. Federoff, a geneticist at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in 2003.

Federoff's description, which appeared in Science, intrigued me. It makes twenty-first-century scientists sound like pikers, I said when I contacted her. "That's right," she said. "To get corn out of teosinte is so — you couldn't get a grant to do that now, because it would sound so crazy." She added, "Somebody who did that today would get a Nobel Prize! If their lab didn't get shut down by Greenpeace, I mean."

As Jared Diamond made several appearances for me while reading 1491, so did Michael Pollan. I don't mean Mann referred to either author (although Diamond is cited in Mann's gargatuan list of references). I mean themes I read about in those author's books surfaced here, too.

Indian farmers grow maize is what is called a milpa. The term means "maize field," but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, the beans using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans' nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by teosinte. The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes.

Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks digestible niacin, the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, necessary to make proteins and diets with too much maize can lead to protein deficiency and pellagra, a disease caused by lack of niacin. Beans have both lysine and tryptophan, but not the amino acids cysteine and methionine, which are provided by maize. As a result, beans and maize make a nutritionally complete meal. Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, "is one of the most successful human inventions ever created."

* * * *

One of the most fascinating parts of 1491 was the section on the Amazon. The Amazon is not the completely pristine rainforest most people believe it to be. It's very likely that the Yanomamo - people thought of as living as their pre-contact ancestors did, some of the earth's last hunter-gatherers - are in fact closer to the holocaust survivors I mentioned earlier.

More important, anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and historians who were reassessing the environmental impact of indigenous cultures in North and Central America inevitably turned to the tropical forest. And in growing numbers researchers came to believe that the Amazon basin, too, bears the fingerprints of its original inhabitants. Far from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on calendars, these scientists say, today's forest is the product of a historical interaction between the environment and human beings — human beings in the form of the populous, long-lasting Indian societies described by Carvajal.

Such claims raise the hackles of many conservationists and ecologists. Amazonia, activists warn, is sliding toward catastrophe so rapidly that saving it must become a global priority. With bulldozers poised to destroy one of the planet's last great wild places, environmentalists say, claiming that the basin comfortably housed large numbers of people for millennia is so irresponsible as to be almost immoral — it is tantamount to giving developers a green light.

The Amazon is not wild, archaeologists and anthropologists retort. And claiming that it is will, in its ignorance, worsen the ecological ailments that activists would like to cure. Like their confreres elsewhere in the Americas, Indian societies had built up a remarkable body of knowledge about how to manage and improve their environment. By denying the very possibility of such practices, these researchers say, environmentalists may hasten, rather than halt, the demise of the forest.

. . . .

Unlike maize or manioc, peach palm can thrive with no human attention. Tragically, this quality has proven to be enormously useful. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what Balee calls "agricultural regression," these hunted peoples necessarily gave up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging. The "Stone Age tribespeople in the Amazon wilderness" that captured so many European imaginations were in large part a European creation and a historical novelty; they survived because the "wilderness" was largely composed of their ancestors' orchards. "These old forests, called fallows, have traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained ground) by Western researchers," Balee wrote in 2003. But they "would not exist" without "human agricultural activities." Indeed, Amazonians typically do not make the distinction between "cultivated" and "wild" landscapes common in the West; instead they simply classify landscapes into scores of varieties, depending on the types of species in each.

Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka'apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajo, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka'apor-managed forests, according to Balee's plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balee cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least n.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was "anthropogenic" — directly or indirectly created by humans.

1491: excerpts part 1

When I read a big, meaty book that excites me, I usually blog about it several times while I'm reading it. But for whatever reason, I found it difficult to write about 1491, so I'm posting about it all at once. Here are some sections I tagged for future reference.

