JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Connects?

She connects with a fair number of male couch beer-swillers who consider her a “hot babe.”

She connects with the gun nuts.

She connects with the trailer-park and fuzzy-dice set.

She connects with the lobotomy cases of the religious right.

She connects with all the xenophobes in America who have no use for “damned fureigners.”

God that’s a lot of people in America, and she is a very dangerous woman.

_______________________________

Apart from Sarah Palin’s dozens of ridiculous errors and misstatements plus a demonstrated tendency towards abuse of power, two facts stand out like the great rocks of the Straits of Gibraltar for me.

One, Sarah took six years at five different colleges before she finally earned her BA in a bird subject like “communications.”

Two, the woman quit her elected job as governor of one of the least populated states in America, yet told us she was not a quitter.

The woman is simply a joke, but then so was Bush, and look what that moron gave the world.

America seems to have a boundless appetite for this kind of insipid daytime-talk show politics.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Three decades in Canada is only part of what Ignatieff is missing.

Perhaps more important is his lack of any real contact or bond with people. There is something, not just aristocratic, but almost autistic about Ignatieff.

He just does not reach the emotions because he just does not feel them.

Contrast him with a wonderfully earthy and charming politician like Chretien, and you feel there is nothing there.

Even in the sphere of the intellect, supposedly Ignatieff’s great strength, I find him surprisingly wanting. Again, compare him to Trudeau whose brilliance shines in every photo and is burned into memory, and there is little there but mannered words and the indulgent remembrance of a well-connected family.

Ignatieff is altogether an unimpressive politician.

If you add his absence and long lack of interest to Canada, he becomes even more unappealing.

And if you add his past defense of torture, mass murder, and imperial brutishness, there is nothing there worth talking about.

This sad situation is made sadder still by the utterly soulless Harper, a robot with no personality and no sense of ethics, giving us nowhere to place a comforting vote of trust.

__________________________

“Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion.”

– Stephen Harper

Many thanks to the person above for posting this. Of course, we must also rememmber Harper supported America’s mass murder in Iraq, and wanted us to join in the slaughter.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Shame on you, Rex Murphy.

This column is a nasty piece of weasel-work, the kind of thing I thought you were above, even though I disagree with many of your views.

You are calling Galloway names, defending what cannot be defended, and, at the same time, suggesting they find a way out of what is a police-state action.

George Galloway is an honorable man. He stands for principles, which more than you can say for Mr. Harper and yourself in this instance.

He has a piercing intelligence. And his way with words leaves even you, Rex, looking the true “sad sack.”

He is a member of the Mother of Parliaments in good standing. There is no legitimate reason on earth to refuse him entry to Canada.

The only reason he is being treated in this police-state fashion is his views on the poor people of Palestine.

Israel’s apologists simply hate him.

How shameful of you to speak disparagingly against him, but not a word about Israel’s murder of 400 children and a thousand other people.

And to this day Israel will not supply the UN maps of where they dropped the dreaded cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon during another savage attack which killed another 1,400 or so, including a brave Canadian officer doing his duty.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

That’s just not true, Rex.

Remembrance Day comes out of WWI, a vast and pointless war in which all the sides involved were imperial powers.

Queen Victoria’s progeny sat on half the thrones of Europe. The Kaiser and the British monarch were related.

How was Britain’s empire over India and other lands any different at all than Germany’s Reich. It wasn’t, not at all.

WWI was about the European balance of power. It was also the result of heavily armed states and arms races.

Huge armaments and standing armies just always get “used.” They do not keep peace or preserve principles, ever.

And if Germany had won? Well, first, there never would have been a Hitler ot a Holocaust or a Russian Front, the most titanic bloody battle in human history.

Second, European states would, over future decades, gradually have adjusted largely back to their origins over time, just as they always do after great imperial conflicts.

I am always touched by the thought of the men in the trenches, but not because all those people died horribly for any great cause, rather because they died for nothing and killed for nothing. And their leaders were incompetent in very many cases.

Your way of thinking about this, Rex, leads nowhere worth going.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Rex Murphy,

You sound so sensible on Cross Country Check-Up [CBC Radio show], can you not write a sensible column?

I’ve yet to read one since the Globe unlocked you.

This one hits bottom.

All the Chinese have done here is to show us how well they’ve absorbed American popular culture, and nothing more. It is regrettable, but utterly insignificant and trivial.

This is pure Hollywood nonsense. How many times have we seen American musical films where the woman on the screen is not the woman singing on the sound track?

There have been dozens.

Please keep in mind that the entire extravaganza of the modern Olympics is little more than a multi-billion dollar Las Vegas show, completely so for the ceremonies, and to a considerable extent even for the athletic competitions.

