This one's for Matt: a Merry Very Crispness

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my friend Matt Paust, the Hemingway of the Henhouse (his name inspired by this rare photo of Ernest H. at the DayGlo Hotel in Ketchup, Idaho: I don't know how he kept all those cats away).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nah. . . it must be a fake.

This has to be the video of the week. Though it's a little hard to see, after falling down like bowling pins, all the cows immediately get up again, almost in unison. Herd animals, I guess. My question is: does the truck hit somebody at .12? SOMETHING gets in the way of the truck which swerves to avoid it, but is it a person? For a minute I thought it was a stray cow.

Syrup suckers

$18M Quebec maple syrup heist leads to arrests

5 more suspects sought by investigators

CBC News

 

Police are looking for five other people in connection to last summer's heist. (CBC)

 

Maple syrup seized in Quebec theft probe to be released

Quebec police conduct 2nd maple syrup raid

Maple syrup seized in N.B. may have been stolen in Quebec

Police search warehouse for missing maple syrup

Maple syrup worth up to $30M stolen in Quebec

An investigation into a massive maple syrup theft from a Quebec warehouse last summer has led to the arrest of three people, who are due to face charges in court today.

Between August 2011 and July 2012, thieves got away with 9,600 barrels of maple syrup worth approximately $18 million from a warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, about 95 kilometres southwest of Quebec City.

Richard Vallières, 34, of Loretteville and Avik Caron, 39, of Saint-Wenceslas, along with a third person arrested without a warrant face charges of theft, conspiracy, handling stolen goods and fraud.

 

 

Syrup Suckers (a seasonal meditation)

 

They have no holiday spirit

these men

(or at least we kind of hope they’re men

though

we're not sure about that Avik Caron character

what sort of name is Avik anyway, not a proper

Canadian name

but I’d be shocked if he was a she

for what sort of woman would suck up

 

so much forbidden fluid?)

and we don’t even know for sure

how they sucked it up, did they use a wet-dry vac

an underground pipeline

or did they just plain

cart it away
 

 

One o’ dese guys is from Saint-Wenceslas

and truly, I resent the implications

of that name

at this festive time of year

 

The maple syrup heist has far-reaching ramifications,

as it looks like Santa’s pancake breakfasts

will be a little on the dry side

with only Aunt Jemima’s “no sugar added”

as a soulless substitute

 

 

Just imagine

After all the hard work of tappin’ them trees

Hangin’ up tin buckets, you know the ones

Making them give up their precious sap

Drip by drip by drip

Then boiling it for about a million hours

Then putting it up in dem-dar vats

(or whatever they are, barrels I think)

then just having them cart it off like that

as if it was nothing

 

Maple syrup is a symbol of our home and native land

(one little, two little, three Canadians)

so we can't just let it all go like that

about a billion barrels

smuggled into Thailand or something

I mean that really bad part

We owe the world our syrup

We are a misunderstood nation

and who was it who said Canadians

are just a bunch of sapsuckers

(or was it syrup suckers?)

It was one-o-dem

wiseacre American ignorami

who know nothing about such matters

and never mind that stuff they make in Vermont
 

 

but it looks like that stuff they make in Vermont

is going to be just about it for the world supply

Quebec’s bitter loss is Vermont’s sweet syrupy gain

until those guys from Wenceslas strike again

tipping the golden barrels of the world

into their filthy coffers

Fie on them, fie

It’s the most wonderful time of the year

and it’s no time to be sucking up all our syrup

leaving us parched pancakes and dessicated waffles

and none-o-dem-dar cookies shaped like a leaf, you know,

them

 

 

what’s got that maple stuff inside.

Dead leaves in your pockets. . .

 
 

 

When you're in the Little Land
You watch the wee folk play,
You see them through a game or two,
You come out old and gray.

 

When you're in the Little Land
They fill your hands with gold,
You think you stay for just a day,
You come out bent and old.

 

 

 

Dead leaves in your pockets

O my enchanted, have a care

Run, run from the little folk

Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets

And snowflakes in your hair

 

 

 

Lights shine in the Little Land
From diamonds on the wall,
But when you're back on the brown hill side
It's cold pebbles after all.

