©
When I arrived at my office this afternoon, which is next to the town arena entrance, the first thing I saw was a foot-sized hole in the glass front door. I guess Christmas spirit comes in all forms, and some folks just keep on giving, no matter what.
Random acts of any sort—kind or violent—are puzzling. We’re hardwired to seek meaning in every event, even when that meaning is not forthcoming. And a good deal of what happens in the universe is random. Even an individual conception and birth is random.
Why, for example, were any of us formed from a single particular sperm, from all the millions of them in just one sexual event, and from one particular egg? How random is that, for you to be you, out of all those millions of random variables? Very, I’d say. And it’s even more random that one of those randomly conceived people smashed in my office door on Boxing Day, of all random days.
We all recognize, however, that things reorganize quickly around random events. Birth order is one such reorganizing feature of families. Oldest children are statistically more likely to be over-achievers. Youngest children are more inclined to be free spirits. Many middle children are envious of their siblings and seem to suffer from lack of recognition, and will go to any lengths to secure it, especially from parents.
I’ve been thinking about this recently, as I’ve just ticked off another birthday on my calendar. And yes, I’m a boomer.
The Baby Boom was one of those accidental demographic collisions. Following the Second World War, soldiers came home, found lovely, lonely girls and made babies by the millions. The result was the largest generation in history. Wikipedia observes:
“In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of affluence. As a group, they were the healthiest, and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.
“One of the unique features of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about.”
There were apparently 76 million baby boomers born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1960. They achieved higher rates of education than any other previous generation, and will likely contribute to a national economic slowdown when they retire.
Funny thing is, as much as it might seem that boomers are a privileged generation, it sometimes doesn’t always quite seem that way. For example, what’s often overlooked is the amount of competition the boomer generation had to deal with when it came to job-seeking. With such a huge cohort, there simply weren’t enough jobs to go around. Our parents, the so-called Greatest Generation, had all the jobs.
And it when it came to shaping culture, it wasn’t the boomers who were shaping it. It was the half-generation before them—the kids born just before or during the war. This was the bunch just before the boomers who included Elvis, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, artist Andy Warhol, feminist Gloria Steinem, writer Ken Kesey, black activist Stokely Carmichael, not to mention politicians like Brian Mulroney, Jean Cretien, Paul Martin and John McCain. Then there’s Charles Manson, born in 1934. And almost half of today’s top 100 wealthiest men in Canada were born before the main part of the baby boom generation really got going.
Sure, there are a lot of famous boomers, too. But few of them were anywhere near as influential as that half-generation before them. It’s like comparing the Bee Gees to The Beatles. The Bee Gees were famous. The Beatles were influential.
In any event, the young boomers made an incredible customer base for the previous generation—and have been soundly criticized for it as being the first consumer generation, and for betraying their early idealism. Fact is most boomers I knew weren’t particularly idealistic to begin with. Yes, there was an experimental fringe group, but most of boomers were headed for a straight up career path with big business.
That career path hasn’t exactly worked out as planned either. Big business has moved a lot of manufacturing offshore and shed millions of their workers-for-a-lifetime—and their expensive pension plans. What we’ve ended up with are multiple carousel careers, job retraining and new self-funded businesses—and a lot of career insecurity and financial anxiety.
Boomers aren’t the recipients of much sympathy from younger generations either. The huge boomer generation takes up a lot of space leaving younger people wondering when, if ever, these people are every going to retire, not to mention die. It’s kind of like watching Prince Charles waiting to become king (although Charles is a poster boy for all boomers, always waiting, rarely leading).
I recently asked a couple of 30-something about their impressions of boomers. Their responses weren’t pretty. I got everything from “self-centred” to “narcissistic” to just plain “greedy”. Their overriding perception is that boomers simply refuse to grow old gracefully.
The whole thing, I realize, is a chimera. Boomers are nothing more than an accident in time, a symptom of a century of war. More than anything boomers represent the full flowering of the world’s first fossil fuel economy—along with its machine-powered wars—and it may also presage that economy’s end.
Already younger generation is taking over the reins of political power. Russia’s 44-year-old, baby-faced president Dmitry Medvedev is a very notable one, though he may also be the last of the boomers.
One thing is certain. Any small cohort that precedes—or follows—such a large cohort is bound to have profound built-in advantages—or disadvantages. It’s the luck of the draw. To be born in the middle of the largest cohort in history is a lot like being that middle child, always craving something more.
And there is more. We’re all about to enter a new decade, and we are all getting older. As for me, I plan to age disgracefully, and hope the next generations will be wiser. They’ll likely have to be.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Mystical magic of crossing borders
©
Every time I drive up to an international border crossing, I feel my heart rate go up ever so slightly. It’s not that I have something to hide, quite the opposite. I don’t like the feeling of someone suspecting me of something I haven’t done.
Every time I drive up to the customs wicket I practise my lines: “Just 23 dollars from Mardens.” “No, three of us; our son is in back.” The questions are simple but fraught with the possibility of eliciting overly complicated, guilty-sounding answers. I doubt I’m alone in feeling this.
This should get worse at Christmas time. But in actual fact, I’m more relaxed at the border at this time of year, even though I have more to declare. And the border guards seem more pleasant, too.
It’s all about trust, and lot of anxiety is generated from lack of it. Put into perspective, our customs officers are hired not to trust anyone. And each time we cross the border we have to earn their trust.
Since landing on the East Coast I’ve had to deal with this earning trust issue on a daily basis, and not just at border crossings. For example, when we first arrived, no one knew us, and we didn’t know anyone here. So how do we begin to trust people we don’t know? Again, we’ve had to earn it.
Growing up in a community, one gets to know the cast of characters from birth. As local kids we’re taught to know the “good” families from the “bad”. And so we begin developing an inner landscape of cultural trust. This person is willow in the wind. That one’s a muddy swamp. This one can be an occasional volcano. And that one over there is solid bedrock.