* * * *

Nobody knows how many died during the pandemics of the 1770s and 1780s, but even if one had a number it wouldn't begin to tally the impact. Disease turned whole societies to ash. Six Cree groups in western Canada disappeared after 1781; the Blackfoot nation, blasted by smallpox, sent peace emissaries to Shoshone bands, only to find that all had vanished. "The country to the south was empty and silent," Galloway wrote. So broken were the Omaha by disease that according to tradition they launched a deliberately suicidal attack against their enemies. Those who did not die quit their villages and became homeless wanderers.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes — all gone. And not just once, but over and over again. In our antibiotic era, how can we imagine what it means to have entire ways of life hiss away like steam? How can one assay the total impact of the unprecedented calamity that gave rise to the world we live in? It seems important to try. I would submit that the best way to come near to encompassing the scale and kind of the loss, and its causes, is to look at the single case where the intellectual life of a Native American society is almost as well documented as its destruction.

. . . .

Cut short by Cortes, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophers and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexicans own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence — and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the disintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

Here and there we see clues to what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-reliefs, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European languages. British ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by giving the Indians brightly colored paints that unlike native pigments didn't wash off in the rain. Indians incorporated the new pigments into their traditions, expanding them and in the process creating an aesthetic nouvelle vague. European surrealists came across this colorful new art in the first years of the twentieth century As artists will, they stole everything they could, transfiguring the images further. Their interest helped a new generation of indigenous artists to explore new themes.

Now envision this kind of fertile back-and-forth happening in a hundred ways with a hundred cultures — the gifts from four centuries of intellectual exchange. One can hardly imagine anything more valuable. Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came ashore.

* * * *

The rekindled dispute over Indian origins has tended to mask a greater archaeological accomplishment: the enormous recent accumulation of knowledge about the American past. In almost every case, Indian societies have been revealed to be older, grander, and more complex than was thought possible even twenty years ago. Archaeologists not only have pushed back the date for humanity's entrance into the Americas, they have learned that the first large-scale societies grew up earlier than had been believed — almost two thousand years earlier, and in a different part of the hemisphere. And even those societies that had seemed best understood, like the Maya, have been placed in new contexts on the basis of new information.

. . . .

Next year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the "New World." Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.

* * * *

In college I read a one-volume history of the world by distinguished historian William H. McNeill. Called, simply enough, A World History, and published in 1967, it began with what McNeill and most other historians then considered the four wellsprings of human civilization: the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in modern Iraq, home of Sumer, oldest of all complex polities; the Nile Delta, in Egypt; the Indus Valley, in Pakistan; and, in east central China, the valley of the Huang He, more familiar to Westerners as the Yellow River. If McNeill were writing A World History today, discoveries like those at Huaricanga would force him to add two more areas to the book. The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.*

Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world's most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

*I am not criticizing McNeill for failing to include the Americas on his list of civilizations; he was simply reflecting the beliefs of his time. I would criticize World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity, a high school text published two decades later, in time for my son to encounter it. Referring exclusively to the "four initial centers" of civilization, this "world history" allocated just nine pages to the pre-Columbian Americas. The thesis of the book in your hands is that Native American history merits more than nine pages.

what i'm reading: 1491

I recently finished 1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann, but I've been having a lot of trouble writing about it. It's sweeping in scope, packed with fascinating, interrelated information, beautifully written, but not easily summarized. I'll give it a shot, and I'll also post excerpts that I've scanned, to give you a feel for the writing and the ideas.

Mann's basic premise is that the original peoples of the Americas were vastly more numerous, and their societies immensely more complex and advanced, than what most of us have been taught. There is also copious evidence to show that they were much older; there were advanced societies in this hemisphere for much longer than was previously believed.

A flood of new evidence pertaining to the pre-contact Americas - meaning, the Americas before European settlement - has been discovered, discussed and often hotly debated during the past 25-50 years. But, Mann says, almost none of it is has filtered down past specialist circles.

In his travels for writing and his own interest, Mann found himself stumbling on bits and pieces of this vast wealth of knowledge, all of it new to him and incredibly fascinating.

Gee, someone ought to put all this stuff together, I thought. It would make a fascinating book.

I kept waiting for that book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself.

Generations of North Americans grew up learning that the indigenous people of North America were small bands of hunter-gatherers who lived lightly on the land. We know that the ancient peoples of Mexico, Central America and South America built great civilizations, because the Spanish conquistadors found (and destroyed) those societies, and their remains are still visible to us. But the famous ruins of the Inca, Maya, Aztecs and a few others are only a small fraction of the many diverse that cultures populated these lands.

