Enter the Czar & Illegal Legalities

 

 

‘Twas the week before Xmas

And all through the Kremlin

Apparatchiks were busy

Except for the Gremlin –

Czar Putin, by name

He cackled with glee

Hardly believing what he could see.

Lame duck Obama

Rattled his blunt sabre

While awaiting the advent

Of someone more favored –

Trump and Tillerson,

Putin’s sworn buddies.

If they couldn’t, who could

These waters to muddy?

 

George W. Bush said of Vladimir Putin, “I saw in his eyes that he was a man I could work with”. To this, the venerable John McCain – who would probably have made a better President than the Great Deceiver, Obama – remarked, “I saw in his eyes three letters – KGB…’ Unlike Joe Turner, Vlad Putin is a man I do despise. 1917 will be a big year in Russia… maybe – it’s the centennial of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution. Not much – if anything – is left of that, and the Marxist ideals for a communist state never even saw the light of day. But we must never forget that Russians have a deeply poetic soul, and, since Peter the Great, have clutched to their hearts the notion that Russia is destined to be the “Third Rome”, inheritor of a third Roman Empire (the second being the “Holy” one). President Gorbachev – a visionary warrior for peace in western eyes, but not to his own people – left a nation in shambles and without an empire. After some embarrassingly catastrophic presidential replacements, onto the scene strides ex-KGB senior operative and front-man for a plutocratic cabal, Vladimir Putin, a figure easily cast as an eminence grise during the dark days of Rasputin and the monarchic twilight. Now, to his credit, he has turned the economy around and set Russia on a course to regain its former stature as a player in the Great Game – the old struggle with European powers, particularly Britain, to control the reachable world, now transposed to a wrestling match with the US. With the notoriously pro-settlements David Friedman named as Ambassador to Israel, and Exxon chief plutocrat Tillerson as Secretary of State, Donald Trump is putting his cards on the table. Israelis are not in fact happy to have as their channel to Washington a man whose attitudes are ideological and not pragmatic. He wants to move the Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – a symbolic act that will help nothing at all, but will anger the Arabs in general, and much of the world too. Jerusalem will always be the stumbling block in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and the only viable solution for the place is that it becomes an international city, governed by neither side. I have had a wait-and-see attitude to Trump’s presidency until now, when it isn’t necessary to wait in order to see. This administration will be governed by ideology, not practical common sense. The Arabs – and by extension all Muslims – are already feeling singled-out as foes, and I don’t think the Donald realizes that this ostracizes nearly a fifth of the world’s population, not to mention a great deal of its wealth. But the Czar of Russia must be laughing his arse off. Tillerson is already a tight buddy, awarded by Putin Russia’s highest civilian honour (for what, I cannot make out), and Trump an avowed wannabe pal. Now, the Great Deceiver, otherwise known as the Magniloquent Oreo, Obama, is brandishing his wooden sword in the Oval Office, saying Russia should stop cyber-attacks, because “we can do stuff to them” in retribution. One trusts a month is sufficient for him to do that “stuff”. Failing other gambits, the Democrats are now trying to blame the lost election on Russian interference. Republicans are saying this should have been brought up before the voting began. In fact it was. On October the 11^th of this year, the National Security Agency, on behalf of the seventeen other national security agencies, announced that there was little doubt Russian techno-terrorists were behind a series of cyber-attacks in the US, most of them aimed at disrupting the electoral process. In fact, Putin’s Russia has a history of interfering with elections in parts of the old Soviet Empire, like Kazakhstan, Baluchistan, and other central Asian states, as well as the Crimea, Georgia and the Ukraine. They do seem to have extended their reach now, though. In a month’s time, the Russo-American Alliance will probably be laughing off the pathetic threats to “do stuff”, but what will the balance of power be in this new alliance? Russia — undisputed victor of World War Two, we must remember — has just made its brutal come-back mark in Syria, bombing all opposition, including the Unislamic State, out of the north-east. But is it now going to leave Bashar al-Assad’s forces to clean up the rest? Unlikely, because his army has been decimated and would be incapable of tackling the last concentration of opposition to the south of Damascus. Sunni soldiers are also sick of killing their co-religionists, which leaves the field clear for Iranian-financed fighters from elsewhere in the Shia world – unless Russia stays to consolidate its military superiority and reap the benefits. For those who think war is an altruistic exercise, this is what Putin will unquestionably do. Which leaves Trump-Tillerson in an embarrassingly awkward situation. In a vacillation that would have made Hamlet seem potently decisive, America has um-ed and ah-ed from West Asia to Afghanistan, leaving nowhere any clear idea of a policy – to the point where no one believes there is a policy. Now, however, Trump has to make America great again by coming up with a game-plan for Syria-Iraq that has to terminate the Unislamic State and also restore peace and prosperity to regions where no one even remembers what that was like. And he has to do it with Putin bestriding western Mesopotamia like a colossus. Hard to see how this cozy friendship will survive the strain, but, soon enough, the next US President will have Unislamic terror to contend with all over the region, into Africa and Indonesia as well. If Obama has a shred of decency in him, he ought to pardon the whistle-blowers, like Edward Snowden and Julian Essanges, before he leaves office, since they performed the only noble, selfless acts of his entire soggy administration. Good riddance, Barry!

