Maude Barlow is right: it’s something in the water

•••

We were picking up a few things across the border and had to stop in at Canada Customs to pay some duty. I struck up a conversation with one of the people behind the desk and we chatted about local politics. And then he mentioned the rising cost of water utility bills in St. Stephen.

To be honest I hadn’t thought about water costs, though I’ve written about water treatment and high levels of chlorine as well as the possibility of arsenic filtering into the water through the rocks upstream.

It triggered another memory, a discussion with a biologist and environmentalist who told me that an important natural gravel-bed filter had been disturbed by workers with heavy equipment at the source of the Dennis Stream water supply. That must have been a decade ago. Since then, he said, there have been problems with the quality and amount of water flow available to the town. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would warrant further investigation. Especially since the small town of St. Stephen alone uses over 1.3 million liters of water a day, consuming at the national rate.

There has also been increasing pressure on the St. Stephen water system over the years to supply both growing residential and industrial demands. While I couldn’t find any numbers on how much water it takes to produce a ton of particleboard (i.e. Flakeboard), I did find out that it takes a liter of water to make one small chocolate bar (i.e. Ganong). It would be fair to say that the Ganong factory has rather large water requirements given their successful production expansion during David Ganong’s tenure at the helm.

So if water costs are rising, is it due to the scarcity, the cost of the water treatment-delivery system or something else?

Environmental activist Maude Barlow tells us that water is the new blue gold. What concerns Barlow is the rapidly diminishing supply of clean fresh water, growing demand and the increasing pressure from corporations to take control of local water supplies.

She poses good questions: Who owns water? Should anyone? Should it be privatized? What rights do transnational corporations have to buy water systems? Should it be traded as a commodity in the open market? What laws do we need to protect water? What is the role of government? How do those in water-rich countries share with those in water-poor countries? Who is the custodian for nature's lifeblood? How do ordinary citizens become involved in this process?

With those questions Barlow starkly points out the massive grey areas surrounding the control of fresh water. In Canada this is of particular concern with the NAFTA (free trade agreement) tearing down barriers to national control of strategic resources.

But is that what is affecting us locally? Is that what’s driving up our annual household water costs to the level of our annual property taxes?

One of the reasons is the coastal effect. Surrounded by saltwater and tides, fresh water can’t be taken directly from the tidal rivers such as the St. Croix and St. John, which in addition to being flooded by saltwater twice a day, have been polluted by industry for decades. Our water comes from lakes, streams or groundwater aquifers, all of which require protection and maintenance, which comes at a cost.

These fragile sources of water are also more vulnerable. Groundwater supplies can’t be seen and, as has been proven the world over, are always in danger of being over-exploited. Lakes and streams are susceptible to problems from runoff and environmental pollution from sources as diverse as agriculture to recreation. And even natural environmental pollution such as algae and giardia pose ongoing challenges to our freshwater supply.

But these problems, all of them, have been around for years, and our local governments have coped very successfully with these challenges. So why would water rates be rising now, if the problems have been handled economically in the past?

Two factors come to mind. The first is the cost of upgrading aging water supply infrastructure, which is very expensive. Most of our systems in North America were first put in the ground over a century ago, and some of that legacy system is falling apart and in urgent need of replacement. That costs money.

The second factor is political. As governments centralize, more federal and provincial funds are spent on centralized administrations, which means there’s less money being transferred, proportionally, to smaller communities. Even federal transfer payments to the provinces are at risk of being cut. And who gets to chose between investing in local infrastructure and, say, building new federal prisons? So where are towns going to make up the shortfalls?

Raising water rates is an easy, nearly invisible fix. While raising property taxes raises a hue and cry at election time (which is rapidly upon us), water rates get a relatively free pass. If this is the case, it affects two groups: those who can’t afford the higher rates, and those who need cheap water to keep their industries running and workers employed.

If rising rates are indeed a concern, perhaps it’s time ask our politicians to open the tap the issue.

A homoerotic shaman Canada's greatest artist?

HUFF POST

What if I told all you Loyalist and Tory art lovers out here on the East Coast, in Toronto, and Alberta that some ugly, alcoholic, Native bisexual was the greatest Canadian artist who ever lived? You might tell me to get stuffed.

This year Norval Morrisseau would have turned 80. He had been suffering with Parkinson's disease and died in 2007 of cardiac arrest. The man was an enigma who left a legacy of paradoxes—and art historians scrambling to clean up the mess. But who was this madman and why should we care?

