Contentious Conversations. A Review of Books by Gordon Phinn

Contentious Conversations

Books referenced:
Manipulating the Message, Cecil Rosner (Dundurn 2023)
The Devil’s Trick: How Canada Fought the Vietnam War, John Boyko (Knopf Canada 2021)
Open, Nate Klemp (Sounds True 2024)
I Heard Her Call My Name, Lucy Sante (Penguin 2024)
A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel (Harper Collins 2023)
Some People Need Killing, Patricia Evangelista (Random House 2023)
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger (Knopf Canada 2023)
Breaking And Entering, Don Gillmor (Biblioasis 2023)
The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, Stuart Ross (ECW 2022)
There Is No Blue, Martha Baillie (Coach House 2023)
Conversations With a Dead Man, Mark Abley (Stonehewer 2024)
Thick Skin, Hilary Peach (Anvil Press (2022)
Cathedral/Grove, Susan Glickman (Signal Editions 2023)
Songs of a Psychic Seahorse, Stephen Roxborough  (NeoPoiesis Press 2024)  
In the Bowl of My Eye, Keith Garebian (Mawenzi House 2022)
Blood Belies, Ellen Chang-Richardson (Wolsak & Wynn 2023)

*

     It is no longer shocking or dispiriting to hear of public relations press releases becoming the first, and often the final, draft of the daily news.  We expect it.  But unless some serious investigative journalist takes a deep dive later, either for a media outlet with big pockets and a reputation to maintain or a courageous solo effort, the PR, with its built-in spin and questionable research favouring whoever happened to foot the bill, those studies and reports with their slants, stats and self-styled experts, elects itself to the accepted position du jour.  Whether issuing from governments, corporations, militaries or security forces, all of it is subject to a full laundry of spin doctors and think tank operatives, who of course vastly outnumber the ever-shrinking teams of journalists, many of whom would investigate if they had any time to spare as they check the social media for trending narratives to feed the 24hr news cycle.

     If you suspect the news is as much entertainment as information, if not more so, you are not far wrong.  The evidence, as patiently gathered and offered by former Fifth Estate producer Cecil Rosner in Manipulating the Message, is wide ranging and more convincing than most of the spin doctored infomercials that pass themselves off every day of the week and every week of the year, not to mention every year of the century.  He agrees with other observers and critics who trace it back to the publicity experiments conceived and then adopted by Edward Bernays in the 1920’s as the tobacco companies saw a hole in their market share that could be filled if women could smoke in public and still be respected.   In this connection it is useful to recall, as does Rosner, that Bernays “began crystalizing his theories about public relations after the first World War when American authorities used propaganda to demonize the enemy and mobilize public support for the war effort, working directly for the wartime ‘Committee on Public Information’.  As Bernays noted at the time, “It was of course the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind”.   Later this, – “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country”.

     So, there we have it: first the government, then Big Tobacco, Big Auto, Big Pharma, Big Media, Corporate Agriculture, then basically any entity Big enough to employ the army of seducers necessary to bully public opinion toward their profit minded pov, followed by second wave of lawyers and paid apologists for the moping up operations when the deceptions are finally uncovered, as the courts hand out millions to the sick and traumatised victims.  It’s that trail of crumbs tracking through the Cold War era and into the proxy squabbles around the globe that benefit one or other defense industry, often several, leading slowly but surely, as one picks apart the spider’s web of interconnections, to Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism and its many scurrilous applications.

       As he offers up the surfeit of examples in our home-grown culture, economics and politics, all of which are spotlighted and footnoted, Rosner falls in line with the numerous critics from the UK and US, who of course, would skim over or ignore the Canadian experience, and for this he is to be congratulated.  We need to be reminded that we are players in the what used to be called the Great Game, often as back-ups, stand-ins and suppliers, as the recent controversy over armoured personnel carriers sold to Saudi Arabia being used against the Yemenis plainly reiterates the quandary. That we snuck around our professed position of neutrality and our carefully cultivated international peacekeeper image has been exposed more than once: Yes, we were actually ‘quietly but consistently’ backing US involvement in Vietnam and later Iraq with supplies of aircraft and munitions, the sales of which doubled between ‘64 and ’67.  Case in point:  Napalm manufactured by Dow Chemical in Sarnia and Agent Orange, the poisonous defoliant, was produced by the Uniroyal Chemical in Elmira.   Initially tested through helicopter spraying around Canadian Base Gagetown in New Brunswick, the residents of Elmira, some employed at the plant and others in the spin-off of sudden prosperity, suffered at first with the sickly-sweet odours wafting about town and then over the long term, as the residue slowly seeped into the aquifer, contaminating the water supply, poisoning them slowly with its load of carcinogens.  That Rosner referenced this shows his determination to expose, that his reference leads me to John Boyko’s The Devil’s Trick: How Canada Fought The Vietnam War completes some kind of circle, maybe one of the ones Dante described.

     With chapters like “Think Tanks or Spin Factories?”, “ Spies And Their Lies”, “Science or Junk”, and “The Age of Influencers”, he casts his nets wide, bringing up both infamous scandals and little known crafted duplicities and outrages.  And those who risked stepping up to the plate, taking the time to catch the suspects wriggling in denial, are given their due.  The bulging cache of ‘experts’ interviewed on issues of the day for their sober analyses who are financially connected to, or rewarded by, the entities they purport to defend is startling, even in this age of know-it-all cynicism.  Why believe anyone you see on major media?  After scouring Rosner’s accounts you will wonder why you bother.  Independent podcasts, underfunded and opinionated as they are, seem to be as reliable as any legacy media source that espouses objectivity in their canny and convoluted sales pitches.  The old caveat still applies: keep your bullshit detector turned to ten.  Watch as the lies take to the floor with deceptions and dance their way through waltzes, tangos and perhaps a knock ‘em down drag ‘em out fight.