In a place like this, the cultural landscape extends back 300 years. In Europe it’s more like 2000 years. In parts of Asia it’s double that, with lines stretching back four millennia or more.
Migrants—including me and my family—no longer have those connections. We lack the essential trust markers on the cultural landscape. We arrive in our new homes as tabula rasae, clean slates. And in many ways we, all of us, are becoming migrants. Air travel and the Internet now lift us across all borders, rendering the world borderless, leaving only the face-to-face cultural differences that divide us. As moderns, we are all strangers in a strange land.
The great human struggle of the 21st Century will be trust. And not just in the immediate, practical—and politically complex—matter of weaning an entire planetary human population from excess carbon emissions, fossil fuel gluttony and over-consumption of natural resources. On our crowded planet, we must trust that, as we make concessions and cut back on our consumption, our neighbours in other political jurisdictions will reciprocate. Here in the West, we may, in fact, be facing the prospect of an extended, century long recession, one I would call The Permacession.
The acts of trust needed to accommodate such wide-scale self-sacrifice may be extremely difficult to attain without some global framework of common morality. Secularists, philosophers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, would suggest that this morality is innate to the human species, and that we can better prevail as a species if we are atheistic. Yet, in reading their work, it’s pretty clear that their “innate” moral assumptions are Judeo-Christian in origin.
And universal atheism is becoming a more remote possibility with every passing day. Fundamentalism of every religious variety has been breaking around the world. Pseudo religions blending pop psychology with mysticism fill in the emotional void felt by those how have “lost their faith”. And mainstream religions are still widely influential, especially in times of crisis. If the major religions are to play a role in easing the strain of a permanent recession, then interdenominational trust becomes a prerequisite feature of international trust.
The key features of such a sea change, both secular and religious, are acceptance and forgiveness. Coincidentally, these are also—as in curbing our resource appetites—self-limiting qualities. So, I wonder, what models do we have for acceptance and trust?
Art, not religion, is the first thing that comes to mind. For one thing, art—like Alex Colville’s famous painting of the woman with binoculars looking directly at you—is an enigma. You can see the picture all right, but you can’t see into the painting; you can’t see either the woman’s face or the thing she’s looking at. She—and the painting itself—remains a mystery.
These mysteries contained in art deal with the membrane between the material world and the metaphysical one. That is the importance of artist Damien Hirst’s sculpture of a dead zebra preserved in formaldehyde or a human skull encrusted with diamonds. At first shocked, we begin to realize that mind, matter and mortality travel together, and as permanent as we’d wish all three to be, they are fleeting and impermanent. The mere act of being alive—the subject of all art—is a mystery. Mystery is the essence of everything. And that’s something that our rational, scientific culture, struggle as it may, can never decode.
Psychologists tell us that art is therapeutic. But that view merely tries to scientifically legitimize art, and diminishes its hidden value. Artists don’t consciously make art as therapy, either for themselves or for their audiences. That’s not to say that there is no healing impulse driving art.
Artists, the good ones at any rate, are prepared to look directly at those things that the rest of us want to avoid. The result is often shock, then perhaps the recognition of a frighteningly sublime new kind of beauty, and a glimpse of the mystery of the human condition.
A good example is the work of Ed Burtynsky, whose photos of industry capture the monumentality of our impact on the landscape. Why, we wonder, are these images of destruction so beautiful? What kind of perverse urge in the human soul created these things?
But Burtynsky isn’t preaching to us. He merely records what he sees, showing without saying: “Trust your eyes, trust your heart.”
Ultimately, the artist exposes us to our own mysteries—so we can heal. We may not understand the content of a particular work of art, but the collective content of our art will inform future generations.
It’s a shame we value it so little. It may be the only thing that can save us from our endless wanting. Merry Christmas, all.
Every time I drive up to an international border crossing, I feel my heart rate go up ever so slightly. It’s not that I have something to hide, quite the opposite. I don’t like the feeling of someone suspecting me of something I haven’t done.
Every time I drive up to the customs wicket I practise my lines: “Just 23 dollars from Mardens.” “No, three of us; our son is in back.” The questions are simple but fraught with the possibility of eliciting overly complicated, guilty-sounding answers. I doubt I’m alone in feeling this.
This should get worse at Christmas time. But in actual fact, I’m more relaxed at the border at this time of year, even though I have more to declare. And the border guards seem more pleasant, too.
It’s all about trust, and lot of anxiety is generated from lack of it. Put into perspective, our customs officers are hired not to trust anyone. And each time we cross the border we have to earn their trust.
Since landing on the East Coast I’ve had to deal with this earning trust issue on a daily basis, and not just at border crossings. For example, when we first arrived, no one knew us, and we didn’t know anyone here. So how do we begin to trust people we don’t know? Again, we’ve had to earn it.
Growing up in a community, one gets to know the cast of characters from birth. As local kids we’re taught to know the “good” families from the “bad”. And so we begin developing an inner landscape of cultural trust. This person is willow in the wind. That one’s a muddy swamp. This one can be an occasional volcano. And that one over there is solid bedrock.
In a place like this, the cultural landscape extends back 300 years. In Europe it’s more like 2000 years. In parts of Asia it’s double that, with lines stretching back four millennia or more.
Migrants—including me and my family—no longer have those connections. We lack the essential trust markers on the cultural landscape. We arrive in our new homes as tabula rasae, clean slates. And in many ways we, all of us, are becoming migrants. Air travel and the Internet now lift us across all borders, rendering the world borderless, leaving only the face-to-face cultural differences that divide us. As moderns, we are all strangers in a strange land.
