Marko Sijan2013-05-20T05:06:50-04:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=marko-sijanCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Marko SijanGood old fashioned elbow grease.Sexual Violence Is Not Inherent in Mentag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29404662013-03-25T12:47:01-04:002013-03-25T12:03:22-04:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/has gotten some bad press (which is good press) in part because he roasted Jodie Foster for baring her breasts in the gang-rape scene of The Accused; meanwhile two gang-rapes and an attempted rape have been reported in India, and rape convictions have "ruined" the lives of two adolescent football stars in Steubenville, Ohio.
I've been wondering about the internal motivations of boys and men who rape vis-à-vis the nature-nurture debate that dates back to antiquity. Plato thought behaviour is innate while Aristotle said no, experience shapes who we are. Today science believes that as much as biology determines the societies we create, societies in turn can alter our genes. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel defines 'interpersonal neurobiology' as a phenomenon in which the lifelong development of our nervous systems depends both on our personal relationships as well as interactions with our culture.
Thus rape as a popular activity for men in cultures as different as India and America is said to stem from sexual differences based in biology reinforced by social circumstances in which they're encouraged to flourish. While the incidence of rape isn't universally and symmetrically distributed across all cultures of the world, many of us live in male-dominated societies where boys learn that sex is one way to be a man, and a vagina is "the box a penis comes in."
One of the reasons behind why the media focused on the "ruined" lives of the Steubenville rapists and ignored the suffering of their victim is this: we think she asked for it and doesn't deserve our empathy. She should have known better than to get drunk and lose consciousness at a party full of boys who, being victims of their inherent need for sexual violence, can't be blamed for being male. Besides, she had a reputation for promiscuity and so invited the boys to "come in her box." At least that's what many tweeters thought, male and female.
True, some are being punished for expressing themselves, but their punishments only validate their opinions, living as we do in 'horizontal societies' where the cynicism that pervades online opinion-making views authority as corrupt and illegitimate. Legal censures then are treated as validations. The so-called 'democratization' enacted by the Internet means anyone's opinion is valid online, and the more offensive it is, the more publicity one earns. This seems to be the end-goal of virtual democracy.
As the Seth MacFarlane debacle shows, today we hunger for giving offense. We gorge on others' weaknesses then spit them out for others to chew. The level of audacity and insensitivity of the jibe is directly proportional to the amount of fame one acquires. Those in the media who expressed indignation over "We Saw Your Boobs" only heightened MacFarlane's celebrity and increased the value of his multimillion dollar brand. Giving and taking a certain kind of intelligently reasoned offence is considered essential for the healthy functioning of democracy, but since it keeps getting harder to offend people and easier to make them laugh, we may see this as a sign of our rotting minds. Television shows, movies and other forms of popular entertainment say worship the body and treat the mind as an afterthought.
Just below the surface of society's consciousness, a sense of the inferiority of females reifies the ubiquity of misogyny, the cultural expression of an underlying belief in biological destiny. Armed with this ruling ideology justified on the premise of an unalterable human nature, we see the Steubenville girl not as a victim but as a criminal who used her male accomplices to help her commit a crime against herself. Such reasoning helps explain why so few rapes are reported and even fewer end in conviction.
Seth MacFarlane, Internet thugs and the Steubenville rapists forge part of the ongoing misogyny in popular culture that implies rape is a legitimate form of masculine self-expression, embodied in the destructive forces of nature, the cruelty of which spawned the male animal.
]]>Overheard on the VIA Train: "Indians Are Lazy"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24987942013-01-18T07:47:53-05:002013-03-20T05:12:01-04:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/ranks aboriginal issues as the least important concern among Canadians. Yet aboriginals have health and education levels lower than the national average, higher rates of poverty, drug abuse and criminality; and youths who commit suicide up to seven times more than non-native youths. Who cares that colonial policies since Canada's origin have put the Indians on a slow, steady course to oblivion?
The way of thinking behind one who'd ask this question is revealed, in part, by Arthur Koestler in his 1944 New York Times essay, "On Disbelieving Atrocities." He defines "a psychological fact, inherent in our mental frame," that modern consciousness is split in two.
Our individual lives form "the trivial plane," severed from "the tragic plane," where we store knowledge about others at some remove from our intimate circle, enduring lives rooted in a long history of misfortune. We may know or believe how much they suffer, but remain largely unaware because:
[d]istance in space and time degrades intensity of awareness. So does magnitude ... A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness.
