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Two Great Movie Ideas: You’re Welcome, Hollywood!

All right, these ideas are copyrighted– okay? So you can’t steal them. They are going to make me a lot of money.

There are two absolutely magnificent, wonderful movies out there just waiting to be made.

First of all, a movie biography of Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan grew up in Minnesota and wanted to be a rock’n’roll singer like Elvis. He didn’t see the fact that he sounded like a chorus of drowning weasels as an obstacle. He hitch-hiked to New York, found out that folk music was what was happening, man, and began playing at open mic shows at several local folk clubs, sounding more like Woody Guthrie than Elvis Presley. In fact, people used to say he sounded more like Woody Guthrie than Woody Guthrie did. (You can check this out by downloading some Guthrie tunes through Napster– the resemblance to early Dylan is uncanny.)

He wrote some of the greatest folk songs of the century. He was noticed by New York Times folk critic Robert Shelton. Bingo– Columbia (now Sony) signed him to a recording contract. For a while he was known as “Hammond’s Folly”, after John Hammond, the A&R man who signed him. But Joan Baez took him along on tour. Peter, Paul, and Mary covered his best songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All right”. He became big. Very big. Even the Beatles were listening to Bob Dylan. (But Elvis wasn’t– he was in the army, and then he was making crummy “B” movies in Hollywood.) He became the “spokesman of generation”. He didn’t want to be the spokesman of a generation. He shifted to rock’n’roll in 1965, with a bunch of Canadians known as “The Hawks” (later known simply as “the Band”) backing him. He wrote more great songs. Then, in 1967, he was almost killed in a motorcycle accident. In the meantime, the Beatles and Rolling Stones released several massively over-produced behemoths of albums, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Her Satanic Majesties Request. Everyone eagerly awaited Dylan’s response. Would he top them?

Dylan shocked the music world by releasing a very folky, very laid-back album called “John Wesley Harding”, featuring drums, bass, guitar, and harmonica. He retreated into a simpler, more introspective style.

It’s a great story. It covers the most fascinating period of American history this century: the 1960’s. It’s got everything. Everything except… the rights to Dylan’s songs.

Bob Dylan– unlike most musical artists today– actually owns the rights to his songs. If someone were to make a movie of Bob Dylan’s life, he would have to get Bob Dylan’s permission, or make a movie about the greatest song-writer of our century without using any of his songs.

Bob– if you’re listening– I have a great idea for you. Call Martin Scorsese and tell him that he can make a movie about you and you will give him the rights to use any of your songs in the movie. Tell him that you won’t even look at the movie or the script or anything until after it’s all done. Tell him he can do whatever he thinks is best with the story.

Come on, Bob. You gave “The Times They Are A’Changin'” to the Bank of Montreal. It’s the least you could do for your fans. You owe it to them.

The results would be a great movie. It would not always be flattering to Bob Dylan, who sometimes acted like a jerk, and who was known to stand aloof from his friends. But the most flattering thing about it would be that Bob Dylan was big enough and brave enough to do the right thing and let someone else make this movie and to let the director have all the control over the material, the way Bob has full control over his own recordings.

Are you listening, Bob? I ask a measly 1% of the gross in exchange for permission to use this idea, and the right to meet Uma Thurman, if she could be given a bit part, perhaps as Nico.

Okay– my second great movie idea: a remake of the 3 Stooges. This time, they are computer programmers working for Microsoft. While they’re not coding new applets for Office 2003 1/2, they are off creating mayhem at the Department of Justice Hearings, or directing U.S. negotiations at the WTO.

I’m serious. People are ready for unsophisticated, trashy, vaudeville-type humour. The baby-boomers will love it. Young people always find obscure retro-acts hip and amusing. Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Windows will immediately appreciate the humour of Curly trying to figure out how “plug’n’play” works, or writing little Java applets for the Microsoft Web Page or finding ways to make Word Perfect crash.

Well that’s it. Are you listening, Hollywood Moguls? Call me and make me rich.

Who should star in a Bob Dylan Movie:

Sean Penn as Bob Dylan
Robert Deniro as Albert Grossman
Anne Hathaway as Joan Baez (yes, Anne can sing).
Ronnie Hawkins as the ghost of Elvis
Tom Waits as Woody Guthrie
Uma Thurman as Nico
Al Pacino as Leonard Cohen
Winona Ryder as Sarah Lowndes

10 years after I wrote this, Bob Dylan did exactly what I suggested– except, he gave it to Todd Haynes instead of Martin Scorcese. The result was the exquisite “I’m Not There”.   You’re welcome, Bob.  Call me sometime and we’ll work out a gratuity.  [2011-03]

Correction: Todd Haynes was the director, not P. T. Anderson as stated earlier. [2014-09-16]

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The So-Called Left Wing Media

Where is the Liberal Media?

