My Log 321 Sept 30 2012: Omar Khadr’s return reminds us of the inadequacy of our federal ministers to their task

Photo of Omar Khadr, copyright released into the public domain by the Khadr family in Toronto. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 The return to Canada of Omar Khadr  puts into the spotlight the niggardly, churlish behaviour of our exalted Harper government and all its pathetic minions

It is not necessary to go into details of the case here: sufficient to say that to any reasonable person the Khadr case is a classic  miscarriage of justice. What interests me here is the behaviour of the Harper government, which has been condemned by fair-minded people around the world. It resolutely refused to repatriate Khadr to his native country, the only nation to have refused that in relation to Guantanamo prisoners.  Even the usually staid Canadian Bar Association appealed to the government to repatriate the young man, and when the matter was taken to court, two lower courts declared his treatment by the Canadian government to be in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and said he should be repatriated, and when the government appealed the case to the Supreme Court, it also declared his continued imprisonment  and the government’s refusal to aid him to be in violation of Canada’s constitution.

Eventually Khadr was put on trial by one of the military commissions set up by the United States to try these prisoners, whom they declared to be outside the normal processes of American law. This commission was ready to impose a 40 year prison sentence on Khadr, at which point, having always declared his innocence of the charges against him, he entered into a plea bargain in which he admitted all charges in return for an eight-year sentence --- not taking into account the many years he had already served in Guantanamo --- which was to be served one year in Guantanamo, and then he was to be transferred to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence.

When the first year of his sentence was up, the Canadian government refused to agree to his transfer, niggling over this and that, until finally the deal was done this week, and the Americans, much to their relief, got rid of their embarrassing prisoner by flying him in a military plane to Toronto.

This is a case that makes one sick to one’s stomach, considering the appalling behaviour of the government. But it is not the first or only case of its kind. I was one of the many hundreds of Canadians who sent small sums of money to buy a ticket back to Canada for Abousfian Abdelrazek, an unfortunate man who visited his home country of Sudan to see his ailing mother, and was then arrested and tortured and held in that country for six years before he was able to make his return to Canada. Although both the government of Sudan, and the security authorities of Canada declared he had done nothing wrong, and he had never been charged with any crime, the Canadian government at first refused to facilitate his return to his home nation; then said they would issue him with a travel permit if he could find an airline willing to fly him (he had been placed on the UN no-fly list by the United States on incorrect information supplied by the Canadian government). But when he produced such an airline, Etihad, the government still refused to issue the travel permit they had promised, and at that point a number of Canadians contributed to the cost of buying a picket for his return. Once again, the courts intervened, ordering the government to facilitate his return.

This kind of behaviour by a Canadian government is so frankly embarrassing before the outside world that it almost  beggars description. Under pressure from the courts, the government finally agreed to allow the man to return to his home country, but even after his arrival back, they have made it as difficult as possible for him to regain a place in Canadian life as a normal citizen.

It will be no secret to anyone who has read this blog over the years that I think this government with its medieval ministers, such as our supposed Justice Minister, our minister in charge of immigration and refugees, and many others, is beyond the pale, and I cannot wait for the next opportunity we have to get rid of them.

Meantime, it is said that Omar Khadr, under Canadian law, should be eligible for parole next year.  We will have to watch to see that politics are not allowed to interfere with this decision.

My Log 320 Sept 24 2012 : Back into the wonderful city of Montreal, where I lived the best years of my life

 I feel that just about everything in my life has changed. I have settled in Montreal, having arrived back after three months in Dubrovnik, Croatia, visiting a friend. I left Montreal (where I arrived to live first in 1957), in 1975 to go back to New Zealand, the land of my birth. When I returned to Canada in 1976, disappointed in New Zealand I guess you could say, I went to live in Ottawa, where I have lived for the last 35 years.

Accustomed though I had become to Ottawa, the suggestion of one of my sons, Thom, that I might find Montreal more interesting prompted me to make a move. I had thought about moving back to Montreal when I had sold my house a few years back, but decided that it would be one move more than I could comfortably handle at the time. So two moves later, through apartments in Ottawa, I have finally made the move, and promise to be well contented with it.

My wife Shirley died in 2007, after almost 57 years of marriage, and I have found a new partner, Sheila van Bloemen, a woman of my own age, with whom I have been exchanging visits for the last couple of years, and she is proving to be an excellent, indeed, irreplaceable and indispensible  companion in my old age. She has a gift for display and interior house arrangement, and she has by some miracle managed to fit all the stuff I have hung on to during these three moves into a one-bedroomed apartment on the fifteenth floor of a building overlooking downtown Montreal. We sit on our balcony every morning watching spectacular sunrises, and today we walked on what is laughingly called The Mountain --- Parc Mont-Royal --- which is only two or three blocks above where we live.

