How We Do Honour Them

It’s 2019.

The Great War, the War to End all Wars, that cataclysm of a generation, ended 101 years ago. The Peace Treaty of Versailles, set down to formally end the war and begin the rebuilding, this year celebrates its own Centennial.

Versailles. The Treaty to end the War to End all Wars. World War 1. And yet you don’t call something Part 1 without anticipating a Part 2, and the failures of Versailles is one of the first causes of the Second Great War any student of history will learn.

I am a man who can recall as a boy meeting veterans of the Great War. My Grandfather’s generation fought in the Second, in Korea. My best man at my 2006 wedding was an 84 year old friend named Bob, who had once lied about his age to leave the farm and enter the war, a man who had fought house to house in Ortona, who had in Holland watched a member of the Hitler Youth intent on destroying the track of a Canadian tank instead fumble a grenade and blow himself to bloody pieces. I saw war fought in Afghanistan twice before I was thirty. I have seen Rwanda, Kosovo, Syria, Myanmar.

I was twenty-three when the two Towers of the World Trade Centre toppled downward, in an attack born from hatred that can be traced back to the Great War, indeed beyond to the Crusades. Perhaps those towers should’ve fallen sideways, just two more dominoes in a line that stretches back for thousands of years, and in our divided and bitter and wilfully ignorant times appears to stretch out past the horizon still.

We’re out of veterans of the Great War. Soon the last of the vets of the Second and of Korea will have gone to their reward as well. Time marches on. How will we honour now? How will we remember, lest we forget? 

What do we do when memory becomes history?

We will always have symbols like the poppy above our hearts, we will always have reminders like this ceremony, and we will always have veterans. What the past 101 years have taught the human race is that we may always have war because we always have had war. That is, until we have the right kind of war and there is no human race. And that is not farce.

War is humanity’s basic response to having no response. It’s the international equivalent of an ape clubbing another ape over food. In 1914, Germany and Britain were the biggest guys eyeing each other across a party, looking for an excuse to fight and bring their friends. It was inevitable. An archduke and a powder keg were incidental.

Fitzgerald’s “great Teutonic migration” had begun. Britain was at war. Was Canada ready? “Aye, ready,” came the answer. Britain brought its colonies and colonies like Canada brought their many peoples. But they didn’t know what for.

Saskatchewan farm-boys died in the trenches. Indigenous sharpshooters returned home to a country that still offered them no equality or dignity. Ukrainian Canadians were imprisoned for the crime of simply having the wrong last name.

We honour those men and women of yesterday, those boys and girls because they knew not what. The Second Great War was a defense against brutality, racism, and fascism, and yet the honour given was to kill or be killed again, for young men to die at Dieppe to test old men’s theories, for Indigenous vets who had fought beside their peers to return to Canada and have their children imprisoned in residential schools, for Japanese Canadians to lose everything they had for having the wrong last name. War has no honour.

Being little more than a child and facing death for you-know-not-what has no honour. Dying for your country has no honour. They must be honoured.

Honour shouldn’t be a noun. It is not something you can gain, something that can be quantified. Honour is a verb. It’s what you do for those who died and those who survived and lived on, for those who fought so that we can live freely to ponder what war is. What is war.

How do we honour after these 101 bloody, racist, divided years? By turning to the person beside us and declaring: no more. Disagreement is a privilege, but violence is folly.

They fought with the hope that they could save our world from itself. So that we wouldn’t have to fight.

We honour them for laying it all out on the wires in the mud, amid the hoots of the shells and the screams of the dying, because they had to believe in something, and so they believed in us. They believed in us, and we must honour them—lest we forget.

Black Lives, Sex Crimes--Do Thoughts Matter?

              We live in interesting times. We live in alarming times.

              Ignorance, partisan politics, climate change. Racism, anti-vaxxers, MAGA.

              The election of an American President the whole planet would be embarrassed if aliens ever found out about. Yellow vests. Pipeline convoys. There’s so much to oppose and there’s opposition to the opposition, but some of the intended good creates bad. It’s all so muddy.

The #METOO movement and Black Lives Matter have been important grassroots attacks on a status quo too complacent with that which is harmful. But they haven’t happened without their own complications, their own questions. Please excuse the racial irony here: but the world just ain’t that black and white.

And sex? Oh, my oh my. I lament the fall of Kevin Spacey even if it does sound if his sexually exploitive misadventures (is that PC enough?—I can’t even keep up anymore) are more than just a single incidence, more than just one person’s accusation, and more than just something that happened thirty years ago. Harvey Weinstein appears to be a career scumbag who deserves every bit of punishment that’s coming. Bill Cosby went from America’s Dad to, yeah, pretty damn unsettling. It’s good these cases are coming to light, even if a single mis-step from a very long time ago leads to a downfall. Celebrity shouldn’t be protection. If you learn nothing else from this, it’s that partiality to a celebrity can only lead to disappointment. I mean, Bill Cosby. He created the Fat Albert show.