These are questions writer James R. Stevens touches in his recent book, A Picasso in the North Country, The Wild Journey of Canadian Artist Norval Morrisseau. I should add here as a disclaimer that Jim is a friend, and I'm not inclined to write a review of a friend's work.

But this wasn't my first encounter with the famous artist. I'd met him a couple of times; once was just before the end when he was selling bad paintings in a Thunder Bay mall. The other was an uneventful encounter in the late 1960s in a friend's apartment in Thunder Bay.

Not too long after that first meeting, the friend, Ray Andrews, told me about riding with Morrisseau on a cross-town bus. Within a couple of minutes Morrisseau asked him out on a date. When Andrews laughed it off, Morrisseau waited until the next stop, pulled a long phallic rock out of his pocket, and offered it "as something to remember" him by before getting off the bus. The rock is long gone, but the story is another of the apocryphal tales that add to Morrisseau's mythology.

And it's Morrisseau's mythology that Stevens unravels with these stories, and in doing so brings a richer understanding of the artist's life that might have been otherwise lost. But the question remains, why would we view Morrisseau as the greatest artist?

There's the conventional story. Through the tangled wreckage of his art career—which ends in art forgeries and a strange array of people caught up reshaping his legacy—we can now see the complete picture, starting with his early work in earth tones guided by Selwyn Dewdney. Then the Toronto years with Jack Pollock and their acrimonious split. And finally his Vancouver years.

All of this is well documented along with several decades of drifting across the country and periodically retreating back to Northern Ontario, famously giving away paintings for bottles of booze. And the man knew he was a mythic figure; he bought into his own shamanistic reputation, managed it, and played it for all it was worth.

Canada has a deep catalogue of excellent artists, from British-born Fred Varley to realist Alex Colville to popular modernists Michael Snow and Jack Bush. And all of them worked hard to define the Canadian experience and bring it to the world. Christopher Pratt's barren landscapes and more recent barren nudes come to mind. Or Jack Chambers' The 401 Towards London. But these originate in a European or American tradition reapplied to defining who we are as Canadians, as seen under a microscope or through a long lens (which adds an odd bit of irony to Colville's stark binocular painting, To Prince Edward Island).

Others, like Emily Carr and Bill Reid, translated the Canadian experience through Aboriginal images and totems. And native Woodlands artists like Roy Thomas caught the form but entirely missed the message.

The same was true of many of Canada's artists of the day. Their work provides a valuable record of our natural history, geography, and cultural iconography, but little of it examines their own meaning in society. But Morrisseau went beyond looking at society -- which he chose not to explore -- and directly channeled his own inner Canadian experience.

Merging his early experiences from the residential school with later experiences living on the streets of Beardmore and Thunder Bay, Morrisseau became a human being on his own terms, and did what no other Canadian had done before him. He explored himself. Not as a Canadian, but as a man.

This is exactly what qualifies Morrisseau as Canada's greatest artist. He was the first Canadian to paint his country from the inside out—not the outside in.

It was Morrisseau's vision of himself—as us—and not some cold-eyed gaze at his land or culture.

As Stevens' book tells us, here was a young man not afraid to dress up in drag and parade around one of the toughest logging towns in Northern Ontario in the early 1960s. Desperately poor, marginalized, unattractive, and strange, he asked, "Who am I?" To answer that, he adopted the fish and animals he'd seen on petroglyphs and painted his own in black and sepia in his now famous X-ray style.

When his mentor and adviser Selwin Dewdney tried to hold him to that style, Morrisseau rebelled, as he would again and again. He evolved. His work began to include self-portraits and wild colours. He became the child in the Madonna's arms. He became the man with the exposed penis and garish feathers in the stained glass paintings. One doesn't need a diagram to understand the origins of these images.

But motivation matters. And ultimately, in both life and in art, Morrisseau's insatiable "I want" cravings drove him from a Métis kid born to the rubbish heap, to international art superstar, to tragic figure.

In the end Stevens wisely dismisses the notion of Morrisseau as a shaman. Morrisseau was what we acknowledge him to be, a true artist.

Today's artists such as playwright Tomson Highway and performance artist Rebecca Belmore owe much to Morrisseau. We all do. John Ralston Saul alludes to this in A Fair Country when he points out that we are all Métis. As has the National Gallery's curator Greg Hill, who formally reclaimed Morrisseau as an equal in the pantheon of Canadian greats.