     It is intriguing, finally, to note that although Rosner does focus on some outrageous misrepresentation of products and their fabricators, like Pfizer, who, fearful of over-the-counter medications outselling their prescription-only pills, quietly sponsored a national Ipsos-Reid survey, whose subsequent press release, quoting the opinions of a McMaster rheumatologist, Dr. William Benson, on the dangers of over-the-counter pain killers (strokes and heart attacks), that was widely publicised. Their sponsorship and Benson’s deep connections to Pfizer, as consultant and clinical trial head investigator, not immediately apparent but eventually exposed, lead to a $900 million lawsuit settlement over Bextra and Celebrex in the same time period that Merck paid out around $5 billion over its version, Vioxx.  Less is made of the seemingly endless scandal around opioids and vaccines, perhaps a timid if ultimately wise choice, given the shadow banning other critics and whistleblowers have suffered.

     ‘You can’t fight City Hall’ used to be the mantra, but these days it seems to be ‘fighting any powerful profit-mad entity’ is not worth the trouble unless some high powered sharky lawyers who have yet to shed their moral compass are firmly on your side.  Rosner, to his credit, picks his battles with care, knowing, with long experience, what can be done and what will have to wait.

*

     Is it about time that Canada’s role in that US military catastrophe in Indochina known as the Vietnam War was reassessed?  John Boyko thought so and I’m rather glad he did.  With our quiet conduit of hardware and armaments and a not insignificant number (maybe 20,000) of volunteers who had, on their own dime, bought into the Communist paranoia nightmare that PR pundits and planners packaged as the Domino Theory, to proudly join in the sweaty hellish swamp of the Mekong Delta, Boyko reminds us that our willing outreach and shelter of draft dodgers, deserters and years later, refugees fleeing the conflagrations between the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodians that we did not have one role in this tragic drama we had several.  Sometimes community theatre lacks sufficient volunteers.  By tracing the stories of several participants, – the joiners, the resisters, aid workers, refugees, diplomats and politicians –  Boyko presents the reader with an admirably detailed all-encompassing picture of a society freshly asserting itself on several levels. 

     Having gained our release from one Empire we were not about to toady to another’s policy inclinations, at least not out in the open.  Under the table, maybe.  And to be frank our primary domestic political concern in that era was Quebec’s ethnic nationalism and its seemingly inevitable surge towards independence.  But having that history of sheltering the escapees and refugees from America’s earlier, and some would say endless wars, such as the Revolutionary and Civil, and of course, the Underground Railroad of former slaves, we had acquired a habitual open-armed stance as well as that ‘longest undefended border’.  In that latest iteration, officialdom could see that the influx of educated self-starters could well be an economic boon over the long term to a still developing gathering of territories.  Later, our willing absorption of about 60,000 Indochinese ‘boat people’ long after our boys had come home was not only a grand humanitarian gesture but the opening of the highway to the multinational diversity we now take for granted.

     As I write the latest update on this pattern comes alive as I read of new figures, published by Macleans, that after two years of war with Russia, 185,000 immigrants from Ukraine have arrived here, 90% of whom are keen to stay.  That, my friends, is not a drop in the bucket.  Along with the recent absorption of what, 50,000 Syrians, we are showing our somewhat reluctant neighbours the true value of ‘loving thy neighbour as thyself’.

     A popular history, yes, but one with much of historical and cultural significance to impart for both the casual reader and serious student.  The author, now on his seventh book, most on Canadian social and political history, deserves the praise he has received.  With almost encyclopaedic knowledge he shows how a distinguished scholar can be a great storyteller without sacrificing subtlety or nuance.

*

     Between all the depressing news items that tangle up our days and the urge to distract ourselves down in the rabbit hole of digital entertainment we can lose our perch on that tree of inner peace, that fabled position we fight to preserve but often fail to maintain.  Is this what impels us to screens and all their apps, those devices that seduce us with their convenience and their portals to almost anything?

     Nate Klemp thinks so, and in Open demonstrates our wilful burrowing into those layers of information that leads us to close off to the rich pageant of life that lies beyond the “jammed inbox and calendar invites” that clutter our hours with social media updates and breaking news alerts, those distractions that enable our hiding form the “frustration, discomfort, boredom and anxiety that comes with living in this crazy world”.  The real problem, he feels, is not that “we are interrupted by these distractions, but that we end up craving them”.  We claim to want to be more present in the moment and fully alive but end up on TikTok.  We claim to “want connection but send surreptitious mealtime texts”, that we want “focus but can’t resist that Pavlovian urge to stay on top of the latest breaking news update”.  Tagging this as ‘closure’, the trip to being closed, where we miss out on “life’s most meaningful experiences, – the joys, the heartbreaks, the connections – because we’re too busy gorging on quick hits of digital pleasure and outrage”.

     He speaks the language of addiction, behavioural rather than chemical, and as it has become the commonplace metaphor for the blips of modern life the reader accepts it as a given.  It was initially coined by that junkie of distinction William Burroughs in several of his rants later reified into literature by worshipful critics who could stomach the mean spirited cut-ups and repeated misogyny.  Aided and abetted by Ginsberg’s famed evocation, his generation of “best minds, starving hysterical naked dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix” it has since outlived its usefulness and comes to us now as a television cliché.  The junkie/addiction metaphor can now be used anywhere anytime, – corn flakes, peanut butter, planting blubs in spring, fingernail nibbling, polishing the silverware, bingeing on Brit detective shows or Stanley Cup replays, afternoon tea with scones.  Through overuse it had watered itself down to a habit.  Habits have a long cultural history and we all have ways of adapting.