North of the equator, we learned that pilgrims and settlers arrived on land that was pristine. Natural. Untouched. The people who lived there - we thought - lived simple lives, not shaping and changing their environment the way more complex societies did.

This is emphatically false.

The native peoples of the Americas - including what is now the US and Canada - actively shaped their environment, molded and influenced the land around them, just as ancient peoples did in Sumer, in the Indus and in China. These original Americans were around nearly as long, and they accomplished every bit as much. Mann gives us a glimpse of the many wonders they created - the technology, the inventions, the culture - and it is truly astonishing.

By now most of us know that the greatest contributor to the demise of the native people of the Americas was disease. There was a big assist from out-right slaughter, of course, but the number one genocidal killer was smallpox. Yet few of us realize the scope of the devastation.

At the time of contact, Europeans had already built up an immunity to smallpox, but were carriers of the disease. People in the Americas had no immunity; in addition, it's likely they were genetically predisposed to not develop one. The numbers - even the conservative estimates of death - are staggering. It was an all-out genocide, with all the social dislocation and deterioration that would naturally follow.

By the time of Plymouth and Jamestown (pardon my US-centric history here), disease had already depopulated the Americas. The pilgrims thought they were seeing an unpopulated wilderness. What they were seeing were the survivors of genocide. It's as if beings from another galaxy came to earth in 1945, landed in Auschwitz, and thought all humans were emaciated creatures in striped pajamas. So devastated were the people themselves, so utterly wiped out were their societies, that within a few generations, the descendants of the survivors didn't even know their former society had ever existed.

The enormous herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, the huge size and vast numbers of oysters, the billions of passenger pigeons that European settlers reported seeing were not nature in some pristine state. They were, in fact, evidence of ecosystems completely out of balance because their principal predator and means of population control had been removed.

Europeans who wrote accounts of their first glimpses of "the new world" had no way of knowing that what they saw was not what had always been. But the Indian population they encountered was a tiny fraction of survivors.

Much of the information Mann presents is still controversial among specialist scholars. He takes you through the outlines of several controversies, but always brings you back to the larger picture. For example, how many Indians - Mann uses "Indians" throughout, except where it is known what the people called themselves, and he explains why he made this choice - lived on these continents, pre-contact? How many people died from the number-one killer, smallpox? Was it 40 million, or 20 million? Who is right, the "High Counters" or the "Low Counters"? How can we know, what evidence is there?

After an overview of the different theories and the scope of the debate, Mann reminds us that, for our purposes, it doesn't matter. Either way, there were many more people than we previously realized.

To Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over the number of deaths and the degree of blame obscures something more important. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding of the new scholarship is not that many people died but that many people lived. The Americas were filled with an enthusiastically diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. "We are talking about enormous numbers of people," she told me. "You have to wonder, Who were all these people? And what were they doing?"

Since Mann is reviewing and debunking our earlier notions about life in pre-contact Americas, 1491, by definition, deals with the history and sociology of science – how science is made, how society reacts, how politics and culture always influence what is known and disseminated. He offers evidence from physical anthropology, linguistics, genetics, the study of pollen, ice core samplings, and many more branches of scientific study. If you're an expert in any one of these fields, perhaps this book would seem overly reductionist. But for most of us, Mann is wonderfully adept at translating the science into more accessible terms.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I have an abiding interest in ancient civilizations, and a lifelong interest in the people of the Americas, especially of Mesoamerica and of Peru, the two cradles of civilizations in this hemisphere. So perhaps not everyone will find this book as compelling and fascinating as I did. But if you have any interest in the history of the land we inhabit - and if you enjoy exploding the myths of our stilted educations and learning something much more exciting, something much closer to the truth - and if you are interested in how we can know history, and what it can teach us, you will love this book.

Excerpts to follow.

happy anniversary to us

Today Allan and I celebrate 22 years of domestic partnership. Unfortunately this year January 3 falls on a Saturday, which means we have to work, so we'll celebrate on Monday.

