The Ten Worst Canadian Things... Ever!

Canada struggles for its identity. It hovers in the shadow of the United States, an economic and cultural powerhouse. Many seek to define Canada by what it isn't and produce a litany of cultural and historical characteristics that make us not the USA. Others point to Canadian victories in war (the reputation of fighting Canadians in the World Wars), victories in politics (Arts Boards, Medicare), victories in science and technology (insulin, the Canadarm, the telephone), or victories in sports (uh... there's probably some real-good sports victories out there to mention but I honestly don't give a fuck).

But let's face it. If we're going to be a real culture like the United States, we need, NEED, a list of bad things to define us. The US has a history of slavery, a bizarre half-assed colonial thing, unbelievable poverty in the midst of immense wealth and a weird news-media culture that can only be called a triumph of the subjective. As Canadians, we can look at these things and say, "See? We didn't do that. We're better than those awful Yankees." If we ever want to be taken seriously, we need a list of faults, bungles and morons that any American can see and say, "Thank God, thank God I'm an American!"

THIS IS THE LIST.

Here are the rules by which the list is compiled. The things on this list must be Canadian icons, people or influences that reached beyond our borders and spread their cancerous filth like gangrene upon the world. Canadian politicians are off the list because they're too easy and, also, one man's hero is another's devil. So as much as I want him here, Stephen Harper is safe. I have also omitted serial killers like Robert Pickton and Col. Russell Williams because, once again, they're too easy, nor do they have much comic potential. Now begins the countdown:

10. Krantz Films, Inc.

Perhaps you've never heard of Krantz Films. No actually, you have, though you were very young when it scarred you. For it was Krantz films that was responsible for those awful, lazy Rocket Robin Hood cartoons and, more famously, the Spider-Man series of the 1960's. The cartoons produced by this animation house can scarcely be called animation. When movement occurs, it is choppy and sloppy. Footage is re-used shamelessly.

"Come on, J. Adrian," you might say if you were in-the-know, "Krantz didn't make anything lazier than any other two-bit animation house of that era. Remember The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and Mighty Hercules cartoons?" Yes. But even they did not sink to this low: plots were re-used. Remember Dementia 5? You should, because both Rocket Robin Hood and Spider-Man traveled to Dementia 5, had the same acid-inspired adventure and in the process terrified two generations of children. Lame lame lame! Canadians did that.

9. Lord Black of Crossharbour
What's better than a rich, criminal media-baron? A rich, criminal media-baron who also happens to be an arrogant windbag, that's who. And it's Canada's very own Conrad Black. Or, I should say, was Canada's own, because he's renounced his citizenship to become a British Lord.

Hating free-speech seems like a strange trait for a newspaperman, but that's our Conrad. He and his supervillain wife, Barbara Amiel, have been a pair of howler monkeys in Canada's tree, annoying Canadians with their right-wing views for over twenty years. Black was so widely-hated that when Queen Elizabeth II wanted to make him a Lord, then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien intervened and argued that a Canadian cannot be made a Lord. That's when Black renounced his citizenship. Yay! Later, of course, he was convicted for fraud and obstruction of justice in the US. More good stuff. I hope you're enjoying Lord Black, Queen Elizabeth II. We don't want him back.

8. The Heavy Metal Movie
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a stupid glowing green ball called the Loc-nar was the cause of all evil in the universe? I didn't think so. And judging by the significance the Loc-nar plays in each of the short films in Heavy Metal, neither did the creators.

Yet the Loc-nar provides "unity" to the rambling tales that comprise Heavy Metal. It forces a little girl to watch scenes of ultimate evil which frighten her. Yet the ultimate evil she beholds include a bald barbarian congregating with topless chicks, some aliens getting high on a substance named Nyborg, a dastardly space captain and some more topless chicks. Scary stuff. Now, if the Loc-nar's evil plan was to bore us to death, I'd believe it.

No, really. Somehow the movie manages to make blood-spattered topless warrior chicks boring. The animation is painfully slow. The plot is constantly interrupted by "music-video" segments which might be appealing if you're stoned. SCTV alumni and Harold Ramis as voice talent could not save it. It's one of the most famous movies to be produced in Canada and it sucks Nyborg.

7. Apartheid
Bwah? Well, rumour has it that during a trip to Canada, visiting South Africans observed our system of Indian Reserves. "What a great idea!" they said, "We should do that to our black people!" They took it a step further. Several steps, in fact, leading to one of the most racist and evil policies of planet earth.

Only #7, you say? Surely this is worse than Celine Dion? Yes, but Canada doesn't get full credit. Our exclusionist policies only inspired Apartheid, after all. Realistically, Canada need only feel guilty about confining our aboriginal peoples to the least-wanted farmlands available to teach them agriculture, stealing the food we promised them and refusing to give them jobs for a hundred years.

Nah, let's just ignore that issue. It's easier.

6. Tom Green
Okay. I'll admit it. I did not see the manifestation of Tom Green's true talent, a little film called "Freddy Got Fingered". By the time it was released, I knew better. Reports that it was one of the worst movies ever made confirmed my prejudgments.

