THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
The price of allowing false
opinions is the gradual loss of one's capacity for
forming true ones.
—Muriel Spark, "Bang-Bang
You're Dead"
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.48 p.m., October 15,
2003►
POETRY CORNER (SPECIAL TERRI
SCHINDLER-SCHIAVO EDITION)
The Latest Decalogue
Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
—Arthur
Hugh Clough
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.47 a.m., October 15,
2003►
THE TALE OF A FIERCE BAD
GERBIL
I know Don Zimmer is an old man, but the right of
self-defence is absolute, isn’t it? Not according to
Mayor Mike. The Associated Press reports:
Boston Red Sox ace Pedro
Martinez should have been arrested for throwing
72-year-old Yankees coach Don Zimmer to the ground
during Game 3 of the American League Championship
Series, Mayor Bloomberg said Sunday.
"If that happened in
New York we would have arrested the perpetrator,"
Bloomberg said. "Nobody should throw a 70-year-old
man to the ground, period. You start doing that pretty
soon you’re going to throw a 61-year-old man to the
ground, and I have a big vested interest in that."
"You just cannot
assault people, even if it’s on a baseball
field," added Bloomberg.
But it was Zimmer who assaulted
Martinez. Why am I not surprised that a politician who
doesn’t believe that people should be allowed to own
guns to protect themselves believes that a person
who’s being assaulted shouldn’t fight back? And am I
the only one distressed by the implication the New York
Police Department is Mayor Mike’s Praetorian Guard?
Of course there would be no need to consider
incarcerating anyone for what happened at Fenway Park
Saturday if the umpires and the Red Sox security staff
had done their jobs. Martinez should have been tossed
for threatening
Jorge Posada; Zimmer should have been tossed for rushing
Martinez; and Manny Ramirez should have been tossed for
threatening Roger Clemens. Major League Baseball should
suspend Martinez and Zimmer, but that’s not going to
happen. And what on earth was a Red Sox groundskeeper
doing in the Yankees bullpen?
The best comment on the melee and its result was from
Boston Globe’s Jackie
MacMullan:
It's the same old story.
The Red Sox behaved badly, and lost. The Yankees behaved
badly, and won.
Which team would you rather
be?
And as for this "cowboy up" stuff, real
cowboys know that trouble comes looking for you; only a
fool goes looking for trouble.
David Wells will be on the mound within the hour. A
latter-day "cowboy" for sure. My word, this is
exciting.
[Update: No game on Sunday night, as it turned out.
The general impression is that the Red Sox have suffered
a psychic collapse. We'll have to wait until Monday to
see if that's true, won't we?]
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.49 a.m., October 12,
2003►
OUR SOVIET TV
You know what PSAs are, right? Public service
announcements, so called. What is the public service
they perform, I wonder. In my country, radio and TV
stations are forced to play this agitprop as a condition
of licensing; one sees and hears fewer of them in the
United States. Currently, I’m assaulted oh a dozen
times a day by a PSA spot from the B.C. Schizophrenia
Society. Therein, some guy tells his married friends
he’s been diagnosed, and they profess the utmost
sympathy. Liberal enough for you? Not half. Subtitles
run underneath their pronouncements "reading their
minds" and proving them hypocrites—they’re
afraid of him, and how about that? How very much like
the paranoia demonstrated by real schizos.
As the great Thomas
Szasz has demonstrated, there is no such
thing as asymptomatic schizophrenia. The symptoms are
the disease. It’s not like someone goes in for a
physical, and the doctor says, "Oh, by the way,
your blood test indicates schizophrenia." How is
schizophrenia diagnosed? Initial stage: Your belief that
the Jews, the Martians, the CIA, the Rockefellers and
the Royal Family are controlling your thoughts. Terminal
stage: You are arrested for stabbing someone, usually
fatally, usually your mother, identified as a conduit
for the Jews, Martians, CIA, etc.
As a long-time student of classical liberalism, PSAs
leave me puzzled. Ludwig von Mises was careful to
distinguish between the free economy, the socialist
economy and the mixed economy. He always insisted the
latter could only be judged by as a distinct entity. I
wonder what he would have thought of a society that
treated free will as something that existed and didn’t
exist, as circumstances dictated. Correct me if I’m
wrong libertarians, but I’ve always understood that
freedom was a nullity if God (or what have you) had not
given us the freedom to choose between good and evil.
The foregoing is a lengthy introduction to an earlier
consideration of PSAs, a Galaxy 500 column first
published four years ago.