The great human struggle of the 21st Century will be trust. And not just in the immediate, practical—and politically complex—matter of weaning an entire planetary human population from excess carbon emissions, fossil fuel gluttony and over-consumption of natural resources. On our crowded planet, we must trust that, as we make concessions and cut back on our consumption, our neighbours in other political jurisdictions will reciprocate. Here in the West, we may, in fact, be facing the prospect of an extended, century long recession, one I would call The Permacession.
The acts of trust needed to accommodate such wide-scale self-sacrifice may be extremely difficult to attain without some global framework of common morality. Secularists, philosophers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, would suggest that this morality is innate to the human species, and that we can better prevail as a species if we are atheistic. Yet, in reading their work, it’s pretty clear that their “innate” moral assumptions are Judeo-Christian in origin.
And universal atheism is becoming a more remote possibility with every passing day. Fundamentalism of every religious variety has been breaking around the world. Pseudo religions blending pop psychology with mysticism fill in the emotional void felt by those how have “lost their faith”. And mainstream religions are still widely influential, especially in times of crisis. If the major religions are to play a role in easing the strain of a permanent recession, then interdenominational trust becomes a prerequisite feature of international trust.
The key features of such a sea change, both secular and religious, are acceptance and forgiveness. Coincidentally, these are also—as in curbing our resource appetites—self-limiting qualities. So, I wonder, what models do we have for acceptance and trust?
Art, not religion, is the first thing that comes to mind. For one thing, art—like Alex Colville’s famous painting of the woman with binoculars looking directly at you—is an enigma. You can see the picture all right, but you can’t see into the painting; you can’t see either the woman’s face or the thing she’s looking at. She—and the painting itself—remains a mystery.
These mysteries contained in art deal with the membrane between the material world and the metaphysical one. That is the importance of artist Damien Hirst’s sculpture of a dead zebra preserved in formaldehyde or a human skull encrusted with diamonds. At first shocked, we begin to realize that mind, matter and mortality travel together, and as permanent as we’d wish all three to be, they are fleeting and impermanent. The mere act of being alive—the subject of all art—is a mystery. Mystery is the essence of everything. And that’s something that our rational, scientific culture, struggle as it may, can never decode.
Psychologists tell us that art is therapeutic. But that view merely tries to scientifically legitimize art, and diminishes its hidden value. Artists don’t consciously make art as therapy, either for themselves or for their audiences. That’s not to say that there is no healing impulse driving art.
Artists, the good ones at any rate, are prepared to look directly at those things that the rest of us want to avoid. The result is often shock, then perhaps the recognition of a frighteningly sublime new kind of beauty, and a glimpse of the mystery of the human condition.
A good example is the work of Ed Burtynsky, whose photos of industry capture the monumentality of our impact on the landscape. Why, we wonder, are these images of destruction so beautiful? What kind of perverse urge in the human soul created these things?
But Burtynsky isn’t preaching to us. He merely records what he sees, showing without saying: “Trust your eyes, trust your heart.”
Ultimately, the artist exposes us to our own mysteries—so we can heal. We may not understand the content of a particular work of art, but the collective content of our art will inform future generations.
It’s a shame we value it so little. It may be the only thing that can save us from our endless wanting. Merry Christmas, all.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Flying high without a safety net
©
Aliens are alive and well and working among us. I know this because several years ago I set up the first meetings between Business New Brunswick and local businesses to discuss the possibility of Romanian immigration. Now they’re here. Whether these newcomers will settle in here or move on is yet to be seen.
Immigration can be a lightning rod topic. Sometimes locals feel that the newcomers are appropriating jobs that they might have had. Sometimes locals become culturally territorial and don’t want intruders distorting the existing culture with new language, mannerisms, ethnic food or whatever else they bring with them from the “old country”. Sometimes locals can just be plain aloof.
That doesn’t appear to be the case here in Charlotte County. As far as I can tell the Romanians have dovetailed nicely into the aquaculture, fish plant and low level manufacturing jobs recently vacated by Newfoundlanders and others who have migrated west to the oil sands projects. If anything, there still seems to be a shortage of able-bodied workers in the region.
The modern country we know as Canada was built on immigration. Scots came with the fur trade. The Loyalists returned from the American Colonies. The Irish came later followed by the Ukrainians, Poles and Chinese who helped build the national railway. Migrations have always been a part of human history, and in truth migrations are human history.
But something else seems to be happening with respect to global migration. Multinational corporations have become migrants, seeking ever-cheaper resources and sources of labour. Rather than relocating workers to other countries, corporations now relocate operations closer to the workers. Through third-party producers, raw materials are shipped to the workers, and finished goods are shipped from the workers to the customers living half a world away.
This has had a dramatic hollowing out effect on the U.S. Rustbelt states—and indeed the much of the once thriving manufacturing capacity here in Charlotte County. Gone are the North American unionized manufacturing jobs—and whole industrial zones. Entire career paths have been erased, from sign-painters to patternmakers, as computerized robotics replace workers domestically, and inexpensive workers take over the assembly jobs relocated in far away places.
Meanwhile, over the past 40 years profit-hungry companies have offloaded costs in the form of expensive responsibilities to employees. Today, many jobs today are only contract positions with no benefits or pension plans, as companies transfer these to the individual workers, who must provide for their own retirement and health care. Dual income families have become the norm, and two generations of kids have now been institutionalized from daycare to post-graduate school without ever having a full time parent in the home.
Even while corporations have migrated, or migrated their purchasing patterns, workers continue to migrate toward jobs. These migrations come in two classes: urban and resource-based. A clear example of classical resource-based worker migration can be seen in the recent tension between Saint John and Alberta, in which both energy hubs are seeking the same skill sets.