I was discussing the long dead Clinton scandal the other day with someone. When she insisted that he really did deserve impeachment, I pointed out that the vast majority of Americans didn’t agree with her. She said, “Oh well, that’s the liberal media…”

The liberal media? What liberal media?

I didn’t want to embarrass this person, but I wanted to ask her to identify a single specific example of “liberal media”. Who can she possibly mean? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal? The Washington Post? The Chicago Tribune? Who? CBS news? ABC news? CNN? U.S. News and World Report? The New Republic? Who?

The media represent one point of view: profit. The media are, almost without exception, owned by corporations, and most of the owners of these corporations are extremely conservative. (The only exceptions, really, are the CBC in Canada and, to a limited extent, PBS in the U.S. However, PBS has lately adopted a far more conservative slant thanks to threats from the Republican majority in Congress, who constantly whine about the mythical “liberal” bias of the network. Look at how often Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak get their ugly mugs onto the air.)

The objective of most news organizations nowadays is very simple: get as many readers/viewers/listeners as possible in order to generate as much advertising revenue as possible. Most of the media thus merely reflect popular opinion. Right now, it is quite trendy, in the U.S., to give harsh sentences to petty criminals. Can you name a single media outlet, newspaper, or television editorialist in the U.S. that advocates the contrary?

How many news outlets in the U.S., editorially or through the selective rendering of news stories, advocate the following:

  • legalization of marijuana
  • cuts to the defense budget
  • the passing of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, for women
  • more sex education in public schools
  • more spending on welfare or other programs that help the poor
  • forgiveness of those debilitating loans which impoverish the third world
  • elimination of capital punishment
  • more regulation of the chemical industry
  • liberalization of the copyright laws

Where is this so-called liberal media?

If there was a liberal media, why didn’t it come out in force during the Clinton impeachment hearings and denounce the scurrilous allegations made by Henry Hyde and his fellow hale hypocrites? Where were the stalwart defenders of Clinton’s wildly progressive, activist government?

You must realize that the bias of the media is reflected primarily in the decision of which story to report and how to report it, rather than in overt editorial content. Thus, when Dan Rather, with his monumental ego, raced back from Cuba and the papal visit–the first to that communist country ever–to report on the semen-stained dress, a momentous indicator of media bias was at hand: the important story is a scandal with elements of lurid sex. Why? Because sex sells. That is the “media” bias. And this bias dominated all branches of U.S. media, from radio talk shows to the Washington Post to the New York Times and CNN. All of them made the scandal their headline stories. You could make an excellent case for the argument that the media was exceedingly biased in favor of the conservative point of view on the scandal, except that the truth is that the media simply wanted to sell advertising dollars.

Even so, after watching CNN on a regular basis for a few weeks, I found it astonishing that most Americans continued to resist this overwhelming drive to convince them that Clinton’s “monstrous” act of consensual groping should result in impeachment.

What is even more preposterous is the idea that a defender of Bill Clinton would be a “liberal” because Bill Clinton is a liberal. Bill Clinton is pro-capital punishment, pro-free enterprise, pro-GTO, and his idea of “reforming” welfare consists of booting people off it. This is a “liberal”? Could someone please point out to me a single “liberal” policy of the Clinton administration? Well, he balanced the budget. Judging from the performances of Bush and Reagan, I guess you would now have to regard balanced budgets as a “liberal” value.

Still, it must be confessed, that real liberals generally thought the whole Lewinsky scandal was a cynical plot by the Republicans to oust a president they never believed was legitimately elected in the first place. But they certainly didn’t get any comfort from a “liberal” media (whom the Republicans also blame for Clinton’s election in the first place).

In Canada, I suppose you could argue that, in addition to the CBC, the Toronto Star is “liberal”. That leaves the Globe and Mail and the Post, in Toronto as bastions of conservatism. As for every other major community in Ontario…The London Free Press? The Hamilton Spectator? The Niagara Falls Review? The St. Catharines Standard? Read their editorials. All of them are fundamentally conservative.

Most newspapers in Ontario are owned by Southam, which is owned by Conrad Black (the owner of the Post), an arch-conservative who wants to be a British Peer when he isn’t busy clearing up editorial space for his wife, Buffy. The Post is rather extreme, even for Conrad Black. Every story is selectively presented to emphasize a conservative axiom. Every headline invites reactionary scorn for Liberal policy. Editorials hammer at our decadently tolerant society.

The Globe and Mail is reliably conservative, but with good taste. It respects some diversity in point of view. To paraphrase the man who finally stood up to Joseph McCarthy, it has some “decency”.

The CBC certainly leans to the left, but hands the pulpit over to reactionaries on a regular basis, if for no other reason than to prove they are tolerant of all points of view—a bedrock liberal value. In television, that leaves Global and CTV and everyone else—all conservative (especially CTV).

So why, if there really isn’t a liberal media, do conservatives persist in blaming it for Clinton’s success? Well, because, to believe otherwise, is to admit that your arguments have been fairly presented and argued before the public and were not convincing to large numbers of people. Better to argue that they were tricked and deceived than that they believe you were wrong.

