I’ve talked to young people these days who feel folks like Shakespeare and Beethoven are over-rated and that there are modern day equivalents who are easily the artistic equals of them

Well, apparently Stephen Spielberg has made a new sort of monster version of the classic 1950’s musical, West Side Story. And, apparently, it did not do as well as expected at the box office during its opening at theatres. And who really gives a shit? I’ve seen West Side Story on stage a number of times and I’ve seen the 1961 movie more than once. They’re both pretty perfect pieces of work. They are great works of art that have the capacity to move the soul and really make you think. So, why in the world would you “re-make” something like this – especially if you’re gonna mess around and take liberties with the original.

Now, I haven’t seen the new one and don’t know if I will being sort of snobby about this sort of thing. But I have seen a few trailers on the TV thingy and I’ve read quite a number of comments on the new production….and here’s what I think. I think it looks overdone and, in keeping with the way we do nearly everything these days, it looks so incredibly lavish and spectacular that it sort of just blows you out of your seat. But does it have the enormous intimacy of the original – because that’s what made you love it when you first saw it – it’s not loud and garish – it’s warm and intimate. Also, the new production is well over two hours in length – considerably longer than the original which leads me to believe they’ve added quite a bit. I saw an interview with Rita Moreno, who was, of course, in the original, and she’s in the new one, but she explained that they’ve built up her part – which seems a little weird to me.

And they have, as is usual in this day and age, heralded this new West Side Story as perhaps the best and the greatest musical ever made. Because a huge number of things which are called art and are released into the market in today’s world are called the greatest of all time. But the vast majority of these “art” works arc through the heavens like the proverbial comment and then, as quickly as they appeared, they are gone without much of a trace. It’s just the way of the world these days. Everything on the planet is mostly flash and pizazz and there’s a massive lack of substance. Or if there is substance, it is overwhelmed by the sheer flash and pizazz that comes with it. But I gotta tell ya, there’s a huge amount of stuff that’s called “art” and a lot of folks who call themselves “artists”, when I think that in actuality both of these constructs are very few and far between.

I have been a “writer” for most of my life. But I’ve never referred to myself as an artist or to what I’m creating as art. I have always felt that is for others to decide. I create what I create and the unwashed masses will determine if it is worthy to be called “art”. I am even pretty cautious about calling myself an “author”……I’m sort of just a writer….it’s what I do…I write. Anyway, not to get caught up in titles and stuff, and who’s calling who what, but I really do think that a lot of younger folks need to give their collective heads a shake. There has been at least some great stuff created in the past – in fact, there’s been a considerable amount of great stuff, even though mine may be the last generation to recognize it as such and to really understand what great stuff is…..I’ve talked to young people these days who feel folks like Shakespeare and Beethoven are over-rated and that there are modern day equivalents who are easily the artistic equals of them.

It’s interesting, you know – the 1950’s, and particularly the 60’s, were incredible watersheds of amazing original creativity in music, visual art, theatre, literature….pretty well everything artistic.  But, for some unknown reason, we seemed to understand that the artists of our generation were “standing on the shoulders of giants”…..so that while we appreciated our own artists and the art they were creating, we were also capable of understanding and appreciating the genius and brilliance of those who came before. I don’t see that as much today. I see young people with little or no understanding of what came before and why we are where we are in today’s world. At least that’s the impression I get when I have a discussion where Kanye West is compared to Ludwig Van……..so there!!!!!  

Smartness only works on our behalf if it is tempered by knowledge and the ability to understand that knowledge and keep it in proper context….

Smartness only works on our behalf if it is tempered by knowledge and the ability to understand that knowledge and keep it in proper context. That is largely not happening today. In today’s world, most discourse is based on ignorance. And that’s a really big problem.

You know, there’s been a bit of a rumble in our North American societies to provide young people with free tuition for post-secondary studies, and I must admit that I’m firmly on board with this….several European countries are already doing this and I’d be willing to bet it’s working out really well. In fact, I feel there’s a specific type of post-secondary education that everyone in society who is able should be required to attend. And I feel that’s about two years – or four semesters – of something that used to be called a “liberal arts education”. I think something like this would greatly improve the public discourse and the public wellness.

Now before all you folks start saying that higher education doesn’t necessarily make you smarter, you should know I agree with that. However, I also feel that it can help you become something we’ve taken to calling a “critical thinker” – and that is something that is vitally and crucially important in the year 2021 when there are copious amounts of serious crap floating around in the mainstream of our information flow. You’ve simply gotta be able to sort through the vast amount of information you’re presented with every minute of every day and you’ve gotta be able to make some type of reasoned response to it. I think most folks are seriously overmatched and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff they are faced with each day.

My liberal arts education would include stuff like politics, history, philosophy, government, sociology, how our societies work and what makes them go….that type of stuff. And I really think if most people had even a basic understanding of the how and the why of things, we’d be in for a smoother ride as we pass along through life’s journey. The way it’s going now, most folks are arguing about things without actually realizing how things work or why they work that way.

I’ll give you an example. I learned this in history class at the University of Guelph. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in the heart of the Great Depression. He was faced with massive economic dislocation, unemployment, poverty and just a really big mess – the world economy had basically collapsed. He realized very quickly that there was only one way to get things going again – he’d have to tax the beejeezus out of the rich folks in America and force them to get the economy going. So, he did. He really went after them and he used the money he got to fund something called the “New Deal”, which was basically a bunch of huge make-work projects and whole bunch of social programs that put the country back to work and helped lift people out of poverty.

The reason I’m writing about this is if I hadn’t read about this and gathered information about it from reliable historical sources, so that I was able to properly understand it, I might be one of the many, many people – mostly on the right of the political spectrum – who believe that you can’t “tax” the rich or wealthy corporations because it somehow hurts society. It cleary does not hurt society, and, in fact, can be responsible for huge good. And there are indeed rich folks who do some of the sharing the wealth stuff by carrying out noble and philanthropic work on behalf of humanity – I’m not suggesting they don’t. But rich folks clearly are not sharing enough of their wealth when we see the vast amount of opulence, decadence and wealth-driven grotesqueness that exists in our world – while so many others are living miserable, poverty-stricken lives and literally grasping and clutching with every small bit of their being just to survive and eke out one more day of life upon the planet.

No, there must be some semblance of equity in today’s world. Maybe at some point in the distant past, there was a need to acquire vast quantities of wealth for some reason, but those times have passed. At one time, we were a bunch of scattered societies operating sort of independently on the planet. And the world was a seriously dangerous and brutal place. It’s the same today, but doesn’t need to be. We have the capacity to fix things. We are smart. But that smartness only works on our behalf if it is tempered by knowledge and the ability to understand that knowledge and keep it in proper context. That is largely not happening today. In today’s world, most discourse is based on ignorance. And that’s a really big problem.

Anyway, if we’re going to try to make this a kinder, gentler place at some point in the future so we’re not all goin’ crazy or starvin’ to death, I’d be on board with that

Lots of folks my age feel things are going sort of wrong with the raising of children these days. They think young parents aren’t quick enough to impose some sense of discipline on young kids and that large numbers of young children are sort of spoiled beyond belief. Lots of parents these days get accused of “helicopter parenting” and it’s generally a frowned-upon thing and seen as a derogatory expression. There’s sort of a general feeling that younger generations are not mentally tough enough to cope with the way life works. I’ve been pretty guilty of this myself and have been hard on younger parents for not being somehow “tougher” on their kids.

But what if it’s the world or the system that’s wrong – and there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that’s the case. Deaths from drug overdose and suicide are extremely high, sort of out of control among young people, seeming to suggest that these young people really aren’t mentally tough enough to survive in the type of world we’ve built. But what if the type of world we’ve built is a really crappy place and maybe, just maybe, we need to build a kinder, gentler world for young people – or maybe those very young people will be the ones who will help turn this into a kinder, gentler world – and wouldn’t that be nice.

It’s really hard for me to understand the way things work, but it helps to understand the role the media has played in creating the mess we live in. I worked in the media for almost 40 years and feel I have a good understanding of how it works. When I first started in the newspaper business back in the 1970’s, I truly thought that the newspaper I worked at existed mostly to provide information to the people who read it. It was sort of a really hard lesson for me to learn that the news is most certainly “the shit around the ads”, because, although that was a common joke in newsrooms for years, it is also the sad truth. It is exactly the way the news is treated in most media markets. Sometimes it might even seem to be front and centre, but it’s likely not.