Yes, Norval Morrisseau was a flawed human being. Yet he is who we are, if we have the heart and the eyes to see. But buyer beware. His work is still so powerful that one piece can easily dominate an entire house.

Yes, but what will happen to Ossie's?

LOCAL

Sunday was the first day of summer and it’s only mid-March. So we packed up the kids and headed for the beach. The moon-roof was wide open, the windows were rolled down and the stereo cranked up.

We zipped along the secondary highway skirting the coast and breathing in the fabulous scenery dancing in the sun. We hit the main highway and headed east toward New River beach. The mood changed abruptly as we hit the new highway construction and shifted lanes to cross the newly constructed bridge over the Digdeguash canyon. Heavy yellow Caterpillar equipment stood idle on both sides of the road, gatekeepers to the construction ahead.

But modern freeway construction in New Brunswick isn’t that ominous. Lane changes are clearly marked and everything is neatly paved. I’m impressed with the planning and speed of highway construction out here.

In minutes we sped past Ossie’s, the famous seafood concession. I have two distinct connections with the place though I’ve never actually eaten there. The first was in the middle of the night when my cellphone conked out and I stopped to use the payphone booth. I put my computer memory stick on the top of the phone and forgot it. I still wonder about the files I lost. The second was meeting with Frank McKenna in Toronto. Knowing I lived in this area the first thing he asked was, “How’s Ossie’s doing?”

And that flashed through my mind as we left it in our rearview. With the new road construction, how will Ossie’s be doing? Would it still be there next year? I doubt that provincial highway planners design dedicated on- and off-ramps for seafood stands.

I’d been involved with highway relocation issues a few years ago, before the new highway bypassed St. Stephen. Though the planning process is complicated it’s a well-ordered one with easements and ramps and signage sites all covered by rigid provincial highway regulations. And the results are self-evident. These new planned highways radically alter how we see the landscape. Whereas before we saw the geography through the twists and turns of the old two-lanes, the new freeways open up the landscape into magnificent, sweeping vistas inviting us onward to the horizon.

The beauty of this, aside from the natural aesthetics, is the improved linkage between large urban centres. The drive from the border to Moncton, or even Halifax, is now a breeze. And perhaps with a new toll highway through northern Maine, we can soon travel, uninterrupted, on freeway from Montreal to Halifax.

But back to the beach. It was deserted and breathtaking and we walked the beach and played in the sand until the sun set before heading home.

The next day we had errands to do in St. Stephen, so we took the new four-lane instead of the old coastal road. Again, it was nice to climb up high over the coast to overlook the vistas, the mountains and inlets and islands in the distance. About halfway to the town we passed the only billboard: a St. Stephen Chocolate Town ad, inviting us to turn in. The obvious irony struck me. For years St. Stephen residents fumed at the summer highway traffic clogging up their town as the cars slowly wound their way down to the two border crossings. And now the town is advertising for tourists.

When new highways bypass small communities everything changes. While the towns are better connected to larger centres, they’re also less relevant. They’ve been instantly relegated to backwater status, and they either survive as destinations in their own right or they begin to fade away.

This pattern is not new. It’s been going on for the better part of 60 years. Freeways are the visible extensions of something much larger, the urbanization and centralization of modern societies. Beyond mentioning it, I’ll avoid the role fossil fuel has played in all of this, though that role has been profound.

Centralization and urbanization are the visible results of, and are only possible because of, these relatively new energy inputs. Our modern, vibrant communities are much larger than in the past, and much more centralized. Where communities once sprang up ever 10 to 12 kilometers, the distance a horse and wagon could comfortably traverse both ways in a day, the new community spacing is the distance crossed on less than a half a tank of gas, roughly a two-and-a-half-hour drive. Exactly the distance between Saint John and Moncton, for example.

New Brunswick is still very much a rural province. In its effort to modernize and urbanize its society and economy, it has invested heavily in new highway infrastructure, making it, in my opinion, one of the most freeway-linked provinces in Canada.

But with every gain comes some measure of loss. So the question stands, what will happen to Ossie’s? And will we really miss it?

My thought? You might want stop in there before it disappears altogether.

Everything you need to know is on Netflix

HUFF POST

The wonderful thing about living in a small town on the East Coast is nothing is exactly current or topical. This is especially true if you work from home. Social contact is reduced to about zero, other than the ubiquitous e-mails and IMs. No one uses the phone much any more.