Or that the circulation of “The Nation” is a lot bigger than is widely believed.

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Hospitals

The President of the University of Western Ontario was recently on the radio, explaining why his institution needs more money. He said that classrooms were filled to overflowing, and the residences were over-crowded– some students even had to sleep at professor’s houses. What an outrage! Mr. Harris better fork over some more money right now!

Then the reporter asked him a simple question– if you don’t have room for these students, why did you accept them? The president floundered briefly, then tried to explain that the University of Western Ontario believed so strongly in the rights of all students in Ontario to a post-secondary education, that it just had to squeeze them in, though they didn’t have enough room to accommodate them.

Hmmm.

Well, well. It’s nice to know that the University of Western Ontario is motivated by such lofty sentiments. One wonders how many homeless people they took in this week, or emergency medical cases.

I found this interview disturbing. I don’t happen to like Mike Harris, but I have some respect for the political process. It disturbs me that colleges and universities in Ontario might have so little regard for the rights of their students that they would use them, crassly, as pawns, in a little political game of showmanship. It looks wonderful in the news when the University of Western Ontario reports that they are over-crowded. The public is outraged, possibly. Possibly, they will demand that Mike Harris increase funding.

Possibly, they might ask themselves why colleges and universities continue to hike their tuition costs, year after year after year, in spite of the fact that average earnings for the average person have not increased at all over the past twenty years. The professors at the University of Waterloo are demanding a 20% increase in their wages. When asked who would pay for it, they insisted that students would not. Oh no– we would never force the students to assume that burden. They say they think the private sector should contribute.

Hmmmm.

And today it was reported that most hospitals in Toronto– 30 out of 32– are refusing to accept emergency patients. Most even refuse to accept critically ill emergency patients. We’re over-crowded! We have no beds! We have no monitors! We don’t have enough money or staff!

Mike, fork over the bucks.

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CNN: Pabulum for the Brain

CNN, the world’s most important news station (and so say all of us!) showed it’s true colours tonight.

Tonight is the 10th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20th century, the tearing down of the Berlin wall. Though the end of the cold war was marked by many different stages and events, the tearing down of the wall was easily the most powerful and dramatic. It marked an end to almost fifty years of isolation and hostility, that macabre dance of death between the two lethally-armed super-powers, the exploitation of proxy states in the third world, and the polarization of the globe’s communities. It provided the world with a striking symbol of the failure of communist ideology to satisfy the needs and aspirations of millions of people. It was one of the most important events of the century.

In honor of this event, CNN decided to broadcast an interview… with Princess Diana’s butler.

You know, this is pretty consistent with CNN’s general philosophical point of view, if you can call it that. News is entertainment. That was clear from the early days of “Eyewitness News”, a stylistic innovation pioneered by the masters of trashy tv in the 1970’s, ABC. “Eyewitness News” redefined “importance” to mean “that which provides the most exciting film footage”. The top news story would be that blazing car wreck at Jefferson and Wilson, or a gaggle of high school cheer-leaders holding a car-wash to raise money for fashion orphans, instead of some new disarmament treaty or new labour laws or trade agreements or whatever. Eyewitness news injected humour and trite personal comments by the newscasters. It emphasized the chemically enhanced skin tones of their anchors and their flashy hairstyles.

This is where most Americans ingest their news. Pabulum for the brain.

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The Slippery Slope

I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that this or that particular development in our society has put us all on the “slippery slope” to who knows where– damnation, probably.

It’s a long slippery slope. It started when Clark Gable uttered those immortal words, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn”, in Gone With the Wind. Or it began when Pierre Trudeau announced that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Or it began with Roe vs. Wade. Or it began with Elvis. Or the Beatles. Or Harvey Milk. Or Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Or Watergate. Or the Internet. Or Mad Magazine. Whatever.

Most people don’t realize that “slippery slope” is a derogatory term. Yes, it is. If you take logics in college– something you are usually required to do for a philosophy degree– you will learn very quickly that “slippery slope” arguments are almost always invalid. Why?

The essence of a “slippery slope” argument is this: this particular development, while not in and of itself evil, will lead to other developments that are really bad. Therefore, we should stop it all right now and take action against this particular development.

It’s appealing– isn’t it? If we allow sex education, we encourage promiscuity, and if we have promiscuity, we will have abortions, and then pretty soon we’ll allow voluntary euthanasia, and then involuntary euthanasia, and then we’ll be Nazis.

But imagine you were in court and a the crown attorney argued thusly: “Yes, picking pockets is not a very serious crime, but many pick-pockets go on to become murderers, so we ask to the court to sentence the defendant, who has been found guilty of picking pockets, to 30 years in prison.”