I have unreservedly happy memories of my first 18-year domicile in Montreal (although eight years of that were spent in London, England, where I was correspondent for The Montreal Star. Still, during those eight years I was in constant touch with the city of Montreal, in one way or another, and these were the best working years I have ever spent. I was extremely fortunate that The Star was a newspaper of a conservative bent, that was prepared to accept copy from its correspondent, the content of which didn’t bother them unduly, as long as it arrived on time and in a regular fashion. I have often remarked since that the job in London was the best in journalism: the office never bothered me, allowed me to write about whatever subject took my fancy, the deadlines were totally favourable, giving me the leisure to write at my own speed and in my own time, and in those days, the money was good because of the imbalance at the time between the Canadian and British currencies. There was also some sort of reciprocal arrangement between the two countries which allowed me to pay tax only on the part of my salary that I brought into the UK, which turned out to be an immense advantage.

Added to that was the sheer delight of writing about London in the 1960s, years of experimentation and change in Britain, as it struggled to come to terms with its declining influence in the world.

I have to say, however, that the moment I returned to Montreal, where I was directly under the thumb of bosses who were worried about what appeared on the subject of Montreal and its politics, the freedom of action and expression I had enjoyed in London no longer applied. Fortunately, I got interested in the subject of native people in Canada, was given the freedom to travel anywhere across the country that took my fancy (partly, I think, because they were happy to see the back of me in the office: once in Alaska, I couldn’t be upsetting the Montreal city fathers, in those days synonymous with Jean Drapeau, the man who said the 1976 Olympics could no more lose money than he could have a baby.) Anyway, although I no more liked the owners and bosses of The Montreal Star than I had of any other paper I worked for, when I look back at them they seem like a lot of decent, bumbling vicars compared with the thugs who run the media these days. And the existence of the Star as an independent newspaper was an important element in the life-style of English Montreal. In summary, if I now carried any sense of  animosity towards the paper that employed me for 14 years in Montreal I would deserve to be called a monstrous ingrate. And I carry no such animosity.

I quit the paper, not in the happiest of circumstances, in 1971, a parting of the ways that was written in the sky, inevitable, given my attitude towards newspaoers and all their works. It was a risky thing to do, since I had four small children, and little prospect of making a living as a freelance writer. To my great good fortune, a chance encounter with Colin Low at the National Film Board got me started doing research for them, which developed into their unaccountable and ultra-generous offer that I should become involved in the actual making of films, and henceforth, for nearly 20 years, I managed to eke out a living making films, writing books, and writing other things, doing research and the like. I left Montreal to fulfil the foolhardy and age-old dream of immigrants, that is, to return to their country of origin, an enterprise that, I am sure fails in more than 90 per cent of cases, as it did in mine.

While in Montreal I had subjected my children to what was, in essence, a political experiment, which was to place them in the French Catholic school system, in the belief that that would be their best and surest method of learning French. They were tossed into it, almost the only English-speaking kids in their schools at the time, without knowing a word of French, and they had a hard time of it. The stories of being locked in rooms with the janitors as punishment for their unresponsiveness, of being beaten up in the playgrounds, and so on, still bother my conscience to this day.  When I returned to Canada, I decided I did not want to subject them to more of that, so I relocated to Ottawa, from which, only two hours drive away, I could commute to work in Montreal. (I may say, in parenthesis, that my children all still speak French, which is evidence that some good came out of the experience I subjected them to, though at a rather high cost, to them, although not to me.)

Okay, so here I am back in this wonderful city. I am slowly exploring the many new things that have been built, and feeling once again, that warmth of the people, which never failed me in the past, and has delighted me in my first two weeks back. I came across one wondrous change in the city block that lies alongside Place des Arts on the west side. The whole block has been refashioned as an open-air spot for concerts and performances, and in those moments when it is not so engaged, it has been made over into a fantasia of fountains, stretching from one end of the block to  the other. It is fascinating to sit beside these fountains, dozens of them, most of them small spouts of water coming up and down according to some preprogrammed timetable, at one point turning into a joyous, jumping cornucopia of fountains that look as if they have lost control in their delight in living, while a huge tower of water in the centre rises, surrounded by these jumping, wild smaller fountains. This installation is a veritable fantasy, amazing, and whoever visualized and created it deserves the utmost credit.

