A Rake among Scholars

 

Great Grandparents of a host of rakes and a few scholars

COMMON RAKE

UNCOMMON SCHOLAR 

“He was a rake among scholars and a scholar among rakes.”

The sardonic description of a certain person by Thomas Babington McAuley, 19^th Century British politician, historian and essayist, could apply to nearly everyone. It’s the social equivalent of the Theory of Relativity; the esteem in which you’re held—or not—depends on what company you’re in at any given time.

We are never satisfied with better, bigger, smarter or more competent; we long to know what or who is best, biggest, smartest or most competent of all. Olympics, the Oscars, sports playoffs, etc. respond to that need. If we can’t determine who’s at the peak by measuring, we devise ways to steer public opinion to a conclusion of greatness ... or mediocrity. Fact is, this mentality not only defines who’s the “scholar” in the paradigm, but also who are the many who are clearly “rakes.”

We visited the Louvre while in Paris and stood in line to see the storied Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. She was roped off to keep viewers back and she’s only 30” X 21,” so our examination was short ... and distant. I’ve seen copies of the painting often and, trust me, it’s only as great as we make it out to be because we say it is. (I took an Art Appreciation half course at the University of Alberta long ago, so on this subject, I’m at least a scholar among rakes.)

Suppose the lead female actor in a local theatre company does a fantastic job of characterizing condescension, more nuanced and memorable than Maggie Smith (rest her soul) playing the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. One will win a BAFTA award and heaps of money; the other will wait on tables in a chain restaurant so she can pay the rent.

“Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen, /and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Wrote Tomas Gray in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Gray’s pensive ruminations in the cemetery (published in 1751) are still studied and honoured. For each of the poets we’ve declared “great,” there are probably ten thousand who have picked up a pen and sought to express their insights through that medium. Count me as one. Full many a one was born to prate unheard, /and waste their insights on the desert air.” (Pardon my faulty plagiarism, Thomas Gray.)

 
You might well imagine that there’s no mystery here; that humans can’t all be kings, not even princes, not even butlers or footmen … nor scholars; that only the village “rakery” position is freely offered to anyone who happens to land on earth unheralded, un-preordained to anything else.

 We who are neither among the rakiest of rakes, nor the scholarliest of scholars, are destined (like everybody else) for all our short lives to be who we are, content with—or chafing at—the restrictions of our time and place in the serendipity of life.

A confession: I have aspired long to master prose writing like, for instance, Herman Melville in Moby-Dick. I have friends who aspire to the extraordinary in quilting, singing, playing an instrument, wood turning, baking, etc. So far I haven’t opened a booth at the town fair for selling what I’ve laboured over, but like those who do, I will put one “wooden bowl” of a poem on display. It’s not an elegy written in a churchyard, but is an elegy written after a visit to a dying father:

THOSE WILL BE PEARLS©

 

i know my

(how do you feel, dad?

are you better today, dad?)

sounds like offer of a lozenge

to a hungry man. but forgive me if you can

my grief for you is trivialized by stammered words

 i know. i feel it.

your deep-lined face, pale bony hands

are answers to

my rote-learn’d clumsy questions

—what use are words to us?

 

no one remembers signing up for sterile halls,

and stark white walls like these

i think we know, my friends, that

somewhere in the index of what’s truly real

where truth lies ‘prisoned-like …

we all enrolled by being born.

 

“full fathom five grandfathers lie

those are pearls that were their eyes.”

 

you smile little, say less

perhaps you understand me after all these years

and what you see … amuses you?

the dying seldom make long speeches

grant you that

and that was ever you

you answer slowly, “ever is a long time, dave.”

(later I’ll think, “why, ever is no time at all.”) 

 

I have to go.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because I truly am
sorry for you, 

but were I honest like we used to be

I’d also raise a prayer of thanks:

thank god it’s me, today,
who smells the coming rain
hears children laughing just across the street
can start his car and drive to any place
and work and make and break
with these still-steady hands.
praise god

and then the sky pours down in sheets of rain and hail

I throttle down my car, my thoughts, my world

and weep.

“full fathom five my Dad will lie;/those will be pearls that once were his eyes.”^[1]

 

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[1] Adapted from The Tempest I,ii,474-477

On Guilt, Innocence and Stuff that goes Bump in our Heads

 

Suppose a mother takes her four-year-old to the playground, that he runs ahead of her, begins to climb on the jungle gym before she catches up, falls awkwardly onto a bar and breaks his spine. And suppose the following years for her are largely consumed by the caring for a paraplegic son … and probably repeatedly blaming herself for his disability.