Some remain questionable and make you think about how quick we are to judge someone, to convict them in the court of public opinion. I’m left wondering if we’re sometimes too quick to judge and worse, what our judgements say about our views of retribution.

The most recent witch hunt targets Liam Neeson, who admitted in a weirdly off-hand way that he once (forty years ago) wanted to commit violence against a random black man—even seeking one to attack—after a friend of his was raped by a black man.

In the outcry that I heard raised those two key components—that he was reacting to a friend’s assault and that it happened during the Ford Administration—are never addressed. It’s treated as plain and simple racism and current events. That’s not exactly what’s going on here. The man admitted fault in his thoughts and almost in his actions, he was expressing the wrongness of this and attributing it youth and rage at what happened to a friend. That’s not an excuse, mind—that’s added facts. Facts are really easy to avoid when they’re inconvenient to your opinion.

The man is simply attacked with the context completely ignored and somehow his story is woven into the modern rhetoric of racism. That’s stupid. Thoughts like this are wrong—as Neeson in his 60s recognizes—but this cannot be reflective of now. These events are as topical as the Cold War. This is not an unpunished crime (like Cosby and Spacey), this is a fit of passion in a young man being judged by himself forty years later as wrong. This is the growth of a human.

No, that doesn’t mean I’m saying it’s okay. It means I’m saying that if we who oppose racism light our torches anytime anyone admits to past wrongdoing we’re going to a) be just as stupid as the folks who prop up Trump and Kenney or let their kids get polio because they read a website and b) we’re going to run out of humans real quick because even Jesus a completely wise kid. That’s why it’s called growing up.

At what point do the facts become to hazy or dated to be valid? If it involves sex or racism it’s never not valid, maybe, but then when a person is completely written off before the system we have to supposedly find truth and rehabilitate the guilty can do it’s job, we’re in mob territory. We have democracy for a reason. Even if Facebook is undermining it. (Note to self: compose a blog how social media is turning us back in to barbarians.)

So many of these allegations were from thirty or forty years ago. Spacey’s was just the one but so many followed it became nearly impossible to contest it. Cosby was actually convicted in a court, and again, the sheer number of accusers made even the court of public opinion fairly credible in its assessment. But in cases like Neeson’s we’re saying that a single impulse (without action) admitted to in the frame of the perpetrator’s own very dated and hazy recollection, we’re now outside the realm of logic.

I once had a conversation with someone who said that if only one allegation against someone is true, then the witch hunt is worth it, and every opinion is valid. Maybe not wrong, but tough talk.

It’s not a new pattern. People have been accused of “sexual interference” before and have for ages, maybe just not in the new politically correct buzz term nonsense speak. The media has taken it and run with it. Lesser journalists are quick to condemn the accused or even add a creative twist or bias to the attacks.

Been around before but it’s certainly stronger now. And rightly so. That #BLACKLIVESMATTER and #METOO have taken by wedging themselves so deeply into our collective consciousness shows we can change a society. Change is happening where it should have long ago but with change should come rationale thought. Otherwise things are just bad in a new way.

We exist in a world where innocence until guilt is proven is how we are supposed to function. Confession to mistakes in youth should equal applause for growth as a person (assuming an unconvicted crime isn’t lingering there somewhere). When we start convicting people for unacted thoughts we’ve gone Orwell.

Non-Fiction Bias

Recently, I was having a discussion with some colleagues about the impact of non-fiction: its composition, its purpose, its effect.

“There’s no such thing as truly non-fiction,” one of them said with a cocked eyebrow and playful smirk. “Not really.”

We pressed her for an explanation. We are writers, editors, many of us educators or at least writing instructors. We work in words and the difference between non-fiction (true) and fiction (made-up) is as fundamental as the difference between poetry and prose. It isn’t just generally accepted: it’s gospel.  

“No escaping bias,” she said. “Intent.”

An author cannot be separated from his story and thus his bias cannot be either.

I was reminded of Descartes’s argument for the existence of God built around the questionable logic that an imperfect being cannot think up a perfect being so therefore God has to exist because no human is perfect. Then I grew uncomfortable for making two mental references to Christianity in the same literary discussion.

The bible? You wanna talk non-fiction . . .

As the day wore on and I was able to think on my own, I reviewed what I knew. Non-fiction is truth, as opposed to “based on a true story” which (as I’ve discussed on this blog before) means nothing because everything is based on a true story and based is the loaded term here. The story that whatever fiction claiming to be non is “based upon” is life.

But we’re back, because isn’t non-fiction “based upon” life as well? It’s seen and told by a person. Everyone introduces bias because it’s impossible not to.