     Klemp finds himself digitally addicted, “closed down” and looks for ways of becoming “open” as the spiritual masters advise.  As Margaret Talbot observes in a recent New Yorker, “psychedelics now sit comfortably within politely au courant circles of wellness culture, start-up capitalism and clinical research, so it should come as no surprize that Klemp’s first break out is psychedelic therapy, several weeks of the trendy new therapeutic psychedelic ketamine, albeit with a guide who keeps him on course as he uncovers a variety of traumatic life passages he’d cleverly suppressed to keep that all-important persona intact.   By all means take an initiation into the overwhelming but do keep your seat belt on.

     Thus, fortified he enters the world of “the enemy”, which, in our polarised world, is pretty much anyone whose bubble is an alternate design than yours, and attempts to see them, three gun-toting NRA enthusiasts, as equals with a legitimate pov.  He finds, much to his own surprize, and maybe that of newbie diplomats, that rigorously suppressing your opinions can lead to a workable détente where nothing is actually resolved but social harmony can be precariously maintained.  

     Boosted by this minor success, he tries “open meditation’, a practice without any obvious goals other than being at peace in the moment as the brain and body go about their business, and then “open meditation in public places”, streets and shopping malls, where Sartre’s notable hell, other people, jostle for position and often smell weird.  Surviving the organised chaos of Costco and the irresistible urge to buy something, anything, he then attempts “letting go attachments” – those pretty ribbons that pin us to attitudes, opinions, and cultural assumptions opening a door to a self that exists outside of his precious preconceptions.  An unexpected email brings him to his grandmother, close to her passing and as the odour of death causes the veil fall from his eyes, to see her Buddha-like acceptance and all-embracing nature without filters as almost as worthy of worship as his beloved Ram Dass.  Unfortunately, at least for me, she’s one of those believers who prefaces every pronouncement with the likes of ‘If the good Lord had wanted us to do such and such’, a piety I personally find oppressive.

     Klemp’s aim to become “clear and open” is commendable but in our era, where the new-age value system has itself become mainstream precious, verges on the cliched.  Mindfulness meditation, much like psychedelic therapy, has become a brand, a bestselling one, and looks in dire need of some clever rebranding to keep the pot boiling.  While Klemp succeeds in keeping it all cooking to serve up generous helpings of life enhancing advice and curatives, I’m one of those old stick-in-the-muds who insists on saying ‘Shit happens and you deal with it’.  Mindfulness?  Stop talking about it and just do it.

*

    When I came across Jan Morris’s memoir Conundrum, 30 odd years ago, recounting her gender reassignment surgery and its aftermath,  It was mainly due to my love of her travel essays, initially published in the then reputable Rolling Stone, then later collected in Destinations.  It was the only text that I knew of that spoke honestly about the trials of that then rare transition.  Terms like ‘gender dysphoria’ and ‘non-binary’ had yet to appear on the horizon.  In the shifting sands of cultural change gay issues became queer issues and were rolled into the fight for LGBTQ rights and respect. The film The Danish Girl gave us an heartbreaking look at the early stages of surgical intervention.  Teenagers, some from families of acquaintances, clamoured, after years of discomfort and depression, for their inclusion. With the growing rejection of the him/her dichotomy, bisexuality, whether chosen or assumed, has become a new norm, an accepted standard that could easily morph into another as yet unsuspected, such is the speed culture now transforms itself.

     While we watch the landscape absorb this colourful plurality of options, it’s educative to read of the experimenter’s journeys.  Some are brutally honest and sincere and therein lies their value.  Fortunately, others are laid down by authors of professional standing.  Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name is one.    Beyond stylish and literate, the life of this author, for decades Luc and now Lucy, held me spellbound as it roved from a childhood of rural poverty in Belgium to a blue collar residence in urban New Jersey and then a shift to New York and finally Manhattan where hanging out with rebel artsy types and musicians of the punk and post-punk era, in shabby dives and lofts gave a semblance of self-expression to the shy and self-critical Luc, whose almost constant femme fantasies were then and for many decades later, kept under wraps for the sake of marriage and career.  Sometime in his mid-sixties he leapt from the safe place of trans chat groups and occasional appearances at parties sporting dress and wig, to the estrogen injections and the scary plunge of surgery.  As she writes, “I couldn’t yet figure out how to square my social roles; I would begin a sentence as Lucy and finish it as Luc.  I was like a character in a science-fiction novel, trapped between dimensions”.

      Working, on a recommendation, to the mailroom of the New York Review of Books somehow opened a chance to profile artsy types for Vanity Fair, and his suggestion of French director Jacques Rivette was given a green light, which financed a fun fortnight in Paris.  Eventually submissions to the NYRB were taken on, leading to the collection Kill All Your Darlings and other much praised non-fiction titles.  While teaching positions at Bard College and a residence in a small Hudson Valley community cemented his newly minted bourgeois status, it also showed the bohemian hipster how seemingly non-descript spots could be as diverse, if not more so as any funky downtown hood.  “Every race and creed and mode of life was present and accounted for – the gay couple with the bishons frises lived directly across from the extended Pakistani family whose male members wore salwar kameez – and even the whole range of incomes, from the millionaire heir on the avenue to the crack dealer down the street.”