Feel bad TV
Public service announcements are the guilt tax of the
affluent society
BC Report, April 19, 1999
The first public service announcement I remember
starred Smokey the Bear. After we children had been
suitably appalled by footage of a wilderness holocaust,
this cartoon ursine was trotted on to declare
mournfully, "Only YOU can prevent forest
fires." He certainly sold me. I would never be so
wicked as those adults that failed to properly
extinguish their campfires. Some time later I discovered
that most forest fires are started not by sinful man but
by Mommy Nature—lightning. Since then I have not
believed a single word of any PSA.
AIDS is everyone's disease? Ha ha. Only you can stop
racism? Pull the other one. This is your brain on drugs?
No, this is your brain on drugs. But most PSAs
today are state propaganda in disguise. BCTV, B.C.'s
most-watched station, now runs so many Government of
B.C. ads it has become Glen Clark's Ministry of Truth.
They come in three types: boastful, bullying and
baleful.
The boastful is represented by those ads that
squander hundreds of thousands of dollars to brag about
the hundreds of millions of additional dollars added to
those already squandered on healthcare and education.
Or, "Investing in Our Kids," as they prefer to
put it.
The bullying is represented by the new wave of
don't-drink-and-drive ads. You will notice that where
once we were admonished not to drive drunk, temperance
has been supplanted by "zero tolerance." My
favourite uses a good news-bad news routine. The bad
news is that our young motorist is about to be
CheckStopped. The good news is that he is under the
legal limit. The bad news is that he is arrested anyway.
Impairment, you see, is far more complicated than a mere
blood-alcohol ratio. Now, the chances of this happening
are about the same as Glen Clark telling the truth, but
the principle has been established. Big Brother is no
longer Mr. Nice Guy.
The baleful is represented by a Workers' Compensation
Board ad I will call "Darcy." Darcy's mother
laments her son's death in a workplace accident and
expresses her pantheistic belief that his spirit lives
on in nature. Darcy may or may not be a real person (I
suspect the latter), and I do not for a moment intend to
belittle any bereaved mother's grief. But this is a
private emotion, and there is nothing I (or any other
stranger) can do to assuage it.
The WCB would be performing a genuine public service
if it were reminding us that death comes to us all, but
of that day and hour knoweth no man. As Muriel Spark
reminds us, life lived without an awareness of death is
insipid. "Darcy," however, is another
manifestation of the modern heresy that the abolition of
death is imminent.
About the time "Darcy" first aired I read
newspaper reports about a B.C. company on trial for the
on-the-job death of an employee. It seems this Darcy had
climbed into a chicken evisceration machine while it was
in operation. As it happens, I once worked for the WCB.
At the end of my janitorial shift, I was supposed to
empty the contents of my trash bag into a compacting
machine and then turn the crank. I was loath to do so,
however, as my supervisor had warned me of the many
dangerous and disgusting things WCB clients were wont to
dispose of on the premises. He instructed me that under
no circumstances was I to put my hands in the machine
while it was in use, but after several evenings of
hearing the splintering noises made by the dangerous
things—and the squelching noises made by the
disgusting things—I decided to dump my refuse in the
machine and then slink away.
So I cannot imagine what would possess anyone to risk
disembowelment, but I do know this. Even if the Rand
Corporation develops a minty gel that removes death's
sting, young men will continue to climb into chicken
evisceration machines, and no amount of PSAs will change
human nature.
Perhaps PSAs do persuade some that you should Just
Say No to evisceration. But I doubt it. That is not
their purpose.
PSAs are actually the guilt tax of the affluent
society (guilt, of the free-floating, non-specific kind
having replaced conscience in our post-Christian world).
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large
automobile, and you may find yourself in a beautiful
house, with a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself,
well, shouldn't I feel guilty? Not to worry. Just turn
on your TV and you will learn of countless Kosovos of
misery, maybe right in your neighbourhood or even in
your beautiful house. We can't do anything about them,
but at least we can feel bad about it.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.01 a.m., October 11,
2003►
WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR
The pic on the front page of ESPN.com said it all: a
Yankees fan holding a sign boasting, "The empire
strikes back." The Red Sox lost, the universe is
once again unfolding as it should, and I couldn’t be
happier. I don’t despise the Sox, just their fans. I
despise the whole
I’m-morally-superior-because-I-back-a-loser mentality.
I despise the whole W.P. Kinsella-A. Bartlett Giamatti
cosmic slop theory of baseball.