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English: Amnesty International Sections, 2005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Link of the day: Amnesty International for long a respectedneutral window on political repression, has fallen under the influence of theUS State department, especially since the appointment of a former StateDepartment official as head of amnesty USA. Read this revealing article by Diana Johnstone, from Counterpunch,called “Pussy Riot and Amnesty International: The Decline of Political Protest.”

Link of the Day Sept 7 2012 Pilger on The Liberal Way to Run the World

English: John Pilger speaking at Marxism 2010, the annual conference hosted by Socialist Alternative. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

John Pilger is a journalist who pitilessly describes the realities of modern politics (often to such a degree that I find it impossible to finish reading his books, because the truths he tells are so depressing.) A couple of days ago he published an article called The Liberal Way toRun the World: “Improve” or We’ll Kill You* in the alternative online site, information clearing house.info  I suggest you read this article, which lays bare, as Pilger does with such relentless persistency and efficiency, the lies and hypocrisies perpetrated in our name by our leaders.

My Log 319 I slog through 550 pages of a Tony Blairite functionary’s diaries, only to have my prejudices about politics and the political process confirmed

English: President George W. Bush applauds former Prime Minister Tony Blair after presenting him Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009, with the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom during ceremonies in the East Room of the White House. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have just realized a surprising thing about myself: it is that I have never been a reader of contemporary political memoirs, those colossal tomes produced by the likes of Pearson, Diefenbaker, Trudeau, or whoever. Such volumes, with their likelihood of containing endless self-justifications, have never attracted me, and I cannot think of a single one I have ever read.

I came upon this surprising lacunae in my political education this week because, for want of something better to read, I undertook a 550 pager by Chris Mullins, who had been a minor political functionary in the Tony Blair-led New Labour government of Britain, a government that lasted for just over 10 years, from May 1997 to the end of June 2007.

The volume of Mullins’ diaries that I have read is called A View from the Foothills, and covers his political life from the end of July 1999, when he was given a job in government by Tony Blair, until May 2005, following the election of that year in which Labour was returned to office, but with a reduced majority.

Mullin was a Member of  Parliament from 1987 until 2010, that is, 23 years, in a safe seat in Sunderland in the north of England. But for most of that time he was a backbencher. He apparently felt he had been a useful member while he was chairman of various committees, but when elevated to a lowly post in the Environment department he complained that his usefulness had come to an end. He was moved to another department, but after the following election he told the Prime Minister he wanted to leave the government because he had felt he was wasting his time. He made it clear he would accept in future only a ministerial position with real power, but when he was recalled by the Prime Minister a couple of years later, it was again to a lowly position, this time in the Foreign Office. In total he spent not much more than four of his 23 years in Parliament as a member of the government.

When Tony Blair won his third term in 2005, Mullins had for two years been an under-secretary in the Foreign Office, with responsibility for Africa, and he was so sure he would be reappointed that at quarter to four on the day he was sacked by the PM he had been on the phone to his opposite number in the US State Department discussing what to do about the Liberian warlord, Charles Taylor. Then came a call from the Prime Minister, whom he refers to as The Man throughout his book, and he records the conversation this way:

“The Man sounded remarkably cheerful. No hint of what was to come. We exchanged chit-chat about the result and then came the fatal words, ‘I’m sorry, Chris, I am going to have to let you go.’

“ ‘Tony, I’m devastated. Why?’ There followed some nonsense about how he had to make room for new faces and how this was no reflection on my performance, which is no doubt what he says to everyone. Then he was gone, leaving me to contemplate oblivion.”

The curious thing about this description is that Mullin has sworn throughout the book that he lived a useful life as a Parliamentarian until he was given a minor office in government, at which point he disappeared into the very oblivion that on the last page of the book he complains he had been condemned to by losing his under-secretary job..

Another curious thing about Mullins is that I discovered only after checking his career on the Internet that he had been a supporter of Tony Benn during his years as the leader of what the newspapers called The Loony Left, and later still had been editor of the left-wing  newspaper Tribune, one of whose faithful readers I had been when in London during the 1950s and 1960s. In fact I had known the editor of the paper, Dick Clements, who preceded Mullins in its editorship.

But I read more than 500 pages of this man’s political diary, and not once had to occurred to me that he could ever have been a member of the Labour Party’s left wing. Strange. Passing strange….