 

Illegal Legalties

 

Anyone who imagines the RCMP are mindful of our hard-earned tax-dollars ought to look at the crap-fest going on in Montreal. Today, the six newly-opened stores selling cannabis products were raided, and reefer celebrity-advocate, Mark Amory was taken into custody. We are told by the media and government that marijuana will be legalized this coming spring. Judy Amory, Mark’s wife, who is behind the six stores, claims she opened them today in order to push government notions about how pot should be sold. Understandably, the erstwhile underground merchants fear an incursion by Big Greed when legalization is implemented – and these fears are evidently well-founded when Shoppers Drug Mart can apply for a weed-vending license. It seems fair that the pioneers, who suffered ignominy and arrest, should emerge triumphant when rational laws prevail. These police raids are then not only vindictive and ludicrously petty – they are suspicious. Would Jean Coutu have been raided? Yes, the defense is that it’s still illegal – but in three months it won’t be. Are all these cases and the staff arrested going to appear in court long after legalization? And what kind of reasonable judgment could be passed down then? The blather over what will happen, and who can buy it where, is bad enough without this rank nonsense. It’s not as if people haven’t been easily buying and smoking weed for over fifty years, is it? Pot shops must not be near parks and schools – please! Are the police so annoyed that pot will no longer be illegal – all those wasted years and useless busts! – that they can wreak a vendetta on the presumptuous weed-merchants at tax-payers’ expense? The Quebec police services have already brought down enough shame on themselves with racial profiling and abuse of indigenous women that one wonders why they want more. Evidently fighting crime is outside their mandate, so, presumably, more persecution of the innocent, by whatever means present themselves, is about the only option left. It’s not as if we are legalizing burglary, is it? The legalization of drugs – and I mean all drugs (who asked the government to be a parent?) – would defang organized crime in a serious way, cutting off a major cash-flow. In my book, Smokescreen, I pointed to the relationship between the government and organized crime in Montreal. I had assumed this was over now – but perhaps I’m wrong? Write to the Police Chief and tell him what you think about the way he wastes your money – I certainly have.

 

Paul William Roberts

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Anecdotal Evolution & the Nobel Laureate

Tags

bob dylan, leonard cohen

 