I quote this passage not to compare the Jewish Holocaust to centuries of aboriginal suffering, but to suggest obstacles to a full, sustained "awareness" of the gravity of natives' past, present and future.
We rarely see aboriginals. Barely a million are left, at least half of whom live scattered across Canada on remote reserves. It's as if they don't exist, making bile of our thoughts every few months when they appear in the news cycle, often in stories about corrupt reserve chiefs and band councils who hoard our tax dollars for themselves and their friends and families, nepotism the government nurtures. Our cash is supposed to be funding reserve housing, education and health care. We doubt the Crown can improve their lives.
Then Idle No More protesters block transportation routes and thus the economy. In terms of job creation, the economy ranks only below health care in the Nanos study of what concerns us most: issues that are "quite close to the day-to-day lives of Canadians," who live quite far from aboriginals.
On the evening of December 30, I boarded a train to Montreal from Toronto. We were delayed at Union Station for four hours due to an INM blockade of tracks near Belleville. My train car was filled to capacity with families, students, businesspeople and the elderly, largely white.
An attendant announced in a surly tone that the train had been stopped due to "une manifestation d'Indiens." Contrary to news reports, my fellow passengers weren't "taking it in stride." Many groaned but didn't speak; I wrote down some of the comments others shared about "the lazy Indians."
A middle-aged mother observed, "The only reason they're out there is because they don't have jobs." Her husband offered a solution to end the blockade: "Just give them a bushel of tobacco." Laughs. "And a box of glue." More laughs. A male student suggested, "If the train moves real slow, they'll have enough time to get out of the way and we can pass without running them over." His friend asked, rhetorically I think, "Why can't we run 'em over?"
It seems more native youths, Canada's fastest growing population, are choosing to integrate into modern society. As they find a way to do so on their own terms, they encounter from the mainstream a kind of traditional warmth, like the holiday spirit of those on the train.]]>Why We Treat Animals Better Than the Poortag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18922362012-09-21T00:00:44-04:002012-11-20T05:12:01-05:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/barking over a recent decision by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to slaughter two seals enslaved at an aquarium on the Magdalen Islands of Quebec.
Normally, at summer's end, once they've done their unpaid labour amusing tourists, seals are freed back into the sea. But this time, afraid the seals will spread disease to other marine mammals, the DFO wants to murder them. After much worldwide wailing, the DFO asked for public donations totalling $73,000 to pay for transport of the seals to another slave den in France. Again, public rage was swift, one seal lover howling, "How dare you now demand money from those who have had the courage and humanity to speak out against the impending execution of innocent creatures."
Courage. Humanity. Innocence. I'm baffled by the power of the media to turn such weighty words into gibberish. How is speaking out against cruelty to animals an act of "courage"? Animal rights is the cause par excellence of the wealthy, their "generosity" the most lucrative of modern brands. The seal cause is also cut-and-dried: to support animal rights of any kind puts one at no risk of controversy (brand-staining).
And where's the "humanity" in defending animal rights? Like me, devout animal lovers and environmentalists (often one and the same) betray an underlying misanthropy, a profound disgust and disillusion with humanity. Ask my uncle why he and my aunt never had kids but have 11 cats, strays they saved and nursed back to health. He'll say, "We're very disappointed in humans." Then ask my friend and his wife, owners of two dogs and three cats, why they care so much for the welfare of animals and so little for the welfare of the poor. They'll say, "I would drop-kick any human in a second, but an animal?"
We can love animals because they aren't our competitors; they're dumb and easily used to serve our ends. Also they're innocent: they don't know right from wrong. On the other hand, human animals, namely the poor are as bankrupt in the moral economy as they are in the financial one. Or so we think as our grandparents thought and our children may too, if they don't grow up. Writing off the poor lifts us to a height of superiority, where we save a lot of money being indifferent to their misfortune, for which we're all responsible.
The two most immoral things we hate about the poor are: they don't have a job with which to contribute their "fair share" to the tax base; and worse, they're on welfare, or free meal courtesy of the hard-working, debt-heavy taxpayer. The poor then are doubly evil because they take too much and give too little back. Our captains of industry and their government lapdogs have never designed it this way. No, the poor choose to stay poor, century after century.
