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   Just as in Seattle when the clouds part and you can see Mt Rainier, Vancouver is pretty when you can see the mountains.  Keep your eyes in the clouds and every place is nice.  In other words, this is a nice place to visit, but . . .

SD:  go to Chicago, St Paul, even Milwaukee—someplace else where you'll be more comfortable.

Take my advise:  get away from your family dysfunctions and get a chance to live your own life.  You'll be able to separate your experience from your surroundings and figure out what it is that isn't working.  I'd suggest San Francisco, but you have to be a millionaire to live there any longer.

Or try Europe, or Australia.  Very likely, if  you're like me, with some distance you'll start to appreciate the good things about the US once you're away from all the bad stuff.  Baseball.  Jazz. Soul music. Even (gasp!) some aspects of Southern culture.  One of the best afternoons I spent here in Vancouver was with a gay black male from New Orleans (post-Katrina) where we talked for hours about the hypocrisy of both the American and Canadian governments—that is, when we weren't arguing about who was the better jazz or gospel singer, from our respective points of view (or whether Roberto Clemente or Hank Aaron was the bettter ballplayer).

I listen to some good early Ray Charles and it all doesn't matter.   Or some mid-career Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra.  Pain is pain,  Joy is joy.  I made my life in the arts, which transcend everything.  Hitler and people like him may have attempted to suppress some of the most profound artistic expressions known to us, but they endure and we see, hear and feel them.  Walk away from a performance of Mahler or Bach and tell me you felt nothing.

These things go back from before our ancestors and their oppressors were born.  At the same time, most the things we find the most moving are born of the same genre of struggle as people are facing now.  My ex-husband was a "freedom-fighter" (though a certain governments allied with the US probably still classify him as a terrorist), and through him I learned the power that art, literature and music have to motivate people—especially when they don't dwell on the differences, but on the potential to unite people on devotion to higher causes.

My point in all these posts is that it is the stupid, tiny things that bring us all down into that place where we hurt one another.  Obviously, as a communist, I'm going to blame the Capitalist machine, but essentially it all has to do with "what is mine and how do I keep others from encroaching on it"?  On the West Coast the factions wear different masks and use different names than those on the East Coast, those in the South or those in the Midwest.

Yet we all get up in the morning, we all look out at the same sky (which is miserably grey here in Vancouver most of the time, hence our native pessmism) and we all make our decisions about how we feel about where we are and how we feel about our lives as we get out of bed and begin our days.

Even with the most conscious effort it is difficult at times to look beyond what is in your immediate vicinity, or what you see on some flat screen in front of you.  Most of us are so busy keeping body and soul together to look much further beyond that, or to do our own research.  We're tired.

The nice thing is that we can look beyond this to the rare occasion when we meet someone with whom we can communicate without a lot of explanation, or someone who has been through what we have.  We can start to understand that, in spite of all the negativity that the media feeds us (and that we displace on other people in our surroundings) there are people who share similar hopes and aspirations for the populace in general; and when we raise our eyes above the stupid petty differences we see that we have much more in common than we had realised.

Some of the friends I lost in the AIDS holocaust in the 90s had been members of religious communities—both Catholic and Anglican—before they decided to realise themselves as gay members of society.  Sadly enough, as soon as they had done so, both the religious communities that had formed their identities since puberty and their families had nothing further to do with them, even when they were dying.  Yet there were religious and social communities in San Francisco that were ready to receive them, and they formed  their own "families of choice" based on real emotional ties that were totally divorced from biological determinism.

btw, sadly enough, I see little evidence of the potential for that here in Vancouver, despite the liberal laws—and I've done some work for AIDS charities here (and I have friends who may be in a position eventually to make use of those services), so I've some idea of what the situation is here.  Talk about stepping back 20 years  or so.  Even Mississippi probably makes better provisions for people with HIV than the GVRD,  but I digress . . .

I'm suggesting that you look beyond national differences—certainly those that separate us in North America or in the West in general—and find a plane of commonality that will take you out of the slough of despond in which you feel you dwell now.  You won't find it by crossing simple national boundaries, or possibly even ideological ones.  Very likely you'll find yourself making personal and ideological compromises when you do so—however, when you do find those you can communicate and work with, best of luck to you.
     

 purelife wrote:
Hmm, I didn't know that Kevin had muscles and I thought that Britney's hair is now black?