As  presented in his own diaries, he comes across as an earnest, well-intentioned person of humanist values, who had a wish to do things that make a difference. Apparently, before he entered Parliament, as a TV journalist he had been somewhat responsible for the righting of a miscarriage of justice towards some convicted Irish bombers, and after he became a minister he seemed to think his most valuable work was when he intervened in personal tragedies that had befallen various individuals who somehow had become stranded in England and were being subject to harsh decisions to remove them taken by faceless bureaucrats. He does come across in the book as a man of humour and perspective. He was the author of the novel A Very British Coup, which had been made into a sensationally effective piece of TV drama, and it was on this account, if truth be known, that I decided to read his diaries.

Whatever his political faith was he never makes a declaration of it anywhere in the book, but rather presents himself as a small cog in Tony Blair’s management team, which is presented as if it was more like a company management than a political party. He gives several dazzling portraits of Blair in action, leading the reader to believe that, like Obama after him, he was one of those leaders who could spellbind audiences, talk people around who were opposing him, and for whom there was a minor connection between what he professed and what he actually did.

I have to confess I have been a lifelong admirer of the British Labour Party, which was founded by the trades unions in 1905 in order to advance a political agenda based on improving the lives of British workers. That it quickly fell into the hands of the British private-school educated elite was, I suppose more or less inevitable, given the class basis of British society. But nevertheless it continued to   struggle to represent the workers,  pursued for most of its life a dogged policy of economic and democratic socialism, and always had in its ranks many superb, self-taught politicians who learned everything they knew in the union movement, at least until it was taken over and utterly transformed into a routine political machine by Blair. 

I grew up under a working class  government in New Zealand, whose ministers, elected in 1935, were almost all self-taught, self-educated politicians, and I have always felt more comfortable when a nation’s affairs are susceptible to such down-to-earth people than when it falls into the hands, as it usually does, of lawyers, journalists and the like.

The minutiae of daily life inside the British government as described in Mullins makes one wonder if this can possibly be, as is so often claimed for it, the best way to run a country. Compromise is the operative word, compromise that has to be struck every day between contending interests (which these days I suppose could be said to be the very definition of politics). And of course, the misuse of power is one lesson that emerged from the behaviour of Blair and his pal and ally Bush in the US.

Blair used to say if you have a weapon, you should use it. And so he became an avowed interventionist, ready for the great metropolitan power he represented to intervene in any part of the world to pursue what he perceived was the interests of his country, and the world. Unfortunately, his support for George Bush’s war in Iraq was given under a cover of monstrous lies, lies that resulted in the death of many thousands of people, that have destabilized and created semi-chaos throughout the Middle East, have not apparently achieved the aims hoped for, but rather something close to the opposite, and have disgraced the name of the British Labour Party.

In sum, I have to say that being exposed to the inner workings of government as it was practised during these successful years of the Blair regime has done nothing to change my overall view of politicians. Although I covered politics in several countries, off and on, for more than a quarter of a century, I can count the politicians I admired on the fingers of one hand, and even fewer are those to whom I would be bothered to write a letter on any particular subject. Almost all of those I admired were outside government, and a common theme among them was that the moment they agreed to join a government, they virtually disappeared from public life, just as Chris Mullin complains he did.

Ah, well, so goes it, I guess.

My Log 318 Aug 23 2012 Masters of Argentine tango enthrall audience in concert given in 700-year-old Fort Revelin in Dubrovnik

Ástor Piazzolla with his bandoneón in 1971. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Richard Galliano (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 A few years ago one of my sons gave me a disc of the tango music of Astor Piazzolla, the man who from the 1930s rescued tango from its declining future. I played the record repeatedly until I knew every note, and was enchanted with it. Last night I had the immense good fortune to attend a concert by a man who has carried Piazzolla’s tradition on, a Frenchman by the name of Richard Galliano, who appeared in Dubrovnik with what he calls his  Piazzolla Forever  Septet.

I am always self-conscious when I write about music, because I am a member of that class that says of itself, I-don’t-know-anything-about-music-but I-know-what–I –like, and one thing I have discovered I like a lot is the sort of new tango as interpreted by Piazzolla, and nowadays by his successor Galliarno. The pleasure of the occasion was doubled because of the venue in which the concert took place. Dubrovnik is surrounded by a wall that runs more than 2000 yards around the old city, stands up to 72 feet in height, and is anything from 6 feet to nearly 17 feet in depth. In other words, it is an impressive structure, reputed to be one of the finest in Europe, and it is held together at certain points by a network of four ancient forts. People have lived where Dubrovnik now stands since the seventh century, and have been active since that time in repulsing attacks on it by pirates, Arabs, Normans, Serbs, Montenegrins and others on and off ever since. They were for centuries a self-governing city state, at one time with embassies throughout the known world, and the defensive works they built for themselves were constructed by some of the greatest stonemasters in history.