"Spare some change?" "No, but here's a thought: get a job. You don't have a job because you're a dumb slug." It requires no courage but a great deal of humanity for me to say such things to the homeless. My fellow "haves"agree with me, and their opinions matter because I can use them to get what I want. You see, my opinions of cute animals and other "have-nots" reveal today's version of a moral vision.
Today I love animals and hate people, especially those below and above me. It feels right. My lame duck cynicism fertilizes the growth of global free market capitalism. Convinced of my impotence to influence it, I'm resigned to its rewarding greed and punishing fairness. I'm weak as a seal, drowsy as a dog. I contribute to the poor's misery by, for example, buying clothes made by children who earn less than a living wage, children who aren't white.
Recently, at a party full of white people like me, I said that while cultural and ethnic diversity paint a pretty picture, they're fictions, obscuring the fact that human similarities outweigh cultural differences. I was then reamed for sharing such a racist and privileged view, so easy for one who's never suffered the prejudices poor ethnic minorities suffer, who's never felt the power of culture to unite those under occupation. For the rest of the night I shut up and stewed in guilt.
I felt even worse another day when I talked to a Lebanese man. "Do you support the Israeli occupation of Palestine?" He asked, cheeks and knuckles trembling. I said, "No ... but I'm not anti-Israel." I barely got the "but" out before he started screaming about the Jews as beasts that must be destroyed; that he watched his friend incinerated by an Israeli rocket; and I'm an entitled white ass who'll never know true pain.
I have nothing left to say, except I love seals. My humanity compels me to share in that courageous seal lover's rage at the savagery of those DFO stiffs. Endorsing innocent creatures makes me feel compassionate. Hand in hand, compassion and generosity form the most profitable brand. But if a bum asks me for money, or an immigrant asks my opinion regarding the affairs of the poor, I keep my elite mouth and wallet shut.]]>How E-Books Are Ruining the Next Generation of Writerstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17537442012-08-08T16:59:52-04:002012-10-08T05:12:32-04:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/
Lately the Internet has regressed into a society of feudal manors lorded over by tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Yahoo, who sell e-books for 99 cents or give them away for free. Their "competitive pricing" is threatening traditional publishers and physical books with extinction, though those are curated and edited by seasoned professionals steeped in knowledge of the literary tradition. Abominations like Crowdsourcing couple writer with readers, who, for a fee, together bear a monster for the mass market.
Self-publishing venues throw out disposable books forgotten faster than they're consumed, if at all. The long tail strangles the chance for writers to find a publisher to nurture their talents over time and finance the marketing of their books, often with a hand from the state. Taxpayers don't know or care about the profitless fiction the state subsidizes on their behalf, maintaining life support for an aging nationalist enterprise that may be euthanized under Prime Minister Harper and his ilk. These men worship one god: Mammon. Big name authors around the world like Ewan Morrison complain "there will be no more professional writers in the future."
In short, to me it's an ideal time in history to create literature.
Portending the death of literature isn't new. Nearly 200 years ago, Saint-Beuve supposed that "perhaps an age is coming when there will be no more writing." After all, the mass-produced book via the five century-old printing press, like all forms of organic and inorganic life, fall prey to the fatal law. The same goes for the Internet. For all its revolutionary benefits, the internet has let writers relapse into vassalage. By literature I mean the work of a singular imagination that enriches readers' intellects with thoughts printed in crisp language, banknotes from a vault of the infinite. In fact the reverse is true of the current age: our thoughts shrink to fatten the bank accounts of a few men like Jeff Bezos.
With the rise of e-books, companies like Amazon peddle mostly tin-eared tripe like Twilight. Writing in 1822, Arthur Schopenhauer complained that "life nowadays goes at a gallop -- and the way in which this affects literature is to make it extremely superficial and slovenly." If he was right, imagine how empty and sloppy books are today.
To avoid the plague of literary sloth I imagine myself a "serious writer," in contradistinction to Morrison's "professional writer," getting paid for his work less often than not, indifferent either way. Convinced that money corrupts his capacity to pursue excellence, through years of patient labour, he chooses his words carefully and hopes to have something important to say, something that adds to his tradition(s).
Being a straight white Canadian-born male of Serbo-Croatian stock, my traditions include three millennia of dead white men and women of the Western canon, as well as works of the former Yugoslavia and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires that occupied and interbred with my ancestors; and the Canadian canon, though few are sure if such a thing exists, our nation still much the provincial backwater it was in 1867.