     Despite bemoaning the writer’s life as “never very interesting as so much of it takes place inside his head”, Luc’s traverse through many social scenes as the introverted interloper makes for fascinating reading.  Chuckles aplenty when he writes of “The 80’s when we ate at restaurants where you were served seven squid-ink ravioli on a plate the size of a bicycle wheel, wore clothes with shoulders that extended three inches past that corner of the body, were always onto the new thing six months before the general public, went in on group summer house rentals in eastern Long Island, went out for brunch and tried fad cocktails and knew the names of liquor-company publicists.  Then the 90’s where we joined a food co-op and experimented with previously unknown leafy greens, drove a Subaru wagon with snarky bumper stickers, spent months touring upstate properties with real estate agents, gave each other Mexican calaveras purchased at the hipster novelty store, socialised over pot luck suppers around fire rings, talking about stuff we’d read in advice columns.”

     Through all this family game play he underwent the processing “passively, like we do the weather”.  It was all “alien and my participation ceremonial, as if I were visiting a foreign country and for diplomatic reasons, undergoing all the observances.”   When, with the heretofore hidden she finally emerged, eighteen months after hormone replacement all the rest and is “legally Lucy, certified female, and out to every single person in my life, however remote”, she can “honestly say I am happy in a way I’ve never been before” and “I am finally inhabiting myself, feeling entirely comfortable, as if I’d always been this way.”

     After participating in Luc’s endless bouts of despair, self-loathing and approval seeking, the reader can finally rejoice: the past has been finally deposed and the present be proud of itself, whether pouting or preening.

*

     One of my favourite literary treats are the collections of occasional journalism, interviews and reviews of celebrated authors issued shortly after their passing.  These praised names always have a cache of hidden gems ready to reignite reputations that may have slipped in later years.  The latest of these is Hilary Mantel’s A Memoir of My Former Self.  Her reputation rests on her two Booker winners Bring Up the Bodies and Wolf Hall, the latter of which was immortalised in many memories by the BBC adaptation with its riveting performances by Damian Lewis and Mark Rylance, playing Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell respectively.  The era of The Tudors was never more alive, except maybe when it was actually happening.

     Her occasional journalism found a welcome home in such publications as The Spectator and The New York Review of Books.  Also included here are her Reith Lectures delivered on the BBC.  They amount to a guided tour of historical fiction, a genre in which she had become something of a master.  It is not a genre I ever felt attracted to, but if I did these would be my course of study.  Also included are a sample of her film reviews, as sharply observant and witty as you might find anywhere.  Her literary essays both short and long, manage to be both masterful and incisive.

     My ‘highlights include’ section, if generously spotlighted, might run to pages of tiresome rhapsodic praise, such is the supply of stylish wit and insightful polemic here on irreverent display.  Let me limit myself with this roll call from Real Books In Imaginary Houses.  “But I am intrigued by the divide between those who say ‘I haven’t the time to read’ and those for whom reading is like breathing. … How do you live life without stories – live in just a single narrative, and that one your own? … The people with no time to read play computer games and watch tv, but I can’t think that the precisely calibrated set-ups and pay-offs of their chosen forms are comparable to the forfeits and rewards of fiction, which leaves us so much work to do and allows us so much input: you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel. … From an early age, the constant reader accepts the story as an artifact.  Alive to the artificiality of texts, he finds it hard to understand the fundamentalist viewpoint, Christian or otherwise, which casts certain phrases as sacred.  The constant reader is skeptical, irreverent and fickle.  He doesn’t make a god of any text, because he knows it is provisional and there’ll be another one along in a minute.”

    Let me encourage you to roll up the couch and devour this compendium of the provocatively clever.  After all this is the woman who published a volume of short stories entitled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.  What further recommendation do you need?

*

     The modern world, or as Anthony Trollope, around 1890, once put it, ‘the way we live now’, is an endless litany of bloodthirsty tribal conflicts, where killing without compunction is the order of the day. From Ukraine to Israel, Syria and the Sudan, the body counts outstrip each other in some race to infamy.  Accusations of genocidal fury ricochet through the media, troubling our hearts.  In such endlessly turbulent times it is easy to forget the ‘drug wars’ of Duterte’s Philippines, where suspected ‘dealers’ are dragged out of their homes, summarily imprisoned or most often murdered within minutes.

     Should one feel comparisons uneven, a quick stat check reveals the following:  – Philippines: around 20,000, though estimates vary; Sudan: 15,000 killed, 38,000 injured; Syria 350,000 killed; Ukraine, 500,000 killed or wounded; Gaza, 28,000; Israel 700 plus 400 combatants.  Displaced persons overall would seem to be in the 7 to 13 million range.  In the interest of maintaining the equanimity and stability that sustains community and family, I humbly suggest you allow your shock, shame and outrage free expression, otherwise we too are poisoned.  If one is not called to support in some tangible efforts, one is at least called to witness.

     If you have forgotten that blighted locale, or just need reminded of how an ideology, once slavishly adhered to, can destroy any remaining semblance of civilised behaviour in a society, Patricia Evangelista’s relentlessly detailed account of Duerte’s bloody rule, Some People Need Killing, will supply the nightmarish narratives behind the statistics.  And in this task she excels; little is left to the imagination once removed, all is fearlessly reported.  She talks to both victims and their families, the strutting participants, pawns of their own pride, those who fell for the dictator’s lies and now revile their naivete, those who remembered Marcos all too well and try to refrain from ‘I told you so’ and those who lunged at the chance of uniforms guns and pay, only to dispatch hapless victims with righteous fury.    Perhaps you feel you’ve had your fill with the relentless decimation of Gaza and Ukraine, and with that I can certainly sympathize, but Evangelista’s haunting mix of memoir and reportage somehow transcends the stark history of man’s inhumanity to man, and delivers a fresh blow to our dearly held myths of tolerance and compassion.

