2013-05-24T22:12:55-04:00 Peter Behrens http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=peter-behrens Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Peter Behrens Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1971156 2012-10-16T17:46:56-04:00 2012-12-16T05:12:02-05:00

Peter Behrens http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-behrens/
That's why the geography of Colorado Springs, where I'm spending a few weeks, hit me so hard. This is a city on the edge of the Great Plains, set hard up against the front range of the Rocky Mountains. There has been exuberant growth over the last 20 years: the population of the metropolitan area was over 600,000 in the 2010 census, and El Paso County, where "The Springs" is located, recently passed Denver County as the most populous in the state. In 2006 Colorado Springs was ranked No. 1 as "Best Big City" in Money magazine's "Best Places to Live."

With large military installations (Fort Carson; the U.S. Air Force Academy; the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD Command Center) Colorado Springs is considered a "conservative" stronghold in a swing state. "Conservative," I think, is not a meaningful description: it's that side of U.S. opinion that is decidedly, radically, reactionary. The geography of the metropolitan area mirrors a political and cultural divide. The original, older sections of city are pleasantly midwestern, with wide, tree-lined residential streets and wooden houses in a delicious mixture of American styles, from massively New England colonial to simple woodframe bungalows that might have belonged in any Colorado mining town, c. 1890.

Downtown is surprisingly small, with some office buildings & hotels, and wide -- often empty -- midwestern-style streets. But the real Colorado Springs is located in the sprawl of suburbs -- really exurbs, since they are only precariously connected to the city -- to the north and east of the old core.

And the exurban neighbourhods of El Paso County seem, to this observer, environments designed for alienation and loneliness: street after street of developer-built houses fronted by enormous, power-operated garage doors, which display an defensive attitude to the street, and to the larger world. Any notion of a neighbourhood being in some sense a "commons" is bitterly denied by the developer-created geography, and the paranoid style of domestic architecture. Fear and loneliness seem written on the landscape by the silent streets.

Citizens of the exurbs speak fearfully of 'downtown' and rarely go there: this must be why downtown is so disturbingly somnolent. The minimal amount of urban activity it does display is apparently startling and threatening to exurban citizens, who stay away in droves. Is the geography of the exurban areas -- the isolation and fear that sprawl reinforces among homeowners -- part of the reason why the fundamentalist and evangelical mega-churches are so popular and powerful? They are really the only "community" available. It is not really an urban life here, but something quite different.

Last week the Colorado Springs' Gazette ran an Associated Press story that was not set in Colorado Springs, but does say something about the way we live now: the strange, febrile cultural divide that runs through the nation, and seems to be growing wider every year, and which our wrong-headed, developer-driven urban geography is just making wider and deeper.

The head was "Congressman: Evolution is a lie from 'pit of hell'" and the story reported videotaped remarks made by Georgia Rep. Paul Broun, a medical doctor, running for re-election in November -- unopposed by Democrats."God's word is true," the story quotes Broun. "I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell...it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a saviour." Dr. Broun said that he also believes the world is about 9,000 years old and was created in six days.

End of story. It all makes The Netherlands seem mighty urbane, and civilized, though fear and know-nothingism have their place in European life and politics, too.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1270441 2012-02-13T14:36:09-05:00 2012-04-14T05:12:01-04:00

Peter Behrens http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-behrens/
On the other hand, golf courses, blue skies, and cheerful degrees fahrenheit aside, you are looking kind of... surly these days. Sure, milk is $.50 cheaper a gallon on your side of the line, but we do have universal health care. We may need to stand in line for it, but we have always been a polite bunch and never minded queueing, as long as the line's fair. You used to be, but you don't seem so into fairness anymore, America.

We read about your plethora of fat cats, those masters of the universe, but mostly, in your upstate, northern border towns, we see poor folk and large, sad children returned from desert wars. Granted our perspective is skewed. The two crosscuts of the USA we're most familiar with are your sunbelt and your northern tier from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to Aroostook County, Maine. Three thousand miles of farms and sawmill towns that used to seem sort of Canadian, except now they don't. Sawmills are shut, farmers are extinct, and much of your Great North Woods seems a hotbed of little but methamphetamine production and military recruitment. That's how it looks to us, anyway, from just next door. Along what used to be our undefended border you've aggressively "thickened" your frontier and you suddenly demand passports from us. Those lines are tedious, those officers aggressive. We don't much want to cross anymore, and if it weren't for the sunshine and the fact our dollar goes a long way these days, maybe we wouldn't.

America, you once elected a brilliant, shiny young president who seemed bold, but isn't, while we're stuck with a dour prime minister who looks and sounds like, well, a Canadian prime minister. Nonetheless, we get the feeling that Canada is moving in the right direction. Partly this is dumb luck: we're a resource economy, producing raw materials that China needs. Our universities are a bargain, and have you tried the brand-new Vancouver subway? It spooks us to see that you are not moving, America. You're dysfunctioning. Living alongside you these days and listening to the contenders in your Republican primaries is like overhearing a crazy family from the Maine backwoods in a loud, weird squabble at the Bangor Mall: everyone threatening, gesticulating, talking trash. The louder these men boast of keeping your military mighty enough to lick all comers, the weaker you seem, America, and so terribly out of touch with the rest of the world. Sometimes -- and we hate to have to say this, we honestly do -- you sound pathetic. Or you would, if you weren't also so magnificently, expensively, and ludicrously well-armed.