I have been told that my Leonard Cohen-Dylan anecdote was recently in the New Yorker magazine. I do not get the New Yorker anymore, although I wish I did and could still read it, because, as I recall, it was the best magazine on earth. Their version of the great Cohen-Dylan meeting was unattributed, set in Paris rather than Montreal, but contained a few of the key elements from my own version. I should stress that I was only told about the piece and did not actually read it myself – or listen to my robot reading it. The fact that a 30-year-old celebrity yarn has taken on a life of its own intrigued me. Of course, I have related the tale to dozens of people over the years, one of them a stand-up comic who used it in his act with himself as the narrator. Naturally, Leonard told the story too, and I once heard him spin a highly embellished version of it – but it was not set in Paris. I don’t know if Cohen and Dylan ever played concerts in Paris at the same time, but they would have had to for the anecdote to work there. However, it is the longevity and adaptability of these snippets about our idols that interests me. Certain incidents, like the Great Summit of Two Troubadours, take on a numinous significance and embed themselves in the larger myth, where they become an intrinsic part of the whole. We see it in every hagiography, from the Buddha to Bowie. Who knows if the young Siddhartha Gautama was really shielded by his father from the harsh realities of life? From what we know of the Buddha’s discourses, he was not given to autobiography, and there are also Nepalese folk-tales concerning a prince who became a holy man after facing life’s grimmer issues – but, attached to the Buddha’s narrative, the story, whatever its provenance, becomes an indispensable metaphor, and is thus intrinsic to the greater corpus. The Christian myth is similarly fleshed out with anecdotes that permit Jesus to say something wise – and some of them are even clearly spurious. When Jesus is asked, in Matthew (I think), about a woman’s right to divorce, he confidently cites Roman law on the subject – when he presumably would have only subscribed to Halachic law, under which a woman has no right to divorce. Gospel exegetes generally concur that the text began simply as a collection of wise sayings, which was then turned into a narrative, mostly by Mark, who created incidents where certain expostulations of wisdom were appropriate. But it seems that many of these anecdotal episodes were from the lives of other people – especially from James, the so-called “brother of Jesus”, who has all but vanished from history, although, unlike his famous sibling, he is in fact an historical figure. When an anecdote enters and is embedded in the myth, its actual truth ceases to matter, and it will continue to exist in whatever form best suits the myth, rather than the truth. In a John Lennon biography, I once read an anecdote of mine that was attributed to Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia. In fact, though, coming from her mouth, it gained a significance in the overall legend that it would not have gained had it come from my lips. In a documentary I watched, a Beatles anecdote I had been told by the horse’s mouth was attributed to Yoko Ono, which increased its aura of sanctity but detracted from its credibility, since Yoko had yet to appear on the scene when the incident recounted occurred. The sculptor David Wynne told me this story, and it revolved around him. He had been commissioned by Kellogg’s Cornflakes to sculpt the Beatles for tiny plastic figurines that would be included in each box of the cereal. Naturally, his maquettes were life-sized and not an inch tall. The work was concluded in Paris, and a dinner celebration had been planned. David wanted to give each Beatle a present to commemorate their relationship, and he found, on the Left Bank, four Egyptian scarab beetles. Not a modest man, he recounted his speech to the four mop-tops something like this: “I told them the history of these scarabs and ancient Egypt, and of course they were amazed – they’d never heard anything like it before, because they were wretchedly uneducated, almost illiterate…” So inspired were the lads, evidently, that, when Ringo discovered his scarab had been cleared away with the dinner things, “he had the whole metropolitan rubbish tip of Paris combed through until it was found…’ Now, you’d think that this anecdote would only work if the sculptor told it himself, no? Well, no. Ascribed to Yoko, it became an entirely different story, one about how she brought culture to the culturally-deprived Lennon, whose scarab beetle was lost and then found through her amazing grace. Ortho-anecdotes might be the term. It is, ultimately, the requirements of the myth that determine the version of an anecdote that survives and thrives, but this does give them a kind of spuriously eternal existence in which they become chameleons, taking on the characteristics of their new surroundings and shrugging off their humble origins.

 

The Nobel Laureate

 

Has anything so eagerly anticipated been as deeply disappointing as Bob Dylan’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize? One was hoping for a Dylan in white tie and tails dining with the Swedish monarch, and even possibly singing a new song instead of delivering a dignified speech. One was also assuming that Bob would actually bother to travel there and accept the world’s most prestigious literary honour in person. He’s nothing if not unpredictable, however. Perhaps he had good reasons for not attending, but he never shared them with us or the Nobel Committee. Instead, the hapless US Ambassador to Sweden read a speech especially written by Bob for the occasion. Actually, it sounded more as if it had been especially dictated in ten minutes on a tour bus. Whether or not it was deliberately moronic is impossible to say, but it displayed the ignorance of a Grade 10 student with Internet access. First, Bob informed us of the prestigious exclusivity of the literature prize, rattling off a short list of previous laureates – but only previous laureates from the US – which did serve to point out how erratic the criteria for awarding this honour can be. Then our humble bard informed us how far from his thoughts winning a Nobel Prize had been for most if not all of his life. He confided that he had played concerts for 50,000 people, and also ones for fifty people, and that it was harder to play for fifty, since they were more demanding and critical – which reminded him that the Nobel Committee was also small in number and therefore more critical, making his award all the more marvellous because… Well, it was hard to say whether it was because, being so small and critical, the panel of judges must have thought very highly indeed of the Dylan oeuvre, or whether such a tiny committee was bound to make grievous mistakes. The new laureate then mused on the nature of literature, opining that literary giants like Shakespeare never thought they were writing literature, just as he, Bob, only thought about scribbling the next song, getting the right musicians for it and the right studio to record in. Warming to his theme, he returned to Shakespeare, who, he usefully reminded us, was “a famous dramatist”. Will the dramatist, said Bob the bard, was writing plays to be seen and heard, not read. He wasn’t writing literature — he was an entertainer. Bob assured us that, when Hamlet thinks about “different thing”, his creator, Will, was thinking about box-office receipts, the right scenery, where he could get a human skull, and whether the play should really be set in Denmark. I laughed my arse off, but it was still hard to say if the Minnesota Maestro was serious about this or not. In his mind, the Nobel had now placed him in some very rarified company, and, by all accounts, he felt quite comfortable there, privy now to the Bard of Avon’s most inner concerns. Dylan wrote long ago of Shakespeare being “in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells…”, or something, which, at the time, made me think his views of the Elizabethan dramatist were derived more from folk tales than history. Is he still so ignorant of the greatest star in the English literary firmament? Is Elizabethan English beyond his repertoire? Anyone with even a mild passion for Shakespeare can see that the curious thing about his plays is they are written to be read on a page rather than seen in a theatre. The poetry and themes are far too dense and complex to be comprehensible to a first time audience – especially one at the old Globe, where you were lucky even to hear more than half a play coherently. As for the Avon Bard not writing literature, on a number of occasions in the Sonnets, he makes it eerily clear that he knows his poetry will outlast time – just as Dante does in the Divine Comedy. Bob also seemed confident that, with the Nobel’s stellar endorsement, his own work was now guaranteed a cozy eternity, and had certainly already resonated with people around the world. He was very grateful for the honour Sweden had accorded him, etc. Not so grateful that he’d bother to collect it in person, however. One felt deeply sorry for America’s Ambassador having to read this rambling twaddle to the King of Sweden, when he could have penned a far more fitting eulogy for Bob himself. But, as always, Dylan vanishes into his own mythic enigma, leaving us wondering if we’ve just been treated to a form of ironic satire, or if it was only another taste of Bob Dylan’s patent scorn for his audiences and fans. Plus ca change…