I'm still amazed that Paris Hilton came out with a single.  That girl thinks that "It's HOT" saying should be trademarked.  LOL.  OMGAWD!  That girl can't sing..... BLEH!


From my point of view, none of the people pictured or mentioned on this thread can sing (and, by extension, I'll include Madonna, as she had some sort of connection little miss trailer trash as well).

Why people waste their time and attention these media creations/whores is beyond me . . .
 
 

What, you want to get into a "suffer-off"?

You want to know why I don't like Hungarians?  I was engaged to a Hungarian Jew who, despite my use of birth control, knocked me up and was ready to marry me until his mother objected—because my father was Jewish and my mother wasn't and that doesn't count?  What it was really about was the fact that my parents were academics and didn't make the big money they were hoping their son would marry into.

Big f*cking deal.  And that's minor in the course of my life, for f*ck's sake.



What does that have to do with the political situation in the US and Canada, which is the subject of this thread?

Especially as it has to do with AIDS.  Want to know how many people I've literally watched die of AIDS?  Having been a performing artist in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis I can tell you a lot.  But does that have anything to do with Harper's actions in the year 2006?


You have to look at the meta-issues, dude.  Otherwise, it's a huge paradox, and you get lost in the details.

Europeans blame North Americans' Puritanistic view of sex as a major stumbling block to rational public policies as regards HIV (the Clinton years notwithstanding).  Yet it was my totally Anglo-Saxon Puritan uncle with his three degrees from Harvard that he's so proud of who told me in the midst of the AIDS crisis that he was thankful for it "because it mostly hit the homosexuals and drug addicts, and it thinned them out".  I almost ran my car off the Bay Bridge when he told me that.  From his point of view, of course, it was perfectly sound fiscal public policy.

Follow the money.  That's where it all goes.
 

[two different Chinese neighbourhoods]

     Sportsdude wrote:
 I've walked in your shoes Dissident I've been on both sides.  I know what I'm talking about.  I doubt you've ever seen real racial tensions. Well I have.


Probably while you were still in diapers I lived in LA.  Try walking into a hardware store and you are the only female and white person there.  The hate was palpable.  All I wanted to do was buy a few screws, fer Chrissake. This was in the mid-80s.  Oh, and try going into a hardware store in two different Chinese neighbourhoods in San Francisco to get something you need for your job as an apartment manager.  It's us "uppity white women" who "act like men" and are responsible for their women running off with white men, or so they used to tell me . . .

Don't talk to me about racism . . .

I was gay-bashed even before there was a word for it.  Even though I'm straight, just because I played sports and was intelligent and outspoken in my teens I was beat up for being a dyke.  Once again, this was in the mid-80s.

Just learn some perspective, that's all I'm trying to say.  Just because it seems so bad to you now, if you talk to anyone who has really been there, it isn't as bad as you think.

Similarly, if I had taken the time to talk to someone who had really been here in Canada (aside from my very conformist and middle-class brother, whom I didn't believe, and now I rue the day that I ever discounted his opinions) I probably wouldn't have put myself through the last four years . . .

     

 Sportsdude wrote:
Oh like being a white male somehow makes me immune. MY ASS!


 Let me put it this way:  you walk into a place by yourself where no one knows you, you are a white male.

I walk into a place where no one knows me:  I am a woman.

I spent the better part of the day today dealing with building subcontractors.  My ex-husband was one, and I speak their language.  Even so, I had a much harder time than I should have—because what does a woman know about these things after all?

One of these guys, who had been fairly reasonable and fair-minded—and who was around my age—made some comment about running into someone he had known in high school nearby, was I from this part of town, had I gone to one of the schools in the area?  I tried to put him off with vague denials until he finally forced me to admit that I had gone to school in the US.  Shortly thereafter he handed me a bid that was several hundred dollars above the other ones I had received for the exact same job.

It's all appearances and assumptions.  Just as I can never truly understand what it's like going through life as a non-white person, you can not understand what it is like to live as a woman—or to live as an American in Canada unless you do it yourself.
     

[fireworks]

   Well, I'll be out of town during the fireworks this year—my house-sitters can watch them from my balcony . . .

The first year they didn't have fireworks on Canada Day I started ribbing some of my friends.  I said, "I've finally discovered the difference beween Canada Day and Fourth of July:  no fireworks.  Is it because you guys lost the war?"

I mean, even the most impoverished municipality in the US has fireworks, on Independence Day, if nothing more.