I had previously watched the Tom Green Show. I knew his shtick. The usual show would go something like this: Awkward onstage banter. Tom drinks some kind of bodily fluid. Cut to Tom with something stupid on his head irritating people in a public place. I change the channel.

Don't get me wrong. From a comic perspective, there is nothing wrong with taboo humour, whereby social norms are broken. I've watched and enjoyed enough Sacha Baron Cohen and Kenny vs. Spenny and know what it looks like when it's done well. Tom's brand of taboo humour was limp, aimless and poorly executed. When he pretended to hump that roadkilled moose, he could have created no more potent a symbol. The moose represented Canada's reputation. Or perhaps comedy. I haven't decided yet.

5. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police
I will receive disagreement from many quarters for this one, but I fervently believe in my choice. Things have changed since the image of the dutiful Dudley Do-right were formed in the consciousness of the world. The RCMP has since forgotten that it is a national police force and not a political entity or a business.

Like most police forces, it has the usual array of brutalities against protesters, questionable taserings and invasions of privacy. What makes the RCMP special is that starting about 50 years ago, it has an odd history of being naughty with fire and explosives: stealing dynamite, burning down barns, and if Wiebo Ludwig is to be believed, staging an attack on a pipeline to frame him. Then there's the time that the RCMP let the Americans know that a muslim(!) Canadian, Maher Arar, was on board a flight in New York. The Yanks quickly bundled him off to Syria to get tortured. That's some nice treatment of our citizens abroad, boys.

Next, the RCMP has been forgetting that it is supposed to be an impartial police force and behaving like a partisan political entity. They used taxpayer money to pay individuals to write negative opinion pieces in newspapers attacking Vancouver's safe injection site in 2008. Then there was the RCMP researching people applying to appear at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's gatherings during the 2011 election, giving helpful tips on who he might not like, and assisting Conservative goons in escorting CITIZENS away from the PUBLIC gatherings! That is not helpful. That is some authoritarian bullshit.

And a final strike against them. We all know the redcoated image of the mountie smartly saluting with his black pants and boots. Did you know that the RCMP sold the rights for this image to the Walt Disney Company for five years? That's great, fellahs. While we're at it, let's license the Canadian flag to Time-Warner. All this adds up to an organization whose brass have forgotten the meaning of the symbolic Mountie: dutiful, friendly, helpful and ready to serve all citizens.

4. Celine Dion
She is one of the most popular Canadian musicians of all time. Of the top ten best selling albums of the 90's, two are hers and a third, the "Titanic" soundtrack, was popular only because of her featured Oscar-winning song.

Her music is the epitome of bland. The second her albums left the charts, we began to hear them piped over the sound system in supermarkets. I know I've heard her music a million times, but for all that, I couldn't name you a single tune except for the one about the big boat and it goes, "Ooooo".

Yet I know there is this invisible class of persons who love Celine Dion, subscribe to the National Enquirer, can be seen shuffling out of scrapbooking shops in sweat pants with weary eyes focused on the pavement, collect animals made out of glass crystal and have no greater joy than when Ellen DeGeneres dances. The following statement is made not on their behalf but from the rest of Canada to the world: We are sorry. We're so, so sorry for Celine Dion. If there's anything we can do, anything at all to atone, please call us when you stop being angry.

3. The Alberta Oil Sands
As the world's oil supply burns into oblivion and prices rise to levels undreamed, you'd think that Canada would be trying to find an alternate fuel source for the future that doesn't cause global warming. Nope. Instead, Canada has encouraged a more expensive, more filthy, more inefficient, more environmentally damaging way of extracting oil from the earth. It requires large amounts of natural gas and alarming amounts of water to do so. Sadly, from a price perspective, it's totally worth it.

It's almost impossible to describe an oilsands development area unless you've been. I haven't visited, but my wife has and it horrified her. I've only seen pictures: vast expanses of sand, filth, machinery and tailings ponds. They dump their industrial waste into these open water pits and position sound cannons around the perimeter to scare waterfowl away. But sometimes mistakes happen and northern Alberta has been witness to many dead, tar-covered ducks and workers.

Oilsand extraction is big business. It makes billions of dollars per year, yet for some reason the Harper government keeps giving them more than a billion dollars a year. They don't need the money, dumbasses! They were going to develop those oil sands anyway because it's extremely lucrative. Quit it!

And lastly, Fort McMurray, which was an awful town to begin with, has grown into a sprawling, poorly-planned blight upon the forest with ONE ROAD connecting all the neighborhoods. Ever seen a traffic jam in the forest? Young people are drawn to the oil sands for the money, find expensive homes in Fort McMurray, get depressed because they're separated from their families and working twelve-hour days, spend their money on abundant booze, drugs and hookers, then get fed up and move home just in time for their partners to ask for a divorce. Fort McMurray, by all rights, should have its own entry on this list, but I've chosen to amalgamate it into the oilsands entry because it is merely a symptom of the oilsands problem.

