Author: Tony Dalmyn

Utopian SF

SF readers, check out this essay in the Boston Globe Ideas section, by Joshua Glenn – Back to utopia. It’s mainly about the critic Fredric Jameson, and his views on Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany and utopian ideas in modern sf. More on utopian fiction by Jameson, an essay – The Politics of Utopia.
Glenn notes: “Fans of Dick, Delany, and their ilk warn neophytes not to read too many of their books too quickly: Doing so, as this reader can attest, tends to result in pronounced feelings of irreality, paranoia, and angst”. And we thought it was something in the water …

Unlucky

If you live in Winnipeg, you will know this story, which was in the headlines for several consecutive days, and in the headlines repeatedly over the following weeks as civic authorities announced new initiatives in the war on crime. I was distressed by the story, because it involves the death of a young man – only 17 years old.
On Monday October 10, 2005, a young man was walking on Sargent Avenue crossing Maryland Street, with another man, a casual acquaintance. Around 11:00 PM, about a block away, other young men, identified by the police as associates or members of a new gang of teenaged criminals called the African Mafia, fired a .22 calibre firearm, from a house, identified by the police and local residents as a crack house. Members of a rival gang, the Mad Cowz, had been at the house and had fled in the direction of Sargent and Maryland. The police suggested that both gangs were comprised of recent immigrants from Africa. One or more of the occupants of the house had discharged firearms. As the story unfolded, they may have been attacked or believed they were under attack, or just trying to shoot their rivals who had come near the house, and the fled. One young man, named Philippe, was wounded in the abdomen, and he died. A .22 calibre bullet has enough force to penetrate clothing, skin and muscle, and to damage vital structures, although it does not have the momentum to cause massive shock. He was unlucky to have been in the line of fire, unlucky to have been hit, unlucky to have died within blocks of Winnipeg’s major trauma hospital, the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. Phillipe’s companion was wounded in the arm.

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Kidocracy

In the local newspapers in Winnipeg, we have had a run of stories in the last few years about whether schools are doing enough to prevent bullying (I’m putting a caveat on that link. The Wikipedia entry summarizes the theories about bullying but it doesn’t evaluate them, and it tends to dramatize the problem – which what this entry is about). I am not going to argue that real bullying should be tolerated. I am arguing that people are being dishonest or gullible about the alleged crisis. We are seeing people promoting a crisis for their own purposes, and we are seeing these fears resonate with adults who then demand, in essence, that the government take steps to make everyone – even other children – treat their children nicely. We are witnessing adults trying to convince themselves and other adults that they are concerned, loving and respectable parents.
The concern with bullying is relatively new, and the language used to discuss it tends to be dramatic. In England the new Children’s Commissioner used the occasion of a teen-on-teen homicide as a platform for advocacy against bullying, as reported in Children’s czar warns of huge leap in bullying in the Observer, the magazine of the Guardian. This surely is a rhetorical mistatement. Children have not become intrinsically more violent or aggressive in the last two generations, and it hard to detect any changes in society that would have made children more violent aggressive – unless you believe in the evil powers of comic books, pulp fiction, satanic rock, television, violent toys, and video games.

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Lightfoot Week

It is Gordon Lightfoot’s week. November 5 – the anniversary of the Last Spike in the CPR, the inspiration for the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. Today, (November 10) the anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which inspired The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. As the riots in the French urban suburbs continued, a fleeting thought for Black Day in July. A video clip on the CBC Web site – some US radio stations refused to play that song when it was first released.

Respect

Deborah Hope riffs on the many meanings of Respect in the Australian. She’s right. It has become a flexible word, prominent in the vocabulary of relativism. All beliefs are entitled to respect (but especially mine …) She might also have said that the discourse of respect is usually self-centred and blaming. Feeling disrespected is a more common sentiment than feeling ashamed for disrespecting others.
The Guardian reports in a story headlined ‘We’re not germs or louts. Sarkozy should’ve said sorry’ that some French rioters are complaining that the French government doesn’t respect them. It sounds like gangster-talk, and it might be dismissed as posturing. However, there is merit to the complaint that French society disrespects its underclass. French immigration and
social policy has tended to marginalize East European, African, and North African immigrants and their children. Some French politicians have used inflammatory language toward everyone who lives in La Zone, which has helped keep the anger and crime going. Some political and media figures are explaining the riots as a mass protest against social conditions. The rioters have the government’s attention, which is a kind of respect.

Prime

This is partly about the movie Prime, and partly about other things like depression, unhappiness, therapy, and young men dating older women.
Prime has been treating with surprising kindness by many critics, but the mean score at the Metacritics site was 58. Ebert liked it because it had some good scenes and tried to say something, although he agreed it was flawed. A movie with Meryl Streep and Uma Thurman, with Uma emoting about relationships, is going to have a safe core audience, and a fan following. It isn’t doing terribly well at the box office though. I thought Ebert had a point about the movie’s having some good scenes, but he understated the flaws.

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The Last Spike

Wikipedia’s start page lists anniversaries, selected from a main entry listing events on that date in history. For November 7, 2005, the selections from the general November 7 entry include the beginning of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia (it was October on the Julian calendar in Russia), the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.
For Canadians, the Last Spike in the CPR at Craigellachie BC in 1885. For Canadian nationalists, a song and a poem and links to photos. The National Archives of Canada have a couple of ways of getting the iconic picture, as a gif image or through a link on a an information page. Or see the section on The Last Spike in the Canadian Encyclopedia’s entry on the construction of the CPR. The CPR has a different photo on photo history page on its Web site. It is a posed photo of follically gifted men in top hats and tails. For hairy Scots, a note in Canadian history and literature.

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November 7, 2005

Wikipedia’s start page has a daily featured article, an entry selected as the article of the day. For football fans, on November 7, 2005 the featured article is about the Arsenal Football Club which plays in the FA Premier League in England.
The French urban riots made the front page of the Free Press today – a picture of firefighters trying to put out the fire in a burning car. Wikipedia had a problem with the story over the weekend – competing rewrites and disputes over whether the article overstated the role of Islam in the rioting. They had an objectivity flag on the story on Sunday, but they have worked that out. Their article is now called 2005 French Urban Violence.