“It’s my fault,” she’d probably say when people she meets ask about the lad’s condition.

My grade school shop teacher repeatedly told us that, “There are no accidents; every injury has a cause!” This set the stage in our minds for thinking, whenever an injury occurred, that somebody had to accept blame. Another effect was that we began to see blameworthiness singly; to get by the problems of multiple causes, courts may execute the harshest penalty upon the last person in a position to prevent an “accident." We haven't figured out how to deal justly with multiple causes. 

Chaos theory is a mathematical construct, its description embedded in the jargon of that discipline. It’s generally illustrated with the butterfly-in-Brazil-causing-a-tornado-in-Texas paradigm. The butterfly fanning its wings sets up a small air current, which in turn alters the force and direction of a larger air stream, etc., etc., until it becomes a tornado in Texas. You wouldn’t be faulted for assuming that “that would never happen; the odds against it are far too great."

Tell me a story, GGE (copyright)

The fact is that virtually everything that happens on earth happens like that. “For lack of nail the shoe was lost; for lack of shoe the horse was lost; for lack of horse the cavalryman was lost; for lack of cavalryman the battle was lost; for lack of battle victory, the war was lost.” Who’s to blame for the loss of the war? The question seems absurd, because at any stage in the sequences that lead to outcomes of note, natural forces of earth, sea, life and sky may intervene, redirecting the air current, the battle strategy.

Just for fun, think about chaos theory and write a story tracing the sequence from an initial position (As they sped down the highway, a seagull shit an enormous blob onto the driver side windshield) to this ending: (That their son should find himself on death row was something they’d have to face.)

My shop teacher was ill-informed; there definitely are accidents because despite our wish that there always be straightforward, single answers explaining events, chaos theory warns us that “there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.”

So back to the woman who opened this discussion by “causing” her son to lose the use of his lower body. But let’s have her trip over a backpack that had been left on the footpath, enabling her son to get ‘way ahead of her. And let’s have the owner of the backpack be eleven-year-old Edwina Stornaway. Is she partly to blame for the accident? And what about Edwina’s mother, who has always been lackadaisical about her kids care of their …

You get the drift.

 

              

 

Olympic Dentaracing is coming

 

This year, break dancing and team break dancing have become Olympic “sports” events. They join a host of “sports” that must be juried, like gymnastics and synchronized diving where relative performance can’t be objectively timed or measured, as it can be with the hammer throw, for instance, or foot races.

Opening the Olympics to more people seems a generous and progressive move. Most certainly, we’re not bound by the illusion that they should remain true to the ancient Greek competitions at Mt. Olympus. There were no Olympics for most of the time between their inception in 776 BCE and 1894 when Pierre de Coubertin organized their revival.

What the modern Olympics retain from their ancient namesake is that they’re primarily physical tests of strength and speed, and are keenly competitive. What they’ve unfortunately added, though, is the nationalism element: posted results generally report medal winners by nation. As I write this (August 03, 2024), Canada is tenth when total medal winnings are reported. Even as an armchair Canadian, I should be very proud.

(Wealthy nations win all the medals. Most nations (153 this morning) are winning zero medals. Canada with a population of 40 million has a GDP around $45,000 per person. Yemen, also with  40 million citizens has an annual GDP per persons around $975. Canada: 12 medals; Yemen: 0 medals. Win a gold for Canada and you get a check for $20,000 Cdn. $15,000 for silver, $10,000 for bronze. In Turkey, a gold will win you $500,000 U.S. Just sayin’.)

Swimmers competing, I’ve read, shave off all body hair. Occasionally, coaches fly drones over competitors’ practices to see if they can find an edge. Performance enhancing drugs are perennially at issue. Sometimes the need to win overwhelms impulses for camaraderie and “sportsmanship.” The politics of the Olympics sometimes goes down dark rabbit holes. Very unfortunate.

For the Olympics to become inclusive enough to embrace me would take some imagination. I propose Dentaracing. It involves eating a sticky bun, removing, brushing and rinsing an upper denture, reinserting it, then eating 15 cherries and spitting the pits into a wastebasket six feet away. A kind of mini triathlon. First finished wins gold, of course, unless he/she fails to deposit at least 12 pits in the basket, which would mean disqualification, as would dropping the denture into the sink.