Stop obsessing about taxes, you can't pay for two wars without them. Anyway, taxes are not your real problem, you pay fewer of them than just about everyone except the Greeks. Be more mindful of your friends. If this isn't your century, well, so what, they can't all be. Get it together, America. Take better care of yourselves. Mind your health. Get moving again.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1236465 2012-01-27T11:58:51-05:00 2012-03-28T05:12:02-04:00

Peter Behrens http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-behrens/
By the way, what do you say to six drunk Canadian defencemen to persuade them to quietly exit the hotel's hot tub?

Try, "Can you get out of the hot tub now, please?" Works every time. Do not forget the "please."

Oh, we are nice. We weren't always. "Canadian gangsters" may seem an oxymoron, but in the days of your prohibition, squads of us made serious moola and some gunplay while pouring our excellent rye whiskey over the border into backwoods Vermont then down the spout of U.S. Route 7, to be shaken or stirred in the highball glasses of Gatsbyesque Manhattan. In fact, Fitzgerald hinted that Jay Gatsby himself was likely one of our cross-border affiliates.

New York City has always been a mecca for us. Back in 1892 the Times was waspishly editorializing (p4, column 4, June 6, 1892) on the dastardly threat posed by emigrating French Canadians ("It is next to impossible to penetrate this mass of protected and secluded humanity with modern ideas or to induce them to interest themselves in democratic institutions and methods of government.") And Joseph Mitchell's 1949 New Yorker piece, "The Mohawks in High Steel" noticed the Caughnawaga Mohawks -- their reservation is across the river from Montreal -- colonizing the North Gowanus neighbourhood, in Brooklyn, where saloons stocked Canadian cigarettes and Molson ale, and a local pastor was struggling to learn the Iroquois language.

These days, your rulers in the White House and Congress wrestle with the evils of importing another nasty Canadian liquid -- oil squeezed from the Alberta tar sands -- through another, possibly violent, delivery system.

Instead of competitive fedora'd gunsels from the Plateau Mont-Royal hustling truckloads of illicit booze through the New England night, and tommy-gunning each other on the approaches to Rutland, this time it's TransCanada's Keystone project threatening spillage and spoilage of precious ecozones in Nebraska on the course of its long run from Alberta ("Where?") to the Gulf Coast.

Well, we Canadians do recognize a business opportunity, and your addiction to high old times -- always cut with pure grains of zealous Puritan rectitude -- usually allows us to deliver our goods, or ourselves, and at a premium, once the hot air cools. You may not want us, but given your insatiable appetites and addictions, America, you're probably going to need us.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1086128 2011-11-10T10:47:49-05:00 2012-01-10T05:12:01-05:00

Peter Behrens http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-behrens/



My uncle John J.K. O'Brien, was one of the names on the "1939-45" slab, along with dozens of other Westmount "boys." They were always referred to as "boys," "the boys," because that was how my mother and aunts and other adults who had grown up in the neighbourhood remembered them: boys playing hockey on the rink in Murray Park; boys hanging out at Macy's Drugstore after school; boys going "overseas;" boys not coming home.

So we wore the blood-red plastic poppies pinned to our lapels in November and we "remembered" what I actually did not, could not, remember, since I was born 10 years after the end of WWII. Now, when I come back to Canada on this endless book tour, I am glad to see the poppies are still worn. Last week when I returned home to Maine for a few days I brought a poppy for my five-year-old to wear; and one for his Westmount-born kindergarden teacher at the Waldorf/hippy school in Blue Hill, Maine; and one for me. I know the symbol and the day has had a different resonance in Canada, since Afghanistan. We must hate the wars, but part of hating them surely means refusing to forget them.

Last night in Vancouver, as guest of a readers' club, I read a piece from my new novel The O'Briens. The bit I read was a "letter," written by a young Canadian infantry officer, in the regiment 22ième, who has just been through his first experience of battle (in Sicily, in 1943). He writes to his young wife, back in Montreal. He does not have the language to desribe what he is feeling so his letter is a raw and incoherent but I hope it has some authenticity. When I composed the fictional "letter" I tried to infuse it with everything unspoken by my family about their experience of the wars. My uncles were silent Canadian officers and gentlemen of the pre-psychologial generation. They were not comfortable "sharing" their "feelings." They were not Oprah Winfrey people (and more power to them!).

I find much to admire in their attitude but there was also a price to pay for all that silence about the disorienting experience of modern war. As they grew old, and faced their deaths, most of what had happened in the decades since their war seemed to recede, fade, lose shape and colour -- and the hard kernels of dastardly memory grounded in those intense weeks and months in Europe, 1943, 1944, 1945, was all that remained, and were spilled out to me, the inquisitive writer/nephew, not in rehearsed anecdotage but in pellucid shards of raw memory; bits of memory like chunks of hot shrapnel, disconnected to any moral or meaning, scorching and dangerous.

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