So the phone call I got this afternoon stood out. It was our nine-year-old son. In the softest voice possible he whispered that he was in ‘the office.’ Yes, I said. Barely audible, he told me that he ‘hadn’t paid attention’ in class. ‘Oh,’ I said, without surprise. ‘Well, OK,’ I said. He went on to tell me that he hadn’t paid attention three times, and was moved into the ‘red zone’ on the board, whatever that was, and was going to lose three of his recesses. ‘Oh,’ I said. It sounded vaguely like a Catholic confession to me.

His teacher got on the line and, in her perkiest teacher-voice I’m sure, told me that it wasn’t her doing; the students had devised the system, and, though it sounded tough, it was just what it was, the students wanted it this way. ‘Oh. OK,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t pay attention at home sometimes. Older brothers,’ I said. She made a graceful slide into a ‘getting back to the class’ and that was it.

I put down the phone and went into the living room. My wife was working on a client web site on her laptop and was concurrently watching a documentary. Yes, on Netflix. It was about some old guy who’d been accused of murdering his brother. I was hooked and dropped into a chair.

The old guy reminded me of some of the people out here in New Brunswick. In fact, there were four old guys and they all looked alike, grey beards, longish curly hair, weathered faces. They were the Ward brothers, all in their 60s, illiterate farmers living in upstate New York. The upshot was that Delbert, one of the three young brothers, was accused of suffocating his older brother. The police had obtained a confession of sorts and their first conclusion was that it was a mercy killing: the older brother had been sick. Then some eager cop dug a little deeper and found out that the two old guys had been sharing a bed, and the prosecution’s theory moved from euthanasia to a sex-and-violence scenario.

Except that there wasn’t any evidence of violence. Or sex. Or even suffocation. The old bird’s heart had just given out.

I’m not quite sure what got to me about this film. It triggered a few flashbacks to the old hermits hiding out in the northern Ontario backwoods that my brother, an antique car collector, used to visit. Occasionally I’d tag along and what I remember most is how these old guys smelled. Like wood smoke and sweat and mothballs and mold. Especially the mold. Their houses were small and the walls were always streaked with mold from the leaky roofs.

The point of the movie, the intentionally and ironically named Brother’s Keeper, was the contrast between the old dudes and the slick, professional legal system, and if the movie proved only one thing, it was that the brothers with their IQs in the low 60s seemed to be a helluva lot brighter and nicer than the county cops and prosecutors.

The movie was over. My wife absent-mindedly flicked on another doc. This time it was The Corporation. I’d seen it before. I got up to make us some coffee, resigned to the fact that the afternoon was shot, and thought about my son and his crime and punishment. The flashback was immediate. There I was in grade three, caught daydreaming again. I was looking out the window and hadn’t realized that the teacher had asked me a question. I looked back. Everyone in the room was silent and staring at me. I was called up to the front of the class and, with great but familiar formality, was given the strap ten times on the left hand. All in all I got the strap on ten or twelve occasions that year, all for the same offence.

Strangely, I think my teacher actually liked me. (Yes, the old joke, one does wonder about the ones she didn’t like.) She even invited me and my whole family out to her farm, which come to think of it wasn’t too different from the cow-and-chicken outfit the old guys ran in the movie. I have an old black and white photo to prove it.

The Corporation proved all over again just how much we’ve changed in fifty years. The old guy movie was just some kind of aberration, a leftover twilight zone, compared to the new corporate order with its industrialized agriculture, terminal seeds and all, and the culture-wide mind control agendas. I mean, it’s a pretty good movie. And it’s aging well, given that corporations seem to be getting worse instead of better.

But I had this nagging thought. Were the old dudes really that much of an exception? As I drive through rural New Brunswick (as former city-dwelling Ontarians we still do “discovery” tours with the kids) I can plainly see the great hollowing out of the rural economies. You can see the old people still living alone in their crumbling houses, paint peeling. Whole islands, like nearby Campobello, have been split into two cultures, the full-time residents who earn a hard scrabble living from lobster fishing, tourism work and EI cheques to keep going through the winter, and the part-time people who arrive in new SUVs and summerize their freshly painted pastel cottages overlooking the sea.

The phrase Brother’s Keeper keeps coming back to mind as I surf through more of the Netflix documentaries. I’ve seen a lot of them, probably too many. All the best ones speak to what we’re doing to the home planet, even the wonderfully gauzy Blue Planet series that my kids watch. The more we know the less we seem to be able to do about it. Or perhaps it’s just the fatigue factor. How many doom and gloom stories can you watch or read before you just don’t give a damn any more? Apparently, I must have a higher tolerance than most.