I could use $30,000 right now.   

 

The Taxman Cometh ... Again!

 

If you own real estate in Rosthern, you have today and tomorrow to pay your property taxes (or make a partial payment at least) before penalties set in. And if—like me—you think what’s demanded of you by the town administration is too much, you might well point out potholes or some such as evidence that your sacrificial taxes aren’t being spent well.

Tax-payer, tax-collector tension dates back thousands of years, to whenever the first taxpayer handed over a few shekels to the first tax collector … at spear-point, probably.

Strikes me there are two main considerations that go into deciding who and how to tax: 1) services demanded or desired, and 2) fairness in determining what will be each individual’s share of the cost.

Our age demands all-weather streets and walking routes, fire fighting, recreation facilities, flowers and lawns in public areas, steady supply of potable water, reliable and safe removal of sewage and waste, street cleaning, snow clearance, etc. Which of these would any of us give up in order to lower the mill rate?

The amount we’re taxed needs to pay for the services we demand. True, we could look back at how these services were delivered and fault our town with inefficiency and waste, on particulars. Generally, though, complaints are about a lack in service, not a surplus.

Property Tax is meant to be a progressive tax like income tax: someone who can afford a $500,000 house on Fifth Street is assumed to have more means to pay taxes than a family in a two-bedroom on East Railway. At present, a government adjuster places a value number on each property, our town sets a mill rate (after setting the budget) and multiplies the property value by the rate, adds a few surcharges like an amount to the hospital building fund and, voila, your and my tax obligations.

Frontage Tax used to determine the property tax amount by the number of feet of sidewalk and street fronting your property, but that was when municipalities provided almost no services beyond street and boardwalk maintenance. It wouldn’t work fairly in an age of condos and other multiple-occupancy dwellings, for instance.

Much older still would be the head tax; each adult living in the town pays $500, say, the most regressive tax system ever.

There are, of course, other considerations, like the Education portion of your tax bill. An elderly Rosthernite said to me, “I have no kids or grandkids in school. Why should I pay an education tax?” Seems logical, if you don’t consider that the kids in Rosthern will be the town council sooner than we expect, and a good education should help them be good council members.

The burst of inflation erupting after Covid and related changes have meant that many incomes haven’t kept pace with costs. The bind exists for businesses, service institutions and municipalities as well. If I had one recommendation to give our council, it would be that they remove the penalties for budgeting taxes over the length of the year. Instead, offer a 3% discount for paying the total on July 31, perhaps, but make a kind gesture of solidarity with those who are struggling.

Happy tax day, everyone!

 

A Debate that Wasn't

I watched the last half of the Trump/Biden “debate” and, of course, the reactions of pundits that followed. The Trump plan was obvious: stay away from policy questions and fill the space with so many accusations that Biden will lose his concentration in his attempt to refute the barrage of falsehoods and fabricated, denigrating claims.

I remembered occasions when so much stimulation was coming at me at once that I could no longer coolly gather and coordinate my thoughts. That’s what happened to Joe Biden. That phenomenon isn’t age specific.

On critical questions posed by the moderators, Biden made coherent policy statements. Trump, meanwhile, avoided the questions, for instance, of childcare policy, border control specifics and—most telling of all—whether he would honour the will of the people in the next presidential election, filling his allotted time with “You are the worst president in the history of the USA” and other meaningless and unsupported accusations.  

The “You’re weak and I’m strong” theme was implicit in Trump’s strategy, supported by, of course, claims rich in chutzpah and devoid of evidence, “If I’d been president, Russia would never have attacked Ukraine,” for instance.

What supporters of Trump undoubtedly saw was their man beating the s**t out of the enemy’s man. The parallels to the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and more recently, Putin, are obvious to students of history. (Take a few minutes to ponder a short film by Yale University’s Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley at https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=youtube+fascism&mid=A7ACBFBB9835BB9E13C6A7ACBFBB9835BB9E13C6&FORM=VIRE)

In Hitler’s rise, the enemies created through propaganda were Communism, Jews, disabled and mentally challenged individuals (the Minderwertiger, those of minimum worth) and LGBTQ+ persons. Gradually, Trump and the “Oligarchy” of wealthy and powerful Americans that support him have been able to convince a massive number of what were soft-core conservatives into the belief that their neighbours who are the “Woke,” the “Leftists” are plotting to harm them, destroy the nation.

