Underground

Mining was in the news over the last few weeks, and I had to think about it, as a one-time miner. I worked two summers underground up north, ultimately as a blasting specialist, and I loved it so much that I got close to kicking over the whole education thing and giving it all up for a life underground.

It was that good.

First of all, hell, the scenery in Northern Manitoba is simply fab, the rough edge of the Shield, little winding lakes and deep mysterious forests. That, and there was a ton of money, I mean I could go up and make enough cash in four months to pay for 8 months of uni, living expenses included. And mind you as a temp, I was kinda at the bottom of the financial food chain.

That, and getting paid all day to play with very large and powerful pieces of industrial machinery. Yes, it is every bit as much fun as it looks. Although I got to be a pretty damn good tram driver, and liked it, using the ho-ram was about the best, I just loved that thing, it was like a dinosaur tail with a gigantic sting (jackhammer actually) on the end. I never got to use the Crusher, and I always wanted to, it was a truly amazing piece of machinery, breaking up huge volumes of rocks all day long.

But best of all was the blasting. I just love explosives, and I got to be pretty damn good at using them. I was using startling amounts too, the Mine Captains regularly got on my ass about it, but the results I was getting, well, they always backed down. For instance, I never once mis-set a cap, so that rather than setting off the charge it sprayed it over the scram/stope/drift (which is a Very Bad Thing). (I did manage to blow up a chute once though, which got me a week of ditch digging duty until the Captain found that there was no-one else on the crew he could trust with the big bangy stuff.)

I kid you not, I was burning through over 100 kg of high explosives per shift on a good day (on a really good day I could get three or even four, not just two Big shots off). On my biggest day ever, I think I went through almost 400 kg of pillow-pack (plastique) and big stick (known as “horse cock” to the guys) dynamite. Gosh it was fun, being paid to blow things up.

Basically what I was doing was breaking up oversize and clearing the hard rock version of log-jams.

Never got much of a chance to play with Amex though, the industrial version of the terrorists’ favourite mix of diesel fuel and nitrates. Was background to a few big shots with that stuff though, and my, amazing. Simply amazing.

They were paying me great money to live in wonderful surroundings and play with plastique all day. What on earth is not to love about that?

Well, the company you keep, and the lack thereof of the female kind. (Though I’ll have you know, at odds of over 40:1, I did in fact score my own less than gorgeous chick for a couple of weeks there.)

It was a pretty brutal and lonely life in some ways, a lot of bachelors with too much cash on their hands, well, it isn’t good. I saw insane gambling and drug and alcohol use, and more violence than I care to think of. I even managed to get my sorry ass in a drunk tank one night, and damn grateful I was for it too, given the circumstances.

It actually was interesting work, with its own whole vocabulary: stope, scram, raise, shaft, grizzly, drift, and so on. And a good deal of art and science going into it. I was a mucker, you see, one of the guys moving the ore, not actually a technically speaking miner, though I did a few shifts as a sort of miner’s helper, working with this gigantic native guy humping around and using a long-holer. An amazing piece of machinery, that. And an amazing guy, missing three of his fingers in some long ago industrial accident, still getting a comp cheque every month, but mining away. It gets in your blood they say.

Ho ho ho he would say, packing another miner’s grease gun with shit (literally) and winking at me, once I watched him sweat some dynamite in a hot tin shed for two weeks to get some nitro to put in the helmet headband and shoe soles of a shifter he hated (massive headaches). But he could pick the goddamn drill up on his shoulder and hump down the drift and raise to the tram, 400 feet if it was an inch. Ho ho ho he said, Rob, you carry it this time. Fuck it weighed 300 lb if it was an ounce. Or sit there for 7 hours straight in the steam and roar of the drill, adding rods, never once giving a second for hunger or bodily functions. And it is a wet nasty noisy business, drilling.

But me, well, I was all for blasting. For surface shots, you go some distance to be safe. Underground, you just go around a couple of corners. Hold your helmet down and plug your ears with your thumbs, hit the lever with your elbow, and then it punches you in the stomach, hell in the whole body, you can see the low frequency of the shockwaves in the cigarette smoke as it shifts a foot or more side to side and you begin to understand what visceral means. Setting off roughly 100 kg of high explosive about 200 feet from you in a confined space, well, it has to be experienced to be believed.

But all the dangers, and there are a ton, well, cave ins and being trapped never really figured. I almost took off a leg once, freeing a de-railed ore-car, and almost killed a co-worker because I mistook the brake for the gas on a tram, and I understood that most injuries, maiming and death had to do with using large powerful machinery in tight spaces. But hard rock mining, cave-ins are very very rare, to say the least.