     In comparing her to Hannah Arendt, Andrew Soloman suggests that “few of history’s grimmest chapters have had the fortune to be narrated by such a witty, devastatingly brilliant observer”.  How many times must we be so reminded?  The answer would seem ‘as often as it takes’.  For what, to restore the respect for democratic principles and justice ruled by mercy and not vengeance?  Dictators and autocratic regimes have their own sense of righteousness, usually along the lines of stamping out evil once and for all, where evil turns out to be the ethnic, gender and religious scapegoats to satisfy the blood lust of a majority stampeded into fear.  Duterte’s mandate seems to be ridding society of the corruption of drug money that bribes mayors and other members of the local authorities by the indiscriminate massacre of street level dealers making their rents and feeding their children.

     In some regimes being an informed citizen following the path of eternal vigilance, as history would advise, may be insufficient the throw off the choke hold of authoritarianism. Often, it’s exile, willing or forced, that presents itself as the only solution.  And when we welcome refugees with open arms, we become part of that solution.

*

     Naomi Klein has a problem: she has a double who seems to stalk her every move and stance.  Traditionally referred to as the Doppelganger and often dismissed as not much more than myth in the fevered imaginations of the superstitious and gullible, it has the nasty habit of manifesting to those on the royal road to the summit of objective rationality from which they can fearlessly analyse and categorise to their heart’s content.  Much like Naomi’s market ascendency with a series of missives fearlessly asserting and elaborating on the rotten core of capitalism, democracy and human rights. But when the double reveals its shadow to the host it can show the castle built with pride is often made of sand.

    There is, it would seem, another Naomi, the once famed and praised feminist Wolf, she of The Beauty Myth, now something a turncoat to the earnest, holier-then-thou lefties like Klein, who themselves delight in embracing all the choice causes while building their own brands and bases, by committing the unforgivable crime of changing her mind and daring to fraternise with the likes of Steve Bannon and those other deplorables of the right, the far right and the loony fringe.

     In confronting what she terms the ‘mirror world’ of Wolf and Bannon and its birthing in the cultural upheavals of data tracking, algorithms, Trumpian righteousness and Pandemic repressions as reflected and multiplied in the swirling circus of social media, she resists the temptation to point the smug finger and snicker, preferring to execute a deep dive into the realities and fantasies of the reactionary right and refusing to shirk from the awkward truths she finds there.  Sure enough the influencers peddle their products, vitamin supplements and other panic promotions while Klein and her cohorts push their massive volumes of outrage and correct thinking.

     Years ago, having already absorbed some the texts she based her best seller the Shock Doctrine on (notably Anne Collin’s In the Sleep Room and John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)  I made the mistake of avoiding the book as a mere compendium of lefty political outrage starting with Mosaddegh’s Iran, Guatemala, Pinochet’s Chile, the weapons of mass deception In Iraq and a number or corporate caused environmental disasters (Flint’s water supply, Deep Water Horizon oil spill, the Volkswagen diesel scam etc.)

   That much of that ‘disaster capitalism’ was inspired by economist Milton Friedman’s and his ‘Chicago Boys’ pervasive influence on first world governments’ desire to upend the era of kind and careful Keynesian economics and replace it with the globalist’s deliberate raids on weak and wobbly societies, where the fire sale buy-out was aided in no small measure by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as they forcibly disrupted and restructured with little or no regard for those who would pay the biggest price, was no secret, but Klein reports with a righteous outrage that flattens all before her.

    While her passionate summations of all that’s wrong with the world, at least as far as lefty liberals and social democrats are concerned, will be useful for those who need to play catch up and the young who likely have yet to uncover the long and winding trail of depredations that is the Big Lie, I find it fascinating that she lists her fave conspiracies and cover-ups, insisting they are provable while others are just out of the question (the 9/11 inside job, the frauds of Big Pharma (opioids yes, virus panic no) with a conviction that reveals just what she bothered researching and what she summarily dismissed. The loony fringe has its uses for those who strenuously assert their version of common sense, and each bubble of impassioned certainty has its own preferred methods of finger pointing.  That the CIA invented the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ for use by its paid media assets of the day, numbering in the thousands apparently, is a factoid that should not be erased; that the Pentagon’s admission that they’ve been tracking UAP’s for years, flying in the face of their insistent denials, is an example, among many, of how fluid the flow from ‘them’ to ‘us’ can be.

     To end on a knowing smile, let me quote, as Klein herself does, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations from 1776: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in some conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”.  The modern version of the packaged conspiracy would seem to be, as Mark Fisher suggests, “the ruling class showing class solidarity”, and as Klein adds, “it’s mostly ultra-rich people in business and government having one another’s back”.

*

     In a season’s reading a provocative and entertaining novel can fill a gap that nothing else can match.  You plunge into the narrative with a celebratory relief, allowing the characters commonplace neuroses and eccentricities to win over any resistance the inbred critic may call up.  After his award-winning People’s History of Canada, a memoir and nine children’s novels, Don Gillmor has gifted us with three scabrously witty takes on contemporary urban life, of which Breaking and Entering is his third and perhaps best.  Unfolding in downtown Toronto during an endlessly oppressive summer heat wave, so vividly detailed I was actively grateful for the cool spring breezes on my back patio.