The judge, of course, would laugh at this logic, and sentence the defendant to 30 days (except in the U.S. where he would, in fact, be sentenced to 30 years). You can’t convict a man of a crime he might eventually commit. It offends our fundamental principles of justice. In the same way, you can’t argue for capital punishment on the reasoning that it will prevent murderers for murdering again. Many people don’t understand this– you can’t punish someone for a crime he has not committed. It’s against our most fundamental principles of justice. Many people don’t care. You should read that again– many people don’t care.

“Slippery slope” arguments should always be rejected as feeble and specious and absurd. If homosexuality is evil, let it be evil, and let’s oppose it. Let’s throw all the homosexuals in jail. If it is not, in itself, an evil thing, then permit it. If there are other things that you think are evil but they haven’t happened yet, by all means, let’s be ready to deal with them when they come.

You see, that’s another problem with slippery slope arguments– if you follow the logic consistently, you would never permit anything, for there is nothing that does not come before something else. It is obvious that abortion is the result of feminist activism. And feminist activism is only possible because women have the vote. And the vote is only possible for women because a court ruled that women were “persons”. So, to prevent abortion, we should never have decided that women were “persons”.

So where do you stop your slide down the slippery slope? Logically, you should stop the courts from defining women as persons. But everybody knows that is absurd. So you pick and choose. Many people choose abortion. Some choose birth control. It’s entirely arbitrary. And that, again, is why slippery slope arguments are so weak.

It is so elegant, so beautiful, and so reasonable to simply say that we will decide whether any particular act is right or wrong and respond accordingly. It works well. It is at the heart of all that is good about our system of justice.

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Go Your Own Way

For a few years in the mid-1970’s, the album “Rumors” by Fleetwood Mac was ranked the best-selling album of all time. One listen and it’s not hard to see why. Rumors has something for everyone, the romantic, the rocker, the thoughtful sentimentalist. I didn’t usually buy pop albums back then– Tom Petty and Jackson Browne were about as mainstream as I got– but I bought a copy of Rumors. My favorite song was Lindsey Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way”, but the most haunting was a group effort: “The Chain”.

fleetwood.jpg (16168 bytes)

fleetwood.jpg (16168 bytes)

There was considerable attention paid to the fact that the members of Fleetwood Mac appeared to be documenting personal experience in their songs. Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were married to each other, as were John and Christine McVie. During the life of the band, both relationships floundered. “Go Your Own Way” is poignant, though you wouldn’t know it from the lyrics alone:

You can go your own way
You can call it another lonely day…

I don’t know the details, but a few years later, Nicks and Buckingham went their own ways and got divorced, and so did the McVie’s.

A couple of years ago, the band reunited for a concert and a new album. As a rule, I am not fond of rock band reunions. The Beach Boys flogged themselves around for years and years and it was downright embarrassing, especially when they tried to drag Brian Wilson along. The Eagles set a record for ticket prices — and greed– on their last tour. What are they selling? Nostalgia. It’s kind of pathetic. They couldn’t stay on top of the charts with new material, so they disbanded. The members all had disastrous solo careers. They all squandered their money on fast cars, drugs, and loose women. Now they’re broke. But all those baby boomers are rich and conspicuous and just looking for something fake and ostentatious to squander their money on and here we are– still singing “California Girls” and “Hotel California” and reliving our misspent youths. Sponsored by Schlitz.

Yes, “Hotel California”– that epic diatribe against shallow, grasping materialism– is now performed by shallow, grasping, aging former rock stars. You may now call them “entertainers”.

There are exceptions. Yes, the Rolling Stones continue to tour, and yes, they have corporate sponsors, but at least they continue to put out original music on a regular basis. So does Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Neil Young even has the integrity to refuse corporate sponsors– one of the very few 60’s icons who hasn’t sold out.

Anyway, back to Fleetwood Mac and “The Chain”. The chorus is

if you don’t love me now
you will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
you must never break the chain

This was not my favorite song when the album came out. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t think it was very meaningful. And there wasn’t much to the lyrics– about four lines worth.

Now I have a better understanding of what it means. If you have been in a relationship for a long time, you know each other in a way that young lovers never do. There is no mystery, no promise, no exciting possibilities. Instead of seeing someone who represents a whole world of new experiences and ideas and feelings and relationships– you see someone with whom you have exhausted opportunities together, and whom you realize is not likely to ever change or grow or improve. Your relationship is established in concrete. Your social circle is congealed. Your potential has been realized. Even your income is probably relatively fixed.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If the relationship is still good, there are other bonds, and familiarity, and understanding, and the thing we refer to vaguely as “home”. The world can be a demanding, stressful place– there should be one place where you are unconditionally accepted and loved. When a relationship works, that’s what you get.

But if you fall out of love with that person– if you lose the daily acts of affection and intimacy and consideration– it will be, I think, almost impossible to rebuild that relationship later. “If you don’t love me now”– right now, this very moment– it will be impossible to fall in love with me again. What we have left is the baggage of your life, your children, your mortgage.