I run the risk now of endorsing the rhetoric I so deplore that news media—other than, say, Fox or Rebel which are defined by bias (and idiocy)—have bias. The presentation of facts by the “liberal media” is what keeps Facebook misinforming and Trump tweets fuelled. Stephen Colbert said that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”  

Facts look like a bias when they run counter to your alternative facts.

Non-fiction should not become narrative because that’s where it runs into trouble. The story—with a beginning, middle, and end—becomes the driving force over facts that are compartmentalized or categorized or analyzed (or all of the above). The more that a character can be felt in a piece, save biography, the less factual that piece is. And when the writer is a character the ground becomes very shaky indeed.

When the author himself appears in a piece with the use of the I/me pronoun, as in an opinion piece where the usually fact-grounded journalist can vent his spleen over what those facts have been telling him and which he’s been unable to say if he works for any credible media outlet, you get strictest bias. The author writes himself as a character within the piece than you’re in the Gonzo journalism of Thompson or his tamer mimickers (still in the pages of Rolling Stone) and you can trust nothing as fact and nothing as fiction. Truth becomes as questionable as Thompson’s sobriety—but it’s all a hell of a lot of fun still.

So, we return to my colleague’s query: is there such a thing as non-fiction?

Well, the complete presentation of facts is impossible without analysis of those facts because you must keep or cut. Diction becomes murderous. What’s different between he pulled her from the car, and he ripped her screaming from the car? Analysis automatically has some sort of bias. The human element is unavoidable. No matter how hard a writer or a newscaster tries to avoid bias it’s impossible not to appear to present it, even if you hadn’t meant to. That’s how a headline “Trump Contradicts Earlier Statement” can be attacked as a liberal spin. Trump says a thing, then says the opposite, then says he never said the first thing—and it’s the media that has a problem? The Thought Police march on . . .

Perhaps the next great wave in true non-fiction, as opposed to the nebulous, wondrous, and oh-so-hard to pin down creative non-fiction genre (isn’t it all—I digress!), will be fiction that defines itself by its author’s absence. No byline, no publisher, both sides presented with tame language and full equality. Neutered news.

No, say I, better an even interpreted bias than that.

Booklist 2018

 Booklist 2018 

January 1-March 19 

1. Secret Path by Gord Downie  

2. Dune by Frank Herbert 

3. xkcd volume 0 by Randall Munroe 

4. An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi 

5. Vancouver by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths 

6. The Essence of Buddhism by Jo Durden Smith 

7. Sheepfarmer’s Daughter by Elizabeth Moon 

8. Red Hood and the Outlaws Vol 1. by Scott Lobdell 

9. Decoys by William Robertson 

10. The Adventures of a South Pole Pig by Chris Kurtz 

11.  The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson  

12. Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel  

13. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 

14. Night by Elie Wiesel 

March 20-June 21 

15. Dracula by Bram Stoker 

16. Conquerors by Roger Crowley 

17. Spain by Robert Goodwin  

18. Untangling Self by Andrew Olendzki 

19. Coke Machine Glow by Gord Downie 

20. Vallista by Steven Brust 

21. Watership Down by Richard Adams 

22. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 

23. Doomwar by Jonathan Maberry and Scott Eaton 

24. Mini Pig Owners Guide by Stephanie Matlock  

25. On Writing Well by William Zinsser 

26. The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien  

27. Mini-pig Training Book by Kimberly Chronister 

28. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien 

29. Out From Boneville by Jeff Smith 

30. The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith 

31. Viking Age Iceland by Jesse Byock 

32. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 

June 22-Sept 20 

33. Eyes of the Storm by Jeff Smith 

34. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling 

35. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien 

36. The Never-Ending Present by Michael Barclay 

37. The Dragonslayer by Jeff Smith 

38. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke 

39. Unfinished Tales by J. R. R. Tolkien  

40. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes  

41. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien 

42. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien 

43. Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn 

44. Rock Jaw: Master of the Eastern Border by Jeff Smith 

45. Old Man’s Cave by Jeff Smith 

Sept 20-Dec 31 

46. Mind Platter by Najwa Zebian 

47. The Overstory by Richard Powers 

48. The Princes of Ireland by Edward Rutherford 

49. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

50. The Broadview Anthology of Poetry Ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Amanda Goldrick Jones 

51. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien 

52. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline 

53. Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne 

54. The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer 

55. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 

56.  Ghost Circles by Jeff Smith 

57. Tay John by Howard O’Hagan 

58. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden  

59. Treasure Hunter by Jeff Smith 

60. Crown of Horns by Jeff Smith 

61. The Flame Bearer by Bernard Cornwell 

62. J.R.R. Tolkien—A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter 

63. Dog Man by Dav Pilkey