People are people and we only change during crises, so we will not be rid of oilsand development until the last drop of oil is extracted and civilization is left scratching its head and wondering, "Now whadd'r we gunna doo?" Cheer up! Canadian scientists are busy, busy working on ways to extract oil from oil clay, a method that promises to be even more expensive and harmful than oilsand extraction! Yay!

2. Usage-Based Internet Billing
Netflix has shaken media as we know them. One day it shifted its focus from mail-order rentals to streaming videos on the internet. It offered this service to Canadians for a low price of $8.00 a month. And Canadians were very happy.

They were so happy that they stopped paying stupid amounts of money for on-demand movie and television with their local service providers. Rather than lowering their prices and "competing", as it's called by capitalists, the big internet and television companies whined to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (a government body which would deserve its own entry if it wasn't a local Canadian thing) and asked it to allow them to charge the small companies who rent their internet lines according to how much data they use. Streaming video, such as that offered by Netflix, uses a lot of downloading capacity.

This has opened the door for an idea called UBB, or Usage Based Billing. Basically, internet companies have put an arbitrary cap on the amount of data Canadians can download. If they go over, they get charged large amounts of money. This led to a storm of complaints toward the the CRTC and the big internet companies. Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised to open an inquiry into the CRTC decision and the Minister of industry threatened them, but so far nothing has happened. Bell and Shaw are planning to make the switch to UBB and have hired their propegandists to turn the Canadian public against itself, claiming there are "problem users" who download massive amounts of data and raise the price for everybody, trying to convince us that people should pay for the amount that they use.

Here's the thing. Let's put aside issues like the facts that UBB is an obvious ploy by monopolists to destroy their enemies and a cheap grab for more money without doing any work. Usage Based Billing is contrary to the vaunted ideas of our Information Age. It might even be contrary to civilization. The internet has always been exalted as a repository of information and entertainment accessable to everbody. With caps on data usage, it means that people will use the internet less to save money. That means that we will be less informed and less entertained. It means that market innovators like Netflix are being punished. But it's not just Netflix that will be affected. The video game industry is relying more heavily than ever on online components to their games and having to worry about download limits will simply make Canada less fun. As computer technology expands, our downloading needs too will expand and I am skeptical that UBB providers will be nice about raising the caps. Also, none of the internet providers have been able to provide a reliable meter that shows exactly how much we've been downloading. In other words, there is no accountability. If Bell says you've downloaded a certain amount, you have to trust them.

UBB is not just one of the worst Canadian things ever, it is one of the worst ideas ever. It is lame beyond imagining. It represents everything that is wrong when monopolism gets confused with capitalism and our own damn government is helping the bastards. I get the sense that the rich and powerful are watching Canada right now, testing UBB on an alternate market like its ketchup-flavoured potato chips before they unleash it on the United States. For the good of civilization, crush, annihilate, destroy UBB before it gets there.

1. "Mister Tambourine Man" as performed by William Shatner
It starts with a classical opening with harpsichord and flute, pizzicatto in the strings. Then the brass and trap set join, transforming the performance into jazz. Then, relentless thumping... a glorious chorus of tambourines! A quiet, tentative voice almost whispers, "Mister tambourine man?" It's Canada's own Bill Shatner, chanting the musical performance that would define him.

It's so bad it's good, then it's awful, then good again and then sublime when Shatner howls the final words, snuffing the music. Shatner's protagonist is a deranged lunatic in the midst of a psychotic break with reality, obsessed with an unfortunate tambourine man, longing to hear the sweet instrument's rattle and clatter. He is rebuffed. He is driven to madness.

Mister Tambourine Man stands as the absolute worst thing any Canadian has ever done, conceived or been.

So, there stands the list. I may come back and edit it if I think of anything else in the future. As it stands it is a fine example of the worst Canada has to offer. May foreigners look upon it in anger and fear, may we view it with shame. For within it lies the secret to our identity. I'd rise and sing O Canada at this point, but to be honest it's a pretty crappy national anthem.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Why I'm Not Voting for Stephen Harper this Year

Okay, I admit it. This will come as no surprise, but I have never voted for Stephen Harper, the Conservative Party or its predecessors the Canadian Alliance, the Reform Party or the Progressive Conservatives (dumbest party name ever). However, just so I'm not mistaken for some ideologue who votes for the party his parents voted for out of habit, I like to give reasons why I'm not voting for Harper. It's only fair.

In 2004, I didn't vote for Harper because I heard that he was a member of a Christian sect that recently stood outside a tavern and prayed to God to make it collapse. I figured it would be a bad idea having a guy like that guy in charge.

In 2006 I was disgusted at the Conservatives' stance against criminals. They wanted to make more laws that would create more criminals and then they wanted to strip those criminals of their democratic rights as citizens and not allow them to vote.

In 2008 Harper revolted me with his comment that ordinary folks don't care about art. As I explored in this post, I don't think he's incorrect. I merely understood loud and clear what he meant: "I don't care about art".