One of these forts, which was so strongly built that it survived the drastic earthquake of 1667 that virtually destroyed the city, is Revelin. It is notable that the fort even today is approachable only over a drawbridge that stands across what was once a moat, and once you have handed in your ticket you start on an upward journey of more than 100 steps towards your seat.  You pass through some beautiful vaulted rooms that are connected by arcades, and eventually come out on a huge roof terrace that is used today for concerts and other entertainments. And it was in this seductive place that Galliano and his six musicians played in the open air overlooking the ancient city.

I had never heard of Gaalliano myself, and he appeared to be accompanied by a different group of musicians from those whose photos appeared in the programme.  That didn’t matter because all of them, although French by nationality, were superb musicians who seemed totally at home with the unique rhythms and pulses of tango music.

That I had never heard of him does not signify anything except my appalling ignorance: he, like his master Piazzolla, who died in 1992, has appeared at the Montreal jazz festival several times. He was born in Cannes, France, the son of an accordion teacher, an instrument  he started to play at the age of four. As his musical studies proceeded he discovered to his astonishment at the age of 14 that accordion was never accorded a place in jazz. He had a distinguished career backing up such French icons as Aznavour, Reggiani and Juliette Greco, and has played jazz alongside many modern masters, in the course of which he met Piazzolla in  1983, who advised him to  return to the roots and traditional Argentine method of playing the accordion.

Last night’s programme notes implicitly gave him credit for introducing to jazz a “completely new concept of rhythm and harmonic style in order to make the accordion fit jazz.” He played three instruments last night, opening the concert with a lovely solo on some kind of South American flute, accompanied by his pianist, and later taking to the bandoneon, a type of concertina, which he could practically make talk, as well as the larger accordion.

I’ll take the programme notes at their  word, because I liked very much the lively style of the music, the contrasting and constantly changing rhythms, and particularly, I loved the melancholic tone struck by both accordionist and violinists as they interposed tunes subtly with the harsher rhythms produced by the base and piano. All I can say is it was marvelous, an opinion that to judge from the huge reception given the band, was entirely shared  by the capacity audience.

My Log 317 Aug 16 2012 : Almost trapped in a Christian celebration, I am able to remind myself that Christianity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

Dubrovnik's heart (Photo credit: Lawrence OP)

Yesterday was some big holiday here, what I would call a mumbo-jumbo celebration. In other words, a religious holiday of some sort.

This town, Dubrovnik, has more churches than you can shake a stick at, and seems to be full of Roman Catholics. Of course, they got rid of their non-Christian co-religionists a few years ago by the simple expedient of driving them out at gunpoint. It is probably also worth remembering that it was the President of this great Christian nation, Tudjman, who gave expression to the totally unforgettable opinion that 

“Genocide is a natural phenomenon, in harmony with the societal and mythologically divine nature. Genocide is not only permitted, it is also recommended, even commanded by the word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith.”

Wow! Some expression of Christianity there! Fortunately, the expression quoted was in one of Tudjman’s interminable books, which, I have been assured, nobody ever read. Still, it is in black and white, and it can never be denied that such a foul opinion was ever expressed, and by the president of a nation that was engaged in war.

So, okay, yesterday morning, unaware of the holiday, I set out to take my regular morning walk, which, if I haven’t told you already, consists of my climbing 230 steps up the hill from the main town, then walking 355 paces downhill to another set of steps, 136 of which (down) deposit me in the centre of the old town, surrounded by the comforting (!) presence of its many churches with their over-abundance of  priests and nuns.

My first suspicion that something unusual was up came when I passed the vegetable market set up every morning at about 7 am. Only a couple of merchants had set up, but the rest of the area was covered by tables from the restaurant that takes over the space every day from lunchtime to closing time at midnight or thereabouts. These tables had obviously been left up from the previous night, which was a night of real celebration, because the members of the Croatian water polo team were welcomed home from the Olympics at a boisterous celebration for which loudspeakers were set up on the church steps. This water polo obsession came as a surprise to me: it is definitely the Yugoslav national sport, and they are frequently to be found playing games in the space right below our balcony in the Old Harbour. It turns out that some nine members of the Croatian team, counting officials, were from Dubrovnik, so their gold medal at the Olympics was a resounding national triumph that they were keen to celebrate.  Only the next day I had pointed out to me an old man who had won several Olympic medals for water polo as a member of the old Yugoslavian national team, on one occasion leading him to be named as the world’s outstanding player of the game.