My Canadian friends told me it was because the government was too cheap to have fireworks.  I told them that stinginess was what I had come to expect in Canada, and the next time I wanted fireworks I would make the trip down to the US.
     

  Sportsdude wrote:
Its a growing issue something you probly haven't seen because you live outside of the country or grew up on the west coast where this trend is not common place.


The family members I was quoting live in the mid-Atlantic seaboard region and adjacent Midwestern states, and I last visited them in 2003.  I am still in touch with some of them (though not the cousin who raised money for Rick Santorum's first campaign, but most of the others) and they feel the same way as they always have.  I can say the same for people I know who still live in the Deep South and Southern California who vote Republican.  It's an economic issue, period.

I also have known a lot of self-described "born-again Christians" who have their own personal ethics but personally disagree with a lot of their church "leaders" in that they don't believe that they have a right to inflict their beliefs upon others . . .


Canada has been slow in areas but that was eons ago (maybe not from your perspective but from mine it certainly is).

You try living here as somethings besides a white male and then you can talk to me about this issue.


There has been a cultural shift to the hard right and if you can't see that well I'm sorry.

Sweetheart, I hate to pull rank, but I'm probably old enough to be your mother.  I've seen more, experienced more, and I lived in a lot of different places in the US (some not far from where you are now).  I know something about where you live and I understand that it's miserable (the last time I travelled through your hometown I was shocked that the clerk in the gas station/convenience store I visited actually had a smoldering cigarette next to her, and that I had to inhale her fumes—this was only three years ago), but it doesn't necessarily represent the whole Midwest, the whole US East of the Rockies, or the whole US in general.

If there's anything I learned from the Reagan-Bush era of the 80s it's that it is the most vocal and fascistically well-organised (in modern terms, the sheep-like religious Right) that get their voices heard—but it is a true "silent majority" (to make ironic use of Nixon's reactionary terminology from the 60s) that populates the US and makes up the more moderate bulk of the population.  Why do you think that the last two Presidential "elections" were expected to be so "close"?  Is it perhaps because the huge number of swing voters not only can't make up their minds between two truly abhorrent candidates, but also because they don't fit into the kind of pigeonholes the media (and you) want to put them into?  That's a far cry from the lockstep jackbooted Christian activists that you (and the media) are portraying to the rest of us.

I'm reminded of a recent German movie I saw about the WWII period—forgive me if I can't remember which one.  A character who suffered under the Nazis was asked why he didn't leave.  His answer:  "I was waiting for the Germans to return."  In other words, the ones who weren't total fanatics and the stupid sheep who just followed along with them.  That's the way I look at the American people—and I believe that, despite all the bullshit that's happening now, the better part of us will prevail.  Just as some college students I knew in the early 80s thought that the world had come to an end when Reagan was elected, and found later that all was not lost.

I'm just finishing up a biography of Germaine de Staël, the famous 18th- and early 19th-century saloniste whose career predated the French Revolution, and whose republican sentiments and writings caused her to be exiled by Napoleon.  A passage I read the other day from this book particularly struck me:

"Compared to what the world has known since, Napoleon's régime seems mild and humane; but to one who remained faithful to the hopes of the eighteenth century, the world of 1810 was a nightmare of brute force.   War was permanent:  it had gone on for eighteen years.  From Spain to Poland, from Amsterdam to Corfu, French soldiers were garrisoned, levying tribute and imposing the will of one man.  With the Continental System and the blockade war had become total, with no end in sight, engulfing all human energy:  the arts had to glorify the régime; philosophy and education must function as tools of conformity; science was enlisted to create synthetic substitutes.  Resistance was punished by demotion, exile, imprisonment and, in the conquered countries, the firing squad.  The year 1810 marked the beginning of a new phase in systematic oppression.  Napoleon created state prisons, where inmates were held without trial, decreed drastic new censorship laws, and deprived the Church of its last vestige of independence.  The Pope himself was arrested and hustled off to Savona.  If his plans had succeeded, said Napoleon in 1816 [in other words, after his defeat—in case you didn't know], he 'would have become the master of the religious as well as of the political world.'"

That was just five years before his defeat.  Since then worse despots have gone down as a course of history and general opinion against them.  Bush and his machine will go down too.

Don't tell me I don't know what it is or where it comes from because I've seen it too.  And it's here in Canada as well, as much as you'd like to believe otherwise.

But it will not prevail.  Simple human decency dictates that.  If you're really worried about that, then get off the computer and do something real in your own community—or go to one in which your efforts can bear fruit.