 

 

 

 

 

Music in the little land
Makes the heart rejoice.
It charms your ear so you can not hear
The sound of your true love’s voice

 

Dead leaves in your pockets

O my enchanted, have a care

Run, run from the little folk

Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets

And snowflakes in your hair

 

 

 

 

When you’re in the Little Land

You watch the wee folk play,

You see them through a game or two,

You come out old and gray.

 

Dead leaves in your pockets

O my enchanted, have a care

Run, run from the little folk

Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets

And snowflakes in your hair

  

 

 

 

Why did this leap into my head today, and where did it come from? Until this morning, damned if I knew. I remember my brother singing it in the '60s when he came home from university. Everyone was singing and playing the guitar and going to hootenannys, whatever they were, and most of us sucked our songs off record albums, often with wrong words and crazy chords.

 

It took me quite a while to find any semblance of this song, except for a very Irish version of it on YouTube. His didn't much resemble mine. It spoke of leprechauns, which gave me a clue as to what the song was about. But my version was one of those cobbled-together-from-memory things. I was only 9 or 10 years old and impressionable. I had NO IDEA what this song meant or even where it came from: I remember finding it weird and disturbing, which it still is.
 

 

 

So today, thanks to the good graces of YouTube, I more or less hunted it down, but it wasn't easy. This was originally written by Malvina Reynolds, an eccentric folk genius who wrote Little Boxes (on the hillside) and What Have they Done to the Rain? This was one of her more obscure numbers and sounds like it's based on folk poetry. One false lead took me to a poem called The Little Land by Robert Louis Stevenson (ph?), but it was one of those How Would you Like to Go Up in a Swing kind-of things, echoes of childhood, etc. Not threatening enough.

 

Somewhere I found a reference to the Limelighters, a folk group we listened to a lot back then. It featured Glen Yarbrough (borough? Who has time to check?), a tenor with a voice that would cut through barbed wire. I remember quite a few of their songs, but not this one.

 

 

So it was still pretty obscure when I finally tracked down the available fragments and pieced them together with my  bits of memory: hey, folk singers do that all the time. (I left out one line: someone's version said "Deadly in your pocket," which is completely nonsensical. 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.) But somewhere else, someone made a comment that actually made sense: Reynolds had a sense of social satire which could be quite biting (see Little Boxes). Perhaps the song was about another kind of "enchantment", not by leprechauns, faeries or other "little folk", but by the seductiveness of riches and fame.

 

It actually works. First you're just looking in from the outside, watching all these charming people at play, and it looks harmless enough, so you stay around for "a game or two". But then, bizarrely, you wake up and realize that decades have passed in a flash. The gold pouring through your hands eventually runs out and disappears. As in those alien encounters where people mysteriously lose time, the lurch ahead into old age is frightening: suddenly you're a has-been who never was.

 

 

The dead leaves in your pockets that I took so literally as a child could be the deadened browned scorched currency of false fame, crumbling away into nothing.  And I don't need to explain those snowflakes. Bright lights, white hair, cold stones. To enchant, literally, means to gain magical power over someone by chanting, usually in song. Soon the sound of enchantment becomes so strong that we can no longer make out the voice of the one we love.

 

It's a kind of evil reverse fairy-tale where the victim quickly shrivels under forces he or she can't comprehend. So much for cute little leprechauns, Lucky Charms and Kiss Me, I'm Irish.

 

 

 

Throw it all away, and listen

I don't have the technical language to describe what the composer is doing from 4:10 to the end, but I had to listen to it 3 or 4 times to believe it: I felt nothing but astonishment. What seems like a simple amen turns and turns again, then spirals upward in utter yearning, only to end by just touching an unknowable mystery.

The Hebrews called God "he who has no name". I hate words and wish I could dispense with them utterly. Music is the ONLY authentic language. Except for a very few geniuses, all of us spew ugliness and misunderstanding daily in the attempt at "communication". Throw it all away! Throw it away, and listen.

Let's forget the headlines: cute Xmas gifs!