American private foundations spend a fortune on their athletes, treating them like hand-groomed Japanese Kobe beef cattle. China does the same through the state, as did the old Soviets. Is the whole world to waste resources this way for a show every four years that pretty much only the very affluent can attend?

The modern Olympics stresses hyper-patriotism, too, a subject best left mostly to scoundrels.

And what is the meaning of a country like Canada, with a population base smaller than the State of California, selecting teams to compete?

I once went through the exercise of taking the top ten medal countries in an Olympics, and made the numbers per capita rather than simple totals. A country like the U.S. then moves from first to near the bottom.

If you do a second deflation, using per capita income for the ten countries (after all, there’s no matching of resources in the simple total count), the U.S. finishes last.

So what is the meaning or significance of a competition built on those foundations? None, it’s a huge, costly show, and that’s all.

Talking about heroism or character or any other exalted characteristic is just silly when you analyze it clearly.

There is no way on earth that the substitution of the singer for appearance will be remembered as anything but a trivial anecdote. The Chinese simply have put on the most impressive Las Vegas show ever seen, and that’s all the Olympics are about.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

“…greatest writerly acts of memorialization ever achieved.”

Good Lord, Rex, no one is ever going to accuse you of the same, given that kind of ham-fisted prose. It’s positively Soviet in its awkwardness.

You should not forget, although many do, Solzhenitsyn bitterly criticized values in his American refuge.

As long as he was attacking the Soviets, he was a media hero, but when this fiercely honest man turned his attacks to the dark sides of American society he became a media non-person.

__________

“Heaping praise upon Alexander Solzhenitsyn is well deserved. Not sure why Murphy feels the need to juxtapose Solzhenitsyn with Michael Moore. Does one have to be criticized for the other to be properly praised?”

Well put, Gary Wilson.

The truth is that someone analyzing Rex’s piece might well come to the conclusion that his praise for Solzhenitsyn is not much more than an excuse for kicking Moore.

The comparison of societal woes Rex makes is actually silly.

Of course, problems nowhere compare to living under Stalin, but if you feel the need to emphasize this thin idea, then we should feel free to make other such comparisons.

The sacrifices of the Soviets in WWII – 27 million killed and utter devastation on a continental scale – make every other sacrifice in any war since seem puny, hardly worth mentioning.

But I doubt Rex would agree with saying that.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

“Truth may enter the world by many doors, but she is never escorted by force.”

Rex, your opening aphorism is excellent, but it seems to me you need to apply it more widely yourself.

It’s not very honest to write such lines and use them only for selected applications.

It applies, for example, in spades to Afghanistan, but you’d never know that from some of your past comments on events there.

And it applies again to a school-yard bully prime minister, and again you’d never know that from some of your reflections on him.

______________

I know the Cato Institute well and met many of its senior people some years back.

Their most important supporter at the time I spent a day at their offices in Washington was Koch Oil.

Believe me, this is a glorified propaganda mill disguised as a dispassionate think tank. Their ‘fellows’ are the intellectual equivalent of guys in white lab coats on television commercials holding clipboards posing as doctors to sell headache remedies.

The formula is a favorite one in the United States where outfits like Heritage Foundation function exactly the same way.

Not that some of them still can’t say a true thing once in a while, much like Rex himself, but the trend in all their work is in one direction only – towards an American libertarianism, really a rather far out variety of conservatism.

Anyone who quotes them as an authority on any issue, without appropriately qualifying their status, is either naive or dishonest.

_______________

There is mud here on both sides.

The fact is that, to an overwhelming degree, the world’s scientists agree that a form of global warming is underway.

Of course there are other opinions, but the impressiveness of the ranks on the warming side is something amateurs dare go against at their peril.

The most fascinating confirmation comes from the Pentagon, where nothing but the best and most expensive and most practical science is listened to. They issued an important report, some while back, identifying global warming as one of the most important long-term threats to the security of the United States.

The real question, whether human activity is causing the warming, is not answered. There are many excellent minds who believe it, but the facts are not conclusive.

So what society faces – before we get conclusive evidence, if we ever do – is a very high-stakes gamble. Change our technologies and behaviors as though the proposition were true, or don’t change and risk possible catastrophic results.

I’m not sure of the answer myself, and my lack of faith in humanity’s capacity to behave rationally suggests we will risk the catastrophe.

In the end, perhaps it does not matter. When our planet of apes passes, eventually another species will arise to take our place. After all, the dinosaurs lasted on the order of a hundred million years. Our half million or so is less than a blink of the cosmic eye.

Perhaps by then our robots will have inherited our place in the universe, as they most certainly will do eventually. They’ll be better adapted to survive and thrive and even travel to the stars.

So maybe there isn’t so much to get hot and bothered about.