Fortunately there’s a built-in offset: all those other Netflix categories, months if not years of good diversion to keep you blissfully happy and distracted from your contract work waiting in your office.

All I can say is, thank God I had an excuse today. The weather was grey and wet, so a movie might be forgiven. But if it were sunny and warm it would have been a whole other temptation. Maybe what I need is a perky teacher and some cruel classmates to keep me in line. Can I get something like that online?

Taking care of ourselves used to be easier, why?

•••

Break is over and the kids are back at school. Meanwhile Daylight Savings has sprung forward and I’ve lost an hour that turned into an all night work session leaving me very tired this morning. And to top it off, it’s been the most glorious, sunny day of the new year.

It was so nice we took the baby out in her stroller, though she’s suffering from a cold. We worry about these things as parents, and dial it up when one of our boys tells us there’s been a case of whooping cough in their school. Did our baby pick that up? Kids are constant worry that doesn’t let up even when they’re out on their own.

We took the baby to the hospital a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t for her. Sharon needed some minor tests. While she was inside I paced up and down the hallways with the baby for nearly an hour.

The walls are lined with old photographs of the doctors and nurses who used to work there and at the earlier Chipman Hospital. It was the old one torn down to make way for the lovely, riverside Granville Park, which was recently sold to developers who put up that giant vinyl-clad condo project I keep complaining about. But I digress.

At the end of one hallway there was a large photomontage of all the registered nurses who’d graduated from the local hospital. I recognized one of the nurses in the photos. She was a friend’s mother. As I stared at the antique faces it occurred to me that there were no nurses schooled and trained here in the local hospital. There are now nursing schools for that. I correctly assumed that the nearest one would be at the university Fredericton. Training, like everything else, has been professionalized and centralized. Knowledge, technology and management have replaced caring, learning and cooperating.

But the Town of St. Stephen isn’t the same place it used to be either. A century ago it was a thriving manufacturing centre and its highway was the St. Croix River. It’s primary trading partners were the neighbouring towns on both sides of the Canadian-American border. It has been more than 50 years since the last of the manufacturing jobs were sent offshore where the wages were cheaper. The only place left is the Ganong candy factory.

Today St. Stephen, like most other small towns, is a service centre. That means there are government offices, a handful of struggling family-owned retail stores and three or four big box stores run by head offices in Toronto or somewhere even bigger. All of the banks are centrally managed. Even the government offices, not to mention the hospitals, are centrally managed. And tourism and welfare cheques have replaced the lost manufacturing jobs.

So what have we lost in the exchange besides production jobs? In a phrase: our local self-reliance. Instead of community leaders we now have branch managers who can’t quite make their own decisions. Instead of well-paid, industrious workers, we have more unmotivated, low-paid part-time workers who are forced to resort to seasonal unemployment “benefits.” And the income gap between the wealthy and the working poor has widened, as we have all heard by now.

As these gaps continue to widen, jobs become more seasonal and low-end wages drop further, citizens (you and I) turn into desperate servants rather than dignified workers. And as outsiders and foreigners come in to manage these service businesses local mythologies are ignored, misunderstood and ultimately distorted and forgotten as the business culture becomes Disneyfied into caricature.

Everything becomes tourism (from our shopping “experience” to entertainment) as production and even innovation continues to be off-shored. A subculture of resentment emerges resulting in vandalism, disrespect, drug use and crime, affecting tourism itself. The end state, as documentarian Michael Moore points out, is Flint, Michigan. Not exactly the tourist mecca of the New World.

Of course it’s not that bad in our quiet corner of New Brunswick. It’s still livable here. But one can feel and see the loss of pride in our communities. And even enduring landmarks like the Algonquin Hotel in St. Andrews show the loss of pride and signs of decline from decades of centralized management.

Perhaps even more damaging than the loss of pride is the loss of trust as our society becomes more unequal. So how might we return to a more intimate, trust-based society?

We might begin by introducing the idea of decentralization into our political decision-making. And control of our local energy systems is the first step, whether these are small hydro-electric dams, solar arrays, windmills or tidal turbines. One way of actually doing this might be forming local-regional energy cooperatives, like credit unions, whereby local citizens can again become both producers and customers of their own products.

But energy self-reliance, as much as food self-reliance, has become a dangerous notion. Powerful centralized forces and their legions of employees, both public and private, see self-reliance as a threat to their existence. As it should be.