 

 

 

 

 

This is kind of the condensed version of that Rudolph show we all watch(ed: I think it still comes on). I want to be a child again, except happy! There were some moments, there HAD to be. Maybe we imagined ourselves into being happy. Like every other kids' story, this one is about the underdog winning. I don't remember too many other underdogs around, so why was this so popular? And at the end of MY story, why didn't I win?

 

 

 

 

What happened to his red nose? Did that only happen at puberty?

 

 

 

Not too funny, but I have a weakness for flashing colored lights. They do something magical to my retinas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now c'mon, guys. . . admit this is cute!

 

We've saved the best 'til last: a holiday tradition. Don't think too hard about what Santa is doing.

Asshole of the week (if not the century)

Mike Huckabee: Newtown Shooting No Surprise, We've 'Systematically Removed God' From Schools
       

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing & Paige Lavender Posted: 12/14/2012 

Former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee addresses the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., on Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) weighed in on the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. on Friday, saying the crime was no surprise because we have "systematically removed God" from public schools.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

This line of reasoning isn't new for Huckabee.

Speaking about a mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. over the summer, the former GOP presidential candidate claimed that such violent episodes were a function of a nation suffering from the removal of religion from the public sphere.

"We don't have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem," Huckabee said on Fox News. "And since we've ordered God out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations, you know we really shouldn't act so surprised ... when all hell breaks loose."

Adam Lanza, 20, is the suspect in a school shooting that left 27 dead Friday, including 20 children. Lanza is reportedly the son of a teacher at the school where the shootings occurred.

Bad enough that a bunch of assholes on "social media" are boasting that THEY shot all those little children. Bad enough that misinformation is spreading like wildfire through "tweets" and Facebook blatherings. This corruption of the truth is so extreme, Adam Lanza's brother was initially accused of the crime BY THE MEDIA, broadcast as fact by reporters who didn't even question the veracity of what they had just said. After all, it was on Twitter, so it must be true!

But we also must listen to these brainless assholes "weigh in" on the tragedy. Substitute "guns" for "God", and you'll get an idea of his real mentality. If he has one.

I'd pray, but I gave up on that long ago.
 

Connecticut school shootings: the moral void

 

Christie Blatchford, a tough and venerable print reporter who exposes truth far more powerfully than I ever could, had some choice things to say about the horrors that happened this morning in Newtown. Some of it touched on social media and the bizarre, faceless way we communicate in this stranger-than-strange time:

The wisest story I’ve ever read about a mass school shooting is a work of fiction – no accident, I suspect, for it takes distance to see past the horror of such things, not to mention get around the makeshift shrines and the spoken and printed equivalents of the teddy bears which adorn them.

Social media and Twitter, it is certain, will make that latter task ever more difficult.

As mainstream newsrooms around the world geared up the sombre music and reporters lowered voices and dumbed down their language (yes, it is hard to imagine) in order to interview eight-year-olds, so did cyberspace fill up with omgs, fake sites, expressions of sorrow, rumours and ghastly bleatings.

To quote a young man named Ryan Lanza, who may be someone with the bad luck to have the same name as the Ryan Lanza who was first wrongly identified as the latest shooter or who may be the actual brother of gunman Adam Lanza, who complained on Facebook Friday, “So aperently I’m getting spammed bc someone with the same name as me killed some ppl..wtf?”

Either way, this is what passes for social commentary in 2012 — illiterate, petulant, self-referential sludge.

I think this is what I was trying to get at - not nearly as effectively - in my tirade against the cult of narcissism that drives texts, tweets and other bleeding chunks of damaged language. It astounds me that up until the past few months, this cacophany of chirping and blathering has been seen as nothing but positive: isn't it marvelous we can connect like this,  that everyone's the same, all of us equal in the great wide sea of cyberspace, so that we can freely propagate lies, scams, gooey badly-spelled sentiment (soon to become standardized, no doubt, in the form of "Twitter English") and other verbal effluvia, all in the name of instant communication!