Anyway, the market was not being set up as usual, and when I walked past the church that lies at the end of our street, the unmistakeable drone of a service within could be heard, and the promise of more action lay in the platform that had been newly built across the steps. I made a mental note to stay as far away as possible so as to avoid these festivities whenever they might happen.

The promised exterior action happened last evening, just as I was sent out to refill our wine bottles. At the local grocery store they fill one-litre and even two-litre bottles with white or red wine, grown locally, that is quite drinkable, and comes at a knockdown price, some six litres of it on one occasion having cost me 80 odd kuna, or about $13. (That would work out to eight normal bottles of our wine for something a bit over $1.60 a bottle. You see what I mean by a knockdown price?)

I felt a bit like a sinner with my bottles slung over my shoulder on my way to the wine shop, as I worked my way through the vast crowd that had gathered around the dignitaries, choir and functionaries who had assembled on the church steps, and that were going through their paces with a will as I pretended to hear nothing and to act as if nothing unusual was under way. It was the closest I have come to being in church since I was 10, when my mother, who was thinking about taking a trip to the Old Country, as we all called England in those days, had insisted that I become a candidate for confirmation (I think that is what it was called, but I never entered into it with any enthusiasm and can honestly say I learned nothing from the process, whether about the sacred world, or the temporal.)

Since I came here I have discovered there are many other fields of human life that have escaped my ken, especially in the field of classical music, about which I know nothing and in which I have absolutely no interest, and, I might add, in the higher fields of culture which have never been of much, if any, allure to me. My hostess here is constantly rushing off to concerts featuring the great composers of the past, played by leading European musicians, events that I have excused myself from on the grounds of my being a total slob.

This reference to culture reminds me of something that happened to me this morning. My grandson, an 18-year-old in Toronto, who generally makes a point of ignoring me (as, I hage to confess I tend to ignore him these days) has recently been bedridden with a broken jaw suffered in a skateboarding accident. These moments of enforced idleness seem to have given him time to think about the old man, at least once, and this morning I found from him a link to one of my favorite popular music performances by the Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto. (In my typically curmudgeonly way, I am wondering if he would have sent it if he had known it would give me such pleasure.)

Anyway, I played the record once, and, enchanted again as I had been when I first heard it, especially by Astrud’s sultry, evocative rendition of the song in Portuguese, I played it again. This recalled to me how excited I was as I went along to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London when Astrud was the featured performer, because like every other man  in London, it seemed, I was totally entranced by her wonderful beauty and seductive voice. What a comedown it all was. The lovely diva, a tiny little thing, stood like a stone, emanating absolutely nothing as she moved through the flat, matter-of-fact song, sounding, especially when singing in English, as if she wanted nothing more than to get off the stage.

Ah, well, you can’t win em all, as they say. But my grandson’s thoughtful action in sending me this link has taken me back to a time I remember with pleasure, and given me a real lift in spirits this morning. Thanks a lot, Ngozi!

My Log 316 Aug 12 2012 Two remarkable novels by James Lee Burke, chronicler of Cajun Louisiana, told in an irresistable crime format

Excerpt from US Navy photo http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=27553, an aerial view from a United States Navy helicopter showing floodwaters around the entire downtown New Orleans area. The Louisiana Superdome is in the center. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 An unexpected thought occurred to me yesterday as I finished reading  two of James Lee Burke’s novels about Cajun life in Louisiana. Even though Burke so vividly describes the landscape in which the Cajuns pass their lives, even though his characters are so compulsively drawn that one almost feels they could leap off the page into one’s lap, even though his tough guy prose and attitudes are underlaid by a persistent strain of homey  philosophy, could it be --- in spite of all evidence to the contrary --- that everything he writes does not depict any life actually to be found in Louisiana, that none of this is real, but is rather a complete world drawn from Burke’s vivid imagination?

I began to think about this when, recommending these books to a friend, I had to admit I have never met anyone who even remotely resembles the characters who inhabit Burke’s pages. Certainly it is hard to think there has ever been a real live detective anything like his hero Dave Robicheaux, and it is certainly hard to imagine anyone with the peculiar mix of characteristics --- a love of violence and willingness to use it, a dedication to a kind of warped idea of  justice, an ultimately maverick carelessness about what he does ---- like Robicheaux’s closest friend, Clete Purcell.