The media is not there primarily to provide you with information – it is there to sell you stuff. Mostly it’s there to keep you consuming as fast as you can and with every available dollar you have. Because if you don’t, the whole damned economy will come crashing down double quick – and you can be sure of that. It’s the type of system we’ve built and it keeps us rushing headlong through life chasing some type of golden carrot or golden mushroom or golden I don’t know what. And we are crashing through life so fast these days that almost no one can handle the pressure. There are line-ups to get in to seek mental health help….and as I mentioned earlier, drug overdose and suicide are wildly out of control.

And the type of economic system we’ve built is not just unsustainable because it’s driving us all crazy – except for the people who are starving to death on the planet….it’s also totally and absolutely unsustainable because there are way too many of us living in a place that has finite resources. I know it may seem that we have unlimited resources but that’s not at all true. Almost everything we rely and depend on in our world is a limited resource and if we keep sucking and gouging these resources out of Mother Earth at the rate we are, sooner or later stuff is going to start to run out. You can’t really have a “growth economy” on a planet like ours. It’s why the really rich guys are trying so desperately to get into space – there’s unlimited resources in them thar asteroids.

Anyway, if we’re going to try to make this a kinder, gentler place at some point in the future so we’re not all goin’ crazy or starvin’ to death, I’d be on board with that. I’d be pretty happy if there was some way to prevent people from living in either almost constant physical or emotional fear, or both, I’d vote for that. Problem is they don’t let us vote on stuff like that. They surely do not. The last thing our politicians and governments want to hear are the voices of ordinary people. Who, I think, would generally choose the kinder, gentler world. 

There is just so much skepticism and cynicism in our world that the situation may be hopeless. If the recent climate change conference offers any indication, it pretty much looks like we’re doomed

I find it wildly amusing and totally hilarious that our world leaders seem to feel they’re got room to negotiate this whole climate change deal with Mother Nature – or whoever in christ they think they’re negotiating with….there’s no room for negotiation in this whole situation. Our scientists are telling us – and have been telling us – what we have to do to avoid catastrophic outcomes in this whole scenario…..and our world leaders are “negotiating” terms. We have to do what we have to do – it’s been pretty clearly spelled out for us. But we’re not gonna do it anyway – we’re going to do what we feel like because if we do what we-re supposed to do, it might hurt the economy. Gawd-damned, we’re f###in morons…. And if you can’t see that, you’re part of the problem…

Of course, it’s like this godforsaken COVID thing. For some unbelievable reason, or reasons, there is a significant chunk of our population who think they can research and do science-type stuff better than the godforsaken actual scientists…..how has that happened? How is it that nobody believes anything anymore? We are an entire planet of skeptics and cynics and it’s no real wonder the way the media herds us along….heard on the radio the other day that only about 50-60% of parents will be getting their children vaccinated against COVID – the rest aren’t sure it’s safe. And maybe it’s not safe – but all indications are that the science is pretty solid on these vaccines. And I guess if everybody that’s getting the vaccine grows a third eye in the middle of their forehead or simply dies off, people will be seeing more clearly or we will have solved the over-population problem on the planet.

I mean, were we all total idiots back in the 1950’s when we lined up and got our polio shots? Did we just blindly follow along in those days and do what the government told us to do without so much as a question about the outcome. Apparently, we sort of did. For some reason, there seemed to be some modicum of trust in government and the decisions it made. That it was somehow acting in the best interests of the people it served. That, obviously, is not the case these days when there are a whole lot of people in our societies who don’t believe government – even when what it’s got to say makes sense – like in the case of the COVID vaccine. When there seems to be a reasonable and effective way to end the damned virus, but the level of distrust among the citizenry simply won’t let that happen.

Societal institutions that we used to implicitly trust simply can’t be trusted any longer. Governments have lied to us for so long and so consistently that it’s hard not to feel this way. When it is cliched to talk about how government and politicians never keep their word – never keep their promises – there is a really big problem. When agencies like our police don’t seem trustworthy or entirely honest in the way they conduct business, there’s a really big problem. When it seems our food companies are out to poison us, most manufacturers want your money but don’t give a shit about quality or customer service, there are more problems. When folks like our food scientists can’t agree from year to year whether butter’s okay to eat or not, it’s hard to blame ordinary people for not knowing what to believe.

And, of course, in the media, you’ve got to be pretty well versed in stuff to fully understand what’s actual news and what’s mostly speculation and analysis because it’s all sort of blurred together. And this is happening at the same time as critical thinking skills are crashing because people’s brains are atrophying because they don’t have to use them any more – they just “google” everything and have lost the ability to actually think for themselves. 

Anyway, don’t mean to always be a doomsday guy, but it’s tough not to be. At a time when we should be pulling together and hard choices need to be made, we’ve sort of lost faith in everything and we are deeply divided and polarized – not a great recipe for success considering the problems we’re facing. I really have no idea how to sort this out at this point – it seems beyond sorting out. There is just so much skepticism and cynicism in our world that the situation may be hopeless. If the recent climate change conference offers any indication, it pretty much looks like we’re doomed.

It was humiliating and embarrassing and a whole bunch of other negative stuff, but, again, people said it “built character”

You know, my grandson is working at McDonalds these days. And he sought the job out and got it by himself. And I guess I think it’s good that he’s shown that type of initiative and decided to officially enter the human race. He’s only 15 so I feel he’s a little young to get too involved and should make sure school stays the priority with him. Remember my Dad telling me when I was a young guy that it was his job to work to earn money to support the family and it was my job to go to school and do well – there’d be lots of time for work when I finished school. Now my Dad was no namby-pamby….and he wanted me to work in the summers, but other than that, he wanted me to concentrate on school.

Now, I was lucky when I was a young guy because I got to be okay at playing the bass guitar and as long as I had a band of some sort going, I had money and didn’t really need to “work” for a living. But there were certainly gaps in the bands, and then I would have to get a real job if I wanted to have any type of social life and just simply have some control over the way things were going. And it seemed I had a whole bunch of seriously rotten jobs whenever I did enter the work force…I mean, I shovelled various kinds of shit, dug ditches, poured cement, carried huge whacks of supplies around a bunch of different construction sites, painted window frames for a couple of months straight, painted barns, cleaned crap-plugged toilets, mopped floors and did a quite a few other really nasty things when I was growing up….

Back in those olden days, there was a real and serious belief that doing this sort of work built something that everyone called character. And I have told people that if this is true, then I have accumulated huge, huge amounts of character over the years. And I think that by building character folks sort of meant that you were developing a certain type of mental toughness that prepared you for actual life – which, of course, was filled with all sorts of unpleasant situations where you would need at least a modicum of mental toughness. I should say at this point in this piece of writing that this totally and absolutely failed with me. I have dealt with a variety of mental health issues in my life mostly stemming from the fact I’m way too sensitive to just about everything that goes on around me. And that can make for a difficult life’s journey for sure.

But, back to my 15-year-old grandson and his job at McDonalds. It got me wondering if kids today – teenage kids – ever do any really back-breaking, gut-wrenching, manual, menial labour….or do they all work at fast food restaurants and big box stories and places like that. I don’t know – does running a French fry machine or flipping burgers build character? Does it build that same type of mental toughness? I think maybe it does. I know for a fact that I’d need to be mentally tough to wear a hair net and run a fry machine for any length of time. My grandson already knows he doesn’t want to make a career out of flipping burgers and I suppose that’s forward progress.

And I don’t know if confronting young people with a constant array of tasks intended to “build character” is a good thing or not. Just like when I was a kid, I wasn’t very athletic. As a result, I usually got picked last for most sports teams – or I didn’t get picked at all because nobody wanted me on their team. It was humiliating and embarrassing and a whole bunch of other negative stuff, but, again, people said it “built character”…and in some people, I suppose it might. But in other people, like me, it can really work to crush the spirit out of you and make you feel like life’s biggest loser. And that’s not a positive thing at any point.