So here it is, 2011, and Harper is running again. Normally, my not voting for Stephen Harper wouldn't be news, or even worthy of a blog post. This year is special. It's special because if he wins, he'll be justified in pulling all his undemocratic horseshit. Read on.

It's fair to say that Harper has been a clever Prime Minister. Since he first formed a minority government, he's known exactly where he is. He knows that he can't get everything he wants because Parliament won't let him. For his first term (2006-2008), he laid very low indeed. He even, dare I say it, governed well. He was receptive to the wishes of the people and he tried to work with Parliament. What resulted was a government that was moderate and responsive.

During this period, I have to admit that I was surprised. I wondered, fleetingly, if Harper was worthy of my vote. But then I thought about it a little more and realized that Harper was biding his time. He had his own Conservative dreams and would have loved to realize them, but he had three left-wing parties breathing down his neck, constantly threatening to topple him if he didn't play ball. He knew that if he governed as a populist, he could maybe win a majority government and then truly do what he wanted, free of meddling.

In 2008, he made his bid for a majority government, called an election and got another minority. It was immediately obvious to me that he was frustrated and losing his patience. The man has dreams after all. He had plots to hatch and Parliament was getting in his way. Harper's government went from being clever to ruthless. This began a new phase for the Conservative government, what I call the "undemocratic" phase.

Since 2008, he has since done everything he could to do to push his agenda and thwart parliament. Remember this? He shut down Parliament. Twice. In 2008, after the election, he told the Governor General to shut down the show. Why? Because it looked like some other parties were going to form a coalition government. Then he did it again! In order to keep a Parliament prying into allegations that Canadian soldiers had handed prisoners to torturers, he closed down parliament. Why? "Uh... the Olympics are on... or something..." Can you imagine that? Imagine the government of the United States shutting down because there were Olympics happening! It would never, ever ever happen. Is Canada even a real country? Disgraceful. Disgrace, shame and INFAMY!!!

Why does this bug me so much? These are our elected officials. He was using proroguing, a rule used in the past to allow our elected officials to go home and help their constituents, to prevent himself from losing power and getting embarassed during the Olympics. If he is re-elected, what kind of message are we sending him? We are telling him it's okay to thwart democracy.

Well, it's not. It opens the door for future abuses, and greater ones. What's stopping Harper from shutting down Parliament whenever it's inconvenient for him? What's stopping him from closing Parliament indefinitely? Legally, nothing. The Governor General can legally do just about anything here, and he/she usually does whatever the Prime Minister asks. The only way to keep Harper accountable for this total bullshit is at the polls. Vote him out!

Need another reason? Okay. How about this? His government was found in contempt of Parliament. His own government! This is the first time in the history of Canada that a government has been found in contempt of its own Parliament! Why did this happen? He's buying some really expensive military jets from the States and refuses to tell Parliament how much they really cost.

Well, Steve, we have a right to know. It's our money and our elected officials get to find out what you're up to. That's why we have Parliament and opposition parties. What are you hiding? Why are you hiding it?

Once again, if we re-elect that guy, it's sending the wrong message. If we put him back in the PMO, it tells him, "Go ahead, Steve. Govern without our consent or knowledge. We think you're cool for being such a rogue! Would you like to hit us over the head with a truncheon?"

(The funny thing is that, you know what? I think the Canadian Forces could use some modern jets. Those junky CF-18s are nearly thirty years old. The Americans seem to be getting a bit, um... unreliable. We can't continue to rely on them to protect us from commies and we need to be more self-sufficient. Bring on the multi-million-dollar hardware. Just be truthful about how much it costs.)

This undemocratic strain in Harper's governing style is now leaking into his campaigning style. If you want to attend a public rally where Harper is speaking, you have to submit to a pre-approved identity check. Then, once you're there, if Harper's goons see that you're wearing a T-shirt they don't like or not acting enthusiastic enough, they can toss you. Then when Harper takes the podium for questions, we only get five. If we ask him why we only get five questions before he leaves, he refuses to answer.

But here's what makes this scary. Our loveable mounties, the beloved RCMP, have recently admitted that they've helped Harper investigate and remove people Harper doesn't like. Can you imagine that? Our national police force is helping the Conservative party conduct its unwholesome business!

I'm reading now that Harper has actually apologized for chucking people out of his gatherings. Is an apology really in order? What does this apology really mean? Is he sorry for being creepy and undemocratic? I doubt it. He issued the orders in the first place. Surely he thought about the moral consequences and decided to do it anyway because he didn't want to be embarassed. No, what he's really sorry for is that people called attention to his George-Bush-style campaigning.

Dear Canadian readers, Harper has kept his minority government since 2006. He has been waiting for his majority for a long time. I now know in my heart what he wants. He wants American-style Republican government. It's not religious, because if it was, they would actually abide by Jesus' wishes to live poor and await the next life. It's not capitalist, because if they were true capitalists they would want fair trade, not monopolies. They don't really believe in smaller government because they spend billions on authoritarian institutions like the military and police. They're not democratic because they are hell-bent on locking more people behind bars and then denying their right to vote. The only word I can use to describe them is Opportunists. They wrap themselves in religious, capitalist and libertarian rhetoric when they are, in fact, the antithesis of all they proclaim. They are servants of powerful men who want more power.