Burke wrote his first book when he was in his twenties, and I am pretty sure that was the one that set me off on reading his works. Unless my memory betrays me, it was about a man who was unjustly locked up in an horrendous Louisiana chain gang kind of prison, and it was so real it made my flesh creep.

Since then, through dozens of novels, most dealing with crime, and in the form of thrillers or mysteries, Burke has dazzled reviewers with the fluency and vivacity of his prose, the aptness of his descriptions of people and their works, and the sheer passion with which he records the usually nefarious works of his characters.

The two books I have just read are The Tin Roof Blowdown in which he has used the tragic destruction of New Orleans by the twin forces of Hurricane Katrina and the neglect, and possibly malicious inaction of the U.S. federal government, as the background for a tale of almost majestic hjuman folly and nastiness.  As thousands of people were swept away, overcome by the breaking of the neglected levies that were supposed to hold back the flood, and those who remained suffered, James Burke describes how looting and theft by the criminal and low-life elements of Louisiana society compounded the misery and overwhelmed even the few honest forces of law and order.

Specifically the book is built around two events: the first is when a junkie priest, who is a friend of Robicheaux’s, is trying to hack his way into the  attic of a flooded home in which twenty or thirty people are trapped by the still rising waters, a family of petty criminals, who have just raped two young women, hack the priest to death and steal the boat from which he was working. The second incident concerns what these low-life people did with the boat they had stolen: they used it to enter an abandoned home, where in an insensate attack of looting, they ripped the walls apart and found hidden stores of counterfeit dollars, blood diamonds (imported from Africa) and drugs of various kinds. When they learned that the house they had robbed belonged to the region’s main mafia connection, their fate was sealed, and Robicheaux was only hoping he could get to them on the rape charges before they were wiped out by the hired guns of the houseowner.

This book has been described as the novel which established Burke as one of America’s outstanding writers. His description of the Katrina hurricane and its consequences is probably the finest written so far, and its use as a backdrop for Burke’s grimly imagined events makes a continuum that is totally gripping. The book is studded with aphorisms, like this one:

“If you have stacked a little time in the can, or beat your way across the country bucking bales and picking melons, or worked out of a Manpower Inc. day-labor office on skid row, you probably already know that human beings are infinitely complex and not subject to easy categorization…I’m always amazed at how the greatest complexity as well as personal courage is usually found in our most nondescript members. People who look as interesting as a mud wall have the personal histories of classical Greeks. I sometimes think that every person’s experience, if translated into flame, would be enough to melt the flesh from his bones…”

One gets his point, although the method of describing it is entirely original. Or here is another one:

“William Blake described evil as an electrified tiger prowling the forests of the night. I wondered if Blake’s tiger was out there now, burning brightly in the trees, the pads of its feet walking softly across a lawn, it's slattern breath and the quickness of its step only seconde away from the place where children played and our loved ones dwelled.”

Sufficient to say that someone turned up who was hired by a prominent man to take care of his problems by whatever means he wanted. This person began to stalk Dave and his family, and Burke posits the confrontation as one between evil and good.

The second book, published in 2005, is called Crusader’s Cross and it concerns the memory of a young girl for whom Dave’s brother fell twenty years before when they were both sixteen. He discovered, too late, that she was already working as a prostitute, and just as he was about to run away with her, she disappeared and was never seen or heard of again.  The brother turns up, recalling to Dave memories of this unfinished disappearance, and the book is about a search for her to confirm or deny the brother’s belief that she was never killed, as most authorities believed. This one involves the full panaply of Dave’s peculiarity: a recovered alcoholic with an on-again, off-again relationship with police work, he finds the weight of this search so heavy that he goes on a bender which puts his job at odds again, and which finishes with him losing such self-respect as he was managing to carry through his life. The denoument is so life-like it is almost unsatisfactory. The girl turns up, but in circumstances that none of them could have envisaged. Dave has been following leads, and blaming the wrong people throughout the book, and he ends it with an almost customary outburst of social philosophy:

“Capitalists are hanged by the rope they sell their enemies. Mystics who help formulate great religious movements writhe in sexual torment over impure thoughts a shoe salesman leaves behind with adolescence. A Crusader Knight in search of the True Cross returns to Marseilles from Palestine with a trunkful of Saracen robes, inside of which is a plague-infested mouse. My experience has been, like George Orwell’s, that human beings are possessed of much more courage and self-sacrifice than we give them credit for, and when the final test comes, they usually go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. Our moral failure lies in the frailty of our vision and not in our hearts. Our undoing is in our collective willingness to trust those whom we shouldn’t, those who invariably use our best instincts against us. But as a police officer I also learned long ago that justice finds us in its own time and of its own accord, and in ways we never, and I mean absolutely never, anticipate.”