Gore Vidal was right: "Nothing succeeds like
failure." Just ask ESPN’s Eric Neel, who simpers
because his teams aren’t blessed with the Red Sox’s
storied legacy of failure:
I wish…the curse (even
though I know it isn't really a curse but a history) was
squeezing my rooting heart and pounding in my loyal
brain this week. It's bad to be under a bad sign, no
doubt, and it hurts to live through year upon year of
frustration. But there's a kind of nobility in bearing
up under pain inflicted by the gods. The fates have
scorned Sox fans, they've mocked them, they've shown
them the promised land and then withdrawn it. And the
fans, knowing deep in their bones that contempt is
better than indifference, have withstood the onslaught
and rallied themselves to hope and pray again and again,
to say "Thank you, sir, may I have another."
It's heroic, is what it is.
No, it isn’t, you ninny; it’s fatuous.
Directions for lifting the Red Sox "curse":
1. Score more runs than the other team in four games
out of seven.
2. Repeat as necessary.
This would be would be the same Eric Neel who filed a
harrowing dispatch
from America’s heart of darkness, The Ballpark in
Arlington, Texas:
By my count there were two
John Rocker…jerseys on folks in the stands Saturday
night, and by my count that's two too many.
And there it is. You don’t need to hate John
Rocker, be "pro-choice" but anti-Second
Amendment, boycott Nestlé and support PETA to be
a Red Sox fan (or worse, a Red Sox fan wannabe), but it
helps.
Death to the underdog!
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.01 a.m., October 10,
2003►
HAIL TO THE THIEF
Yes, yes, Senator Sam Brownback is from Kansas,
not Kentucky. My latest piece for The American
Spectator is up. It's about Intellectual Property
and ripped (pun intended) screaming from today's
headlines. No, wait, don't slink away; it's got jokes.
A good time will be had by all:
It's
playoff time again, so I'll be watching a lot of
baseball on TV in the next few weeks. I'll take in a lot
of ads but I'll also miss quite a few. I will, for
example, take advantage of the commercial breaks to
channel surf, stretch my legs, or grab something from
the fridge. Does this make me a thief? Jamie Kellner,
president and CEO of the WB Network, thinks so. May I go
to the bathroom, Mr. Kellner? "I guess there's a
certain amount of tolerance for going to the
bathroom," Kellner told
Cableworld last year. Phew!
According
to Kellner, "Your contract with the network when
you get the show is, You're going to watch the
spots." I don't recall signing any such contract.
Do you?...[More]
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.48 a.m., October 10,
2003►
COMPARISON IS ODIOUS
One of the reasons I so enjoy the London Mail on
Sunday is that it treats the famous with the
contempt they deserve. Doubtless there is envy and
prurience in this, but these days I take justice as I
find it. There’s a lesson here for the rest of the
media. Just because your readers can’t read enough
about celebrities doesn’t mean they like them.
The Mail nurses a particular loathing of
Elizabeth Hurley. A well-deserved loathing, I would say.
Among her many crimes, Hurley’s public modelling of
Gianni Versace’s safety-pin creation catapulted that
yobbo to the front-rank of designers and made it
acceptable, almost mandatory, for "A-list"
celebrities to dress as tarts.
The October 5 Mail employs expert analysis to
explain Hurley’s "signature pose": her hand
on some man’s (or woman’s) behind.
"It’s not hard to
imagine why a man would want to put his hand on her
buttocks," says psychologist Oliver James.
"But why she should feel the need to keep her hand
on his. Golly…"
A direct hit! But the cruellest gibe is yet to come.
Could it possibly be that
Hurley thinks this buttock-clasping behaviour endears
her to the public?
"Hurley is a skilled
practitioner of the Press," agrees James. His
opinion is that the pose is rehearsed, backed up by its
curiously asexual nature…
So what could Hurley feel
this achieves? "Ever since Elizabeth Hurley arrived
in the public eye, she’s been an upper-crust version
of Jordan," says James.
For the unfamiliar with the British tabloids, Jordan
is the Queen
of Totty, the saddo Page 3 model who has
been pumped so full of silicone (36FF and expanding) she
needs weights on her heels to keep from toppling over.
Hurley’s screams must have been heard from Land’s
End to John o’Groats. Jordan! One almost feels sorry
for Liz. Almost.
Hurley in Versace, Jordan in silicone: Which one is
'upper-crust,' again?