     Depicting the infamous ‘sandwich generation’, those self-pitying empty nesters burdened with frail and often demented parents, jousting with their partners in the vain attempt to keep the fires burning, fearing the loss of real estate even more than the supposed perils of senior citizenship. Being a stylist of effortless sophistication he gives the reader a cruise to not just one but several destinations, none of them geographic.   The inexorable movement towards what they most fear is dished up fearlessly and on occasion heartlessly.  Is there room for empathy in satire?  Hmm, tiny jabs here and there.  Mostly it’s mockery, more garrulous than gentle, and given the characters’ vain obsessions and snarky attitudes well deserved.

     “The weather settled in like an ancient feud.  Every week more casualties.  Afternoons smelled like rotting meat. Inside condos with high fees and a reserve fund that couldn’t cover the looming infrastructure problems, couples re-examined their relationships in the sick heat, like a thumb testing the sharpness of a blade.”  Treat that as an aperitif, the full course meal that follows over 300 pages, delivers more of the same.  Much more.  We speak of the pleasures of the text, the endless nuances available in narrative, the shocks and surprizes as egos cave to the demands of neurosis.  What we have here is a prime example.  Allow it to unfold into you; you will be swamped but not disappointed.

*

     In the performance of my ongoing critical function there can be lovely and surprising confluences.  I choose to remain cheered by such and plough onward knowing that one harvest can be as rewarding as any other.   I have before me two memoirs by Canadian writers dealing with death and grieving.  One is well known to me and the other is not, but both are prime example of how high-quality literary expression can slip by almost unnoticed.  In The Book of Grief and Hamburgers poet Stuart Ross itemises all his dealings with mortality and his struggles in coping.  His treasured memories, his pile of regrets, his ‘lost’ friends and family, his survivor’s guilt.  All is evoked with touching sensitivity that carefully eschews the traps of sentimentality by employing the long-established discipline of his craft, something I have watched him build over the last twenty years and as many books.

     As an author he varies his output, some prose, some poetry and others, like this, which he terms an essay.  Years back he published a very witty series of short essays he titled Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, a collection I recall with great fondness.  In this series of even shorter essays, he explores the meaning of grief and mourning, taking his inspiration, it would seem, from C.S. Lewis’s classic, A Grief Observed.  It is a brave unflinching effort, and I say that as one who does not share his profession of atheism and existentialism.  For example, in invoking the Holocaust, he writes, “How can I even complain about anything? Am I mistaking self-pity for grief?”

    All of his works make use of recurring metaphors.  In one novel it was ‘flippers”, in this it is “hamburgers”.  He suggests that his obsessive use of such emblematic fast food is a way to avoid the impossibly tragic.  Hamburgers, it would appear, lighten a poem.  It seems pointless to challenge the notion that the cliche’s of everyday spice up a poetic extrusion: the embrace of the commonplace has become so enshrined one feels compelled to join the party. So as far obsessive metaphors I’m persuaded to the extended use of “cheesecake”; may it aid in the digestion of that heavy meal.

    Apparently, Martha Baillie’s novel The Incident Report is to become a movie fairly soon.  After reading this disturbing memoir, There Is No Blue, I shall be intrigued, as Baillie’s expression rises above and beyond the call of duty within the memoir genre, which, despite the standing offer of ‘anything goes’ as childhood and family traverses the battlefields of psyche and society, more often than not finds its practitioners sticking to well trodden paths.  While Ross mourns the passing of several friends and close family members, spreading his sadness more or less evenly over his garden of grieving, Baillie focuses on the gradual descent of her elder sister from artistically charged eccentricity through the way station of urban hermitage and anti-depressants to the depths of paranoid schizophrenia, where all are seen to conspire in toppling her precarious mental stability.  Baillie, to her credit, recounts several attempts to align herself with her sister’s damaged but yet creative psyche, the most resonant of which is a co-composed text, Sister Language, quotes from which are revealing to say the least.  Attempts to save the self-destructive from their often-meandering path into that dark ravine from which they will not emerge, are usually futile in the long run, and Baillie’s recounting underlines that.  We cannot save people from themselves no matter how much we might like to try on the heroic mode.  Compassion, like many an attribute, contains the seeds of its own destruction.

    In attempts to grapple with the charges of abuse, neglect and torture, none of which appear to bear fruit, Baillie exhumes as many memories as can be accessed, for example the rebelliousness and disrespect that were punished by the then approved parental recourse to spanking, disputes breaking into rages and all the rest, distressing as it is, of a family’s psychic baggage.  In this benevolent, merciful yet relentless investigation, the impossibility of accomplishing much more than investing in the usual coping mechanisms acquired along the way.  Of course, we recognize the old saw that creativity is akin to madness, and in this artfully revealing account it has never been more apparent.

     Baillie survives the extended family tragedy with long lived patience and determination just as the reader emerges from the tunnel of dark impulse and suspicion into the light of acceptance if not understanding, a light illuminated by Baillie’s exquisite rendering.

     *

     Moving from mourning of those lost to the unavoidable immersion in mortality, we come to a confrontation with the notorious dead and what might loosely be termed the karma of their actions.  In this second edition of Confessions Mark Abley reignites the controversies raised and never put to rest of by government policies towards the original Aboriginal peoples of Canada.  I came across the first edition some years back and read it with great interest.  In the intervening years my pleasure in Abley’s works, particularly the memoir The Father and the travelogue Strange Bewildering Time, has only increased.

     After a timely introduction enumerating several emendations necessitated by changing times, we are soon back in Abley’s home where he feels himself visited by the spirit of Duncan Campbell Scott, who has become in the last seventy years the scapegoat of all perceived repressive and short-sighted actions by the Canadian Government of his day.  As the major domo of Indian Affairs at the height of his bureaucratic career he is has become the lightning rod for all recent criticism of the rabid colonialism and superiority of the capitalist Christian civilisation that took hold of the conquered peoples, fencing them in with reservations, land-use laws and culture crushing initiatives mostly based on an assumption that assimilation to the dominant culture was not only desirable but inevitable, and that any measures that could hurry it along were to be efficiently employed by those who knew best.