Our regional resources and our regional citizenship belong to us and not to some distant head office.

I am with the Lorax, at least on paper

•••

Here I am, sitting in a hotel room, looking at a blog photo of Stephen Harper with a sour look on his face. Apparently at least one American Jungian psychologist is having a problem with our PM.

Yes, it’s March Break, the kids are in the pool and I can’t quite take the TV with shows like 17 Kids and Counting, which in the first five minutes gives you a picture of some Christian family with seventeen kids and another on the way. Oh dear.

But back to Harper. The Jungian blogger writes, and I quote: “This is a Prime Minister who has no trouble lying to anyone and everyone in public while promoting a vision of taking down other political parties and destroying the social fabric of Canada in favour of vested economic interests which are not necessarily aligned with any particular nation. In my opinion, he is not much different from many other leaders, acting out of a collective shadow in the attempt to gain and keep power.” Enough of that, we’re on vacation.

Well, a mini-vacation. Instead of doing the 60-hour round trip drive to Florida we decided to do a long weekend trip, pick up our daughter at university and go hang out. Maybe take in the new Lorax movie in 3D at an amusement park in Dieppe. And that’s what we did last night. But, oh, the irony.

It’s difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with the movie last night. The Lorax, for those who don’t know one of Dr. Suess’s most famous characters, is the guardian of a vast forest of Truffula trees. The Once-ler comes along, invents Thneeds, a knitwear product made from the tops of said trees and through a series of misadventures manages to wipe out the entire forest leaving behind an industrial wasteland.

Before we got to the movie theatre we first had to find it. It was a drive through a depressing commercial maze with the typical box stores: Wal-Marts and Sears and drive-thrus and paved parking lots. In fact acres and acres of them with the Crystal Palace indoor amusement facility and movie complex at one end. I counted three trees. No Truffulas. The parking lot was pockmarked with massive potholes as if it had been the epicentre of a bombing raid.

We stopped and bought our theatre tickets then checked into the attached hotel. The prices were outrageous but hey, this was a holiday. We were starving, so we headed into the amusement park (a giant steel box) to find...just one restaurant. It was a dark and shop-worn place done up in a quasi-British pub theme and it was packed, so we waited. And waited. Finally, we got a table. And waited some more. We were going to miss our movie. We got up and left.

We walked through the complex to go to the theatre but discovered we had to go outside and walk around the theatre to get in the front door. Still starving, we walked through the buffet-style food concession and ordered up a few slices of pizza, two bags of popcorn and a hotdog, a quick fifty bucks, chu-ching.

The Lorax movie was OK. Lots of great digital animation in 3D. On the way out one old guy said, “that had a good message.” I surveyed the crowd. Lots of overweight kids dressed in nylon and polyester with matching parents. This wasn’t exactly the granola bar experience Dr. Suess might have had in mind.

After the movie we headed back into the amusement mall and the big box bookstore with, yes, a Starbucks. The parental units had coffee, the kids shopped for books. We were all beat so we turned in early. We got up hungry, looking forward to some kind of quick snack, only to learn there was no continental breakfast in the hotel. We’d have to go back to said English pub for that. So we got dressed and drove through the vast wasteland of parking lots to find a Sobey’s store for real food and a Tim Horton’s for coffee, then back to our room and the wet towels and TV.

During a brief five minutes, I follow what the kids are watching: the aforementioned show with the seventeen kids. In this episode the two Christian parents get ready to go out on a rare solo vacation. It starts with him gassing himself inside a cloud of hairspray to fix his do (which looks virtually identical to the stiff do of the aforementioned Harper). The happy couple is off to San Francisco to the famed Haight-Ashbury district, where they tour old head shops and hippie hangouts while offering Christian morality statements such as “just say no” to sex, drugs, alcohol or just about any other vice San Fran has to offer. One wonders why they’d go there in the first place. But the cynical answer is clear; it makes for better reality TV. And all that in just five minutes. Change channel.

I am now sitting beside the indoor pool with four giant fake palm trees, a lava-looking mountain along one wall and a mass of happy, shouting kids in the over-chlorinated water and bored parents sitting under thatched hut umbrellas. If I didn’t know better, I could be in Florida.

The simple irony, of course, is the vast corporatization of every facet of modern life as we pursue our desire for play, authentic experiences and social interaction. It must make guys like Harper, the ultimate corporate man, proud. Let’s hope this movie plays out as well as The Lorax does.