Thursday, January 25, 2007

$10/hour!

Tonight a community meeting - raise the minimum wage to $10/hr. At the moment the new member of provincial parliament for my riding, Cheri de Novo, has a private member's bill to that effect that's made it through second reading.

The federal M.P. for the riding, Peggy Nash, has the same bill before federal parliament, and they were both at the meeting. This meeting was filled with energy, all the good Torontonians talking about how a living wage is what everybody deserves. It was one of those moments where I felt kind of proud to be a Torontonian (not something easy to achieve), with a 150 people of all different ethnic backgrounds, unionists, new immigrants, old and young all listening to each other in roundtable discussions and all sorts of enthusiasm for this new political campaign.

Well, I guess it makes sense: all the cynics stay home. The people who want to do something come out. It had this interesting, people-telling-politicians-what-to-do and not the usual other way around business. Good for you, Cheri.

Track bike!

Have you seen my black track bike around town, the one with the blue anodized rims and Michee hubs? Well, if you did, its because I've been riding it as of today. I've been trying to get that bike up and running for months now, and good for me, because it finally happened and boy was it fun!

I rode that bike for two years, came within an ace of selling it to a courier one time, then backed out the next day, and I'm glad I did. That bike is about one third lighter than my road bike and so much more fun to ride. Damn, that's good, especially in the Coldest Days of the Year, which are now upon us here in Hogtown.

Gotta go bed.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Winter thoughts

A few years ago I found myself in a cafe in a whitewashed coastal town in Morocco (where Europeans owned the best traditional houses), surrounded by local men watching an American tv movie while drinking the famous sugary mint tea in large glasses. I was there with a couple of locals who were 'hosting' me.

The movie was already into its second act,if I remember correctly, and was dubbed into Spanish with Arabic subtitles.

The film was a drama about a neo-nazi group in Los Angeles who are attempting to shanghai the broadcast of a Holocaust remembrance ceremony where an important Jewish Nazi-hunter was receiving an award. I think the plan was to assassinate the Nazi-hunter while broadcasting a speech by the Holocaust-denying neo-nazi leader, using the hijacked tv station that was filming the ceremony.

Morocco is a kingdom where polical expression is tightly controlled, especially in two areas: the ruling monarchy and Islam.

It was a bit like watching a prison-revolt drama from inside the day-room of a jail (which I've also done). I kept wondering just who these Moroccans were thinking of as the villains in this cheap tv drama. The film ended with the neo-nazis getting caught and the Jewish human rights defender being saved, just as we all knew it would in an American film featuring murderous antisemites, the memory of the Holocaust, and Jewish targets. We all know how that script goes - all of us - Arabs and Spaniards and Canucks and Malaysians, anybody. Its the successful confluence of history, Western media and Western morality since World War Two.

As the credits rolled, one guy said something in Arabic to the general agreement of the others. I asked what he had said and was told, "He said that the Americans try to fool us Moroccans with their propaganda but we are not fooled by them". That was all that was said on the subject and we left.

This was the winter of 2005, in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of 2004, the vicious targeting and killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (who made an incendiary film criticizing women's place in Islam, and was shot and stabbed to death in the street in Amsterdam with a note left in his body explaining why, and also the bombing of a Casablanca synagogue the year before that left many dead). The point is that in all cases the killers were Islamists of Moroccan origin. Times were a bit tense.

That subject had already come up over tea in the house of my hosts and I had rhymed off all of the above, minus the synagogue bombings (I'm now forgetting yet another European incident of the time that really cemented the 'low-ebb' of Euro-Moroccan relations in the whole context of Arabs-vs-the-West crisis we're living in these days), and was met with much nervous laughter and embarrassed smiling, in particular by the older brother, a failed gambler who'd married a Danish woman and then given up his life there having lost a custody battle over his daughter. He hated Denmark.

The Moroccans saw the film simply as the propaganda of the imperialist, who re-writes history to reinforce his agenda, in this case sympathy for the Jews to justify and reinforce the state of Israel, that perpetual insult and humiliation to the whole Arab nation. In Morocco and in all the Arab world, America is seen as a "Jewish country", dominated completely by Israel with a 100% pro-Jewish, anti-Arab bias in the mass media, Congress, and of course the White House. The political use of the Holocaust by Israel to justify a) its creation and b) its defense has manifested the inevitable: an equally politicized Arab rejection of the historical reality of the Holocaust as an imperialist Jewish lie.

I guess at this point all this is common knowledge, and yet I'm pointing it out. Something about that two weeks or so trip to Morocco still sticks in my craw, a trip only taken because it was an easy ferry-ride away from where I was staying in the south of Spain, a bit of utterly gratuitous Westerner-in-the-east backpacking slid into at the casual invite of a couple of young Aussies.