 

Paul William Roberts

Voodoo Economics

 

 

Here is a question. A woman, a wife, dies in an accident that was in no way her fault. She does not work, but her husband still has to be compensated for her loss. So, in terms of cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and love, what is her life, or her death, worth? Believe it or not, but professional economists are frequently asked to answer such questions, with reasoned arguments, annotated spreadsheets, and so forth — by insurance companies. And they do the work – for a fee – either as honestly as possible, or, often, with the interests of an employer in mind. Thanks to the superlative CBC Radio show, Ideas – It’s the Economists, Stupid, November 28^th – I came across Professor Richard Dennis of the Australia Institute, an economics think-tank. A former university economist and lecturer, Dennis is a very interesting fellow, who, as some might say, is now the bane of his fellow economists. He points out that economists have become the new priests or shamans, telling us what the ‘markets’ say or want, the way priesthoods in antiquity, or in primitive cultures, would invoke dictates of the gods. The markets, Dennis says, tell us nothing but what people with millions invested in them want us to believe. But he reserves his greatest scorn for ‘economic modelling’. Just as a model train or car is not a real train or car, Dennis says that economic models do not necessarily reflect reality in any way, but rather indicate an outcome desired by whoever commissioned them. In other words, to put it kindly, they are just opinions – and not the hard evidence they are usually proclaimed to constitute. A notorious example, says Dennis, is that of oil-pipeline companies. He has some egregious examples from Australia – where a company boasting 44,000 new jobs could actually provide none, when their numbers were unravelled – but he also points to claims currently being made by companies in Canada. They all use something called ‘Input-Output’ modelling, which ostensibly fudges funds and labour invested with profits and jobs to be delivered. Dennis uses the analogy of a GDP incorporating the goods and services provided by every single privately-owned house in a country – the value of warmth, protection, shelter, accommodation, pleasure, and so forth. According to his critique, we should examine far more carefully the claims of Kinder-Morgan, Northern Gateway, and the others, all of whom make extravagant boasts about the jobs their pipelines will bring people along the way, and the immense tax-benefits their vast profits will accord governments. More often than not, says Dennis, these claims are lies based on deliberately skewed economic modelling. As prognosticators, economists have an especially dismal record – yet no one remembers it, because the shamans are busy predicting the next catastrophe, or sometimes the next great thing.

The rat’s breakfast of contemporary economics is not without levity. A pundit wrote that nurses ought to be poorly paid, because low wages attracted only the most altruistic to the profession – and, wrote this wretch, altruism is the most necessary quality for a nurse. This prompted another economic wag to counter that CEOs ought to be poorly paid, since this would ensure the kind of essential altruism that puts shareholders and staff above personal concerns.

It used to be said that, ‘There are lies, damned lies, and statistics’. Clearly, we did not realize that, behind the concocting of statistics, were always economists. In an era where so many major decisions are based on fiscal oracles, perhaps we need to take these spurious prophecies with more than a pinch of salt – which, after all, was a prime form of currency for the Romans.

 

Paul William Roberts