You could still go on for forty or fifty years, without ever feeling passion for each other again. Some people think that is magnificent. Family values. You should hang in there and try to work it out.

Or you could dissolve the relationship. But that’s pretty depressing too.

You get the feeling, from the content of Rumors, that Lindsey Buckingham wanted out of his relationship with Stevie Nicks, and that Stevie Nicks didn’t want him to leave:

It’s only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat… drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost… [songwriter: Stevie Nicks]

But these are just songs. People write from the heart, but they also have an ear for rhythm and an eye for strong imagery. Maybe it was the other way around.

Ian and Sylvia, the folk duo who had their best years in the 1960’s, (“Four Strong Winds” is probably their best-known song), also did a reunion concert a while ago. Like Buckingham and Nicks, they were a married couple writing and performing music together. Sylvia Fricker ran away from home in Chatham, Ontario, (“River Road”) and joined the older Ian Tyson in Toronto, and they had a pretty good career together, mostly covering songs by Dylan, Lightfoot, and others. And like Buckingham/Nicks, they eventually split up. Sylvia left Ian because she felt somewhat stifled by the relationship, and felt a need to develop her own potential away from his dominating influence. In all of their recorded music, Sylvia rarely solos.  [I later read that there were affairs…]

ian and sylvia.jpg (44347 bytes)

At the reunion concert, they sang a lot of love songs, about relationships starting and relationships dying. I had the feeling that Ian was inviting her back, in song, pleading with her, promising that it would be different this time. Sylvia looked more like, hey, it’s just a damn song. Let’s get the nostalgia thing over with so I can get back to my life. The chain was broken. She works in Toronto for the CBC. He has a ranch out in Alberta.

Why are so many pop singers so physically attractive? At the most superficial level, you would think that what we’re really after here is a voice. But of course, that is nonsense. In fact, the music industry will quite often take someone who can’t sing at all, but has a great body, and turn her or him into a singer.  Or someone who is attractive and can act:  the Monkees.  They never do that with someone who is overweight and has a bad complexion. No, singers have to be beautiful because part of the experience of listening to their music is a powerful sense of identification and fantasy. All around the world, men imagine that Stevie Nicks and Sylvia Fricker and Shania Twain and even Madonna are thinking about them when they sing songs about passion and surrender and desire. And women feel the same way about Donny Osmond.

Well…

If you have Rumours in your collection (if you’re a baby boomer, the odds are pretty good), give “The Chain” a fresh listen. Then turn up “Go Your Own Way” really loud and dance with the kids.

Note 1: Nicks and Buckingham actually split up as the album was being recorded, not afterwards.

Note 2: Nicks’ wrote a song called “Silver Springs” which was left off the album for management reasons. Nicks reportedly went ballistic when she found out and never forgave whoever it was she thought was responsible for the decision, which might have been Fleetwood and McVie.

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Our Moral Decline

A number of things happened in the 1940’s and 50’s that created many of the social problems we have today.

Firstly, people started to do pretty well for themselves. They made money. And, thanks to the huge government subsidy of the auto industry (especially the Interstate system in the U.S.), many people could afford cars.

Secondly, developers began to build a new type of residential community: the suburb, which was designed around the principle that everyone would have a car. The suburb was located away from the downtown (cheap land), which meant a lot of people had to drive their cars around in order to get to work. Public transit doesn’t work very well in the suburbs because of all the winding streets and the low density of population.

Thirdly, effective birth control allowed families to reduce the number of children they would have. This, in turn, allowed women to re-enter the work-force more quickly. It allowed numerous families to send their children to college who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. It changed the character of the family.

Fourth, the tax base shifted away from the inner city and out to the suburbs. As a result, city governments lost their ability to pay for the upkeep of downtown areas. These areas decayed, housing prices plummeted, the poor moved in with even more social problems, unemployment among the inner city poor soared, drug and alcohol addiction increased, and so on and so on.

In the 1960’s, this was all no secret. Sociologists and social scientists understood very well the negative effects of urbanization. Lewis Mumford wrote some sensational, amazing books on the development of cities. We studied them in high school as late as the early 1970’s. Too many people living too close together tended to develop strange behavior patterns. Most of us have heard about the girl who was raped and murdered while dozens of her neighbors leaned out of their high-rise windows and listened, and not a single one of them decided to call the police and go to help her.

The suburbs are no better. Instead of communities, where people know each other and interact with each other at local businesses, and operate schools together, and build playgrounds together, and help each other out, people barely know their own neighbors, because they can travel to see their friends, in their cars, and you don’t want to get too friendly with a person who lives just 30 feet away from your lawnmower.