A few years after the initial bird-brained euphoria, the rotten underside of this whole ill-planned enterprise is beginning to stink big-time. The fact that it has fewer rules governing it than the Wild West is only just now beginning to make itself felt in bullying and cyberscams and other forms of human hatefulness. Old people are being bled dry and have nothing left to live on, teenagers are killing themselves due to relentless organized persecution (after which we get all sentimental and fix things by designing a tshirt). Even the shocking suicide of that poor blameless nurse after the Duchess prank may have been driven by a barrage of cyberabuse.

Blatchford speaks of a novel called We Need to Talk About Kevin, in which a budding Adam Lanza-type begins to emit those eerie waves of incipient violence that everyone is so good at ignoring.  This bit of dialogue is both hair-raising and wrenchingly accurate:

The dad once asked Kevin, “Do any of the students at your school ever seem unstable? Does anyone ever talk about guns, or play violent games or like violent movies? Do you think something like this could happen at your school? Are there at least counselors there?”

“All the kids at my school are unstable, Dad,” the son replied. “They play nothing but violent computer games and watch nothing but violent movies. You only go to a counselor to get out of class, and everything you tell her is a crock."

Blatchford touches on the new industry of trauma therapy that always leaves me feeling as if something had been stuffed down my gullet:

I was in Littleton, Colo., 13 years ago. What was almost as horrifying as the carnage — 14 students and a teacher dead, the killers having shot themselves — was the theatre that followed. Students were able to grieve only in public, preferably for the cameras; professionals descended in swarms to help the town mourn; people urged each other to hug their children, as though without the reminder, no one would have thought of it.

Tonight I listened to countless reporters say things like "experts claim that -" and "let's talk to an expert on this subject", after which a psychologist would come on camera and spout truisms that any grandmother would know. Not one person had the guts to say, "My God, I don't know! I don't know what to do about  any of this. I feel like there's nowhere left on earth that's safe." Not one of them admitted that there is NO WAY to "safely" let your children know about all this hideous carnage in a way that will spare their feelings and leave them emotionally unscarred.

Don't lie to them, we were told, but don't say too much.  Don't disclose, but don't withhold either, and make sure you give them a big hug (because otherwise, we might forget).
 
But even that convoluted mobius of non-advice wan't the worst.  Every single "expert" I heard tonight told us that we should reassure our children that it "won't happen to them".  Oh? Do we know that for sure? Did Newtown know that for sure when it woke up this morning? If a place that looks like a Norman Rockwell painting could bury twenty small children just a few days before Christmas, we should not be so sure it "won't happen" in our town, that it won't start to happen in escalating waves as more and more people go crazy from alienation and meaninglessness and fall into the moral void that breeds pure evil.

Connecticut school shootings: not again, not again

 

 

First there was that groan, the sound that has become almost involuntary of late:  oh, no. Not again. That sense of headshaking disbelief and dismay, and horror. Another mass shooting, this time in an elementary school, and right before Christmas! And then the words echoing in my ears, something my 7-year-old granddaughter had said to me earlier in the week: “My school was in lockdown yesterday.”

 

WHAT?

It turns out that “lockdown” in elementary schools has become as routine as fire drill. This is a word I never heard in my childhood, or in my children’s. In fact, I never even heard it 20 years ago. So what in hell is going on here?

I could go on and on – I have a tendency to go on and on when I am confused, frightened and angry, whipping up my adrenaline against the awful sinking depression and despair that is surely to follow. I could go on and on about gun culture, about how Americans seem to think that the solution to guns is “more guns”. It has been a contentious point between Canadians and Americans for as long as I can remember, and has now become inflamed as never before.
 

 

Here is my point. If you have a deadly weapon in your hands, you don’t have to think. All you have to do is make your way to a promising venue, a mall, a movie theatre or an elementary school, and squeeze the trigger. Pop, pop, pop, the sound registering as “firecrackers” to people who are used to hearing the phony “BLAAMMM” of TV shows and movies so that they don’t even know enough to respond.

As a matter of fact, almost everyone involved in these horrors says something like, “I thought I was in a movie”. Oh, how distanced we have all become from what is real.

My feelings are like a dark kaleidoscope, all broken up and shifting and moving. Pieces jump out at me, jagged as glass, and I don’t want to look at them.