Of course my town hosts were in the process of attempting to rip me off through an bit of extra-billing at the end of my little stay with them. The trick being that the price of the bed, meals, etc. was a non-issue until payment time, with a huge outburst of rage and shock when I politely refused their price. I had fallen for their game but wasn't going to fall all the way, as I'd traveled in enough Arab countries before to know how outrageous their whole ploy was. It was an ugly ending, but the law of the land was completely on my side and while they tried to pretend otherwise everyone knew it, and finally the three of them faded away, having boarded my bus for Tangiers, after following me through the streets determined to get their rip-off price no matter what.

It all left the open question of just what the hell I was doing in a poor, Muslim country that faced onto rich Europe directly, where scores of young men calling themselves "guides" attach themselves to tourists, relentlessly determined to scam themselves into a few hundred diram for an hour of hustling the said ignoramus of the pink-skinned variety around town. Got to make a living somehow.

It was pretty hard to argue with Moroccans when they made the point: the world's hyper-power is of course 1000% pro-Israel, and so are the other western countries despite whatever gloss of criticism a France or Italy might make whenever Israel starts another invasion of Gaza or Lebanon or the West Bank. In every corner of the Arab world people watch Al Jazeera each night and see Israeli tanks and warplanes ripping the army-less Palestinians apart, and have been watching all of it helplessly since June, 1967 and even before. Even without mentioning the parallel American occupation of Iraq its totally obvious to Arab eyes just who the West loves, and who the West despises. Its as though the sickening, bloody history of the Crusades has taught us nothing.

A wintry veil indeed hangs over us all, in this age of carbon-fuel induced world-warming. This 'new year' won't hold so much new-ness I think, but only so much more of the same.

Monday, January 08, 2007

The Holidays

Holidays. I had a pretty good set of holidays because I got out of town and up to the farmhouse retreat I co-own up in the Ottawa valley. Just four days away, but what a difference it makes, no electricity, no plumbing, just a lot of woodburning and skiing and good wholesome meals by candlelight.

To make my overworked biker's body even happier, I didn't deliver anything for about nine days in a row. That made being back on the road come the new year feel vastly better; its called recovery time for a goddamned reason isn't it? My new year's resolution is to work only four days a week - Workless Wednesdays here I come!

After overhearing a few dozen office/elevator conversations about the stressbag mess that Xmas causes the citizens of Christiandom, it made me reflect on the work-mad nature of our fabulous Northernish European-derived culture. In some countries it is not unknown to have six weeks of paid holidays per year. Yes, that's correct, six weeks. But we couldn't handle such a thing here (especially here in Protestant Hogtown), because holidays are so incredibly stressful, what with the annual explosion of over-consumption that is the Xmas season.

Its such a fine piece of industrial society conspiracy: let the masses exhaust themselves with celebration fatigue so that they are positively relieved to get back to the calming rhythms of the daily grind. Instead of the craziness of Carnival in Brazil or the month long festival in Valencia, Spain which culminates in a huge blast of TNT and giant puppet-burning in the city square, or the Tomatino (a huge, drunken tomato fight in public), there isn't a real release of collective tension at Xmas. Its more like the opposite, an increase through the added traffic, parties and dinners to plan, and the miseries of gift-buying, all in the midst of the usual workload until 24 December. Then there is all the work and stress of organizing vacations to faraway, calmer places, which may or may not be combined with the Xmas/New Year holidays.

But don't you all know all this already? Of course you do, but that's what our overdeveloped industrial-consumer society is for, the exclusive use of time for relentless productivity, no matter how useless or destructive it may be.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Ah, January

I've been neglecting the blog, being off-line as I have been until today. Nicolas came over and worked away at my alien-to-him iBook of 2001 until finally, a couple of Mac-friend phone calls later, he had me back up and surfing like everyone else.

Its interesting, this world wide web. In N. America its an absolute passion, nothing less, for millions of people. It seems like every single person I know has their own website/blog/flickr account/whatever. In Mexico (which I am quite aware qualifies as "North America" according to whoever's in charge) people use the net all the time but its not the same, its MSN-ing and websurfing, not this absolute life passion that it is in these parts. But that's N. America for you, life through glowing screens.

One of those screens was set up in the lobby at 181 University yesterday, to show Canada vs. USA in a world junior hockey tournament. It was great, a 1-1 tie after sudden death overtime when I arrived. Frank told me to stay there and give him updates instead of fetching some waybill I'd left over at the Dungeon. So I obeyed my dispatcher and got really pumped watching tomorrows hockey stars trade penalty shots for admission to the final game.

Its not like soccer where the goalie is at a huge disadvantage because the net is so big, a hockey net makes the whole confrontation just about even. And a hockey shooter doesn't just shook from a fixed point as in soccer/futbol, he skates in from centre ice to add to the drama. Canada won it 6-5 or so. All the office workers cheered. It was more joy than I'd ever seen expressed in one of those buildings so stark in their perpetual absence of human emotion. I felt great for the rest of the day, a non-hockey fan thrilled by what I had seen and a non-patriot actually proud of 'our boys' holding the national game up.

Half the country on the edge of its seat, so it seemed, while doubtless in the U.S. of A no one even noticed. Hell, in Sweden, no one seemed to notice: the rink was empty. Of course, the Swedish team was no nowhere to be seen at that point.