But nobody could do anything about urbanization. Or was it just that we were all complicit in urbanization? We all wanted our own homes with a back yard and a driveway. And we never blame ourselves for society’s ills, so we blame hippies or blacks or other minorities, or a decline in “family values”, or softness on crime. That way, you can elect fascist leaders, give more money to the police, sentence people to thirty years in jail for possessing marijuana, and execute developmentally delayed adults for murder. This, apparently, is more satisfying to some people than reconsidering the huge subsidy to the auto industry.

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Cities

Why do we, the taxpayer, pay for roads? Ever think about it? Whether you want to or not, you kick in thousands of dollars every year to pay for roads.

Well, you say, you like the roads. You use the roads a lot. But what if someone told you that you could save a lot of money if we just got rid of most of the roads and spent about half as much money on public transit? Who says this is the only way to move people around?

Have you ever thought about cities? Cities suck, big time. I know, there’s all sorts of glamour and excitement about “downtown”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about suburbs and neighborhoods and freeways. I’m talking about the homeless and the panhandlers and squeegee kids. I’m talking about traffic tie-ups, pollution, and over-crowding. Cities suck, big time.

Why do we have so many problems in our cities? Whenever people talk about big social problems, like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime, they tend to blame social and cultural developments. Kenneth Starr and his repressed buddies on the Republican Right, like to blame the sixties, with all that evil rock’n’roll and anti-authoritarianism and draft evasion and lifestyle experimentation and, later, feminism. That’s why our society is falling apart. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame our oppressive economic system. We don’t share enough of what we have with those in need. We need to pour money into projects that will revitalize our cities. We need a higher minimum wage. We need more development.

No one seems to realize that cities, with all their problems, didn’t happen by accident. Most of us used to live in the country. Then, around the turn of the century, we began to mechanize the farms and build factories. So jobs moved from agriculture to industry, and industry located itself in cities, because they needed the transportation and support industries and other resources that were located in the cities. So people moved to the cities. These people needed places to live. So developers started building houses and apartment buildings. As more people wanted to live close to their jobs, the prices of these houses went up higher and higher. People were forced to move into apartments, or farther and farther away from the downtown.

So how do you get these people to work? How do you get them to sports stadiums and art galleries and malls? You have two possible options. First, you can build a whole bunch of buses, trolleys, and streetcars, so you can move fifty or sixty people at a time fairly efficiently. Doesn’t that make sense? Why have sixty huge automobiles clogging up the streets, filling the air with carbon monoxide, wandering around looking for a place to park, when you can have just two or three streetcars? The streetcars drop you off and then get out of the way. Cars stay there, taking up miles of valuable real estate. Look at all the parking lots and parking garages in the downtown of any major city? They are ugly and useless. The cars just sit there all day. They just sit there, waiting for the owner to finish his work or his shopping or whatever. What a waste!

Public transit isn’t the only alternative we’re talking about here. New York City had developed a very interesting, complex set of pneumatic tubes throughout the downtown area in the early 1920’s. These tubes moved small items through large buildings fairly fast and efficiently. Then General Motors got some of their cronies elected to city council and they voted to replace the pneumatic tubes with stinking, clumsy, big GM trucks. This was not a magical strategy developed by the “free market”. It was sabotage. [added July 2004] The pneumatic tubes didn’t work perfectly, but neither did the trucks. The question is, if you invested 40 more years of development and refinements into the pneumatic tube system, what would you have?

You can spend so little on public transit that you make it necessary for anybody who can afford it to buy their own cars. The result, in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, is that only the poor and destitute use public transit. Nobody listens to the complaints of the poor, so public transit is often poorly maintained and unsafe. All the money goes into highways instead, and cops to patrol the highways, and signs, and lights, and parking lots. When all those people in their own cars clog up the streets, you just keep adding new highways to accommodate them. And when those highways get clogged up, you start demolishing neighborhoods and dividing communities with great big ugly freeways. And when they get hopelessly clogged, like the 401 is now, every day, from Mississauga to the Allen Expressway, you suddenly realize that you have a serious problem with no solution. That, in fact, is what they now realize in Toronto, Canada’s fastest growing city. They can’t build any more freeways—it’s too expensive and people are too smart: they won’t let you just plow their neighborhoods under anymore. But the 401 can’t handle all the traffic coming into the city. So what do you do? If you’re Toronto, basically, nothing. People waste hours and hours every day sitting in their cars staring at the trunk of the car ahead of them. It is not unusual for a citizen of the metropolitan Toronto area to spend four hours of his day, every day, sitting uselessly in his car. Chances are also pretty good nowadays that he’s driving a four-wheel-drive sport utility, sold to him on the illusion that it would provide him with a liberating sense of adventure and freedom.

What many people don’t realize is that the government pays a huge subsidy to the automotive industry by providing us with endless highways, traffic lights, streetlights, bridges, freeways, police, and parking spaces. And don’t forget the cost of hospital emergency wards which spend a lot of time treating victims of accidents. The subsidy is way, way more than it would have cost if the government had simply developed public transit more effectively, and required car-makers to make their own roads and bridges. Hardly anyone would own cars today if that had happened. Think about that, the next time you start rhapsodizing about how great the “free market” is. Do you love your car? Well, you can love your car because every taxpayer in the province is chipping in to make highways for you to drive on.