I like to watch a very lightweight entertainment/news program called Inside Edition, the kind of show that usually has a funny animal video at the end (though, come to think of it, almost every TV station in the world showed the Ikea Monkey the other day). A cop or some other security guy – who pays attention to these things? – was demonstrating to the host what to do “when the guy opens fire” (not if!). This was in a mall, and the security person said, “The last thing you should do is run.” This reminded me of nothing so much as the instructions for dealing with an enraged bear or a cougar or some other predatory animal.

 

No, if you run you’re a moving target – prey. You’re supposed to crouch down, take cover - preferably behind one of those big metal garbage cans with the bars on it. Bulletproof, unless (he said) a bullet accidentally ricochets off the wall and gets you in the back of the head.

I almost can’t write about the kids right now, but I will, a little bit at least, because writing is the only way I can even begin to get my mind around it. One thing I notice about mass shootings that affect children:  right away the grief counsellors pounce on them and insist they talk it all out, tell them everything that happened to them, every horrific detail, preferably over and over again. Lately some of these counsellors have come under fire (sorry) for squeezing memories out of kids who might be “processing” them a different way, who might not be ready to say anything, or (amazingly!) might prefer to talk to their Mum or Dad or their grandparents.

There is a grief industry now. I don’t remember anything like that when I grew up because there was no need.  I also don’t remember one single shooting in a school, not even of one child. Nor do I remember any of this happening with my own children.

 

The game has changed, obviously, dramatically, irrevocably. How are we to raise a generation of kids who are anxiety-free? All right, no one is anxiety-free, but how are we supposed to take them to the mall – or the movies – or even drop them off at school without a horrible fear of chaos and screams and blood on the floor?

I could say it’s the boom in technology, and I think it’s a factor. I realize that this is a highly unpopular, even taboo and stigmatized thing to think or say, but I will say it.  No one has a conversation any more: they text, phone, “tweet” or go on Facebook, an ironic name for something with no face.  Sociologically, we just haven’t had time to catch up with this explosion, this game-changer that everyone assumes is an unalloyed good.

 Who questions technology, for God’s sake? You’ll sound like an old fuddy-duddy, a party pooper, a Luddite. You’ll sound like me.
 

 

We can’t see each other’s facial expressions any more (and Skype doesn’t count because, in my opinion, it’s theatre). It’s all “lol” and “wtf” and poorly spelled messages that don’t really mean much of anything.

I recently asked my husband in exasperation, “What do these people talk about on their Smart Phones all day?”

He looked at me. “Nothing,” he said.

Tacking away with your thumbs like some self-obsessed crustacean does not make you more human, does not help you communicate anything of importance. It only feeds your vanity and narcissism and  helps you shut off your feelings so that nothing is quite real. So when the awful time comes, you’ll think you’re in a movie, playing the role of the hunter, or – even more tragically – the hunted.

 
(This is a sidebar. In catching up with the latest news developments, I came across an article that said it has become increasingly popular for women to text while - prepare yourself - giving birth. Next they'll be reporting on the quality and intensity of their orgasms, or perhaps the success or failure of their bowel movements. Or how about blowing your nose? As with photographing the Grand Canyon but never actually looking at it, texting ensures you will never really experience anything in your life.)

 

We can’t take it all back, turn back the clock, and I’m not saying we should, but someone HAS to respond to this escalating nightmare with something that actually makes a difference. Alienation and unaddressed rage have become a huge problem in contemporary culture, leading to widespread bullying and other forms of sadism. How easy is it to bully and threaten and mock and shame vulnerable children when you’re not even in the same room with them?

But unfortunately, to kill them, you have to be there.

Doesn’t anyone make any connections any more, or are they afraid they will express an opinion that’s unpopular?  Do these problems have no roots in personal alienation and the dizzying rate of social change, or is each shooter “just some nut with a gun”?

 

I think we need to go back to the very beginning and learn how to be human again. How to put down the devices and stop the madly clawing thumbs and look at each other, really look. And talk.

And figure out what’s wrong with everything now, and what’s right with it, and how to deal with things as they go faster and faster without our conscious awareness because we have all become so terrifyingly numb.

 

 

Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol, Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh.

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around.

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

 

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me.

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.