Anyway, I have survived almost to the age of seventy, so maybe all the crap I did as a young guy, and not getting picked for teams, did actually somehow make me mentally tougher…don’t really know. But I do know we’d have way less mental illness and addiction and other bad stuff if only the world was a kinder, gentler place that cherished all life for its very preciousness……

At one time, away back when, there were just gigs all over the place…

At one time, away back when, there were just gigs all over the place….there were bars featuring live entertainment on almost every street corner – there were dances everywhere all the time….there were weddings and anniversary parties….

You know, I’ve got a new band together these days, and I’m having a heck of a good time with it. For most of the past 25 years, I’ve played in blues bands – and some pretty good ones at that. And it’s been great for sure. I’ve had some of the best musical experiences of my life playing the blues and I’ve had the chance to do stuff I never thought I would…like go to Memphis to play at Jerry Lee Lewis’ club on Beale Street. That was pretty heady stuff for a small town guy who started his career in the basement of the Queen’s Hotel in Hanover way back in the mists of time. No, I was really, really lucky to be in the blues bands I was part of over the last quarter century.

So the new band is not a blues band….it is a Sixties tribute band and we are currently doing all tunes from that decade – even though that may not always be the case. In fact, band is called, Spirit of the Sixties, and not really just because of the music we do, but also sort of for the vibe we hope to create. And, so, with this band I am sort of going back to my roots, despite the fact that I’ve always told people I learned to play the guitar by mostly jamming the blues in the old days, it is also true that we were smashing out rock ‘n’ roll hits – songs that are now considered classic rock – almost as soon as we’d figured out which end of our instrument was up.

Except for a very brief period after high school, I’ve never been a professional musician. I sort of realized pretty early on – like by the time I was early twenties – that I just didn’t have the stuff to make a career out of it. I’m not nearly a savvy enough musician, just don’t have enough music talent or smarts or whatever to ever play with the big boys. And by big boys I mean the folks in the business, and I’ve met lots of them, who were just born to make music. I’m pretty sure at this point that I’m here to write, and write fairly seriously, while just making music to have some fun – which I have done….

And the business has changed enormously even from my perspective as a part-timer. At one time, away back when, there were just gigs all over the place….there were bars featuring live entertainment on almost every street corner – there were dances everywhere all the time….there were weddings and anniversary parties….there were just a whole lot of places to play. I had a buddy back 40-45 years ago and he’d line up a bunch of band gigs – mostly dances and weddings and that kind of thing, then put together a band, learn a bunch of appropriate songs, and, just like that, you were sort of on tour. It was a lot of work because you had to learn a whole lot of songs in fairly short order. But it was a way to pick up some cash in the old days.

And even when there are gigs these days, they seldom pay what they should and I really am not sure how that happened. You could make sort of “living” money back in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s by working the bars if you were ambitious. Surely can’t do that today when playing in a bar is usually pretty crappy money – unless maybe you can crack the casino circuit….most places that used to be really great venues are gone in this day and age. High school dances – or concerts – were pretty fabulous things back when I was in school. Most of the biggest rock bands in Canada came through my high school and local bands had chances as well – one of my garage bands played the prom at Fergus High School back in the day. I think our kids are missing out not having these opportunities to see really great entertainment of a really high calibre. Plus they’re missing one of the great sociological happenings from when I was a young guy….

Anyway, having a lot of fun in the new band….really getting a chance to rock ‘n’ roll and getting pushed to my limit to learn a whole lot of new material – might be good for the old brain cells to keep them somewhat active….I think that’s what they say….whoever “they” are….. 

Rich folks have forgotten that when inequity gets really bad…

Rich folks have forgotten that when inequity gets really bad, and more and more of society are arbitrarily disadvantaged, financially and otherwise, it is only a matter of time before the poor people rise up and cut off the rich people’s heads

So, there seems to be a worker shortage afflicting our societies here in North America. There are help wanted signs out all over the place and some folks are saying that people just don’t want to work anymore. What I think’s happening here is that the working poor – that’s most of the jobs that can’t be filled – have discovered that if they’re gonna be poor anyway, what’s the point in working. You have to remember that if you’re on social assistance, you’re poor, but you’ve usually got some type of government benefits and things really aren’t a whole lot worse than if you’re out there slogging away for minimum wage or something slightly above.

Truth of the matter is that I could write, ad nauseum, about pretty much the same thing every week – and maybe should until some of you people actually understand what’s going on here….there is massive inequity in our societies….there are a bunch of people in our societies who are doing extremely well…there are a bunch more people who are just doing well – and then there’s the whole rest of the population who are really and truly struggling to eke out a living in the capitalist system – and are not doing very well at it.

Most of us, and likely most of the people who might read this, live in a type of economic bubble. I live a comfortable life, as do most of the people who surround me in life….so if I’m not careful, I can easily forget about the legions of people who are not in my social strata – as the sociologists tend to say. And most of us need reminding on a fairly regular basis that we live pretty privileged lives in our world, but most people do not. Please remember that capitalism is sort of like a giant pyramid scheme…and for centuries and centuries wealth has been flowing toward the top. It’s the natural way of things…water always flows down and money always flows up. That’s why the whole idea of “trickle down economics” was a wildly stupid and insane way to try to run our economy. In fact, it should be fairly obvious that it was a plot deliberately hatched by those wealthy criminals who somehow control our societies. And we just lined up and voted for it like the obedient sheeple we are.

And, of course, the biggest mystery about all of this is that it is the middle classes that have supported the system that has bankrupted them to the benefit of the really rich. We have voted in successive governments, both right and left, that have ridiculously skewed our tax systems to the point where the really rich are getting pretty much a free ride, the poor pay very little, and the so-called middle class is holding up the whole system. It’s totally unsustainable. Rich folks have forgotten that when inequity gets really bad, and more and more of society are arbitrarily disadvantaged, financially and otherwise, it is only a matter of time before the poor people rise up and cut off the rich people’s heads. That’s also the way of the world. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is because the rich people have let us take cruises and buy golf memberships and eat lobster just enough to convince enough of us that our lives are not entirely hopeless….oh, forgot lotteries. George Orwell would be quite pleased to know we’ve given our poor and middle class folks lotteries, along with that faint hope for success.

I sort of feel an obligation to write about this every week…..until more people get it. The reason I feel this obligation is because I seem to have been born with a larger-than-usual social conscience. I’m not worried about myself when I write these diatribes – indeed, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about how bad we feel about the world we are leaving to our children and grandchildren and future generations beyond – or even Keith Richards for that matter.

We need to somehow fix things, people. The old adage that the world is shrinking is so totally true these days. We are constantly in each other’s faces and in each other’s business, meaning it’s more important than ever that we start working together to create a better, safer and more secure planet for all to live on. And that’s only going to happen if or when we decide to make a real effort to share the resources of our world with everyone on it. And learn to respect all life. 

Anyway, I don’t really even know how to argue the point that unions or worker collectives are good for working people. It’s sort of the ultimate no-brainer

Let’s talk unions this week…..let me try to understand how the very mention of the word union seems to leave a foul taste in most people’s mouths these days. Let me see…unions have given us the 40-hour, five-day work week, decent and living wages for the workers who belong to them, all sorts of health and safety legislation and the list sort of goes one and on…pretty well every advance made by working people in the last century was accomplished because workers organized, banded together and forced employers to treat them fairly and with some modicum of respect….Even today, where I live, workers like police, nurses, teachers, fire fighters (all public sector) earn extremely decent money and have great benefits and many other rewards earned for them by their worker collectives. There are very, very few unionized private sector jobs because our unions today are badly broken and are not doing their job. Workers who are unionized in the private sector, like some auto workers, are also doing well, but they are a tiny fraction of the total workforce….

Why? In today’s economic climate, the working poor – and there are a whole lot of them in our society – are struggling to try to get the rich folks to bestow on them $15 per hour….you can’t live on $15 per hour in today’s world….you will be living in abject poverty for sure. Most of our working poor have no benefits, no pensions, no anything….they are just the working poor and, as the current pandemic has so graphically illustrated, they are holding all of society on their shoulders. I can’t, for the life of me, see why folks in the upper echelons of our society can’t seem to understand this. And, actually, I’m pretty sure they do understand it but somehow enjoy putting a knee to the throat of the working poor everywhere.