Don't believe me? Go ahead and vote for Harper. Give him his majority and see. Then come back in four years, read this post and weep.

Alternately, why don't we all save ourselves a lot of trouble and vote the crooks out? If we hand government to another party, I guarantee Harper won't run again. We'll be rid of him and maybe, just maybe, the Conservatives will get the message that it's not okay to pull this bullshit.

I once took a political leadership class in university. In it, my professor told me about many of the constitutions of other, less-democratic countries. These constitutions are well-thought-out and sincere in their desire for democracy. However, powerful dictators in these countries routinely declare martial law, choose not to hold elections and make people disappear at night. By contrast, Canada has very few legal safeguards on our constitutional monarchy. Our Governor General has the power to roll tanks through the streets, dissolve Parliament on a whim and choose not to hold elections.

Why doesn't it happen here? It just isn't done. We have inherited a British Parliamentary tradition of fair play, compromise and reverence for our method of legislating and certain things you just don't do.

Well it's being done now. Harper isn't playing fair. Rather than compromising, he is finding sneaky ways to circumvent Parliament. I know a few people who like Harper because he "gets things done." What price are you prepared to pay for getting things done? Any dictator can "get things done" by waving his hand. And where does it end? If the Conservatives are not handed their asses, this bullshit will continue with other governments, no matter which party is ruling.

So please, dear Canadian readers, when election day arrives, vote NDP. Vote Green. Vote Liberal (even though they started this proroguing bullshit in the first place). Vote for the skeleton of Abraham Lincoln. Vote for the giant, malevolent toad who only you can see and tells you to do things. Take your ballot and wipe your ass with it.

Anything, anybody but Harper.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com

Sex in Canada

...and the title of this blog post alone will give it more hits than any other I've written so far.

I recently watched a Canadian movie by the name of "Young People Fucking". Mini-review: it was hilarious, candid and touching at the same time. Four couples and one mismatched threesome have sex in five separate storylines. It's like a romantic comedy without the hokeyness or the predictability. The dialogue is fantastic. It's a wonderful movie for couples to watch, provided feigned sex and unclothed boobs don't upset you.
4 1/2 awkward interruptions out of 5

A few years ago, Young People Fucking was at the centre of a Canadian controversy. The Conservative Government was set to pass a tax bill by the name of Bill C-10. Buried deep in this document was a section saying that if the government decided that a Canadian-made movie was "contrary to public policy", they could retroactively yank its tax credits. Canadian artists and filmmakers, after the bill was passed, noticed the clause and rallied the troops. The artists (correctly) pointed out that the vague wording would make filmmaking more risky, therefore less-likely to be funded by banks, therefore less-likely to be financed, and therefore less-likely to be filmed. Obviously films of a certain subject matter, as in ones involving sex, are riskier than others. The word "censorship" was touted, a stink was raised and then the issue just kinda faded out. Did the bill get defeated or something?

Anyway, Young People Fucking became the target of the pro-censorship crowd, eager to make this film an example of the kind of pornographic filth that Canada ought not to support. It was an easy target because of its title. But, as is always the case with conservative censorship scandals, the pro-censorship crowd obviously didn't go to the theatre to watch the film and back their claims. If they had, they would have seen how the show was about relationships and communication.

One of the over-arching messages of Young People Fucking seems to be that communication is poor or absent in each of the trysts. If the people involved had engaged in truly open, honest dialogue before they hopped into bed, the sexual experience would be much more rewarding and less awkward.

What a useful moral! We Canadians can be a frigid people when it comes to sex. We possess the urge to hide our sexuality, to repress public displays of affection, to hide our nakedness, and most importantly, secret our feelings. The most conservative amongst us believe that sex is for procreative purposes only, and these people have somehow managed to convince society that sex is bad, naughty and not-to-be-discussed.

And yet surprise babies keep appearing. Unmarried couples retire to shared beds and do it. Half-naked women sing banal songs and advertise products to us. One in every four workers accesses a porn site on the job every day, and even more porn is accessed from the privacy of Canadian homes. The efforts of morally-decent folk to the contrary, sex for social and pleasure purposes is here to stay.

Why do religious people and their prudish allies hate non-procreative sex and the human body? What is the societal consequence that these people fear will happen when their gay neighbors get married and do each other up the poop-chute? What disastrous THING will occur when mothers can freely whip out their tits to feed their hungry babies in public? What cataclysmic event is coming as the result of the internet porn industry?

Honestly, it sure beats me. I'd like to think that if I was a Judeo-Christian religious man, my faith would be strong enough to survive any pornographic assault. But as far as I can tell, sex is viewed as a temptation by these people. The love of Jesus is not always enough to sustain them and sometimes they want to do naughty things. They feel that open displays of sex and nudity will call them to a life of shame and drag them to hell.