Birthdays and anniversaries are our thing. We always do something very special for our anniversary, and a little something to mark our "other anniversary," the day we met.

In New York on January 3, we would go to one of the really high-end, four-star restaurants, and spend an obscene amount of money on an incredible dining experience. We did this long before we could even come close to affording such a thing - a complete indulgence, and always very memorable.

For the big round numbers, we've tried to go away. For five (which seemed big at the time!), we went to a gorgeous B&B in Pennsylvania, and for ten, to Bermuda.

Two years ago, for our 20th, we had a once-in-a-lifetime experience at the Ice Hotel. One of these years - maybe for 25 - I want to go to Quebec City.

This year we'll have dinner at La Castile, an old steakhouse in Etobicoke. For some reason I've wanted to go here for years, and this seems like a good excuse.

Thought for the day: 22 years is a long time! When I think back on the Allan and Laura who drove the U-Haul from Vermont to New York that day, it feels like we were different people. And we were. It's kind of amazing.

who serves in canada, who serves in the u.s.

I wrote a letter in response to this column by Christie Blatchford, but this letter is so much better, I'll share it with you instead.

Christie Blatchford demonstrates that Canada's armed forces are (still) primarily white, male and small-town based, and then uses this to smear both immigrants and urban dwellers, implying that neither seem interested in the "heavy lifting" soldiering requires.

Perhaps Ms. Blatchford would like to consider this problem from the opposite side of the coin. A democratic, peaceful, largely urban and fully industrial society like Canada has moved beyond the notion that a substantial armed forces is the key to prosperity.

Most Canadians do not want our troops in Afghanistan. Those of us who hold this view are not lazy; we simply disagree with the ideological underpinnings of armed combat or professional soldiering.

I respect those who toil in the armed forces; I grew up minutes from what was once one of the largest army bases in Canada. But I refuse to accept the red-necked rhetoric that being in the army is noble, while resisting its self-sacrificing lure is unpatriotic.

That is a sentiment best reserved for a nation far less free than ours.

Kim Solga, London, ON

Speaking of nations far less free than ours, how about this from the US military.

A veteran who has been out of the military for 15 years and recently received his AARP card was stunned when he received notice he will be deployed to Iraq.

The last time Paul Bandel, 50, saw combat was in the early 1990s during the Gulf War.

"(I was) kind of shocked, not understanding what I was getting into," said Bandel, who lives in the Nashville, Tenn., area.

In 1993, Bandel took the option of leaving the Army without retirement and never thought he would be called back to action.

"Here he's 50 years old, getting his AARP card, and here he's being redeployed with all these 18-year-olds," said Paul's wife, Linda Bandel.

"I can understand, say, 'Here, we have this assignment for you stateside. Go do your training,'" said Paul Bandel. "But, 'Hey, here's a gun, go back to the desert.'"

Involuntary recall allows the military, regardless of age or how long someone has been out of service, to order vets back into active duty.

Is it any wonder the US military needs "involuntary recall"? They have long since run out of sacrifices based on informed consent.

Involuntary recall is usually known as "stop-loss". Please remember that the next time someone says US war resisters should be deported from Canada "because they volunteered".

helen suzman, 1917-2008

Helen Suzman, a leader in the struggle for justice, has died at the age of 91.

Suzman was a tireless, and often lonely, voice for the end of apartheid in her native South Africa. As the only Member of Parliament representing the Progressive Party, she was probably the most recognized white anti-apartheid activist. She was an early champion (and later a friend) of Nelson Mandela, the only woman who ever visited the political prisoners on Robben Island.

From the New York Times obituary:

Diminutive, elegant and indefatigable, Mrs. Suzman confronted the forbidding Afrikaner prime ministers — Hendrik F. Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha — who became synonymous with apartheid's repression of the black and mixed-race populations. She was dismissive of the death threats she received by telephone and in the mail, and undaunted in her showdowns with the men she described as apartheid's leading "bullies," who in turn dismissed her as a "dangerous subversive" and a "sickly humanist."

