American Logo November 8, 2014 Volume V, #5 ______ As the Canadian Government moves to abolish the Indian Act (to make way for Big Oil and Big China) and the American mid-term election hoves into view, it’s time to respool a double harangue we unveiled about a year ago. – Ed. A plague on both our houses: a tag team critique... 1 The Trouble With Canada: Doing Right By All Our Pets by Kevin Annett My bleeding Canadian heart was so relieved some time ago when I read that an “international forensics team” had hurried to the west coast to disinter and investigate the remains of those poor, cute little sled dogs that were executed by a firing squad soon after the Vancouver Olympics. Never let it be said that we aren’t a humanitarian people. We Canucks sure love our pets, at least. We have the English to thank for our civilized humanity, of course. Sometime around the time of the Great War that was supposed to end all wars, when over a thousand miners in South Wales had died from explosions and on the job accidents, King George V wrote an incensed letter to the mine owners of the region, demanding that they treat their pit ponies more humanely. The mine owners complied. A few years earlier, after shipping out record boatloads of wheat and cattle from a starving Ireland, Queen Victoria and her Church of England sent specialists to Cork and Dublin to see what aid could be brought to the ravenous multitudes there in the form of workhouses for the poor. The Irish, like any other workaday animals, were worthy of attention. Dang, I was so proud of my heritage of Anglo-Saxon humanitarianism that I vowed to go and personally welcome that forensic team when they arrived in Vancouver, to get to the bottom of that horrible crime committed against a bunch of innocent sled dogs. Intended to, but I was called away to attend a seminar in Dublin concerning the Magdalen Laundries and other Catholic charities. Im sorry I missed the investigators because, being foreigners and not knowing their way around, they might have got the wrong part of B.C. and ended by digging up the wrong mass grave. One of those with Indian kids in it. I once had it all wrong about my country. I thought that Canadians just didn’t care about dead little Indian kids. Several years earlier, when not a single cop, politician or reporter replied to my published list of 28 mass gravesites near former Indian residential schools, I assumed that it was because they were all indifferent to aboriginal people. I thought, with typical liberal arrogance, that when 800 native women went missing and the RCMP said there were only nine (9), it meant that just possibly our national police force was trying to cover up murder. How wrong I was. Of course we care. Indians are different from animals, after all, and therefore worthy of our long tradition of care and husbandry. Weve allotted the aboriginals the kind of care they deserve, as we do to all our pets. First, after eliminating and breeding out the savage ones among them, we domesticated, neutered and trained the rest to do our bidding. Today, we confine them to kennels called the rez and toss them our scraps; and when we discover that wrong has been done to them, we establish a Royal Commission to study the problem, usually for five years, and then shelve its report in Ottawa. Sometimes animals go astray, and need to be hunted. Mistakes are made. But you just can’t rush these things. The Indians aren’t like you and me, and they themselves have not been exactly chomping at the bit to dig up the remains of their own people who have died. We wouldn’t let them, of course, but that’s beside the point. A housebroken animal knows its place. Besides, thanks to our own special Indian Act, they have no need of the prerogatives of citizenship, like the right to refuse medical treatment or enjoy due process. We take care of our Indians. We know their needs better than they do. We will provide them all the compensation, and apologies, and healing and reconciliation that they will ever need. So why in God’s name should we disturb this special, thoughtful arrangement by digging up the wrong mass grave? You know, it’s good to live in a country like Canada, where pets get treated the right way; where even the lowliest animal can receive justice, and a proper criminal investigation. We care that much. 2 The Trouble With America Chomsky, Hamilton And Me by Bill Annett Returning a year or so ago from Europe, Noam Chomsky, that perennial sayer of sooth and academes favorite Dissident Emeritus, reported that most of the Europeans he met believed that – at least concerning the then-unfolding Presidential Election, viewed from the right-hand side - the American people have collectively and at long last become totally bonkers. A glance at the slate of eight Republican candidates in the last presidential election, continued Chomsky, tends to confirm that anecdotal tranche of opinion. And sure enough, with the subsequent public drawing of straws that reduced the list to the most worthy survivor, confirmed the view that only a return to the free, unregulated markets that had brought the nation to its knees a scant four years earlier could provide the answer. Its always hard to argue with Noam, but especially is that the case in this instance. What other conclusion was possible when, looking back at the demise of the other seven troglodytes, like those that attended Snow White, we recalled that: (1) the sometime front-runner, Perry, advocated simultaneously seceding from (a) the Union, and (b) any action to avert global warming, even while his socio-political model, Texas, was burning from the Gulf to the Panhandle; (2) Bachman, a crusader who believed that all gays and lesbians could be brought back to the narrow path of virtue with a little 12-step procedure in her husbands clinic; and (3) the other extreme, where Ron Paul, the libertarian physician, would heal the nation as well as himself either by requiring that every terminally ill patient rise from his bed voluntarily or else fund the emergency wards by turning them over to the Church. While the remaining four simply provided window-dressing for the emolument of the Tea-baggers, one of the total group (certainly preferable to Huckabee the last time around, who believed that the dinosaurs were created and erased in seven days) could quite possibly have become the next President of this declining but still most influential country in the world. That may have been a bone-chilling thought, but the fact of this nadir in a century of numbskull politicians is not really the point. The point is much worse. And Noam and his European friends may be exercising typical Chomskyism: the art of succinctly and precisely diagnosing a situation, and thereupon - instead of running a sound follow-up ground game - choosing to punt on second down. The Slate of Eight, in fact, represented a movement unprecedented since 1787: the systematic destruction of the American institution known as the Federal Government. Except for a few incidental functions that should be retained in Washington, such as Defense, which means the trillion-dollar commitment to be prepared to withstand the onslaught of some unseen enemy “though none is worth the strife,” a veritable shadow-box, a will o the wisp combat avec tes defenseurs. Why defense? Because, of course, permanent war, even without an adversary, is good business. According to Simon Schama, the noted historian, Teddy Roosevelt was not even a Republican, considering the current parameters. He believed in laissez-faire, but carrying a big stick, which he was known to apply to fat backsides when he chose to go about trust-busting. And even the daily-quoted Reagan, who may have started the whole Fed-bashing evolution (“Government is the problem, not the solution”) looks like Leon Trotsky compared with the contending crop of bozos. The concept that worked pretty well for about 200 years – that of two differing political parties, who came together, argued, negotiated, compromised and, enfin, legislated, and which has not been evident since Clinton - owes a lot to Alexander Hamilton. That famous statesman, politician, lawyer, regimental commander in the Continental Army of Washington, and framer of the Constitution, staunchly stood against the others, led by Jefferson and Washington himself, who would have slanted the thing more firmly in the direction of States Rights and individual enterprise. Its indeed ironic, that Hamilton, who once kept an office at 57 Wall Street, is buried in Trinity Church, the ancient black specter at the top of The Street, as if to exercise permanent surveillance over the self-styled Masters of the Universe whose unbridled, sparsely-regulated greed, with their creation of faulty mortgage-backed securities, maneuvers such as credit default swaps and shorting against the box, very nearly brought the nation to its knees in 2008, not the overweening control of a paternalistic Administration, Judiciary and Congress. When the wealthiest man in America, recently peering over the top of his Honey Cocaine-Cola stock certificates, declared: “You should be asking more of people like me,” it is perhaps time to stop worrying about whether or not it is the Government that is too big to be endured. Rather, its probably a little too late.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:40:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015