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.34 p.m., October 9,
2003►
MEDIA NOTES
Apologies for my recent absence. I have been
preoccupied with the subjects of bankruptcy and
eviction. These have been forestalled for two weeks, but
beyond that, as the poet said, "The future’s
uncertain, and the end is always near."
Izzy Asper’s death
yesterday took me, as it did most, by surprise. I
can’t say I ever had much liking for his media
practices, but I rather liked Izzy. This affection was
the result of a single conversation with the great man
almost 20 years ago. I was a radio producer, while Asper
was engaged in a protracted legal battle to take control
of a local TV station. I contacted his office for an
interview on the subject, and to my surprise he called
back himself. He subjected me to the full force of his
considerable charm and flattered me with the telling of
a scurrilous and hilarious story about his attempts to
serve papers on one of the principals of the TV station.
According to Asper, this fellow was so determined to
depart the station parking lot without being served that
he slammed his car door on the unfortunate process
server’s hand.
As Asper surely knew, this story could not be retold
over the airwaves, so it remained his gift to me. And I
was grateful to have it, as Asper surely knew. I am told
he favoured many other journalists with similar stories
over the years to similar effect. Later, after Asper
finally succeeded in turning Global into Canada’s
third TV network and, unexpectedly, bought the Southam
newspaper chain and the National Post, he came to
treat the media he didn’t own (and many of the
journalists he did) as the enemy. They responded in
kind, to the detriment of Asper and his newspapers. I
suppose he felt he didn’t need us anymore. Why keep
dogs and bark yourself? But Izzy once knew that one can
catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. It
certainly worked with me.
In some circles, the appointment of a new Daily
Telegraph editor is taken as seriously as the
election of a new pope. (The papacy and the Telegraph
are both Catholic institutions.) Conrad Black’s
appointment of Martin Newland to replace Charles Moore
was greeted in the British press with "Who
he?!" perplexity. Newland had left the Telegraph
in 1998 to join the National Post as managing
editor. The Aspers fired him (and founding editor Ken
Whyte) in May.
Post readers had long known of the devotion
Newland had inspired in the Groovie Ghoulie, Christie
Blatchford, and now Guardian readers know too.
"I would walk into traffic for him," she told
that paper. Cristina Odone, deputy editor of the New
Statesman, is another admirer. She raved in her Observer
column:
As a former colleague of
his at the Catholic Herald, I can vouch for his
brilliant investigative and reporting skills. I also
remember his impressive physique (the guy was a body
builder in the days before the whole world cottoned on)
and, above all, his good humour. Martin always allowed
the various members of our eccentric staff, which
included a former priest and a Consecrated Virgin, to
bore on about their personal lives to their heart's
content. When our editor would make an unreasonable
demand or berate him for late copy, Martin would turn
the other cheek.
In the Spectator, Stephen Glover lamented
Moore’s retirement as "a sad day for Tory
England." How sad remains to be seen:
Newland is, like Mr. Moore,
a Roman Catholic, but otherwise the two men would seem
to have little in common. Mr. Moore is an intellectual
and a Tory; Mr Newland is a practical, news-orientated
journalist with little knowledge of Conservatism. He may
turn out to be a newspaper genius, but his appointment
is undoubtedly startling.
Glover worries the Telegraph might become even
more populist (i.e., smutty and vulgar) that it
had become under Moore. It Glover had ever seen a copy
of the National Post, he would be more worried
still. If the Globe and Mail was famously aimed
at the gay stockbroker, the Whyte-Newland Post
was aimed at the polymorphously perverse of all
occupations. In addition, it demonstrated appalling news
judgment in its massive over-coverage of stories that
had nothing to do with Canada (JFK, Jr., the Concorde
crash, etc.); its fawning treatment of celebrityhood was
sickening; and its arts coverage was a disgrace. On its
editorial pages, "conservatism" meant money
and worship of the United States. Patriotism and the
needs of society had no place in the Whyte-Newland Post.
How much of all this was due to Ken Whyte and how much
to Martin Newland is unknown to me, but I suspect Whyte.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Newland’s
elevation is the fear that his Telegraph will ape
the Post’s obsession with the Middle East in
general and Israel in particular. During the Whyte-Newland
regime, I often had to remind myself that I was reading
the National Post, not the Jerusalem Post.
(This has only gotten worse since they were fired, of
course.) This isn’t a question of politics (I remain a
Zionist) but of boredom. An overweening interest in this
subject is common only to a handful of fanatics. The
rest of us would prefer to read about our own countries.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.25 a.m., October 8,
2003►