A very remarkable writer is this James Lee Burke, who stands somewhere between the low-lifes about whom he writes, and the justice he would like to believe in.

My Log 315 Aug 10 2012: Swifts, compared to frigate birds in their ability to stay aloft for hours, days and even weeks.

English: Dubrovnik from the aeroplane. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English Harbour (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I was watching the swifts doing their enchanting perambulations across the Old Town of Dubrovnik the other morning, I remarked that it reminded me of when I watched frigate birds, in similar circumstances, in the island of Antigua back in 1974.

I had taken my whole family --- then early-teenagers --- for a holiday, with the intention of writing a book. Miraculously we managed to hire a beachside cottage around the corner from English Harbour in the south of the island, for $250 a month. (The next time we returned to Antigua five years later, the same cottage was renting for $250 a day.) Every morning I would write my book between 6 am and noon, while my wife would take the children off to one or other of Antigua’S 365 beaches, and at noon we would all pile into our mini-moke, drive up through the island to St. John’s, the capital, where we would go for lunch to the garden of the Kensington Palace Hotelk,m where a grouop of civil servants would emerge from their surrounding offices to play in a steel band over the lounch hour, while we drank rum and ate club sandwiches to our heart’s content,before taking off for one of the beaches where we would spend the afternoon in the sun. These are memories of happy times that have never left me: perhaps because I succeeded in finishing the book, and returned to Montreal feeling as if I had been on holiday, which, indeed, I had.

But before I got into this daily routine, I would bundle up the family and drive up to watch the frigate birds take off from the cliff above us. Our cottage lay just under a huge cliff from which, in the evenings, just as we would be settling for our evening gin and tonic, an army of bats would arrive to swoon around over our heads as they caught the myriad insects that came out at that time. Very similar to what the swifts do over Dubrovnik, or so I am told.

The cliff we drove up to was called  Shirley’s Heights, where an abandoned fortification from Napoleonic times stood on the top of the cliff, looking out to sea for any suspicious --- namely, French! --- ships that might heave into view. Just as the sun was rising, a flock of frigate birds would rise from the cliff below us, soaring up into the wind as still and quiet as if asleep,  never moving their huge wings as they caught the draught, and passed us almost within touching distance until, higher up, they caught the wind and headed off out to sea, every morning. It was such a wonderful sight I have never forgotten it, more especially since, on our return five years later, we discovered that the fortifications had been restored, restaurants and other impediment had been built, and the frigate birds had disappeared.

Oddly enough, when I looked up the indications for swifts, frigate birds were mentioned as having something similar to the swifts in characteristics, namely that they are both mostly aerial creatures which can live in the air for days without ever touching down, just like the swifts, especially those of certain species in some parts of the world.  There are five varieties of frigate bird, and the one that hangs out around Antigua and its neiughbouring island of Barbuda has become the subject of a scientific study which is trying to build more knowledge about a bird whose characteristics remain largely unknown to humans.

Swifts, apparently, in certain species, can live in the air for weeks at a time, and have even been known to mate in the air, as well as feed in the air from consuming insects. One Web site I read about frigate birds indicated that they are thieves, which steal food from out of the mouths of competing species, although in what circumstances they do this was not clear to me. I remember that in Antigua we watched in amazement one day as some frigate birds circled around a neighbouring bay and entertained us to an amazing exhibition of sharp-shooting --- that is, diving from a huge height and at a considerable speed into the water, and emerging holding a fish. So this seems to be one feeding characteristic not much noted by the experts on frigate birds, at least those two or three I have read.

Like the frigate birds, the swifts  seldom flap their wings, but they still manage to catch the draughts and soar at an immense speed back and forth in what looks like gay abandon.

This morning when I awoke and opened the door to the balcony I was almost knocked over by the wind. It is often like that for a short while in the mornings, but the wind soon moderates, and even sometimes dies away completely, as it has almost done already, two or three hours later. When these strong winds occur, the swifts are not to be seen, except perhaps one or two brave ones that have caught the wind and are soaring away up in the air above us, barely visible to the naked eye. 
I find it hard to believe that insects have been able to maintain themselves in such high winds, and I have some doubt that the species of swift we see here really does get most of its food from picking off insects in the air. Maybe I will meet someone I can ask about that in the month remaining to me in this extraordinary little town.