I am, of course, profoundly disappointed in each and every one of our current unions. They are garbage and useless as tits on a goose, as the saying goes. They have been fighting a steady, retreating action against big business and big government for most of the last 30 years. They are losing this war/battle as is indicated by the already low and shrinking numbers of union members across North American society. They should have been on the offensive all along, protecting workers’ rights, and waging a real war on corporate greed and government ambivalence. They should have been busy signing up members by the tens of thousands in places like big box stores and fast food restaurants and pretty well every sector of our society. Instead, they have been sitting on their hands, soaking up what benefits they still can and waiting for a few more worker collectives to be gutted and destroyed by the wealthy autocrats that control our economy.

You never know if what you’re reading on the internet is true or not, but nearly everyone does their own “research” these days. Of course, most people wouldn’t understand real research if it hit them on the head, as proven by the fact that most ordinary people these days seem to feel they know way more about stuff than actual experts in the field. But, I checked this out as well as I could…..McDonald’s employees in Denmark make over $20 per hour, have benefits, a pension plan, lots of holidays and there are lots of fulltime workers in the system….In the U.S., McDonald’s employees make an average of about $9 an hour, usually have zero benefits and no pension….a Big Mac costs about 45 cents more in Denmark. When I was mentioning this to a guy who has a degree in economics, he said it all boils down to the level of greed in North America. Clearly, something is way out of whack. Some folks are making far too much money -and they’re mostly making it on the backs of the working poor….

Anyway, I don’t really even know how to argue the point that unions or worker collectives are good for working people. It’s sort of the ultimate no-brainer. Corporations of all stripes, private and public, are all working to balance budgets or make profits for shareholders and they’re doing it by raping and pillaging working people. It takes a sort of unholy triumvirate to keep society economically healthy. It takes big business and big government and big labour all sort of fighting for their share of the proverbial pie….big labour’s gone missing for sure….

I could not, under any conditions, afforded to have raised kids today. It would have been beyond me….

You know, my grandson, Isaac, has gotten himself a job. He’s 15 now and, somehow, kids can work at 15 these days. It was 16 when I was his age and me and most of my friends were damned glad it was. I mean, all of us did some sort of work in those days because Dads were pretty stingy with the cash. But until you reached the official working age of 16, you could slack off a bit and your parents weren’t constantly on your case. And that was regarded as a good thing back in the old days. I was particularly lucky when I was a kid because my Dad really didn’t want any of us kids working during the school year – we could, but he didn’t insist on it for sure. He always told us he worked at his job and school was our job and that’s what we needed to focus on.

My grandson has gotten himself a job at Mickey D’s and back in my day that would have been a pretty namby, pamby job, and by that, I mean pretty darned easy. Nope, when I was a kid, I didn’t run a French fry machine or flip hamburgers – I ran things like a shovel and I was usually tossing some sort of manure or dirt around. My friends and I took a certain type of pride in who could work hardest or who had the shittier job….I really did a lot of hard, manual labouring jobs when I was young. It was to the point where I would do almost anything for money – except, as I tell people these days, sell my body….Anyway, we were all workers back in those days, but most of us didn’t need really very much money. Stuff was cheap and we just didn’t have huge expectations the way the kids do these days.

I mean, we didn’t have cell phones or computers or a lot of the things people, including young people, seem to think they desperately need these days. You know, somehow we managed without all that crap. I was explaining to a younger person the other day the way things worked in my hometown of Hanover when I was growing up. There were 8-10 furniture factories and Hanover was the Furniture Capital of Canada and most of the men in the community worked in one or another of the factories. Most wives did not work and stayed home to tend to the children. I know this sounds remarkably sexist, but it’s just the way it was. Anyway, my point is that on a single factory income, those guys were able to buy a house, buy a car, raise a family and usually take a couple of weeks vacation each year.

So, what in the sam hill has changed since back then. Today, even couples who have pretty great jobs and have a pretty good combined income are having trouble making ends meet and keeping up…..Well, folks, you’re not gonna believe me, but most of it has to do with the money you pay the government – and I know I sound like a broken record, but the middle class in Canada currently works ‘til about the middle of August just to pay the government. Most of us are paying about 55% in combined taxes….and that would be income tax, HST, tax on gas, natural gas or electricity…tax on pretty well everything….You know what your grandfather or father was paying in 1946-47, just after the war…..he was paying about 18% income tax and there were very few, if any, other taxes. And I’ll tell you that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a conspiracy theorist to understand that that’s a whopper of an increase. 

The middle class is currently holding up this entire house of cards and getting very little help from anywhere or anyone else.

It’s true that corporate America is busy finding new and innovative ways to get our cash from us every day….think about the number of bills this generation is faced with and, again, compare that to what your grandfather or your father was faced with. I raised my kids 30-40 years ago, but if it was today and I had the same money, they’d definitely not have cell phones or streaming services and they’d be damned lucky if there was a single computer in the living room. I could not, under any conditions, afforded to have raised kids today. It would have been beyond me….

Anyway, wasn’t sure where that was going when I started, but I think it did eventually get there – wherever that is. Anyway, see you next week…over and out…..

Life has become just another commodity. And it has become cheap. And that’s a great tragedy…..

So had practice for the new band last night. Left the practice room with a big smile on my face. Hard not to when you’re working on tunes like Happy Together by the Turtles and California Dreamin’ by the Mammas and Pappas…..I have a brand new Sixties’ tribute band going and I’m having more fun than you can shake a stick at – and there’s a really old expression for you. Anyway, after playing these really great, feel-good tunes, I got to thinking about the media for some reason – and the effect I think it has on virtually all passengers on Spaceship Earth. And here’s what I mean.

Back in the mythical Sixties – that decade of peace, love and violence – despite all the chaos and mayhem that was going on in society, the media continued to project mostly hopefulness and good vibes. Even though we had our “dark” figures in music, for example, like Jim Morrison and perhaps Jimi Hendrix and a couple of others, most of the music we listened to was pretty positive and upbeat – at least that’s my memory of it. There were lots of protest songs for sure, but even they were somehow catchy and positive.  On TV, we were watching shows like Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres and Gilligan’s Island – shows that expected you to do nothing more than laugh. There were all kinds of goofy, but upbeat movies in those days. We basically lived in a sea of positivity regardless how bleak the actual world scene was….

And I think that contributed in a big way to the fact that young people in those days – and really pretty well everybody – felt pretty hopeful about the future – young people really and truly believed they could change the world for the better. It was in general terms a great time to be alive. Contrast that with today. Young people today are absolutely and totally buried in negative media….it’s all around them. Don’t know the modern music scene these days, but know most mainstream music – read rap and hip/hop – is not really upbeat and positive….many new movies are wildly dark and foreboding – lots of horror and shock type movies. The news is filled with all sorts of negativity…how we’re losing the battle with climate change, how there is war and carnage, people are starving, homelessness is all around, the work climate is filled with uncertainty….it’s really no wonder that two of the leading causes of death among young people are drug overdose and suicide….those are also perhaps the most tragic indicators in our societies that things have gone terribly wrong. How can we continue to let this crap happen? How insensitive and unfeeling are we? How terrifically stupid are we?

Anyway, I’ve mulled this over quite a bit. I see it this way in the here and now. The modern media is like a huge, dark cloud hanging over the planet, smothering most of the light – or good stuff. When good things happen, and there are lots of them, they are like tiny pin pricks of light piercing up through the darkness. Problem is this cloud of negativity has been institutionalized and become part of the planet’s psyche if you like. That’s because it’s mostly big, black-hearted corporations that are driving most of the media – and they have massive amounts of power and a tremendous capacity to snuff out anything that bucks the mainstream. On the other hand, it’s mostly much smaller organizations or individuals around the world who are doing the good stuff. In most cases, they are badly overmatched by the evil Establishment – at least, that’s what we used to call it.

And it is insidious. It has sort of rotted our societies from the inside out. And we have let it happen, my friends. While we have been cruising and golfing and staying at fantastically brilliant resorts in luxurious and exotic places, the Establishment has been eating our young….and we have been shovelling them into this great maw simply by not paying attention to what is happening. And so there are lots of drug overdoses and there is lots of suicide among young people because they’re buried alive in the bullshit. And they can’t see the sheer brilliance of the planet and now precious all life is….life has become just another commodity. And it has become cheap. And that’s a great tragedy…..