Just as the border insulates me from living with the Christian Right 24/7, so your geography isolates you from those as near as the Northern Midwest (and yes, I am in close contact with friends there, too) who believe as you do.

One last point:  even my friends in the Midwestern US are shocked at the kind of sexism I've had to deal with here in Canada.  As a white male, you are in no position to comment on the kind of oppression and regressive attitudes I've confronted here.  I have made part of my living in a male-dominated field since long before I left the US, and I have never encountered the repression and shockingly outdated views of women that I have here in Canada—and if you put yourself in my shoes for 24 hours you might sing a different tune, you little pissant.
   

 kitten wrote:
In 1972 I was not allowed to buy a car in my own name without my husband's written permission.  Things have changed a lot since then.

Get this:  in 1976 my mother, a medical professor who had just finished an auto repair course, took her new car back to the dealer for some warranty-covered repairs.  The dealer said to her, "OK, honey, now you take this estimate home and show it to your husband, and if it's OK with him, he can call back and authorise the repairs."  

My mother said, "Well, first of all, the person who owns the car, the person who has paid for the car, and also the person who knows how a car actually works is standing in front of you, whereas my husband neither knows how a car works nor how I spend my money keeping it in repair—and you, sir, ARE A COMPLETE SEXIST!"  

Oh, how I wish I had been there.

Even better:  my mother had a friend, a black female Army psychiatrist, who made great money as the medical chief of a VA hospital in an unnamed but almost completely white and very rednecked American town in the late 1960s.  This woman decided to buy herself a motorboat to enjoy her time off on some of the local reservoirs.  When she went into the dealership the salesman kept steering her towards the less expensive boats, even though she was interested larger ones that would allow her to invite more of her friends along.  But she went along with him and settled on the boat the the salesman suggested.    When it came time to settle the bill he started outlining various financing options.  She just pulled out her chequebook and asked him how much it was, and promptly wrote out a cheque for the full amount!  That stupid racist and sexist mofo must have realised pretty quickly that he had just missed out on a much bigger sale had he not made such stupid and short-sighted assumptions about what turned out to be one of the more well-heeled customers he had had all year!

I wonder if things are much better now, to be honest.  Real estate people still "steer" single women and minority couples towards lower-income neighbourhoods, even when they can afford more.  It happened to me when I moved to Vancouver.  I ended up buying in a cheaper neighbourhood than I could have, and ultimately ended up spending more in renovations than the difference between a place here and one in an area where I wouldn't have had to put so much extra money and work into my property . . .
   
 

 Omigod, Peter Mansbridge looks like he's just out of high school in that clip . . .

Hey, thanks.  Looks like it was going on at the same time both countries.  I knew some Japanese-Americans who had been in the camps, so I remember hearing about the reparations in the US—but it was before I moved to Canada, so I didn't know what happened here.

What do you think global economic politics has to do with the situation?  After all, the reparations to Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians happened well before the collapse of the Japanese economy and Japan was one of our major trading partners at that time.  Now that China has the economic bullwhip over us, the government is finally getting around to apologies to Chinese immigrants?

When is the Canadian government going to make apologise to [span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"]women [/span]of all races for withholding suffrage and property rights from them until after WWII?

   

 Lise wrote:
 there are temples in India where rats are considered sacred where they're fed and worshipped everyday.
 
Rats Rule at Indian Temple Article: [a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0628_040628_tvrats.html"][font size="1"]http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0628_040628_tvrats.html[/font][/a]


Remember that Tori Amos video where she was singing about God and had rats crawling all over her?

Used to make me shudder every time I would see it.

 

The first Canada Day celebration I went to it turns out that I knew the person who sang the anthem.  Later on, I told her that it was pretty sad that it took an American to point out that she had actually left out an entire line of "O Canada" when she sang it . . .  

Don't count out Italy.  They always play dirty.  My ex-husband was European, I learned all about the Italians and the Spanish teams . . .  

Hey, Lise, forgive my ignorance . . . has the Canadian government ever made reparations to Japanese Canadians for internment during WWII?  That was a big issue in the US in the 90s.    