Everything we have didn't exist until we imagined it. All our inventions, like money and its evil twin usury, are as much fictions as the fictions we invent to chronicle the ongoing folly of our species. Narrative history down the ages forms a warped chain of contradictory accounts. My task, as I see it, is to commit my brief life to recording for posterity the dungheap of our cultural reality. A writer probably can't do this in a market that endlessly replicates the cheap, stupid and profitable. Literature belongs outside the market and in the solitary imagination.
On the surface it seems swell that Amazon will publish books in addition to selling them, offering authors the chance to bypass the old middlemen -- agents and traditional publishers -- and earn up to 50 per cent of profits. But Amazon isn't interested in books that last, just ones that sell by not making its overworked readers think or feel too much, something like a novel (whose plot is stolen from a movie) about sexy teenagers on a remote island, flirting and chopping each other up. Amazon wants big mass-produced best-sellers by movie stars and athletes, paint-by-numbers genre fiction, self-help books that promise to help us unleash our creative potential and extort millions from our neighbours, perhaps even a how-to book called Fishing With Grenades.
The entrepreneurial spirit of the age encourages writers and creative types to market themselves not as humans but as brands. We aspire not to sentience, but corporate psychopathy. It follows then that lords of online manors should charge extra fealty when a writer submits content, because in fact he's buying ad space for himself, the only product he wants to sell.
All the while we waste hours every day on social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, who rake in millions selling our personal information to other millionaires, who then persuade us to buy their stuff at a colossal markup, plunging us deeper into debt our descendants will pay for. In the current economic and intellectual climate, by working for a living and not attaching money to writing, I feel I have nothing to lose. I hope the creative freedom that flows from this feeling lets me write at my best, which may amount to nothing.
The manorialism of the Internet is bringing about a paradigm shift in the way books get written and published. A writer who wants an audience has few other options but to toil on his virtual fief. Meantime, I work my day job while taking my writing seriously, but not our medieval digital age.]]>How Barack Obama May Lose the Presidencytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16450142012-07-03T13:51:45-04:002012-09-02T05:12:16-04:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/reached out to several donors of his 2008 election win in a conference call on Air Force One. He warned that while his campaign has "a better grassroots operation ... and a better message," Romney has way more money and "the special interests that are financing Romney's campaign are just going to consolidate themselves. They're gonna run Congress and the White House." He laments that during his first presidential term his hair has turned gray because it's been so hard and slow making change, "especially when you've got an obstructionist Republican Congress," whose presidential nominee has billionaire backers like David and Charles Koch spending more alone on Romney than all of Obama's backers combined. However, the president does strike one positive note, seeing it as a "nice thing" that Americans "agree with our [Democrats'] message when they hear it ... A few billionaires can't drown out millions of voices."
In my opinion, Obama's lying to himself and his donors, and knows full-well that a few billionaires can in fact determine an election. One way is through super-PAC ads. What's baffling is how cheap they look. One strains to believe they could sway even the most simple-minded voter. But apparently they can, provided Americans are relentlessly assaulted with them via television and the internet, bludgeoning their critical intelligence. Even more absurd is the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favour of Citizens United defining corporate donation as a form of human free speech, making it unconstitutional to limit the amount a corporation may contribute to a super-PAC. In his Harper's magazine essay, "It's a Rich Man's World: How billionaire backers pick America's candidates," Thomas Frank argues that super-PACs "have imported market logic directly into our politics," the U.S. becoming a country of, by and for the rich.
Once Obama may have held social-justice ideals, such as the one that the poor, despite contributing little or nothing to the national economy, deserve handouts like hospital care financed by taxes on the rich and the working-class, medical attention being a privilege then not only for those who actually contribute something in return. However, by asking his donors to give him more money, he concedes that he can't beat corporate America, so instead he'll join them. In February his campaign manager Jim Messina assured potential contributors in New York's finance industry that Obama promises not to "demonize Wall Street as he stresses populist appeals in his re-election campaign." The president understands the clear and present danger that corporate money may fork over another Republican majority in Congress, and even worse, a Republican president.
It's not that a majority of Americans aren't smart enough to know the bile spewed in super-PAC ads consists largely of lies; surely they suspect Romney could care less about them, and his presidency would hinge solely on placating the so-called "one-percenters" who really run America; it's just there's something omnipotent about the way unlimited amounts of money slowly, steadily steer our thoughts and desires.