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The Prison Franchise

Mike Harris wants to close down Ontario’s prisons. They are expensive and inefficient.

Whenever someone from a conservative political party says “expensive and inefficient” you know he has friends waiting to make a lot of money with a backroom deal– and he is about to announce a new privatization scheme. Sure enough, Harris wants to privatize Ontario’s prisons. He wants to pay private companies to incarcerate Ontario’s criminals.

Don’t we all believe that private companies are more efficient and effective than government? There’s something to the idea. Most private companies exist in a competitive environment. If they are inefficient or lazy or slow, they get squashed by those powerful rivals. In theory, this means that most private companies are smarter, quicker, and more responsive to changes in the marketplace than governments are.

Unless you happen to be Microsoft.

This is the simple myth that America lives by. It’s partly true. It’s also partly untrue. The U.S. has a private health care system in which hospitals, insurance companies, and doctors all compete for your business. Canada has a government-run monopoly on health services. Which system is more competitive, efficient, and cheap? Surprise! The Canadian system is at least three times more efficient than the U.S. system. Why? Because there are some advantages to a government-run monopoly. First of all, the government is able to control costs by negotiating the rates for medical procedures with the doctors. In the U.S., the market is supposed to keep doctors prices low. Right. Like you’re going to go shop around for a cancer treatment and see if you can get a discount from that “big box” medical centre out near the highway. Yes.

Secondly, there is much less duplication of services. Some U.S. cities have five or more Magnetic Image Resonance machines, each of which cost millions, and each of which sits idle most of the time.

Thirdly, the Canadian system is actually run quite well, thank you, by people who know their jobs.

Fourthly, the Canadian system doesn’t have to skim off a certain percentage of profits for greedy corporations.

Anyway, back to the prisons…

Privatizing prisons is quite popular in the U.S. there are thousands of them, run by several companies. Unfortunately, they haven’t reduced costs quite as much as expected. In fact, some studies show that they haven’t reduced costs at all. And when you think about it, why would they? A privately run prison must provide all of the same functions that a state run prison provides, plus, it must provide a profit for the owners. Now there is only one way for the owners to create that profit: and that is to run the prison more cheaply than the state does. That means less staff, less training, less programs for the incarcerated, and less medical care. Less food. Cheaper food. Smaller cells. More over-crowding. Less control.

In fact, this is what is happening to the publicly owned prisons as well. State after state is going to court to try to reclaim control of their prisons. Wait a minute… reclaim control? That’s right. They no longer control their own prisons. Why not? Because about 20 years ago, lawyers for the inmates began filing lawsuits against various state governments alleging that the prisons were so badly run, so decrepit and vermin-infested and dominated by sadistic long-term convicts that sentencing any person to spend time in them constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”. The courts investigated and agreed and seized control of the prisons. Many states still did nothing about the horrendous conditions.

Now, not only do state governments want to treat criminals like animals, they want to contract out the service of treating criminals like animals.

Unless you really believe that these corporations that own these prisons are seriously interested in rehabilitation and whatever.

The truth is this. Governments find it unpopular to treat prisoners too, too badly. Sooner or later, some muckraking journalist comes along and uncovers the dirt and then those liberals will demand reform. Or, as we have seen, the courts will step in and order expensive improvements. Some idiots actually think that prisons should have some rehabilitation programs. Some real idiots actually think that prisoners should be treated with some kind of dignity and respect, even though they have committed awful crimes.

You have to remember that when rich people commit crimes, they don’t go to prison. So when rich people privatize prisons, they know very well that no matter what, they themselves are never going to end up in one of those prisons.

So the goal of privatization is to append a flattering objective to a contemptible practice.

Now, wait a minute. If a private citizen or company locks me up in a room and threatens me and forces me to eat disgusting food and prevents from leaving…. isn’t that kidnapping? You bet. So why is not kidnapping when a private company does the same thing, even if it’s with permission from the state? How can the legal government assign rights that are normally only given to duly-constituted civil authorities to private individuals employed by a for-profit corporation?

Would it be legal for a state government to allow the mother of a murder victim to decide on and execute the punishment of the offender? It certainly would not be. But then again, never over-estimate the intelligence or ethics of twelve years of Republican-appointed judges. The Republicans have shown, over and over again, that they are willing to appoint relatively unqualified people to the position of judge if they share the “correct” ideology. Clarence Thomas, a manifestly undistinguished jurist, immediately comes to mind. And these judges, who were appointed too late to have an influence on the earlier court-ordered prison reforms, have been trying to undue their effects piece by piece. And they have ruled it is legal for a private company to hold people prisoner on behalf of the state.