At first, we had visions of Easy Rider and wondered if we were about to be bludgeoned by some of the townsfolk

You know, I used to get a lot of places by “riding my thumb” back in the old days….me and my friends hitchhiked all over….we visited neighbouring communities regularly and often headed for the big city of Toronto to check out the hippies in Yorkville….huge numbers of young people used to hitchhike back in the day – girls and boys. And I started my hitchhiking days when I was likely 13 or 14-years-old. It was just something everybody seemed to do when I was young. Well, not everybody – but lots and lots of people.

Then, when the era of the hippie arrived in the mid to late Sixties, suddenly everybody was hitchhiking everywhere. And it seemed everyone was trying to capture the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, where you just stuck out your thumb and sort of tried to find yourself – whatever that used to mean. I’ve spent most of my life trying to find myself, but I’m still lost somewhere on life’s highway and not in any serious danger of finding myself any time soon. So, anyway, I was struck by the wanderlust back in 1971 – exactly 50 years ago this year. Me and a friend were sitting on the back campus of high school on the last day of classes and right on the spot decided to go on a hitchhiking odyssey.

So, for preparation, we headed down to the big city of Toronto to buy WWII army surplus ponchos – which every self-respecting hitchhiking hippie had. While there, we happened to catch Woody Allen’s excellent film, “Bananas”, in a theatre filled people who were pretty busy laughing their asses off. Then, we loaded a few things into our back packs – a change of clothes, a few cans of food, a can of tobacco and rolling papers….stuff like that. And then we were totally ready for the road. I remember I asked my Dad for a little travelling money and he pulled out his billfold and presented me with a two dollar bill. I was pretty excited about that….

Anyway, we set out and headed to Toronto and then Ottawa and then we started across the TransCanada Highway toward North Bay. And the most interesting thing happened to us in Deep River. We got stuck in Deep River along with quite a bunch of other young people and the black flies were eating us alive and night was happening and we were pretty sure we were facing a night in the ditch. Then, just as the sun was sinking into the western sky, we could see a line of headlights coming out of the actual town toward us. At first, we had visions of Easy Rider and wondered if we were about to be bludgeoned by some of the townsfolk.

Instead, they picked all of us up. My buddy and I got picked up by an old widower guy. He drove us back to his place, let us use his shower, cooked us dinner and let us sleep in his rec room. In the morning, he cooked us bacon and eggs and while we were eating, I asked him why he’d invite a couple of very scruffy looking guys into his home like this. He explained to me that people in Deep River had young people who were out on the road, and they had decided to try to help out any young people who passed through their community and hope their own young people would be treated with kindness wherever they went. It was sort of like one of the biggest miracles I’ve seen in my life even to this day….

I’ve often told that story over the years to try to explain to today’s young people the type of trust that used to exist in our societies….I also ask them if they think something like this could happen in today’s world. They mostly just laugh – they know it couldn’t. And that’s the type of world we’ve created. And it’s a damned shame. A damned shame for sure.

Lying and deceit and evasion of the truth are rampant in our world – especially among those we really, really need to trust

You know, trust is a massive concept. It sort of underpins everything on the planet. Right now, we are seeing the way the world spins when there is an almost complete absence of the concept of trust. And there is good reason for this total and complete lack of trust. It has been caused by the incessant barrage of lying and deceptiveness we have been subjected tofor most of the last 70 years, when almost all of our major institutions, and by definition, the folks who have represented them, have misled and misinformed us at almost every turn. Indeed, it has become very difficult and challenging to separate the so-called wheat from the chafe in our societies…..

There is, of course, an almost total lack of trust in government at all levels. The populace have come to expect politicians to evade answering questions and to break promises pretty well as fast as they make them…..In Canadian politics, you can find numerous glaring examples of where government has acted directly against the wishes of the public, starting as far back as the flag debate in 1965, followed closely by wage and price controls in the early 1970’s and on to the struggles over free trade and the GST in the 1980’s. There are “lots” of examples at all levels of government. So, is it any wonder that ordinary folks don’t “trust” their elected officials? And that’s a really big one.

Everybody knows, of course, that you really can’t trust the media. The media just out-and-out lies almost every time it opens any orifice of its monolithic structure. Everybody just knows that. It’s not actually true, you know. When the media sticks to reporting actual “news”, the stuff that involves some use of actual facts, it does sort of an okay job. The problem we have with the media today is that since the advent of the 24-hour news cycles, they have massive amounts of time and/or space to fill. So that a huge percentage of what is passed off as news these days is actually so-called analysis or speculation. And a big part of the problem is that most ordinary people can’t tell the difference between the “news” and the “opinion”….and that has a lot to do with the way the media packages their stuff. The media portrays everything as news, when clearly most of it is not.

Let’s carry on with large businesses and corporations. Again, the public totally expects these huge entities to lie and deceive it at every turn. Most people understand that the vast majority of advertising and market messaging consists of mostly major untruths. It’s just the way it goes. Most people, I think, realize that our major food processing companies are gradually poisoning us by adding huge numbers of awful and terrible chemicals into most of our food, while at the same time telling us how wonderfully healthy this same food is for us. Major appliance makers tout the wonderfulness of their fancy sophisticated products, but they deliberately build stuff that doesn’t last and is clogging up our landfills. Plastic is literally destroying the planet, but not only are we not stopping using it altogether, there are new plastic products being released into the market every day. It’s just one big, huge pile of bullshit and almost everybody knows.

Anybody watched any police shows on TV lately? I really liked Hill Street Blues when it was on back in the 80’s. Loved what I thought was a look inside actual policing in a big city. And I watched NYPD Blue and a bunch of Law and Order and shows like that. But I really didn’t tune into things right off the bat. I watched as police detectives regularly lied and broke the law themselves to get convictions. Somehow, it seemed okay to do that because they were usually getting bad people off the streets. These days, though, I don’t think it’s okay for police to do “whatever it takes” to arrest bad people. I think police and law enforcement people in general need to be above reproach. They should never use any type of questionable tactics just to get a conviction. Because that approach has killed trust in the police.

No, it’s really no wonder there very little trust left in society. So, it’s not surprising there are all kinds of folks out there during the pandemic who don’t trust scientists or politicians or health care people or anybody else – and don’t want to wear masks or get vaccinated – even though both of these things seem like no-brainers to most reasonable people. I have no idea how we could ever get this trust thing going again in society. Lying and deceit and evasion of the truth are rampant in our world – especially among those we really, really need to trust. And so it goes….

If you want to vote for a liberal or conservative party in the upcoming Canadian federal election, you must really enjoy being raped and pillaged

If you’re planning to vote in the upcoming Canadian federal election, I’d appreciate it if you would read the following. In fact, if you live pretty well anywhere in the Western World you should likely check this out….I’m going to be talking about liberals and conservatives in this week’s blog. And I’m going to be writing about the massive inequity in our societies and how that’s been very deliberately created by our so-called liberal and conservative governments over the last 75 years – since the end of the Second World War – back in the days when the rich and large corporations were asked to pay their fair share of the tax bill. Since that time, successive governments, both liberal and conservative – and notice I’m writing about all parties that lean left as liberal and all parties that lean right as conservative – have radically reduced taxes on the big guys, while, at the same time, radically increasing taxes on the so-called middle class.

We currently have a society in Canada, and I would suggest other parts of the world, where what’s left of the middle class is holding up the whole system. The majority of our working people these days are fighting for $15 per hour, when that really still leaves people well below the poverty line. When I moved to the community of Wallaceburg 36 years ago, the community was a real manufacturing hub. There were over 8,000 great jobs here and even labourers in most factories were making $15-20 an hour. And they’re struggling to make that same amount of money now – only it’s over 30 years later. While the wealthy have gotten drastically wealthier over the last any decades, the rest of us have been brutalized by both liberal and conservative governments

When I was a kid growing up in the small Ontario town of Hanover back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the town was known as the “Furniture Capital of Canada”, and boasted maybe 8-10 factories that produced some of the best furniture in the world. And the guys who built that furniture – and it was mostly guys in those days – got paid enough money to get married, buy a house and car, raise a family – sometimes with eight kids – and even take vacations – and they did it all on the salary of one furniture factory employee. Also in those days, a small retailer, like Louis’ Men’s Wear in Hanover, could not only provide a really good living for the folks who owned the store, but also usually a couple of fulltime employees – who were also busy buying houses and raising families – also usually on one salary in the household.