In Romney's ads, the viewer imagines Obama a foreign-born socialist; ominous sounds and images accompany bolded text read in voice-over by a man who intones with apocalyptic earnestness that the current president is responsible for unemployment rates hovering near 10 per cent in several states, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, including those in the manufacturing and construction sectors, the heart of the American working-class. It also shows Obama's stimulus spending has gone haywire through radical tax hikes across all socio-economic levels.
Through repeated exposure to such ads, voters grow cynical and info-glutted and may cease to care what's true and false. Obama's campaign will unleash its own torrent of anti-Romney vitriol and do so with increasing ferocity, spoiling whatever integrity and vision he may have held when first elected. Furthermore, I suspect the American people no longer trust their president and are seeking a reason, any reason, not to vote for him. No doubt Romney's campaign will save the biggest and most venomous onslaught of propaganda for the weeks and days before the vote, which, given our split-second media-blitzed attention spans, form the crucial moments that decide who wins an election.
Democracy, per se, has yet to exist in reality, and while it has acquired a veneer of authenticity, now the thought of an American presidential election reflecting a "democratic process" seems absurd. Whoever wins will further entrench America's corporate elite as the true governors of the nation. After all, money may be our single greatest invention.
According to John Buchan, money is widely considered the only true measure of success and failure, of happiness and misery, and a language we can all speak and understand, even the poorest of the poor. No longer the means to convey our desires, but an end in itself, money, be it our own or someone else's, shepherds us in most of our decisions.
As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, we hold from conception in the womb till death the belief that "[a]n augmentation of fortune is the means by which the greater part of men propose and wish to better their condition." Perhaps Romney's campaign will frame broadcast revenues for states it targets with ads as windfalls for their cash-strapped residents, especially those living in states that have suffered huge losses of jobs and industries. I fear the colossal and superior spending on ads by Romney's super-PAC will play a major role in securing his election victory.
If it's bulldozed into the minds of enough Americans that higher ad revenues means Republicans are infusing more cash than Democrats into their state economies, voters may choose Romney as the one who can augment their fortune and better their condition.]]>Kids Eat Up TV Ads, Then Junk Foodtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15192302012-05-16T11:22:34-04:002012-07-16T05:12:04-04:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/New York Times article describes the results of an American national survey of 12,000 students in Grades 5-10 that link poor eating habits in children to the amount of television they watch.
Similar findings have been made by Canadian researchers. It seems the more television kids watch, the more junk food they snack on and the more unhealthy their general eating habits are. The American study attributes the link primarily to broadcast advertising, which is suspected to influence the food choices youngsters make, even when they're not watching television. Ergo, the ads' syrupy images of saccharine foods stick in the kids' brains and direct the dietary choices they make in the corner store or the school cafeteria.
While this isn't new information and should surprise few people, it serves as a useful reminder of the moral burden borne by parents, the advertising industry and junk food-producing corporations. Kids are being indoctrinated into the long-term negative effects of eating unhealthy food -- effects that range from obesity to early death.
However, given the following, it's unlikely that levels of childhood obesity and bad eating habits will change demonstrably in the near future:
The popularity of Pizza Pockets, chocolate bars and potato chips and their widespread availability in supermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores; their generally cheaper prices than healthier choices; the fact that nowadays a large number of parents both work full-time and have few free moments to cultivate healthy eating habits in their children; that television and other forms of entertainment media have, to a large extent, replaced parents as the main source of education in their formative years.
Dr. Ronald Ianotti, staff scientist at the American National Institute of Child Health and Prevention Research, recommends parents limiting the amount of time their children spend watching television and ensuring their kitchens are stocked with healthy snacks, such as apples instead of apple-flavoured jelly beans.
That's a good start, we can all agree, but unfortunately, knowing how wily kids can be, who's to say they won't simply buy junk food on their own? Perhaps parents also need to keep tabs on the money their children earn through allowances or part-time jobs, carefully monitoring what they're spending it on.
Also working against increasing children's consumption of healthy foods is the fact that oranges don't taste as sweet as sugar-rich treats such as licorice, so it's hard to get kids to be enthusiastic about "fresh" fruits and vegetables...I mean, the cardboard-tasting genetically modified vegetables widely available in grocery stores and supermarkets. Organic produce is generally more expensive and difficult to afford in our recession and debt-heavy times.