[True]

  Sportsdude wrote:
Because they attach themselves to religion. Most people in this country that go to church vote. So if they say they are pro-life or whatever that means people will blindly vote for them even though the politicians themselves will never act on those 'pro-life' promises because its politicial sucide because then they loose a trump card to the other guys in elections. Thats why democrats have only been in office 8 years since the roe v. wade decision went down. Its like when the Liberals use scare tatics against the Torries in elections saying they are against women issues and such. (Which actually is technically true and knowing and watching Canadian conservatives they'll do anything and not think about the consquences just look at Mulroney did and it f-ed up his party for a decade.)
 
So if the abortion issue passes the republicans are basically screwed because there are millions of people who just vote on one issue in this country: abortion and if that goes away then that opens up a huge grey area.



Do you really believe that the real majority of Americans feel that way?  Reagan and Bush père got elected on economic issues more than anyone else (well, that and a racist view of violent crime–as the "Willie Horton" ads of 1988 will attest).  That's what the "Reagan Democrats" were all about.  The sad thing is that the Republicans drew the wool over "working class" males' eyes about what they would do for them.  They found a good scapegoat in women and minorities.

There was a phenomenon in the 80s of the "Angry White Male":  men between 20 and 45 who were finding their social and economic primacy eroded during that period—mostly by globalisation and the anti-labour politics of Republican administrations—but the Republicans were good at casting the enemy as not the corporate overlords but the "beneficiaries" of Affirmative Action and "the women's movement".   For example, the main reason why women made wage gains against men in particular professions during the 80s and 90s wasn't because they started earning more:  it was because men started earning less (the same case can be made for minorities as well).  That's a lot of what's behind the Far Right even now.

After all, what was the rallying cry in the Clinton campaign HQ in 1992 but "It's the economy, stupid"?   Clinton was able to capitalise on the economic downturn of the early 90s, just as Reagan was able to milk his "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" bullshit in 1980.  Don't think that Thatcher and Mulroney were any different.

Yes, there will be a few very vocal nut jobs who will swear up and down that their real reason for voting Republican is based on social issues.  But even these people will have some sort of economic imperative behind their opinion.  I've yet to meet someone who would tell me that they stand to stand to see their income go down if their candidate is elected, but it's worth it to them to see said candidate enact some sort of social legislation.  After all, the whole anti-choice position was sold to the greater populace on the basis of the "welfare queen" myth.  True right-wingers (like certain members of my family) support abortion rights because, from their point of view, it keeps the poorer classes from breeding and burdening the wealthier ones.

btw, this is perhaps off the subject, but let me tell you something about the rights of women in Canada.  Women were not allowed to vote [span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"]or even own property[/span] until 1947.  The next time you go off about how historically more liberal Canada is as compared to the US, why don't you take that into account?  When I found out that little piece of information, it sure explained a lot about some of the regressive attitudes I have encountered in this country.

Please try to look at the current situation in the context of history, not just in what you see now.

 

     They don't necessarily have to be created with an airbrush.  There's a region in Italy where most of the details (cornices, arches, decorative stonework) have been traditionally done in paint in a "trompe l'oeil" style—it dates back past the Palladian period, if I remember correctly.  When I lived in SF I did a scoring gig with a guy who was doing a BBC documentary on the subject.  It's fascinating.  Thanks to historical preservation, there's a whole guild of artistic decorator types in this region who do nothing but create these "architectural details" in paint.  From what I can tell, they use traditional techniques—in other words, no airbrushes.  The more modern "photographic" ones probably do.

From what I've seen in old palaces in Europe where they have this type of painting, the old techniques are actually a lot more convincing.  The less "detailed" the image, the more the eye and the brain "fill in".  That's why they still look so good, even centuries later.

I'm with you, Sportsdude.  I wish they did more of that–especially those "big box" places:  what better place to put a nice mural?  You'd think they would figure out that doing such things would help their PR (though it doesn't make up for the fact that they treat their employees like shit, it doesn't hurt to give some mural artists a gig here and there, either).    A lot of cities mandate that a certain percentage (usually something like 1%) of public works budgets (and some private projects as well) go to artwork on the site.  That's why you see interesting (and not so interesting, I must admit) sculptures in front of power stations and crappy office buildings.  For example, there's a big stone sculpture in front of the BofA building in SF that has become known locally as "the banker's heart" (God knows what the original name was).  Why don't they insist on spending a similar percentage on decorating these warehouse-style stores?  Imagine a Lowe's or Target with a pretty mural on the front.  I may not be more inclined to spend money there, but it would be nice to see on the occasion that I have to traverse the faceless (and characterless) suburbs where these behemoths tend to congregate . . .