Fair enough. But that's not my problem. I'm not religious in that way. Society's mollycoddling regarding sex damaged me when I was growing up and, honestly, I'm still recovering from it. Sex still embarrasses me when I wish it wouldn't. My urge to hide my sexuality still results in misunderstandings, hurt feelings and arguments. It's not my parents' fault. They did their best. If I had to grow up all over again, I think I'd rather do it in a nudist colony than the public school system so that sex wouldn't be such a big goddamn deal.

Canada's absurd obsession and fear of sex is hurting us. The only answer is open, honest dialogue regarding sex between all of us. But that won't happen anytime soon. If all Canadians spoke candidly and truthfully about sex with each other, the prudes would come to the alarming realization that porn, premarital sex, prostitution, homosexuality and adolescent sex are an unchangeable reality of humankind, that indulging in harmless perversions, fantasies and wanking doesn't make you a bad person, and the sexual tastes of other people do not affect the ability of religious people to get into heaven.

Let's take porn as an example. You discover that the people next door filmed a porno flick in their basement and people worldwide are watching it. How does this affect you? It doesn't. It's their business, their everlasting souls and their bodies. They're not going to tunnel into your house and film down there, nor will they force you to have sex with a stranger. The world goes on and if you're religious, Jesus still loves you.

I'll take it a step further. Suppose you discover that a man down the road paid the pretty Ice Cream clerk to have sex. Is your family any closer to hell? Nope. Did he pay your wife to sleep with him? Nope. So who cares? And furthermore, why was their tryst an arrest-worthy crime?

Much of the time, the prudes swell their audience when play the "protect the children" card. Yes, I agree. Children need to be protected. This means stopping predatory pedophiles, pimps and child pornographers from exploiting your child. Kidnapping, sexual assault and fraud are all arrest-worthy crimes.

But when the censors ask us to "think of the children", they seem to be forgetting that, as adults, it is our responsibility not only to protect children, but to teach and nurture them. Sheltering them from sexual information, particularly when they hit puberty, is not the answer. When puberty arrives, children are hit with powerful instincts to have sex, and some will do it no matter how much they have been sheltered.

Consider this: you're watching a movie with your nine-year-old son, Junior. Then suddenly the scrawny heroine whips her top off and starts kissing the hero. Many parents would cover Junior's eyes. But why? He's too young to have sex. He can't even understand why sex is appealing. What harm are those too-perfect boobs causing him? He's not going to have nightmares about boobs stalking him in the forest. Are you protecting him for his own sake, or are you just concerned that if Junior watches the scene, he'll ask a question that makes YOU uncomfortable, like, "Why are those people doing that?" And furthermore, why will it hurt him for you to explain it? His head will not explode, nor will yours. He's going to find out eventually and it might as well be you that prepares him. Wouldn't you rather he found out from open, honest dialogue than from tittering rumours whispered amongst classmates?

I remember when I was a high school student, the Catholic school up the road had the highest teen pregnancy rate of any school in the city. Coincidence? No. This was back in the days when the prudes had convinced the Catholic school board that sex education was a bad idea. Why on earth would you deprive teenagers, once they become capable of having sex, with valuable information about their sexuality? They need to know about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases. Ultimately, as a parent, your child's decision to have sex is not yours. It's theirs. When they have the opportunity to have sex, if they have bad or faulty information, they will make equally bad choices.

I say these things as a new father. I know that much of the urge to protect children comes from a parental desire to keep their offspring innocent. When you raise a child from a baby, it's hard to see them grow up. But grow up they will. It's hard to believe that my little baby will be a woman someday. Honestly, I can't wait. As she becomes a toddler, a little girl, a big girl, a teenager and a young adult, I intend to help and inform her in every way I possibly can. If that means that I'm going to have to weather several uncomfortable conversations, I'm prepared. I will do my best to see that she does not join the ranks of the repressed.

So, dear Conservatives, mollycoddlers and censors: Canada is, or should be, a land of free speech. That means occasionally putting up with opinions, stories and art that you don't like. That includes stuff that's too violent, too sexy, too stupid, too smart and too gay for you. By all means create ratings systems and classifications that tell parents what their children will see in their entertainment. That's useful. Just never tell me what my kids shouldn't see.

If you inhibit entertainment so it fits your mold, you will inhibit open, honest dialogue. There are plenty countries of out there where the government stands for moral decency at the expense of free speech, and do you know what? They all suck.

Even Lot managed to raise a peaceful, God-loving family. That includes two daughters who stayed chaste, and they lived in Gomorrah of all places. If he can do it, so can you. In the meantime, quit trying to impose your primitive, early-agricultural religion on me and my family.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

The Disaster that is Art

I'm sure this will be a long post. Grab your coffee and sit back for an epic.

In 1981 Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers released his album, "Northwest Passage". The title track was a hit and became a cornerstone of Canadian culture. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has admitted his own love for the song, saying that Northwest Passage is the closest thing Canada has to an unofficial national anthem.

And this is where things get hypocritical. In the last election, Stephen Harper, whilst on the campaign trail and defending his government's $45 million dollar cut to arts funding, said that (paraphrased) ordinary Canadians don't care about arts funding.