Urban migrations are a more modern phenomenon. In developing countries all around the world people are migrating to large urban centres as agribusiness displaces them from their farms. This holds true in the developed world. Today, less than 2 percent of the American workforce is engaged in farming. But urban migrations are much more complex than the rural-urban transition. Entire urban landscapes have become specialized. Houston, for example, is a high tech hub. As such, it attracts engineers from around the world, and boasts a vibrant and affluent Asian population in its Sugar Land suburb.
Specialized communities have created a different kind of cultural distortion as individual experts seek jobs in these cities. In fact I ran across an example this weekend. A visiting tourism coordinator lives close to her work in Florida with her mother and daughter, while her husband, a financial planner, lives close to his work in Boston. They separate for the winter, and join up every summer in Massachusetts. In a few years they’ll both retire and move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to be close to world class skiing while their daughter attends an Ivy League school back east. They’re the post-modern, post-industrial family.
In his latest book, Gray’s Anatomy, philosopher John Gray mentions migration in a 1998 essay on globalization. He first speaks to the effects of global commerce, then forecasts the recent banking collapse, and finally identifies two of hallmarks of globalization: “delocalizing” and “deskilling”.
This caught my attention. For some time I’ve been mulling over the idea of “relocalizing” and “reskilling” our regional economy relative to the most daunting challenge of all: the inevitable decline of fossil fuel. Gray, among many others, sees fossil fuel as the major driver of the world’s spectacular technological and economic growth over the past 150 years. And he sees delocalizing and deskilling as the principal symptoms of this transition.
Of course what he means by delocalizing is that in a global economy we are inextricably linked to every human activity on earth. Everything we do is dependent on something happening somewhere else. Our food tomorrow is dependent on the weather in Mexico or the rainfall in California today. Confidence in our stock market today was affected Abu Dhabi bailing out Dubai World yesterday to the tune of $10 billion.
It’s clear that today’s economy is not local. And it’s equally clear that few of us have the skills to survive outside the global economy. And it’s this interdependence that makes our present system so completely vulnerable. The thin, fragile web of commerce can be easily disrupted, as we’ve seen in the financial meltdown over the past 18 months.
Other than “repurposing, relocalizing, retooling and reskilling” our local population what can we do? There are examples. One is the World Wide Web. Another is Al-Qaeda. Both institutions are based on a cellular approach to stability. In other words, both entities have been designed to function even when pieces of them are cut away and destroyed.
At present our local economy doesn’t have such a failsafe mechanism. The residents of Charlotte County would be hard pressed to supply their own food, let alone supply their own energy requirements. Forget about tools and clothing, we produce none of those.
And given that we’ve been exporting our best and brightest young minds for decades, it’s unlikely that we’ll be relocalizing—or desktopping—portions of the global mainframe economy any time soon.
The best we can do is fasten our seatbelts.
Aliens are alive and well and working among us. I know this because several years ago I set up the first meetings between Business New Brunswick and local businesses to discuss the possibility of Romanian immigration. Now they’re here. Whether these newcomers will settle in here or move on is yet to be seen.
Immigration can be a lightning rod topic. Sometimes locals feel that the newcomers are appropriating jobs that they might have had. Sometimes locals become culturally territorial and don’t want intruders distorting the existing culture with new language, mannerisms, ethnic food or whatever else they bring with them from the “old country”. Sometimes locals can just be plain aloof.
That doesn’t appear to be the case here in Charlotte County. As far as I can tell the Romanians have dovetailed nicely into the aquaculture, fish plant and low level manufacturing jobs recently vacated by Newfoundlanders and others who have migrated west to the oil sands projects. If anything, there still seems to be a shortage of able-bodied workers in the region.
The modern country we know as Canada was built on immigration. Scots came with the fur trade. The Loyalists returned from the American Colonies. The Irish came later followed by the Ukrainians, Poles and Chinese who helped build the national railway. Migrations have always been a part of human history, and in truth migrations are human history.
But something else seems to be happening with respect to global migration. Multinational corporations have become migrants, seeking ever-cheaper resources and sources of labour. Rather than relocating workers to other countries, corporations now relocate operations closer to the workers. Through third-party producers, raw materials are shipped to the workers, and finished goods are shipped from the workers to the customers living half a world away.
This has had a dramatic hollowing out effect on the U.S. Rustbelt states—and indeed the much of the once thriving manufacturing capacity here in Charlotte County. Gone are the North American unionized manufacturing jobs—and whole industrial zones. Entire career paths have been erased, from sign-painters to patternmakers, as computerized robotics replace workers domestically, and inexpensive workers take over the assembly jobs relocated in far away places.
Meanwhile, over the past 40 years profit-hungry companies have offloaded costs in the form of expensive responsibilities to employees. Today, many jobs today are only contract positions with no benefits or pension plans, as companies transfer these to the individual workers, who must provide for their own retirement and health care. Dual income families have become the norm, and two generations of kids have now been institutionalized from daycare to post-graduate school without ever having a full time parent in the home.
Even while corporations have migrated, or migrated their purchasing patterns, workers continue to migrate toward jobs. These migrations come in two classes: urban and resource-based. A clear example of classical resource-based worker migration can be seen in the recent tension between Saint John and Alberta, in which both energy hubs are seeking the same skill sets.
Urban migrations are a more modern phenomenon. In developing countries all around the world people are migrating to large urban centres as agribusiness displaces them from their farms. This holds true in the developed world. Today, less than 2 percent of the American workforce is engaged in farming. But urban migrations are much more complex than the rural-urban transition. Entire urban landscapes have become specialized. Houston, for example, is a high tech hub. As such, it attracts engineers from around the world, and boasts a vibrant and affluent Asian population in its Sugar Land suburb.