All of these factors lead to a dour outlook regarding the future health of our children, coupled with the fact that government-subsidized pensions and social security programs are slowly vanishing. And our consumer society, and the banks and corporations that rule over it, encourage spending, not saving. A paradigm shift in our collective way of life seems in order, and while unlikely, it's worth exploring, because if we aim for the stars long enough, perhaps one day we'll reach at least beyond the status quo.
In other words, unhealthy food-production corporations and their advertisers can't be made to risk significant reductions of their profit margins for the sake of the long-term health of future generations. But we as citizens of a (royal) democracy are still allowed to fancy the moral advantages of encouraging healthy eating among kids, if only to allay our guilty consciences and let hope fuel productivity in our professional lives, maintaining steady incomes to keep roofs over our children's fattening heads.]]>Rafael Nadal's Platonic Couragetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9686012011-09-20T12:39:33-04:002011-11-20T05:12:02-05:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/dancing like monkeys in a corporate circus, last week's U.S. Open men's final offered a rare glimpse into the fact that victory and defeat as separate entities is little more than a persuasive fiction. Life and death don't oppose one another, but weave the warp and woof of a single fabric flowing we don't know where. Not a fan of Rafael Nadal, nonetheless I've been haunted by his tragic performance in the final set of his loss to Novak Djokovic. He seemed in the space of only a few minutes to become both loser and winner and embody what Plato called "the whole nature of courage."
In his dialogue "Laches," Plato provides a partial definition of courage, a "sort of wisdom" or knowledge of when to fear defeat or hope for victory in war, sport, disease, poverty, politics, even love.
From the mouths of Socrates and his companions, Plato defines a "thoughtful courage" not as hope or fear of past or present actions, but as a principle of "wise endurance" with respect to the future: knowing when you'll lose, staring into that "little death," absorbing the terror of the moment, yet preserving the mental strength to carry on and fight another day. Socrates avers that courage, like the boldness of a boar in battle, doesn't mean standing one's ground beyond the limits of mental and physical capability, risking a humiliation so great that it results in the death of one's competitive acumen, or of one's sanity, or even of life and limb. Instead, courage entails the intelligence and foresight to learn from the mistakes that caused the loss and have the patience to wait for the next chance to seek victory. However, because he acknowledges that his definition doesn't include consideration of past and present factors that may contribute to the prescience in this "wise endurance," Socrates concludes by lamenting that "we are all in the same perplexity."
But that perplexity, briefly, seemed lifted as I watched Nadal accept defeat in the final minutes of his championship match against Djokovic. Nadal had lost the first two sets (2-6, 4-6), then pushed his mind and body to the edge of their endurance to eke out a tie-break win (7-6) in the third. The risk he took didn't pay off. As the fourth set began, while Djokovic himself inched toward bodily collapse, Nadal was exhausted that much more. He lost the first three games and what bursts of energy he could still muster proved insufficient.
This was when he began to display a dignity and strength of character rarely seen in sports or any other arena of human intercourse. The humiliation of having been outplayed for nearly the whole match; the humiliation of having lost to Djokovic during their five previous encounters (all in finals); the humiliation of having been stripped of his number one ranking earlier this year by Djokovic in the Wimbledon final: Nadal bore all these indignities on his thunder-clapped face.
During the final three games, a storm seemed to brew within his psyche, audible on his rumbling brow. There appeared to be moments when he stood ready to punish his body's failure to match the vigour and determination of his mind, as if he were debating whether to burn his body to ash, drive himself to madness and defy the reality that he'd struck a wall he couldn't climb: Djokovic was simply the better player and no amount of bold boar-like rashness would change that fact. Nadal scowled and gnashed his teeth like steel in the furnace of his mouth, yet after some vacillation, as shot after shot blew by him, it looked as if he'd finally grasped that Platonic "wise endurance," the foresight largely unknown to men, women, children and animals, the intelligence to eclipse emotion with reason, allowing his pores to absorb the grief of defeat. Calmness consumed his face, like circles on water which, as they vanish, expand. His eyes grew fuller and assumed a soft lustre. A mysterious shade crept over his face. He seemed to pull himself back from the point of frenzy and evince in his broken form both defeat and victory, death and life.