The hypocrisy? Stan Rogers was a Canada Council funding recipient. I think it's fair to say that without the Canada Council, the CBC and other forms of government arts patronage, Northwest Passage might never have happened. In short, Harper likes Canadian culture but doesn't want to pay for it. I would be more angry about his comments, but I'm not necessarily sure that he's wrong when he says that ordinary Canadians don't care about arts funding.

This blog post is not about my Prime Minister's hypocrisy. It is about what is wrong with art, music, writing, film and stage today in its execution, funding and the public's understanding of it. It's about why ordinary folks don't care. It's about how artists either starve or work jobs to which they are not suited and undervalued. It's about how our educational system and artists themselves are deepening the divide between art and its audience. It's about the cultural black hole that is being filled by American values. In short, the arts are in the toilet and nobody wants to fish them out.

An uncomfortable truth about artists is that they need patrons. When an artist begins the slow process of building his or her career, practicing their craft, building contacts and reputations and expanding their portfolio, only the very lucky make any money. Those that do make money do not make a living wage. Therein lies the problem. People like living. Generally, if given the choice between following a dream and survival, people choose the latter option.

Artists in this situation therefore must squander their talents and waste their lives working unskilled jobs. For many artists, this secondary career becomes their only career. Some get tired of never earning money with their art. Others are forced into their non-artistic job to afford housing or children.

Patronage feeds artists. It lets them use their talents. It lets them quit those jobs they never wanted to work anyway, providing employment for other people who also need feeding.

Many businesspeople and politicians don't seem to understand this. When viewed through the lens of the free market economics, it makes no sense to support the arts. To the economy, starving artists are starving because they are creating product with no demand. They deserve their fate. Why waste money on something nobody wants?

It's a disconnect from reality. The longer artists practice their craft, the greater the demand for their product. If they can't feed themselves and produce their art at the beginning of their careers, they will never create demand.

About 500 years ago in Italy, the greatest revolution in the history of art occurred. It was the Renaissance and its power was fueled by patronage. Obscenely wealthy noble families, such as the famous de Medicis, kept artists in business with their favours and commissions. They competed with each other to see who could patronize the most beautiful art. It was a societal priority. I could go on and on about the Renaissance, but to attempt to do so within the confines of a single paragraph would be a terrifying injustice.

Well, them days is gone. Yes, our society has obscenely rich people. Yes, many of those people are patrons of the arts. However, it's fair to say that art is no longer a societal priority. Our societal priority, and I challenge anybody to contradict me, is sports.

Don't believe me? We just spent $8 billion dollars for a two-week party in Vancouver called the Olympics. For that amount of money, Canada could have paid more than 100,000 artists full-time minimum wage to practice their craft for three years. Want more proof? Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a city of 200,000 people can barely keep its Symphony orchestra afloat. By contrast, late 18th-Century Bonn, a city of 10,000 people, had two orchestras and produced Ludwig van Beethoven. Canada produces top-notch NHL players, not musical genius.

Where art is to be found, it's quick and dirty. As Capitalism has entrenched itself in North American society, it just doesn't make sense to produce anything that lasts or is of high quality when you can cut corners. Open the newspaper and look for illustrations. Chances are, you'll see quickly-drawn, highly-abstracted first-drafts drawn in ink. Take it from me, the newspapers of yesteryear put love and effort into their drawings. How is it that the primitive, sub-humans of medieval Europe managed to erect towering, beautiful cathedrals and castles with their low population and lack of machine tools? Because to them, the art of their construction had value. Today with our ballooning population and marvelous technology, there is no reason to make a beautiful, stone WalMart with gargoyles and ornate carvings that is meant to stand for a thousand years. It's just cheaper and easier to barf out tin boxes by the hundred with concrete floors and unfinished ceilings.

Shouldn't we be ashamed that tiny villages full of toothless, smelly, gruel-eating apes who believed in werewolves could make prettier buildings than us? Nope. Nobody cares.

However, there is one branch of art that our society truly treasures: film and television. It is the divine art of the modern age, combining visual art, film, music, writing and crafting into one marvelous spectacle that we take for granted. For Canadians, most film is an abstraction. It shows up on our screens from very far away, created by people we don't know, and often it is free. Unlike other art, film and television is big business and is profitable. It replaces our need for art on a local level by beaming in easy entertainment. Why go out to a concert when you don't have to leave the couch and be entertained for free?

It's all too easy to forget that this multi-billion dollar industry is the result of the efforts of many tiny little artists who had to claw their way to success. It's also a little scary to think about how many Canadians are working in Hollywood and New York because they couldn't make their film careers work in Canada.

Canada used to have a film industry in the 1980's. Not just a coastal-temperate area that American companies could film TV episodes for cheap. Not just an annual film festival in Toronto that American celebrities attend to look pretty. I'm talking an actual industry. Funding was high. Tax breaks allowed random companies to produce a movie in Canada just to save money at tax time. Compared to Hollywood, yes, it was chintzy. Yes, most of the movies that were made in this period were low-budget horror flicks of dubious quality. But Canadian artists were working. In Canada. It all stopped when governments cut their film incentives and funding. Now this place is a howling wasteland for film, dependent upon the low-value of the Canadian dollar for survival. Pathetic.