So, clearly, something has changed rather dramatically since the glory days of the middle class back in the 50’s and 60’s…..and it’s been primarily the system of taxation our governments have foisted on us. At one time, back in the late 1940’s, rich people were taxed at a rate of about 90%....today, that has dropped to about 30%. Guess who’s picking up the difference….Back in the late 1940’s, the middle class was paying about 18% in income tax….today with a wide variety of taxes now hitting the middle class, it’s paying something in the neighbourhood of 55%, which means middle class people are working for over half the year just to pay the government.

This is so wrong it’s really difficult for me to get my head around. And we have let it happen by electing successive liberal and conservative governments (Republican and Democrat in the States) which have taken turns raping and pillaging us. We need hefty wealth taxes and estate taxes and capital gains taxes and nearly every other tax we can hit the rich with. The libs and cons will tell you it really hurts the economy if you put too many taxes on the rich. They’ll move somewhere else and take their money with them. And I say let them move. Even rich people have to know how upside-down our tax system is – or they’re idiots. Don’t really want to share the country with folks who don’t want to pay their fair share so that everyone in the country can live with respect and dignity. And it would be a simple thing to do – to fix the tax system. All we need is a little political will and the knowledge our governments won’t just waste any extra money they get. But that’s our fault too if we let it happen.

If you want to vote for a liberal or conservative party in the upcoming Canadian federal election, you must really enjoy being raped and pillaged. That’s all I’ve got to say. 

I wish Canada and some of the other NATO countries would have stayed behind to protect the at-risk and vulnerable

You know, I’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to the Afghan war. And I’m really sort of disappointed in myself for not staying better informed and more in tune with the whole situation. Because, lately, stuff about the big withdrawal from Afghanistan has really been dominating the old news cycle. And what is happening is truly heart wrenching and tragic beyond all reason. I do not understand and will never understand why some type of arbitrary date had to be selected on which all NATO troops would be out of the country…..why couldn’t a date have been set determined by when the last at-risk Afghani was gotten safely out of the country? Why did it have to August 31 come hell or high water?

For starters, everybody, everywhere knew the Afghan army would collapse as soon as NATO pulled out – that was totally predictable. It’s true that it happened way faster than anyone could have foreseen, but everybody knew it was going to happen. So, why didn’t NATO simply dump huge numbers of troops in and around Kabul to make sure the bad guys were denied access until everyone was safely out. Why, oh why? And if the Americans were bound and determined to get out by August 31, why did the rest of NATO just follow merrily along? There were quite a few countries involved In the NATO coalition and they all have armies – put extra troops on the ground to ward off the total disaster that’s happening there right now. Everyone should have been gotten out safely. It could have been done.

In fact, I can’t believe we’re just pulling out and abandoning the women and children of Afghanistan who will soon be living life back in the Middle Ages if the Taliban has its way. I can’t believe we’re leaving at all. I know it was an endless war that was costing a whole bunch of money and also lives. However, it seems our governments have endless money when they feel they need it, and when people join the military, they’ve gotta know there’s a chance they could end up in harm’s way. But isn’t it somehow what we should do – that we have a moral obligation to protect the less fortunate and the most vulnerable on our planet. So that maybe if we have to maintain armies in some of the world’s hot spots to keep people safe, that’s what we should be doing….

The whole global situation would be way easier to manage if we weren’t faced with the problem of China and Russia….these are both rogue nations that have no respect for international law or any of the other protocols that would allow humanity to exist in peace and harmony. Both these countries are brutal, dictatorships with absolutely no regard for human rights and both are working to undermine and destroy any type of democratic political system that exists on the planet. I’ve always hoped for a sort of Star Trek future where all the countries on Planet Earth are one big, harmonious family out there exploring the stars. Instead, we seem to be heading more toward a Mad Max or Bladerunner future where all of life is bleak and miserable.

And I have absolutely zero idea how we accomplish much of anything on Earth as long as we’re fighting and squabbling over most of the crap we tend to fight and squabble over. At this point in our history, there should be a United Nations’ police force of some type that just roots out and fixes all injustices around the world. And I think it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s an injustice and what’s not, no matter which side of the world community you’re on. Russia and China are, of course, huge problems, but neither of them would likely be foolish enough to take on all the rest of us…Although that’s surely not a given.

It’s just that I can’t bear to watch another bright, articulate Afghan woman weep openly on the Tv news about how her life is likely about to change. I feel truly bad about the whole affair. I wish Canada and some of the other NATO countries would have stayed behind to protect the at-risk and vulnerable. And if we had to stay for another 20 years, or even for a hundred years, that’s what we should have done….All life is precious, people…all life…and if we’ve got the means to protect it when it’s at risk, that’s what we should do…no doubt about it.

At one point, people of my generation would have taken to the streets to protect CBC-Radio and it was often referred to as a “national treasure”

You know, it’s only a couple of weeks ago that I wrote about CBC-Radio and the dismal shape it’s in these days for anyone over about 25. Wouldn’t normally write about the same thing so close together, but news out of CBC over the last few days has prompted me to re-visit our national broadcaster in this space. Apparently, long-running CBC-Radio staple Saturday Night Blues with Holger Peterson has been bumped out of the Saturday night time slot is has occupied for many, many years. It will continue to air somewhere on something called Radio 2 – which I’ve never been able to locate on my radio – or somewhere else called CBC Music – and I haven’t got the foggiest notion where to find that. This sad and bewildering news hot on the heels of earlier news that Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap is ending its run altogether. Yikes!

So CBC continues the alienation of any of its older audience that still remains – and I think there is little of it left already. I learned the fate of Holger Peterson from a Facebook post by outstanding Canadian blues guy Al Lerman. At one time, you heard artists like Al and Rick Fines and my musical friend Richard Knechtel and Willie P. Bennett and Fred Eaglesmith on CBC Radio all the time. Now, it’s a rare happening, indeed. Mostly, and as I’ve said before here, you get young “singer/songwriters” whose music is somewhat questionable to say the least. Nearly all CBC programming these days targets young people and I really wonder how many of Canada’s youth are much tuned in unless they have some type of vested interest in what’s being played. 

There was quite a bit of feedback to Al’s post about Saturday Night Blues, most of it from folks around my vintage, and most of it negative toward CBC. It was suggested that former PM Stephen Harper had loaded up the CBC Board of Directors with anti-CBC people because the Conservatives generally don’t appreciate a lot of the opinion on the national broadcaster. If that was the case, the federal Liberals have had around six years to fix the problem and the network. Trudeau’s Liberals were supposed to be CBC friendly, but I can’t see any real evidence that is the case. The gutting of CBC has continued unfettered under the Liberals as witnessed by the Holger Peterson story.

And it really is sad because if you listen to Saturday Night Blues at all, you will know how absolutely loyal its audience is and how much its audience loves the show, the blues and Holger. Why in the world would you mess with something like that – like if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Unless your goal is to deliberately diminish it and the organization it is part of. You know, back a number of years ago, whenever any part of the government talked about messing with CBC, there was a really huge outcry about how important the network was to our sense of national identity and sort of who we were as Canadians. Those days are long over. I’ve heard Sally Field and Tori Amos on the CBC morning show. Why? Because they had new work out. Either a book or a record. Still, they’re taking up broadcast time that should go to Canadian artists. CBC should be all-Canadian all the time.

As a writer, I find CBC’s attitude toward artists extremely bush league these days. I’ve tried to contact various shows and departments at CBC concerning a number of issues as a writer, all I ever get in response – or non response – is what I call the “Wall of Silence”…..in other words, they just never respond. They don’t say “thanks for your interest” or “how good of you to get in touch” or “your work really sucks leave us alone”….they never say a damned thing. Which I find rude, disrespectful and bullshit. Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s, I submitted a lot of stuff to CBC and quite a bit of it made it onto the radio. But when they weren’t interested in something, they let you know…these days there’s nothing but utter and complete nothingness. Sometimes I think they can tell how old I am somehow, so I’m automatically disqualified because I’m over 25…..

Anyway, enough railing about CBC – ain’t nothin’ gonna change….too late now….most of the hosts who seemed to care about Canada and Canadians are long gone and I don’t think there’s any going back. At one point, people of my generation would have taken to the streets to protect CBC-Radio and it was often referred to as a “national treasure”. That’s surely not the case these days. Wonder if their new young audience is quite as passionate? I imagine at some point, we’ll find out. And it may not turn out all that well….