It was among the richest moments I've experienced in recent memory. The self-possession that took over Nadal, an involuntary exhibition of his deeper self, trumped the victories of Djokovic's near-flawless performance as well as his many achievements over the course of the year, all of which acquired an inferior significance. During the match's final minutes, in my mind's eye, Djokovic vanished, as did the corporate advertisements littering the stadium and the malignant wailings of the illiterate crowd. Like an ocean tide, the court lifted Nadal higher toward who knows where. His defeat took on the grandeur of a victory that outstripped the baser limitation of our terminal obsession with "winning."
At the risk of over-stating my case, Nadal's body and face became the birthmark of a revelation suffused more with darkness than with light. The ancestral glow of all our griefs shone in him down through the ages. He became "the whole nature of courage." Of course, I may have been letting my imagination get the best of me. The impression left as fast as it came, but a trace of that original feeling still lingers.]]>Stephen Harper's Royal History Lessontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9453102011-09-06T09:46:30-04:002011-11-06T05:12:02-05:00Marko Sijanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-sijan/expressing a wish for a "renewed patriotism founded in our traditions," believes the "royal" moniker will enact a "restoration" and "renewal of our historic memory." He may be right, but only if one takes that "historic memory" to its reductio ad absurdum and studies in depth Canada`s colonial history.
First, the British royal navy, fueled by Prime Minister William Pitt's desire for British commercial superiority forged the conquest of France's North American colonies in 1760. France's final defeat seeded the condition of modern Quebec, widely viewed across Anglophone Canada (if viewed with anything more than indifference) as a culture of victims living on federal handouts. In my opinion, Harper's decision to (re)rebrand our national identity in British monarchical terms is in part an intentional snub against Quebec. The British army's defeat of New France 251 years ago set Quebec on the road to its reputedly insignificant role in Canada's national identity, a project Harper has pursued as an apparent act of revenge since Quebec lambasted him in 2008 for cutting $45 million in arts funding, part of which was deemed essential in Quebec for the preservation of its language and culture. Harper's strategy against Quebec echoes the position taken in an article from 1790 in the Anglophone paper Quebec Mercury, the author exulting his Anglo readers to help "unfrenchify" the province by "raising mounds against the progress of French power."
Second, the Tories have given Canadians the chance to remind themselves of who we are as a former colony of the British empire. We need only recall the royal treatment of First Nations peoples since the British took over the land Aboriginals had considered home for centuries before us. To get a sense of the possible extinction of Canada's Indians, a "soft genocide" being executed not with a bang but a whimper, consider, for example, the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857. It was designed by the British colonial government of the time who saw themselves as intellectually, culturally and technologically superior to their indigenous subjects, thus choosing to "enfranchise" them into British North American society by stripping them of their cultural beliefs and traditions: their identity.
Is there a significant difference between how they were treated then and how our enlightened federal government treats them now? Today's First Nations are consigned to remote reservations far removed from the cities that grease the engine of our economy, relieved of the burden of taxation on alcohol and cigarettes to be left weak, unhealthy, demoralized and dependent on government handouts, and allowed to run casinos on reservations to keep them distracted from the gravity of their plight and addicted to the narcotic of loss. Poilievre's aim to "renew our historic memory" should also take into account our royal legacy of the maltreatment of our conquered and vanquished: Quebec and First Nations, respectively.
Third, the Tory decision to focus more on our royal military roots bolsters Canada's global image as a competitor on the world's battlefields, notably in Harper's commitment to Arab-Asian military adventures in Libya and Afghanistan. The federal government's official policy is to liberate these nations from tyranny and to nurture democracy, but informed Canadians hold some inkling of the truths behind the lies. The campaigns in which we're involved in Libya and Afghanistan reveal what Canada is and what it was: an imperialistic nation governed by a minority ruling class. In fact, Canada began as a corporation: The Hudson's Bay Company, felting beaver fur for Paris hat makers selling their wares to wealthy elites.
Similarly, today, we obey our American overlords by participating in the so-called New Great Game of trying to prevent African, Middle Eastern and central Asian oil and gas supplies from reaching America's greatest competitors, such as China.
I suspect that digging deeply into our royal roots wouldn't achieve the "renewed patriotism" Harper, Poilievre and the other Tory cronies covet from Canadian citizens, but an honest "renewal of historic memory" would expose the truth that British North America's identity mirrors modern Canada's identity as a burgeoning military power poised to play a role in driving civilization to collapse. Widespread acknowledgment of this fact may compel us to change the course of our history largely devoid of growth and change.
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