Specialized communities have created a different kind of cultural distortion as individual experts seek jobs in these cities. In fact I ran across an example this weekend. A visiting tourism coordinator lives close to her work in Florida with her mother and daughter, while her husband, a financial planner, lives close to his work in Boston. They separate for the winter, and join up every summer in Massachusetts. In a few years they’ll both retire and move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to be close to world class skiing while their daughter attends an Ivy League school back east. They’re the post-modern, post-industrial family.
In his latest book, Gray’s Anatomy, philosopher John Gray mentions migration in a 1998 essay on globalization. He first speaks to the effects of global commerce, then forecasts the recent banking collapse, and finally identifies two of hallmarks of globalization: “delocalizing” and “deskilling”.
This caught my attention. For some time I’ve been mulling over the idea of “relocalizing” and “reskilling” our regional economy relative to the most daunting challenge of all: the inevitable decline of fossil fuel. Gray, among many others, sees fossil fuel as the major driver of the world’s spectacular technological and economic growth over the past 150 years. And he sees delocalizing and deskilling as the principal symptoms of this transition.
Of course what he means by delocalizing is that in a global economy we are inextricably linked to every human activity on earth. Everything we do is dependent on something happening somewhere else. Our food tomorrow is dependent on the weather in Mexico or the rainfall in California today. Confidence in our stock market today was affected Abu Dhabi bailing out Dubai World yesterday to the tune of $10 billion.
It’s clear that today’s economy is not local. And it’s equally clear that few of us have the skills to survive outside the global economy. And it’s this interdependence that makes our present system so completely vulnerable. The thin, fragile web of commerce can be easily disrupted, as we’ve seen in the financial meltdown over the past 18 months.
Other than “repurposing, relocalizing, retooling and reskilling” our local population what can we do? There are examples. One is the World Wide Web. Another is Al-Qaeda. Both institutions are based on a cellular approach to stability. In other words, both entities have been designed to function even when pieces of them are cut away and destroyed.
At present our local economy doesn’t have such a failsafe mechanism. The residents of Charlotte County would be hard pressed to supply their own food, let alone supply their own energy requirements. Forget about tools and clothing, we produce none of those.
And given that we’ve been exporting our best and brightest young minds for decades, it’s unlikely that we’ll be relocalizing—or desktopping—portions of the global mainframe economy any time soon.
The best we can do is fasten our seatbelts.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Rolling thunder drifting into Coldplay
©
Somehow my name had popped up on the Serbia’s Ambassador to the world website. I’d Googled my name to see if my blog postings would come up, and there I was on this Serbian site. Oh, I realized after clicking in, it was the old “Serbia isn’t California” remark from a few columns back—the one in which I’d made a couple of faux pas.
The Serbian ambassador had written a short feature on my error, and several people had commented. The first was a young lady we’ll call Hayley—in fact that’s what she called herself. In two lines she dismissed whatever I had to say as irrelevant, as I’d spelled ‘Schwarzenegger’ incorrectly. So I clicked on her profile. Her blog came up with maybe 8 photos of her—one shirtless in a B-cup bra—confessing in her bio that she was 22 years old and trolling for dates. Always nice to get a sense of one’s critics, I thought.
In the good old days, before the Internet, editors controlled what hit the media. The dross was pre-vetted for the reader, leaving relatively sane, ready-for-publication information. That form held true through centuries of book printing, newspaper publishing and the relatively recent radio and television broadcasting. Now, with the Internet, anyone can express an opinion.
Yet editing is one of the most important and fundamental human skills. It isn’t unlimited creativity that sets us apart from other creatures—it’s the ability to edit out the irrelevant, to jettison the immaterial, in order to focus on and recombine into unique set of specifics. All human “discoveries”—and expertise—come from this ability to edit and focus.
And now we have the Web, with all its undisciplined, unrestrained opinion on full display for all to see and read. Rather than becoming a vast pool of valuable information, the Internet has become a vast cesspool of disinformation.
But one thing is certain. Whether the information is accurate or not, the Internet characterizes the tonal rhythms of a new century. In the last century, the tonality was mechanical. The sounds we came to love were the heavy-metal poundings in rapid percussive precision inside mechanical monsters of all types—printing presses, cannons, ship’s engines, paper mills, foundries, cars, transport trucks, railway locomotives and of course, Harley Davidsons.
An artist friend once stopped on a street to watch a Harley drive by. “A thing of beauty,” he said to himself reverentially, almost inaudibly. It looked like a ratty red heap to me, and a whole bunch too noisy. But it carried the rider low in the saddle, had lots of burnt chrome, and did that blat-blat-blat-blat farting sound that young kids and bikers seem to love.
Our little Charlotte County towns will be viscerally experiencing 5000 of these sounds up close in the first week of July next year. In case you haven’t heard Atlanticade is coming. There’ll be dresser Harleys and Sportsters and Fat Boys and gleaming custom choppers and Gold Wings and big imitation Harleys—the big twin Hondas and Yamahas and Kawasakis. There’ll be a few BMWs and old Triumphs and BSAs too, I’m sure, and a lot of sport bikes—crotch rocket Suzukis like the Hayabusa—and maybe even a Ducati or two. Just to put it all in perspective, at cruising speed, 5000 bikes riding three abreast will stretch out for almost 5 miles (or 8 kilometers if you prefer).
Now that’s rolling thunder. But one of the more interesting things about Atlanticade is not the noise but the demographic. These guys and gals are older—a lot older and a lot more affluent—than the young Born to Be Wild image they’re reliving. Which bodes very well for tourism, I expect, at least for one short week here next summer—that is if we can find enough ways for them to spend their money that quickly.
But for all their age and affluence rock and roll still courses through their veins as much as the sound of their bikes. Which brings me to the music my 17-year-old daughter downloads on her iPod. Every so often she hands over her ear buds wanting to see what I think. And what I think is this. It’s not exactly rock and roll.