Fascism needs enemies; how else can it cast itself as people’s only protection?

It's not surprising that here in Canada, consideration of Justin Trudeau’s Prime Ministership should be reopened after many witnessed the humiliation of Joe Biden. We, too, seem to have learned that nothing succeeds as well in an election campaign as the humiliation of opposing parties’ leaders. We, too, are in danger of abandoning our ethical, moral guidelines for crass expediency and a need to be with “the winners.”  

Democracy takes work; let’s all make sure we’re engaged in its protection. 

(Feel free to copy and share with credit to G.G. Epp. Reply if you wish to gg.epp41@gmail.com) 

 

"Look Out! Speed Bump!!"

 

The Autobahn between Frankfurt and Cologne in Germany has no speed limits posted. If you like to drive at a sedate 110 KPH, you need to stay in the right-hand lane, or better yet, in the ditch; at that speed, you’re a highway hazard. In Mexico, speed limit signs exist, as do stop signs (ALTO, meaning Stop or Tall, take your pick, language learners). But the speed limit is whatever your vehicle and your nerves can manage, except governed by whatever is ahead, like side-by-side trucks, or a series of suspension-jarring speed bumps.

In Canada, a highway  passing through a town has reduced speed limits posted, and a flashing display will tell you your speed, will sometimes even flash you a happy face if you’re under the limit. In Mexico and in Panama (incidentally the only two Latin American countries I’ve visited) speed bumps are assigned the job of slowing down traffic. The sign warning of an upcoming speed bump, though, is too long to be read at 140 KPH (“obstaculo de volocidad por delante”) so the first indication for the novice driver in Mexico might well be a passenger or driver launched through the sunroof. An abrupt education in paying closer attention!

For me, The interesting question in all this lies in deciding how best to gain public cooperation for anything, anything as seemingly benign as not littering or as consequential as driving slowly through a village where a child might be running out into traffic at any time. Every strategy has, of course been tried historically, from persuasion, to punishment, to rewards, to sheer force.

I’m sure that if the penalty for making a U-turn at a controlled corner were legislated to be a minimum of two years in prison, and for exceeding a speed limit, a thousand dollar fine for each KPH over what’s posted, I would sell my car and stay at home … problem solved; cooperation secured. Many, however, might see this as a challenge to offend without getting caught, or just as a colossal infringement on their personal freedom, an impertinence in need of defiance.

I’m betting technology will see us all becoming law abiding citizens, at least on the roads and highways. Each car will be embedded with a chip that transmits the driving speed and sundry possible driving choices to a central computer, which also automatically adds pluses for good driving and minuses for bad driving and sends you a bill or a cheque at the end of each month based on a legislated formula. Just making up the formula could be a hoot

Road-use Statement for Rhoda Dendron for March, 2027

Driving 100 Km without once exceeding the posted speed limit …………………+10

Changing lanes without proper signalling ………………………………………….-10

Swearing at another driver………………………………………………………….-10

Using a cellphone while driving……………………………………………………..-20

Zipper-merging properly…………………………………………………………….+10

Total………………………………………………………………………………….-20

Credit/Debit………………………………………………………………………….-$40

Payable online at www.bigbrotheriswatching.com

 Take that, Mister “No one tells ME what to do!” 

Probably wouldn’t work, though; tech-savvy people would very soon figure out how to hack into their own cars.

But that’s pretty pessimistic, I admit. We don’t have to breathe tobacco smoke when in a restaurant anymore, and peeing in the public street is rare. Something works, even though it’s not been that long since, for instance, people assumed a right to light up a smoke wherever they wished.

I don’t think shaming would be acceptable as the key to cooperation either. That choice could mean bringing back some variation of that ancient humiliation device; Big Mac Donalson gets caught speeding through town and by way of a corrective measure, he’s tied to a post (or stocks) in the centre of town for an afternoon wearing only his jockeys. 

Speed bumps work. It doesn’t matter if you’re a private citizen commuting to work, or the Minister of Highways being transported by security to a high-level meeting, or a passenger in a fifty-seat luxury bus, or a bank robber in a getaway car; in Mexico everybody slows down for towns, intersections, construction like good little missionary kids. You might say that speed bumps have you administering your own punishment for your own offense … ingenious!

How to apply the principle elsewhere? Now that would take some thinking/planning beyond my inchworm imagination.