At the time, miner lore had it that oxygen deprivation was the scariest thing, could kill you really quickly with little warning in the oddest of circumstances. And it seemed to be true, I did get in trouble that way a couple of times, and yes, it was subtle.

But all in all, I loved it, honestly, and came very close to making it my life.

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Contrariness

I'm a little weird.

Here are some things I do out of my insanely distorted pride and amoral personality:

I don't go back and fix typos and grammatical mistakes here. I can live with them, so can you.

My eyesight is deteriorating rapidly, I depend on grocery store reading glasses to function at all: I pick the ugliest ones I can. If I am going to wear glasses, they are not a fashion statement. Wearing them can only be a sign of defiance. If I had to use a wheelchair, you could expect it would be the biggest, clankiest, and most Victorian appliance I could find. And thats all I have to say about that.

I dress like a slob, frankly. Well usually my clothes are at least clean. But that would be about all you can say for them. I have no particular interest in looking good. Because I am the kind of asshole that knows he is good, and knows that eventually you will realize that too, and I don't have to advertise it with packaging. I have a certain contempt for men in suits frankly (sorry Dan), it always looks to me that they are trying to claim status rather than have it thrust upon them.

Beginning to get the picture of me as a vain asshole? You don't know the half of it. I am also amoral and deeply manipulative:

I really dislike most of my allies, yet truly do hate my enemies, so I hang in there with my pathetic stupid allies. It makes it complicated for me to interact at conferences, since I really dislike most of what I hear from the people I am supposed to be loyal to. It's just that I hate the other guys much worse.

You know, it makes me see red, when I have to sit and listen to lectures about what is and isn't right and what should and shouldn't be. Fuck off, I want to scream, you don't want to be right, I've been right most of my life and it didn't really get me anywhere near as far as winning did. Adolf Hitler had a point: the winners basically get to determine what is right or wrong. Sometimes you have to take a longer view on winning, so I think that Ghandi and MLK and yes Jesus basically won. And they got to say what is right and wrong.

How amoral is that? They didn't win because they were right, they were right because they won. But then I believe in god, and when you are on that side, well, you get a lot of battalions, and its a little easier to win.

And to tell you the truth, I actually don't like winning so much. I just HATE losing, I am just so bad at being a good loser that I do everything possible to avoid being in that position. Sort of an ass-backwards motivation I suppose, but it works for me.

I got a compliment about a year ago, that I am still struggling to understand: payroll said, after a fairly stupid fight that I won (heh): "You are so loyal to your staff." Me? I fire people, all the time, at the drop of a hat. I actually enjoy firing people (I really hate hiring people). But I guess I do believe that if you have anyone good, you do what it takes to keep them, and keep them doing what you need them to do. So, I guess that can be seen as loyalty.

Oh, and I basically like and am interested in people, so I suppose that can be seen as paying attention. People pay far too little attention to each other, most of the time. It is a deeply worthwhile hobby. Well, the folks that work for me do seem to like me doing so, although they do get frustrated with my laziness and ambivalence.

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Text Prices

I’ve been thinking about prices lately, mostly because of the big signs you see in Canadian book stores where they make lame excuses for their prices. With the fairly dramatic rise in the Canadian dollar vs the US dollar, you shouldn’t be paying 30 to 40 % more anymore, right? Well apparently, with the lag in the supply chain, much like the lag in the gas refinery chain, apparently you should. It never works the other way though, does it?

Pricing is a very very weird thing at the best of times, and particularly strange in the publishing industry, like it is in all effective monopolies, as the content of books being totally non-fungible. For years and years the price was set by the publisher—the label was printed on the book. It still is, of course, “publisher’s recommended price” etc to get around trade laws, but now, at least in hardcover, it is a bit of a fiction, because the bookstore immediately slaps “30% Off” stickers on it. With mega bookstores, I suppose that they can emulate Walmart and other big boxes and put pressure on their suppliers.

And incidentally, you have the ridiculous price-differential between hardcover and paperback, to say nothing of the fairly recent issue of the glossy large softcover (“trade paperbacks” I believe) which is really just a paperback with a little bit more size, sold at near hardcover prices.

But the economics are weird all up and down the chain, from the authors’ “advances,” to agent’s fees, to the publishing business (with its return policy that delivers all the worst features of consignment selling with none of the benefits), to the marketing systems (do author appearances and book signings and readings really bump up sales?), to, ultimately, the bizarre pricing strategies.