It’s more like, well, I don’t know what. A lot of it doesn’t have much of a beat at all. One Radiohead tune seemed almost bland. And then it hit me. This is the Coldplay generation. This is the first generation of digital listeners. It’s the other side of the Internet phenomenon. While opinion and privacy go unedited, all those mechanical internal combustion engine sounds have been edited away in favour of a new, digital sensibility. The sound is more vacant, more ethereal, more lyrical—and less rhythmical than ever before.
Where the previous mechanical-industrial generations were primal, jazz being the highpoint of refinement, the new digital generation seems to have more in common with the past. This new music doesn’t seem to show up on the radio (which is mostly car-based anyway). It’s downloaded direct from server to iPod to ear. To me this music—like the Cocteau Twins tune, Alice—has more in common with the Impressionist compositions like Erik Satie’s Gymnopaedies or much older compositions from the Middle Ages or the Elizabethan Era.
It’s a bit like taking all the salt and sugar out of your diet. At first the food tastes bland, until you become accustomed to the real flavour of the food. So maybe there’s some decent editing going on here after all.
There’s something else to this transition that’s striking, too. Biker conventions like Atlanticade are graying anachronisms—the fading rumblings of old iron horses—in an age of dwindling fossil fuel reserves. Maybe our kids are consciously or subconsciously preparing for the post partum days to come.
Sure, there are still kids cruising around with the low-rider Hyundais with the huge 500-watt boom-box bass speakers in the back pounding out 120-decible hip hop. But there are a helluva lot more who are staying at home, downloading oh-so-cool tunes on iTunes and posting on Facebook.
I’m pretty sure even the girls in Serbia are well into this new digital paradigm. Come to think of it, I’ll have to consult Karl, the Serbian ambassador on this. I’ll keep you posted.
Somehow my name had popped up on the Serbia’s Ambassador to the world website. I’d Googled my name to see if my blog postings would come up, and there I was on this Serbian site. Oh, I realized after clicking in, it was the old “Serbia isn’t California” remark from a few columns back—the one in which I’d made a couple of faux pas.
The Serbian ambassador had written a short feature on my error, and several people had commented. The first was a young lady we’ll call Hayley—in fact that’s what she called herself. In two lines she dismissed whatever I had to say as irrelevant, as I’d spelled ‘Schwarzenegger’ incorrectly. So I clicked on her profile. Her blog came up with maybe 8 photos of her—one shirtless in a B-cup bra—confessing in her bio that she was 22 years old and trolling for dates. Always nice to get a sense of one’s critics, I thought.
In the good old days, before the Internet, editors controlled what hit the media. The dross was pre-vetted for the reader, leaving relatively sane, ready-for-publication information. That form held true through centuries of book printing, newspaper publishing and the relatively recent radio and television broadcasting. Now, with the Internet, anyone can express an opinion.
Yet editing is one of the most important and fundamental human skills. It isn’t unlimited creativity that sets us apart from other creatures—it’s the ability to edit out the irrelevant, to jettison the immaterial, in order to focus on and recombine into unique set of specifics. All human “discoveries”—and expertise—come from this ability to edit and focus.
And now we have the Web, with all its undisciplined, unrestrained opinion on full display for all to see and read. Rather than becoming a vast pool of valuable information, the Internet has become a vast cesspool of disinformation.
But one thing is certain. Whether the information is accurate or not, the Internet characterizes the tonal rhythms of a new century. In the last century, the tonality was mechanical. The sounds we came to love were the heavy-metal poundings in rapid percussive precision inside mechanical monsters of all types—printing presses, cannons, ship’s engines, paper mills, foundries, cars, transport trucks, railway locomotives and of course, Harley Davidsons.
An artist friend once stopped on a street to watch a Harley drive by. “A thing of beauty,” he said to himself reverentially, almost inaudibly. It looked like a ratty red heap to me, and a whole bunch too noisy. But it carried the rider low in the saddle, had lots of burnt chrome, and did that blat-blat-blat-blat farting sound that young kids and bikers seem to love.
Our little Charlotte County towns will be viscerally experiencing 5000 of these sounds up close in the first week of July next year. In case you haven’t heard Atlanticade is coming. There’ll be dresser Harleys and Sportsters and Fat Boys and gleaming custom choppers and Gold Wings and big imitation Harleys—the big twin Hondas and Yamahas and Kawasakis. There’ll be a few BMWs and old Triumphs and BSAs too, I’m sure, and a lot of sport bikes—crotch rocket Suzukis like the Hayabusa—and maybe even a Ducati or two. Just to put it all in perspective, at cruising speed, 5000 bikes riding three abreast will stretch out for almost 5 miles (or 8 kilometers if you prefer).
Now that’s rolling thunder. But one of the more interesting things about Atlanticade is not the noise but the demographic. These guys and gals are older—a lot older and a lot more affluent—than the young Born to Be Wild image they’re reliving. Which bodes very well for tourism, I expect, at least for one short week here next summer—that is if we can find enough ways for them to spend their money that quickly.
But for all their age and affluence rock and roll still courses through their veins as much as the sound of their bikes. Which brings me to the music my 17-year-old daughter downloads on her iPod. Every so often she hands over her ear buds wanting to see what I think. And what I think is this. It’s not exactly rock and roll.
It’s more like, well, I don’t know what. A lot of it doesn’t have much of a beat at all. One Radiohead tune seemed almost bland. And then it hit me. This is the Coldplay generation. This is the first generation of digital listeners. It’s the other side of the Internet phenomenon. While opinion and privacy go unedited, all those mechanical internal combustion engine sounds have been edited away in favour of a new, digital sensibility. The sound is more vacant, more ethereal, more lyrical—and less rhythmical than ever before.