I’m lazy so I don’t want to write a hundred pages about why this is a stupid idea. It just is. Sorry. I’d love to spend a week in the library so I can refer to you specific documents that show what a stupid, sorry mess the U.S. prison system is, but I have a job, so I can’t. But there’s one thing readily apparent to everyone: the Americans love to punish criminals. They love to see them suffer. They love capital punishment. They love long, long prison terms. For everyone who commits serious crimes, except the rich.

The Americans are on this vindictive schtick and it’s pure barbarism. It makes me wonder if you can even call the U.S. a civilized society. It certainly calls into question the intelligence of the average American voter. For about 30 years now, the U.S. has been throwing scores of people into prison and lengthening prison terms all in the name of being “tough on crime”. I would like just one of these people to give me an objective measure that will show us if and when this program is succeeding. When does the crime rate go down? When can you show me that it is having some positive effect? Can you show me that the benefits outweigh the costs? When will we finally see the slightest indication that we are winning the war on drugs?

They can’t and won’t because they are wrong. Longer, tougher prison sentences do not reduce crime. If they did, the U.S. would be the most crime-free nation on earth, and Canada and Europe would be infested with criminals. Instead, it is quite the opposite.

Privatizing prisons is a very bad idea. Mike Harris thinks it will save money and provide more “efficient” services to Canada’s justice system. I think it will result in scandals and abuses as these private companies try to cut costs to make bigger profits. Harris thinks, so, who cares? They’re criminals. They don’t deserve to be treated with respect or dignity.

The net result will be an increase in man’s inhumanity to man.

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This Crazy Millenium

This Crazy Millennium

Well, I’m sick of the Millennium, so I’m just going to talk about the century for a moment instead. No other century is remotely comparable to the 20th in terms of significant changes to society and technology and religion.

Now that we are at the beginning of the last year of this century, it is an appropriate time to consider what the really significant events were of the past 100 years. It’s not that hard. Here they are, in chronological order.

  • The Development of Cinema
  • Industrialization
  • The 1917 Communist Revolution
  • The Automobile
  • World War I
  • Radio
  • Flight
  • The Depression
  • Government Intervention in the Economy following the Depression
  • World War II
  • The Development of Atomic Weapons
  • The Birth Control Pill
  • Television
  • Feminism
  • Rock’n’Roll Music
  • Personal Computers
  • The Internet
  • Biochemistry and Genetic Engineering

Now, what was the most significant development of the past 100 years? I mean, in terms of sheer, brute influence on all of our lives. Surprise—none of the above. We hardly notice the most significant development because we don’t notice the forest for the trees: urbanization.

What happened was this: with the invention and development of automobiles and other technologies, people were able to move to cities in massive numbers. In 1900, we were an overwhelmingly agricultural, small-town society. In 2000, we are overwhelmingly urbanized.

How significant is that? All of the other important developments of this century were radically shaped and influenced by the simple fact that most of us began to live in cities instead of small towns and villages. Anyone who has lived in a small town or village understands this immediately. The city is huge. It is anonymous. It is economically powerful. It is commercial. It is rich. It is filled with competing interests. It is sophisticated, fast-moving, complex. It is concentrated, organized, chaotic. It is full of people, cars, buses, buildings, devices, police, stadiums, hospitals, universities. It is, in the minds of many people, utterly empty and devoid of human values.

Christians like to point to rock’n’roll or the movies or literature or comic books or the Internet or whatever as being responsible for the “decline” of public morals in this century. First of all, there never was a public morality like they imagine it. Secondly, it was never those things anyway. All of those things were only possible because of urbanization, and all of them were given content and meaning by the insurmountable fact that we all lived in cities and had developed an urban mentality.

What is an urban mentality? It is the embrace of mass culture and homogenization. In a small town, where everybody knows you, culture and religion and social patterns develop indigenously, influenced by local hierarchies and institutions, and closely monitored by everyone. We all know how difficult it is to go against the grain of a small community. We are held accountable for our behavior by our neighbors and friends and churches. We know the teacher. We know the grocer. We know the local mechanic. We have our own ideas about how to do things. We know what works here.

In a large city, we are anonymous and autonomous. We could go to church or go to another church or not go at all. We don’t even know our neighbors, let alone the grocer or the mechanic. We drive across town to visit our friends.

So how do we learn about our culture? What begins to shape the way we think about things? Mass media. Radio, television, the movies. This is why we have Hollywood and the NBA and Michael Jordan and Stephen Spielberg, and it’s why we had Elvis, and the pill, and the internet, and it’s why we’re going to have genetic engineering.

As much as we would like to flatter ourselves and declare that our ideas are shaped by the influence of other people’s ideas, the truth is that our ideas are also powerfully shaped by our immediate environment and our perceived needs.

The city has produced our culture. Our culture is hysterical. We’re like those little ants running around in circles around the ant hill that someone has just crushed with his big toe. We’re out of our minds, but we have no idea of where else to go.