Comments to gg.epp41@gmail.com welcomed. 

Is Trudeau really to blame?

The photo was startling, at least to me: Jordan Peterson, Danielle Smith, Tucker Carlson and Conrad Black posing in connection with an event in Edmonton, I think. It accompanied an article written by Black titled something like: What happened to Jordan Peterson has serious Implications for all Canadians.

What happened to Peterson is that the governing body of professional psychologists in Ontario ruled that some of Peterson’s public pronouncements went beyond the bounds governing professional conduct and obligated him to take a media course if he wished to retain his license to practice.

Since then his case, propagated as a conspiracy to stifle free speech in Canada and championed by Conrad Black and Rex Murphy and others, has become another signpost on the supposed “road to perdition in Canada.”

The article was published by the Epoch Times, a periodical that purports to tell the unvarnished truth while predominantly printing news that can be tailored to its central theme, which is the promotion of a reactionary response to liberal values and legislation. Of late, it seems clearly to have decided to jump on the bandwagon with those demonizing the Prime Minister, a strategy that’s working but is unworthy of thinking persons in a democracy, in my opinion.

Firstly, the Peterson incident is not a case of stifling free speech. Black, Murphy and Peterson himself have aired that shibboleth repeatedly in public without repercussions. Their opinions, their speech are not hemmed in by Trudeau, or the Liberal Party, or the courts; that declaration is a flag waved to attract the disaffected, individuals who feel oppressed by circumstances, convincing them that “Trudeau’s to blame.”

Based on a comparative assessment of individual economic and personal freedom, Canada ranks high, alongside other liberal democracies. (The World's 10 Most Free Countries - WorldAtlas) It’s been liberal democracy that’s established and maintained a country where the balance of individual freedom and community cooperation has been able to thrive. We need only go back as far as the eras of Lester Pearson, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Elliot Trudeau to see how liberalism in Canada ensured access to medical care for every individual, took its place on the world stage by initiating peacekeeping forces, got the police and courts out of our bedrooms, gave status to millions by legislating official multiculturalism.

And when we look back on the COVID and climate change dilemmas down the road, assess how we under Liberal governance and later, Liberal/NDP cooperation, weathered the pandemic storm, we’ll conclude that we did the best that could be expected given the knowledge and resources available. At least, comparisons to the experiences of other countries all point that way. A Pew survey reported by the World Economic Forum[i] indicated that in Canada, 88% of citizens believed their country had done well in its response to the pandemic; in the USA, the approval of the country’s response to the pandemic was at 47%. The indecisiveness of the Trump administration at the critical time has been cited as a reason for US citizen dissatisfaction.

All this is important. Two Sundays ago, in an expat church in Mexico, a pastor lamented “what’s going on in Canada.” The anti-Trudeau rhetoric was blatant and overt in US news during the convoy protest/occupation in Ottawa. Conspiracy theories, crime news, intimations of threat spread easily and far; to see our fellow Canadians bargaining away our international reputation for political points at home is discouraging, especially when using false scenarios to do so. 

We are a great country, as great as countries anywhere have so far managed to become. Per capita crime rates are lower than ever, our healthcare system is faltering but will clearly recover, literacy and education standards are higher that ever, individual freedom of choice is remarkably unhindered, our politics are made responsive to public need by free and fair elections and although we’re not nearly there yet on environmental protection protocols, we’re working hard at it.

The word on political systems popularized by Winston Churchill continues to be insightful: Democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the others that have been tried from time to time. Let’s all weigh what we hear against the reality of our own experience. Trudeau is not to blame, dictatorship neither characterizes our government nor are we moving in that direction, personal freedoms are not being stifled, there are no such things as a leftist or “woke” conspiracies, the Chinese didn’t create COVID, the phasing out of fossil fuel energy sources is good for us in more ways than one. And as every adult knows, there never were monsters under the bed. Moldy cheese sandwiches and lost socks, maybe, but no monsters.

Conrad Black, Jordan Peterson, Danielle Smith, Tucker Carlson, please think further down the road when you speak; your words have an audience, you attract followers, choose the paths you advocate carefully.

 

 

 

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[i] These countries handled the COVID-19 pandemic well, says recent Pew survey | World Economic Forum (weforum.org) The WEF is itself the target of conspiracy theories that see it as manipulating world economic conditions for the benefit of its members, a theory which the Conservative Party of Canada is supporting as an election strategy.