Where the previous mechanical-industrial generations were primal, jazz being the highpoint of refinement, the new digital generation seems to have more in common with the past. This new music doesn’t seem to show up on the radio (which is mostly car-based anyway). It’s downloaded direct from server to iPod to ear. To me this music—like the Cocteau Twins tune, Alice—has more in common with the Impressionist compositions like Erik Satie’s Gymnopaedies or much older compositions from the Middle Ages or the Elizabethan Era.
It’s a bit like taking all the salt and sugar out of your diet. At first the food tastes bland, until you become accustomed to the real flavour of the food. So maybe there’s some decent editing going on here after all.
There’s something else to this transition that’s striking, too. Biker conventions like Atlanticade are graying anachronisms—the fading rumblings of old iron horses—in an age of dwindling fossil fuel reserves. Maybe our kids are consciously or subconsciously preparing for the post partum days to come.
Sure, there are still kids cruising around with the low-rider Hyundais with the huge 500-watt boom-box bass speakers in the back pounding out 120-decible hip hop. But there are a helluva lot more who are staying at home, downloading oh-so-cool tunes on iTunes and posting on Facebook.
I’m pretty sure even the girls in Serbia are well into this new digital paradigm. Come to think of it, I’ll have to consult Karl, the Serbian ambassador on this. I’ll keep you posted.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Climate change moving in right direction.
©
It’s like a Chinese finger puzzle: the more you struggle to get out, the more you’re stuck in the trap. And that’s exactly what it’s like trying to puzzle through the right wing climate-change-denier traps set by the Courier’s “guest commentary” writer Dr. Stephen Murgatroyd last week.
To be clear, this Murgatroyd fellow actually has nothing to do with the Courier; he’s a stringer for Troy Media, a Western Canadian outfit that offers its right wing columns to weekly newspapers at no cost. In his column, “Desperation grips environmental industry” Murgatroyd takes aim at Al Gore, David Suzuki, George Monbiot and British PM Gordon Brown. The intent, if I read it correctly, was to connect these high profile men to the “bizarre rhetoric” he claims is being launched before the upcoming climate change talks in Copenhagen.
In his slap at Al Gore, the “champion warmist,” as his invective begins, Murgatroyd claims that Gore told a business forum in Dubai that sea levels will rise by 220 feet in ten years. In actual fact Gore was reported as saying 67 meters, which was somehow translated into 220 feet.
But wait. Apparently Gore was misquoted by the Arab Internet services company Maktoob Business, the original news source. This was uncovered by the right wing American Thinker.com’s writer Marc Sheppard (who first ran a highly critical piece on Gore’s misreported statements). Sheppard concedes:
“Yesterday, I received such advice from Mr. Husain, who wrote to me in an email: ‘In the second quote, it should be 6-7 meters… not 67… It has been rectified on the website.’”
Husain clarifies further. The quote: ‘If the North Pole were to melt it could increase sea levels by 67 meters’ was replaced with: ‘Gore said if Greenland and West Antarctica, made up of massive ice sheets, were to melt it could increase sea levels by 6-7 meters … Greenland and West Antarctica are such massive amounts of ice each one of would lead to a six to seven meter increase in sea level if it were to melt. And both West Antarctica and Greenland are beginning to melt.’
Cleaning up just one misreported mess is tiring enough. So I won’t bother to deal with Murgatroyd’s slagging of Suzuki, Monbiot or Brown. But his voice is evidence of the quagmire of right wing sophistry spinning around climate change, peak oil, resource decline and environmental degradation on the Internet. Rather than talking about the potential impacts of these environmental challenges, these corporate shills do nothing but look for cracks in the messengers’ findings.
I find this reprehensible. And so do others.
Over the past two weeks I received two e-mails on the subject.
The first was from Liz Neve who wrote: “I want to express my thanks to Mr. McEachern for writing about the Courier's increased use of the opinion pieces from right wing think tanks based in Alberta. On the day his article appeared, there was another piece, from a third organization, Troy Media, on the same page, in which the author defends those who deny climate change—even though the enormous majority of science confirms the human impact on climate change and the importance of our needing to change the way we do things. Could it be that Troy Media is also funded by Alberta oil, as the other two Mr. McEachern discussed are?”
The other was from Donald Gutstein, a media prof at Simon Fraser University. Donald wrote: “I enjoyed your column on right-wing think tanks. You might find my book Not A Conspiracy Theory published last month, interesting in this regard.”
His cover blurb reads:
“In Not a Conspiracy Theory, Donald Gutstein skillfully documents one of the most important but least recognized political developments in the last thirty years: the prolongued propoganda campaigns mounted by business to influence our opinions on fundamental issues of social and political life. Think tanks with impressive names and populist sounding agendas—staffed credentialized researchers with well-honed reputations—churn out research that purports to be both independent and free of bias. But peel back the curtain and what do you find? Big business with its big bucks and anti-democratic agenda: maximizing and maintaining profits no matter what. Free of bias? Not even close.”
The climate deniers want us to believe that nothing is happening. And as I’m not a climate scientist, that may well be. But there are some scientists that I tend to trust. One of these is James Hansen, the scientist who successfully launched the global campaign to ban CFCs, which were destroying the protective ozone layer around the earth.
Hansen believes that figures that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is using for sea level rise this century—about 1.6 meters, tops—is too low. He warns that over 5 meters could be possible by 2095, as ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctic may be non-linear. The IPCC’s figures are based on a linear progression.
Sciencedaily.com, contradicting the opinions of many right wing climate change deniers, reported the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration findings, stating: “The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2009 was the second warmest on record, behind 2005, 1.12 degrees F (0.62 degree C) above the 20th century average of 59.9 degrees F (15.5 degrees C).”
And a month later the CBC reported that: “July was the warmest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.”