     Governments are like that.  They assume they’re on top because they’re smarter, better educated and have the budgets to ensure dominance.  But turning aboriginal hunter-gatherers into real estate owning farmers proved a bridge too far for these willing enthusiastic pawns of empire.  The people would not be moved unless forcefully shoved.  Loving their traditions and culture as much as the do-it-our-way Europeans, they participated in a centuries long clash of civilisations, that as is customary with the injustices of history, left many victims by the wayside.

     In conjuring up the spirit of Campbell Scott for a series of contentious dialogues where the varying values and presumptions of one epoch get to duel with another, Abley performs a valuable function: He allows the scapegoat a voice and respectable position from which to defend the foment against him and his colleagues.  And it is a wide-ranging debate, rising at times to anger, resentment, finger pointing and fulminating, all the attributes of the blame and shame game so familiar to the present day.

     In between these spirited debates Abley scours the historical record for documents, position papers, reports and the chatter of private correspondence to construct his rather too righteous case against the seemingly doomed Scott, and cannot be faulted for scanty research.  One senses a field with no stone unturned.  Also, it should be noted he is more than fair in his assessment of Scott literary heritage, much praised in his day, as was his friend Archibald Lampman.  The balance achieved in the comparison of Scott the native-praising poet and Scott the potent bureaucrat, frustrated by parliament with its ever-tighter budgets and the regional omnipotence of churches, both Catholic and Protestant, obsessed with Christianising the pagan and heathen by whatever means possible, is remarkable.

     This exemplary slice of creative non-fiction, such as we have come to label the genre, is as much of a deep dive as we can reasonably hope to expect in these times of headline sloganeering, political correctness and the sly manipulations of propaganda.  In the truth and reconciliation movement moving slowly through our epoch we have the key to calming the stormy waters of history.  Past wrongs are exposed, admitted and forgiven.  As with the wanton destruction of mother nature we pick up the pieces and move on.

*

     I have yet to encounter Hilary Peach’s poetry, but this plunge into memoir Thick Skin, reflecting on her twenty years of welding for the Boilermakers Union, at a time when very few women had yet to enter that workforce, traditionally a guy-only club much like firefighters & police, whose secrets societies were about to be penetrated by gender mavericks and other questionable interlopers, quickly becomes a chatty, amusing and insightful view into yet another subculture most of us know nothing about.

    Based in British Columbia but more than willing to endure the awkward flight hopping journeys to remote rural Montana and Pennsylvania for the top paying jobs, living in strip mall motels and cashing her paycheques at local bars rather than pain-in-the-ass banks, enduring much less sexual harassment than you might expect, particularly when she proved herself an more than able team player in noisy smelly industrial situations, she comes across as brave, likeable and canny individual, ever ready to embrace the assumptions and coinage of another culture in her meandering journey to a not insignificant measure of self-knowledge.

    In one leap she seems to have mastered the construction of the conventional rolling narrative, personalising it with a minimum of posturing and prejudice.  As a sophisticated urbanite from Vancouver encountering the distinctly small town and rural men who flock in their camper trucks to the rotating short contracts, ready for the rigorous schedules that pay for their kids’ educations and mortgages elsewhere, she delights in their difference, enjoys their male bonding while insisting on the deference she is ultimately given.

     This is a book to inform and entertain as it demonstrates yet again how our society shifts into new and challenging configurations.  I enjoyed every page.

*

     Over the last few years, I have developed a comfort level with the poetry of Toronto’s Susan Glickman, and I am pleased to report that her new book Cathedral/Grove continues to build admiration for her expression.  In any of its five sections I was drawn in a steady steam of ideas and images.  Stimulated by some and soothed by others.  Insightful and yet graceful.  Heartfelt when called for, harsh when required.  A poet of many modes and voices, she moves the reader through the roll call of life: walking the dog, travelling to funerals, re-examining the rickety remnants of history, the cultural heritage that chains us until we demand release.

     As she rolls out the various arguments, angles and invocations one feels jostled by a lively companion who can be relied on to walk the distance and then return home with some issues resolved and others refreshed.

To Hypnos

You always liked to tease me,

waiting patiently till I finished a task

then appearing at the periphery

of my vision and making me chase you

until you caught me in your embrace.

I slipped into it as a tranquil pool:

cool silk everywhere, no distinction

between our limbs.

Now you sulk in another room,

a disappointed spouse.  Nothing I say

appeases, nothing I do tempts you

to my bed.

How did I offend?

was it those early mornings in the garden

when I rejoiced to hear the dawn chorus,

those birds who plague you by praising the sun.

Or was it the many midnights,

worries wrenched me from your arms

as though your divinity was less worthy

than mortal concerns?

Lord of rest and renewal,

teach me how to regain your love.

*

     Stephen Roxborough’s verse, much praised in this column, aims at invigorating with rhythm and cultural rhetoric.  He contemplates the generations as they go about their business unheeding of warnings as naïve fools of the faux pas.  But he sees that it is their job in life: upending the old ways to prove that the new ways are just as viable.  This Psychic Seahorse is something of a fellow traveller with the still reverberating voices of the Beats, echoing down the decades with their impatient & impulsive calls to arms despite the all-previous failures to fashion a new society from the ashes of the old.  Roxborough mourns what L. Cohen once called The Old Revolution and would seem to want to bury it and revive it at the same time, such is his passion for its ideals, not quite trashed as yet but, you know, tired and needing a recharge.  Relishing my several read-throughs I clearly saw the tunnel and the light illuminating it.  More power to those, like Roxborough, who will not retire from battle.