What did Freddie Mercury sing about…”We want it all – and we want it now….”

So, while I was attending the University of Guelph in the late 1970’s and studying toward a Master’s degree in history – specifically Canadian history – I took quite a number of courses in the politics department sort of for fun. And all the politics courses I took dealt with political philosophy or theory because I’ve always been fascinated by the way the world’s various and sundry political systems work…..even before university, I’d been reading guys like Henry David Thoreau – it’s always been a passion of mine. And without question, the most academically stimulating teacher I had in those days was Professor Fred Vaughn. And I can still remember him telling us way back then that Western society would be the most hedonistic in the history of the planet by the year 2000. He was bang on the money.

The society we currently live in drips of hedonism, where the pursuit of personal pleasure is what drives a lot of what goes on. Look at the way the restaurant and hospitality industries were off the map before the pandemic. As was travel, where people who are flat broke will borrow money to take a cruise or go to a resort in Mexico even without knowing how they will possibly be able to pay the money back. Everybody drives big huge and new SUVs and trucks with no real consideration about whether they’ll even fit into an average parking space. Big screen TVs….fancy, schmanzy cell phones that will pretty well cook dinner for you….what did Freddie Mercury sing about…”We want it all – and we want it now….”

I was listening to this social scientist guy on CBC radio a week ago or so and he was saying that one of the huge problems with the way our society works is that most entrepreneurs and inventor-type people are entirely too hung up on giving people what they “want”, as opposed to what they “need”….Think about that. He was saying that right now we “need” a lot of stuff to help out the environment or to improve some chronic health care conditions or to feed the billions of people who live with chronic hunger. The people living in poverty around the world don’t “need” a better, more improved cell phone, or a car that parks itself or comes to you when you call it. They “need” food, health care and place to live in relative safety and security. And they are getting none of those things right now. They are getting screwed, blued and tattooed by a bizarre socio-economic system that places the health, welfare and security of life well down on its list of Planet Earth priorities. Like do you really want to live like this, people?

I’ve often told my wife that when I finally do expire – well past the expected date – she should put the words, “Dazed and Confused” on my tombstone…..because that is surely how I’ve spent the vast majority of my life – totally dazed and confused that after over 10,000 years of recorded history, we have not yet figured out how to somehow equitably share the resources and wealth of the planet so that all people can live in some semblance of peace and harmony and so that all life – even the beasts of the field and the fishes of the sea – can be held precious – as it should always have been.

You know, these days, there is a whole lot of looking backward in time and being shocked and dismayed at the awful cruelty and barbarism exhibited by humanity throughout its history. The thing is that if you know anything at all about humanity’s recorded history, you should definitely not be shocked or dismayed by anything that is uncovered in the past. After all, this is the planet where the people of one country gassed to death over 6 million human beings because of their religious beliefs – I know it’s not nearly that simple, but you should get my drift. Planet Earth has been a wildly brutal place always. There has never really been a time of peace in this place. It has been almost totally brutality after brutality and there’s really no way to disagree with that assessment.

Doesn’t have to be that way. We have some smart people on the planet who know how things could be done better. But we never seem to listen to them. If we all followed something called the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them to unto you – things could be markedly better. We need to get it together people…right here, right now. As the planet gets more crowded and more congested and we’re more and more in each other’s faces, we need to figure it out. Time is running out – and quickly.

Lots more one-hit wonders in the world of today…..

You know, I am amazingly and relentlessly dazzled by the celebrity culture that has somehow evolved on our planet….these days, pretty well everybody has a shot at being a rock star. When I first started in the rock music biz back in the mid 1960’s, it was almost impossible to produce any type of quality recording without doing it in a for-real recording studio that had the necessary equipment and expertise….and there was a sense that you needed at least a modicum of expertise to produce a decent record. Mind you, if you could get your hands on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, you could make your own recordings – but it was ridiculously difficult to produce any type of quality product on your own.

Now this meant that there were sort of filters in the music business. They were the big, bad record company executives who were not really all that big and bad in the old days….nothing like today. What these folks did in the old days was somehow assure that the musicians they were dealing with could actually play their instruments and sing and write songs usually with some kind of melody line and who had at least some small bit of talent and ability. These days, when anyone can call themselves a musician and crack off some songs in their basement or their bedroom then pour them out into cyberspace, there are no filters. None in the least. Some will argue that this has democratized the music business and made it fairer. I’d say it’s flooded the whole system with so much crap and corruption that it is really difficult and, actually, just about impossible for the real good stuff to find the surface. It’s still out there but you’ve really got to be willing to search to find it.

The writing business is pretty well the same. Computers have totally and absolutely changed how books and pretty well everything else is written. In the old days, writers didn’t re-write stuff eight times in some vain attempt to produce perfect writing. It’s so easy to re-write and move stuff around in the body of your work these days, that most stuff likely doesn’t end up much the way it started. And I think it’s really sort of destroyed the business. Everybody can be writers these days – just like everybody can be musicians these days. And everybody can be visual artists and everybody can be just about anything else they want in the arts these days.

I’m pretty convinced that there’s not much “art” being produced today that’s going to stand the test of time. I like to look around me at the arts culture and try to imagine what in our contemporary world might last for 500 years like, say, Beethoven or Mozart of Shakespeare or DaVinci or Michelangelo…..maybe I can’t see them in the here and now because I’m too close to the whole scene right now. I think they are likely out there, but it is unlikely their stuff will last because of the way our current celebrity culture and the media work. When a song is released these days and it becomes a big hit, it tends to arc through the heavens like a comet – but then it’s gone. It vanishes just like a comet. And I wonder if the music being released these days by artists like Kanye West and Justin Bieber and Beyonce will be remembered even for a scant 50-60 years like the music of my own youth. I’m not sure the Rolling Stones and the rest of the gang will be remembered for 500 years, but they have made it to 60 years which, I think, is quite an accomplishment in itself.

These days so much new “art” is being released on a constant basis, and everybody thinks they’re an artist, so that most of society is completely overwhelmed and can’t begin to keep up – or even to manage to expose themselves to even a tiny bit of all the stuff flooding out there. So that a vast number of our so-called celebrities and artists will have almost no chance of passing into the world of tomorrows….but will exist only in the world of today. And maybe it was always this way. I get to watching old re-runs of Johnny Carson – an old talk show guy – and I am constantly amazed by the people I see him interviewing who I’ve forgotten all about. But, just for an instant, back in 1968 or 1973, they starred in a hit TV show or a big movie or had a hit record – and they had their proverbial 15 minutes of fame. And then they were gone. And maybe that’s just the way it’s always worked. But I’m guessing it’s way worse today…lots more “one-hit wonders” in this old world these days. Lots more…..

Thanks, boys, for giving a hard look at the massive inequity on the planet…..

So, must congratulate our billionaire astronauts on accomplishing something really important with their brief junket up above the clouds – they managed to draw massive attention to the massive inequity on the planet and how stupid it’s really getting….if the social media platform I’m part of is any indication, Mssrs. Bezos and Branson had an enormous amount of ridicule and contempt directed their way for such a wanton waste of cash while so many of their fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth are living in squalor and misery without the basic necessities for life….while I appreciate that humanity would like to travel out into space and it might turn out to be a worthwhile endeavour, space travel and exploration is something that will take the resources of a planet not a couple of rich boys…..

You know, my wife and I often get talking about the vast unfairness in life and how many, many people on the planet have enormously difficult lives - while others, a hugely smaller number, are wealthy beyond belief and could not spend all of their money in several hundred lifetimes. And the only real way to fix any of this is to somehow share or spread the wealth around. And it would be really pleasant and nice if the really rich folks would willingly share and spread the wealth around, but they clearly don’t. Instead, they buy 500 foot yachts, diamond-encrusted Rolls Royces, gold plated bathrooms – I mean the stupidity never ends and gets worse and more grotesque with each passing generation of really rich folks – because they just keep getting richer and richer and richer and richer…..