Here’s the most troubling aspect of all this. The Internet is overrun with climate change critics, the vast majority of whom have no scientific grounding in the climate science at all. Murgatroyd, for example, is a psychologist. Great, he knows how to shape opinion. But do we trust his climate science?
The real climate scientists—and the politicians who should be listening to them—are a distinct minority on the Internet. And what they do publish is often too technical for the lay reader.
I would think these issues would merit attention at the highest political level. And indeed they have. Prime Minister Harper recently appointed Mark Mullins of the right wing Fraser Institute to the board of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which funds university research projects including studies on climate change, and appointed his good friend and climate denier John Weissenberger to the board of Canada Foundation for Innovation, which funds large research projects.
Now that’s moving in the right direction.
It’s like a Chinese finger puzzle: the more you struggle to get out, the more you’re stuck in the trap. And that’s exactly what it’s like trying to puzzle through the right wing climate-change-denier traps set by the Courier’s “guest commentary” writer Dr. Stephen Murgatroyd last week.
To be clear, this Murgatroyd fellow actually has nothing to do with the Courier; he’s a stringer for Troy Media, a Western Canadian outfit that offers its right wing columns to weekly newspapers at no cost. In his column, “Desperation grips environmental industry” Murgatroyd takes aim at Al Gore, David Suzuki, George Monbiot and British PM Gordon Brown. The intent, if I read it correctly, was to connect these high profile men to the “bizarre rhetoric” he claims is being launched before the upcoming climate change talks in Copenhagen.
In his slap at Al Gore, the “champion warmist,” as his invective begins, Murgatroyd claims that Gore told a business forum in Dubai that sea levels will rise by 220 feet in ten years. In actual fact Gore was reported as saying 67 meters, which was somehow translated into 220 feet.
But wait. Apparently Gore was misquoted by the Arab Internet services company Maktoob Business, the original news source. This was uncovered by the right wing American Thinker.com’s writer Marc Sheppard (who first ran a highly critical piece on Gore’s misreported statements). Sheppard concedes:
“Yesterday, I received such advice from Mr. Husain, who wrote to me in an email: ‘In the second quote, it should be 6-7 meters… not 67… It has been rectified on the website.’”
Husain clarifies further. The quote: ‘If the North Pole were to melt it could increase sea levels by 67 meters’ was replaced with: ‘Gore said if Greenland and West Antarctica, made up of massive ice sheets, were to melt it could increase sea levels by 6-7 meters … Greenland and West Antarctica are such massive amounts of ice each one of would lead to a six to seven meter increase in sea level if it were to melt. And both West Antarctica and Greenland are beginning to melt.’
Cleaning up just one misreported mess is tiring enough. So I won’t bother to deal with Murgatroyd’s slagging of Suzuki, Monbiot or Brown. But his voice is evidence of the quagmire of right wing sophistry spinning around climate change, peak oil, resource decline and environmental degradation on the Internet. Rather than talking about the potential impacts of these environmental challenges, these corporate shills do nothing but look for cracks in the messengers’ findings.
I find this reprehensible. And so do others.
Over the past two weeks I received two e-mails on the subject.
The first was from Liz Neve who wrote: “I want to express my thanks to Mr. McEachern for writing about the Courier's increased use of the opinion pieces from right wing think tanks based in Alberta. On the day his article appeared, there was another piece, from a third organization, Troy Media, on the same page, in which the author defends those who deny climate change—even though the enormous majority of science confirms the human impact on climate change and the importance of our needing to change the way we do things. Could it be that Troy Media is also funded by Alberta oil, as the other two Mr. McEachern discussed are?”
The other was from Donald Gutstein, a media prof at Simon Fraser University. Donald wrote: “I enjoyed your column on right-wing think tanks. You might find my book Not A Conspiracy Theory published last month, interesting in this regard.”
His cover blurb reads:
“In Not a Conspiracy Theory, Donald Gutstein skillfully documents one of the most important but least recognized political developments in the last thirty years: the prolongued propoganda campaigns mounted by business to influence our opinions on fundamental issues of social and political life. Think tanks with impressive names and populist sounding agendas—staffed credentialized researchers with well-honed reputations—churn out research that purports to be both independent and free of bias. But peel back the curtain and what do you find? Big business with its big bucks and anti-democratic agenda: maximizing and maintaining profits no matter what. Free of bias? Not even close.”
The climate deniers want us to believe that nothing is happening. And as I’m not a climate scientist, that may well be. But there are some scientists that I tend to trust. One of these is James Hansen, the scientist who successfully launched the global campaign to ban CFCs, which were destroying the protective ozone layer around the earth.
Hansen believes that figures that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is using for sea level rise this century—about 1.6 meters, tops—is too low. He warns that over 5 meters could be possible by 2095, as ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctic may be non-linear. The IPCC’s figures are based on a linear progression.
Sciencedaily.com, contradicting the opinions of many right wing climate change deniers, reported the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration findings, stating: “The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2009 was the second warmest on record, behind 2005, 1.12 degrees F (0.62 degree C) above the 20th century average of 59.9 degrees F (15.5 degrees C).”
And a month later the CBC reported that: “July was the warmest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.”
Here’s the most troubling aspect of all this. The Internet is overrun with climate change critics, the vast majority of whom have no scientific grounding in the climate science at all. Murgatroyd, for example, is a psychologist. Great, he knows how to shape opinion. But do we trust his climate science?
The real climate scientists—and the politicians who should be listening to them—are a distinct minority on the Internet. And what they do publish is often too technical for the lay reader.
I would think these issues would merit attention at the highest political level. And indeed they have. Prime Minister Harper recently appointed Mark Mullins of the right wing Fraser Institute to the board of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which funds university research projects including studies on climate change, and appointed his good friend and climate denier John Weissenberger to the board of Canada Foundation for Innovation, which funds large research projects.
Now that’s moving in the right direction.
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