Sometimes the kids surprize me

 

& take problems of the world

seriously

               as if they could actually

               make dent of difference

or maybe turn the ship on a dime

before a global climatic

titanic

sometimes they stand at the helm

fearless and full of maxim and proverb

they still believe they have rights

& these laws might help them

create a better place

     how I admire their heroic

     lambs-to-slaughter idealism

I’m both old and young enough

to remember

the 60’s

              how our hearts got lighter

              as the games got darker

*

    It’s has been some time, regretfully, since I plunged into the verse of Canadian poet and critic Keith Garebian, but his new collection In the Bowl of My Eye brought his vision of ethnically diverse urban dwellers and the beauties of nature that serenade rather than surround them found a new home in my heart.  These are poems that never shy away from the awkward and unpleasant, that embrace the loneliness and suffering camouflaged by the crowded and built-up streetscapes of the suburbs in which he has his being and practices his art.  Garebian is unapologetic as he allows the modern world to rampage through the reader’s perhaps delicate sensibilities as the headlines of the day are given the spotlight some would like to keep in the shadows.

     But not I: I continue to applaud the shameless unveiling of the awkward, uncomfortable contraries society would prefer to tidy away under the carpet of jokey conventionality.  And in doing so he manufactures a potent urban music born of discomfort and page-turning disdain.  Two more recent chapbooks, Arete and Scan, continue the high road of expressive achievement on several fronts, not the least of which is provocation aligned with a lyrical yet acerbic precision.  A critic, biographer and essayist of long standing, Garebian shows no sign of flagging anytime soon, and I look forward to finding the time to reopen my lagging investigation of his oeuvre.  In the meantime, as I sit in a public space, the old Tom Petty song “And I Won’t Back Down” plays and as I hum along, I think, Yeah, that’s Keith.

No Frills Coyote

Cruises the parking lot

at No Frills, stalking hidden,

shy, or frightened winter prey,

calculates strategy sneakily,

furry flanks smelling of wild,

dreaming blood red meat.

Moves between parked cars,

mothers huddling kids who mistake

him for a lost pet dog.

Even men dodge his path,

hurrying away from omens.

Coldly trained trickster eyes

on Anishinaabe land.  Lover,

glutton, demiurge, bringer of fire

and daylight which now streams pale.

Could have been early man, greedy

deceiver, concupiscent adulterer.

Would like to show us a special

trick of returning from the dead,

if we trust his passion which can rise

choir-high, half orgasmic,

full throated.  A wooing

you must hasten to disinvite.

*

Over the years this column has welcomed the works of a number of French, Swiss, Italian and Greek poets, all due to the tireless translation efforts of John Taylor, an American émigré now resident in France. The newest arrival, Veronica Dalkoura’s” Bird Shadows: selected poems and poetic prose 1967-2020” continues to spice up our cosmopolitan yet rather English-centric posture with her original and provocative work, moving from hybrid poems to longer narratives with a surrealist edge, somewhat influenced by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, covering the territory implied by death, rebirth, eros and spirituality. Although this arrived too late for a full review, one senses a talent and vision that equals the other titles translator Taylor has offered to WordCity, and I would take this opportunity to give thanks for his gifts.

*

     Ellen Chang-Richardson’s debut collection Blood Belies arrives at my desk with no small

amount of digital new-author praise, such as is needed when a name will not suffice.  And so it should be: every boat requires a boost from harbour.  Her expressions arrive coated in unconventional and innovative design: type in grey and black, stanzas seemingly attracted to circular and horseshoe shapes, sometimes disappearing into almost blank pages.  The sort of approach some will find stimulating and others irritating.  Sombre themes such as institutional racism and the scars it leaves in its wake tend to get lost in such design loquacity, losing the force that was likely impassioned.  That Canada’s serious missteps in assimilating those from non-European cultures has been thoroughly dealt with by other critics, memoirists, essayists and poets is not to be denied, and if so, only by those who have yet to take

the time to do some archive delving.  But for the young and perhaps naïve, the message requires repeating.

between branches

I want to sit where

living incites

no violence

where you, where I

exist as the leaves

of my Zamioculcas do;

I want to breathe not crumble

beneath our burdens

where controlled burns sustain

not destroy;

I want to swim in oceans,

In lakes, in rivers,

Devoid of trash

Where choking hazards are just

carnal fantasy;

I want to dance

but not on the bones of migrants

visit the shades of my ancestors

in the spaces between pine

and sky;

I want to spin

& spin & spin & spin

& spin & spin & twist

until time

rewinds.

*

Return to Journal

Gordon Phinn has been writing and publishing in a number of genres and formats since 1975, and through a great deal of change and growth in CanLit.  Canada’s literary field has gone from the nationalist birth pangs of ’65 – ’75 to its full blooming of the 80s and 90s, and it is currently coping as well as it can with the immediacy and proliferation of digital exposure and all the financial trials that come with it. Phinn’s own reactions was to open himself to the practices of blogging and videoblogging, and he now considers himself something of an old hand. His Youtube podcast, GordsPoetryShow, has just reached its 78th edition, and his my blog “anotherwordofgord” at WordPress continues to attract subscribers.

Phinn’s book output is split between literary titles, most recently, The Poet Stuart, Bowering and McFadden, and It’s All About Me. His metaphysical expression includes You Are History, The Word of Gord On The Meaning Of Life.