It's not just the amount of arts funding that is at issue here. It is the method of distribution. It's an old problem. English author Samuel Johnson, for instance, refers to a patron as, "one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help". Simply put, our system of government arts patronage gives the lion's share of money to people who have already established their careers.

I understand the thought-process that goes into it. Why waste money on an unproven artist? What makes an artist? If we start handing money out to nobodies who call themselves artists, surely fakers and layabouts will emerge to take advantage of our generosity. However, it is undeniable fact that starving, unknown artists, the people who need the money most, are being denied funding and offered a pittance when others are receiving large amounts of money they don't need. What's the point?

But you know, it's not just clueless politicians, bureaucrats and apathetic citizens that are causing all this misery in the art community. In many ways, the artists and educators that teach it are bringing it upon themselves. The sad fact is that art education is in horrible shambles.

I took art classes every year in high school. Not once was I taught to render on paper or in clay that most basic of artistic expressions, the human form. I had to buy a book called, "How to Draw Super Heroes and Heroines" to learn its value. I also took Creative Writing courses throughout high school and University, yet nowhere was I taught classical story structure: I had to learn that from screenwriting books after University. The education system taught me English but not how to use it to influence the hearts of humans. Similarly, I took a music degree in University and between my Theory classes and my Orchestration classes, I learned the bare bones of music composition, yet a basic element was denied me. No instructor was willing to tell me the meaning of those chords to the human ear and their emotional effect on "ordinary folks".

Unbelievable. Artists are being trained without the basic tools that will make them successful. I've been submitting short stories to a mutual review site lately and almost nobody knows anything about classical story structure and are shocked when I let them in on what seems to be this huge secret! Why is this happening? As you might have guessed, I have a theory.

You see, in the last century, the "modern" era began, followed by the difficult-to-define "post-modern" era. In these eras, guided by odd notions about "progress" as applied to art, artists started trying to be different than each other. They came up with genres that were at first reactions against the rigid forms and styles of the previous centuries, and then tried to invent new languages and modes of understanding. Abstract art, twelve-tone scales and nonsense versions of English were produced. The score of one piece of music, for instance, contained no musical notes: merely the phrase, "Crawl inside the vagina of a living whale." Some performance artist took snapshots of his self-inflicted castration. Recently, some students were arrested for skinning a cat alive and calling it art.

Honestly, is it any wonder that there is little demand for this product? As the artists of the modern eras invented their new languages, they left their audiences behind. Stuck on traditional ideas of art, "ordinary folks" paid for new artistic forms that weren't quite so radical: Hollywood movies, graphic novels, jazz and rock music. All these forms were ones that did not completely shun the lessons of the past.

Meanwhile, the lame-duck grade schools were at work. Somewhere along the way, it became "uncool" to constrain kids with artistic rules. It was during this era that the "personal essay" became the highest form of pubescent writing. In art rooms, children were encouraged to "do their own thing".

The post-modern high-art snobs who are entrenched in universities and the hippie grade-school educators are very different but they seem to have one thing in common: they don't believe in creative limitation. They expect that artists young and old should do their own thing and create their own artistic language from scratch.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with creative limitation, here it is. Apparently, the human brain finds it easier to be creative if it has a set of rules to work with or against. By removing the lessons of the past from curriculae, the education system has made being creative actually more difficult for students.

Some people may be reading this and thinking that I'm an artistic conservative. I'm not. If you like post-modern art, it's not my place to criticize you. It's not my place to say what I like is better than what you like. My point is that by leaving important information out of the curriculum, Canadian artists are being denied a critical part of their education which will help them connect with their audience. Wouldn't it be better to teach students the rules of their art as society understands them, then give them the choice later whether they wish to transcend them?

Rest assured, friends, art is not as mysterious as some persons would have you believe. Part of it is craft and can be learned. Many of my teachers in the past had me thinking that creativity is this elusive thing that descends upon you like luck, cannot be controlled, that certain persons are born with. That's partly true, some people have more talent than others. But all art involves learning how to use a tool and using your brain in conjunction with it. It takes practice and it takes proper training. Why would we send our poor artists alone into the world without that training?

So here we are. Ordinary folks don't care about art and those of us that do can't define it. For most people it's a mystery. People love music but have no idea how it's created. Abstract art hangs on gallery walls that is valued either for the artist's reputation, the overlong explanations that justify them, or their shock value. Post-modern music rattles in crumbling concert halls, played by under-funded orchestras, tolerated by audience members who when asked what they thought of it are obligated to say, "It was interesting". American television beams into our homes, each reality TV show slowly crowding Northwest Passage from our collective memory. New schools are being constructed without music rooms. If Mozart was alive today, he might just be serving you coffee.

So what the fuck are you going to do about it? Do you even care?

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/