It’s interesting – I heard Janet Yellen (sp.), who I think is the Treasury Secretary in the U.S. government, and she has suggested an international corporate tax rate, so that large multinational corporations can’t keep avoiding paying fair taxes by continually moving to the jurisdiction with the lowest corporate tax rate. This, of course, is a brilliant idea but getting all the countries on the planet to sign on seems a bit of a tall order. Of course, there should be an international wealth tax on the planet as well – one that would prevent the rich folks from avoiding paying their fair share of taxes by doing the same thing as the corporations. It is completely and totally galling to me that both corporations and wealthy folk refuse to simply pay what is fair for everyone and are constantly trying to evade what is really their responsibility to the societies that have made them wealthy and successful.

You know, I always keep coming back to the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who assumed the American presidency at the height of the Great Depression. FDR knew there was only one way to get out of the Depression and that was for government to get involved and put the country back to work. So, he levied huge taxes on the richest people in American society – he really put it to them to the point where he would receive death threats for the rest of his life. And with all the money he gathered up through these taxes, he created the “New Deal”, which was mostly about huge government make-work projects and infusing significant amounts of cash into the economy at key places to get things going again. It worked.

Taxes on the wealthy and large corporations were at extremely high levels right after the Second World War as countries struggled to get their economies back on track after years of war spending. But, sadly, shortly after the end of the war, governments started a slow but steady assault on the middle class in society, gradually raising taxes on it, while slowly, but equally steadily, cutting the taxes of rich folks and corporations. This is well documented and happened under both the so-called liberal and conservative governments and has continued to happen for about 75 years. To the point where today, the really rich and the really poor pay virtually no taxes while the folks in the middle – you and me – are holding up the whole damned system. I told my son the other day that he works likely to mid-July to early August just to pay the government its pound of flesh…..

The only way we can even begin to fix the myriad of problems we face on Planet Earth is to somehow share the resources among everyone. And if we don’t start to willingly share some of the loot, it’s only a matter of time before it will simply be taken. I was saying that back in high school. It’s already happening – check out the migrants arriving at the Mexico-U.S. border or the people flooding into Europe across the Mediterranean…..if we don’t share it, they will eventually just take it. Even sharing our stuff with the poor people in our own societies isn’t enough. The whole world’s watching….. 

Workers of the world unite; cast off your chains…..

I have a lot of friends who earned their living as teachers, nurses, government employees and other similar jobs…most of them are now retired….and one of the great peculiarities that I run into from time to time is when one of them gets to spouting the evils of unions or worker collectives….and they always use the same example to explain why unions are bad for society. And it almost always involves the autoworkers in Windsor and how grossly overpaid they are for putting nuts on bolts. In the meantime, most of the professional folks I mentioned earlier have done wildly well throughout their working lives, and are now enjoying sort of a gold-plated retirement, totally because they have been members of some really super strong worker collectives that have rung enormously good working conditions out of employers – usually the government.

Seems it’s okay for professional folks who work mainly for the government to organize together to negotiate for decent money, benefits and working conditions, but it is not okay for ordinary working folks to do the same thing. Even the word “union” has an extremely negative connotation to it these days. And that is truly an enormous tragedy and has gone far to create the gigantic inequity in our societies. Put plainly but simply, there has been absolutely no one looking out for ordinary average working people for the last 40 years. And the result is that they have been raped and pillaged and assaulted in all sorts of catastrophic ways to the point where most working people have trouble even trying to eke a living wage out of a bloated and corrupt socio-economic system.

When I first started university back in the mythical seventies and started to take politics courses, one of the first things we were taught was about the balance of power that exists within an effectively functioning society….that balance includes big business, big government and big labour….all three have to be properly balanced for there to be any fairness or equity in our societies. So, you should be able to see the problem we’ve got these days….big business is huge beyond belief….big government has mainly a business agenda and seems controlled most of the time by the big business sector. Big labour is missing altogether. It has just been totally beaten out of society by a relentless and everlasting propaganda campaign carried out by the conservative elements in our world. And they have been totally and completely successful in discrediting unions and all worker collective organizations.

And the leadership of our worker collectives have done exactly nothing to fight back. They sit and collect their fat pay cheques and to live in grand mansions while there are increasingly large numbers of “working poor”, a term that should automatically be considered an oxymoron. If you work and do your best to make a positive contribution to society, you should never be “poor”……working and poor should never go together in the same sentence. In fact, a lot of people who know me know that I occasionally call myself a “communist” and I have this simple understanding of how life should work…everyone who makes a positive contribution to society should get relatively the same reward. It’s as simple as that. Whether you’re a brain surgeon or a lawyer or a sanitation worker or you stock shelves as a grocery store, if you’re out there bustin’ your ass, you should get pretty much the same benefits out of life. During this pandemic, it has been graphically illustrated that everybody in society is really pretty important in their own way. A grocery store worker and truck drivers are just as important as brain surgeons and lawyers. I know it’s a bit of blow to the ego for the folks who have traditionally been at the top of the human food chain, but it’s the way it mostly is.

Anyway, many, many working people in our society need worker collectives in order to restore some sanity to the world we’re currently living in. Big labour might be able to do something to protect all of us from big business and even big government, because it has become very clear in recent years that government sure as hell ain’t on our side. It has allowed big business to pretty well pluck us clean of every scrap of privacy that ever existed and has done nothing to protect us – when that’s pretty well its only job….

Workers of the word unite; cast off your chains….thanks, Karl…..

Billionaires in space….space…space…space….

Most weeks I’m not sure what I’m gonna write about until I situate myself in front of the old computer keyboard and am ready to type. This week, though, I’ve had a pretty good idea what I’d be writing about for most of the past week. I mean, what else is there to write about but our merry band of billionaires and they’re journeys out into the great beyond. Billionaires Sir Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos – and there might be another one – are launching “spaceships” into “space” with them aboard. And there have been plenty of cracks on Facebook that maybe they should just keep right on going – perhaps Bezos more than Branson…..

There has also been a lot of chatter about the cost of doing these little “space” shots, mostly for the publicity they generate, when there are such huge and pressing problems happening on good, old Planet Earth….places where large amounts of cash could really come in handy – like feeding people….like providing health care for the people of the world….like solving the climate crisis…like just a whole whack of issues that are kind of crucial to the survival of humanity these days. These billionaire guys aren’t really going anywhere any time soon. Even with their vast fortunes, they will come up short as far as accomplishing very much meaningful in terms of space exploration. It’s going to take more money than even Bezos the Bozos has gathered up -  mostly by exploiting other folks.

You know, I do think it’s important that we venture out into space if we can figure things out sufficiently to make that happen. We’re not even close right now. We’re just sort of bumbling away sort of in our sleep and accomplishing sort of piddly all. Some of it might seem important, but at this stage of the game, it’s really not. What we need most as a species is a new type of energy source that could lead to some new type of propulsion system so we can fix many of the problems on this planet and really get out into space where the action is. Some type of new energy source that could be used cleanly and renewably would go a long way toward helping to clean up the planet, plus if we got out into space, it would provide a much-needed frontier for humanity. Throughout our history, the frontier has been valuable for us because it forces us to innovate.

You know, I don’t hate what the billionaire guys are doing with this space stuff….we need to push in that direction for sure. But it’s going to take the united governments of the world to make any serious space stuff happen. Sort of like in Star Trek, where everyone on planet earth is working together and pulling along in the same direction. Of course in Star Trek, earth was engulfed in a huge eugenics war in the 1990’s before everyone started to get their act together. And maybe that’s what it’s going to take for us – something truly catastrophic and planet-changing, whether a really big natural disaster or another really big pandemic or something like that. I really just think that we will need the combined resources of the whole planet before we’re going to accomplish much in space.

Another thing is that I’m not real keen on expanding capitalism out into space – at least not the way it works here. If we use our capitalist system to drive our journey out into space, that journey will be chaotic and haphazard and filled with uncertainty and inequity of truly galactic proportions…..just the way our history has gone on planet earth. And it will also be brutal and filled with death and destruction – even without the Borg. When and if we do make the big plunge out into space, it would be good if there was some sort of advance planning done so we could make that plunge with some type of coordination and dignity.

The only way we’ll ever get the billionaire guys to do the right things with their money is if we take some of it away from them and spread it around ourselves. And by “ourselves”, I mean society or government if you like. If we’re ever going to solve any of the serious issues facing our species in the here and now, we’ll need some type of functional world government looking out for the best interests of all concerned. That ain’t likely to happen. So I guess life will continue to be one interesting situation after another…until we’re all dead…..