Shouts of "Go back to Moscow!" greeted her when she rose in Parliament, and, on at least one occasion, "Go back to Israel!" — a reference to her antecedents as the daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. After the 1976 Soweto riots, Mr. Vorster mocked her for beating with what he called her "pretty little pink hands" against apartheid, while secure in the knowledge, as he claimed, that she and other white opponents could continue to enjoy the privileged lives apartheid guaranteed without fear that their demands for an end to the racial laws would succeed.

"I am not frightened of you — I never have been, and I never will be," she told Prime Minister Botha in a parliamentary exchange in the late 1970s. "I think nothing of you."

For his part, Mr. Botha called her "a vicious little cat." When a government minister once accused her of embarrassing South Africa with her parliamentary questions, she replied, "It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers."

Her home and office telephones were constantly tapped, an intrusion she liked to counter by blowing an ear-splitting whistle into the mouthpiece.

Anti-apartheid work was my first involvement in activism. When I was in university, the movement to persuade US businesses (including universities) to divest funds in South Africa was in full swing, not unlike the activism now around Israel.

Suzman disagreed with the divestment strategy, so she was a controversial figure in the movement. To me, though, she was thrilling: a woman, standing alone, unapologetic and unafraid, speaking truth to power.

yet another award nomination. not sure if we should care.

Through Jon Swift, I have learned that we move to canada is a finalist in the 2008 Weblog Awards, in the category of Best Canadian Blog.

Wmtc is not the best Canadian blog, but neither are any of the other nominees. And I say that with the utmost respect and admiration for my fellow progressive bloggers who were nominated: Saskboy, Buckdog, and Calgary Grit (see? I didn't forget you). It's a bit silly, calling any of us the best Canadian blog.

On the other hand, it would be nice to prevent any of the wingnuts on the finalist list from claiming influence and popularity that they don't deserve. Surely the Best Canadian Blog shouldn't be written by people who would remake Canada in the US's godly image. To look at the list, you'd think Canada was, well, Texas.

I keep saying I'm going to ignore all these awards, that they don't mean anything... then I get into it anyway.

Voting begins Monday, January 5.

random notes on a few masters: stephen sondeim, wayne shorter, philip seymour hoffman

Last night we watched "Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" Tim Burton's adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical. The movie is very good, and Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter are both excellent, but the real master of this movie is the music of Stephen Sondheim.

Sondheim is one of the great composers of our time, and among the greatest lyricists of any time. I saw Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" on Broadway in the late '70s, with the original cast of Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury. I was madly into theatre then - I still love it, but it was hugely important to me at the time - and the show was a transcendent experience.

The story translates beautifully to the screen, especially since the blood and gore - so central to the story - is more up-close and convincing. "Sweeney Todd" is such a brilliant combination of drama, tragedy and comedy - so dark in look and topic, but so light in tone, and surprisingly amusing.

If you haven't seen this movie - especially if you haven't heard the music before - treat yourself.

* * * *

About a month ago, we saw Wayne Shorter, with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, at Massey Hall.

The show was very good, but much of it was beyond our scope of jazz, a little abstract and out-there for us. Relative to my other musical interests, my exploration of jazz is very new, so everything's on a learning curve for me.

I want to hear more live jazz, because that's the ideal way for me to experience music. But that puts me in the odd position of going to hear concerts where the music is totally unknown to me. I'm familiar with Wayne Shorter's earlier work, but I knew almost nothing of what we heard at Massey Hall. It's cool, but it's a little odd.

Now that I've gotten over my intimidation - where do I start? how do I know what to listen to? how do I listen to music out of context? - I am eager to increase my jazz collection. Hitting lotto would be a great help.

* * * *

Here's a long feature about Philip Seymour Hoffman from the New York Times Magazine. PSH is arguably the greatest actor of his generation. He's also committed to continuing to work in theatre, which should make theatre-lovers happy and hopeful.

If you're interested in acting - the actual craft of acting, not the lives of attractive celebrities who star in movies - it's well worth reading.