And aside from the exchange-rate issue, there has been another one popping up: textbooks. It turns out that like pharmaceutical companies, textbook companies publish “generic” ie cheaper paper/less illustrated versions (or pirates do) for use in third world countries, at substantially lower prices. Desperate North American students (many living at 3rd world income levels) are importing them. This is driving the publishers mad, and you are hearing the same kind of language you hear from Big Pharma and the MPAA.

And it gets worse—some textbooks (particularly in sciences and engineering) are so expensive that it is cheaper to “rip and burn” them, ie photocopy them, than to purchase them. And believe it or not, students and copy-shops here in Canada have been charged and convicted for doing this. Our own little samizdat industry, sort of.

And on top of that, there has been a 20 year struggle, as publishers keep putting out what are in effect “updates,” severely limiting the value of the secondhand market.

Now all of this sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? I am particularly put in mind of the music industry. Remember the $40 CD? What happened there is essentially what happened to the publishing industry a hundred years ago. International copyright piracy was a huge issue, with the Americans doing to the Brits what China is doing to the US right now. What had happened was that the cost of duplication had dropped substantially in relation to the potential volume of sales (which incidentally also spawned pulp fiction), and the copyright pirates went to town.

There were various legal efforts, and pleas from authors (including Dickens and Twain and ultimately Tolkien), which pretty much came to nothing until publishers were eventually forced to drop their prices dramatically. The situation wasn’t really cleaned up until the 1970s in fact, when as a penurious student I could afford several paperbacks a week. The effect of the true cost of manufacturing the product vs the asking price was simply unstoppable, as has been the case with the music CD, with the same results. And DVDs, for that matter, the amount of money Hollywood is making off $20 (still too expensive) DVDs is astonishing.

When the tech world finally comes up with a cheap, useable (ie comfortably readable & easily portable) method of duplicating large volumes of text, well, the publishing industry is going to be in deep deep trouble. And unlike musical artists, writers really do not have a realistic option of returning to live performance as their primary source of income. Its going to be interesting, when it happens.

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'Nuff Said

"I try to remind myself to appreciate every experience, even the ones I don't really enjoy ... I've been thinking a lot about fate lately. It was such an accident of birth that we ended up where we did when we did, that we are where we are now with the choices that we have available to us. It seems to me that we have such a burden of responsibility to make the world a better place for those who were born into far worse circumstances."

Captain Nichola Godard, 1980 – 2006, last letter home to her parents.

First Canadian woman killed in combat. She died shooting, May 17.

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Very Little Class

Had a bit of a seismic shift in the sector today. Another fairly major agency, with no warning, no excuse, no nothing, abruptly fired a very high acheiving Executive Director. I was put in mind of something Winston Churchill once said about the British PM, something to the effect that the PM must be loved, never questioned, backed absolutely, until it becomes necessary to get rid of them, at which point they must be poleaxed immediately.

Well, Boards are weird things, and I should know, having served on a few in my time. It can get pretty randomn.

But today, well, it was the Queen must die, and soon I am sure, it will be Long Live the Queen.

And much scurrying and gossiping and rumour mongering and so on in the meantime.

But I must say, it was done with very very little class.

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This 'n That

For you, my small brave band of faithfull readers, an update on why I haven't been blogging much. First of all, conference, year end, and Annual Report time, and secondly, well hell its Spring.

I've been gardening.

It is one of the odd things about getting older, you find yourself doing things you hated when you were younger. Every May long weekend, I put in my garden, and every year, I enjoy it more and more. Though every year I find each morning after that my body likes it less and less. But these days, I rather like the dirt under my fingernails and the slow patient weeding and the smell of the water gurgling from the hose. Too bad Calgary sucks so much for agricultural purposes.

But back to the other stuff. I'm putting together a couple of sessions for the June CCR conference, which is going to be a biggie, and it is distracting and annoying, as I have to deal with all these central canadians. I am coming to the conclusion that Quebec and Ontario are each their own solitude, and then there is the rest of the country, which pretty much agrees what assholes they are. Hell, I can live with the frogs, we even have a lot in common, but I am beginning to think we gotta kick the fuckin' Ontarians out of confederation. They are so goddamn stupid and yes provincial, they are a bunch of little people who have had their numbers and centrality go way way way too far to their heads.

Guess what, we actually don't have LA affiliated Jamaican street gangs blowing each other away under the eyes of a totally racist police department anywhere outside of Toronto. That's your issue, not a National Issue, because Toronto is Not Canada, fuckheads. And organize all the antiracism demos and petitions you want, and nice you get paid for it, but in the rest of the country, well hell, we are trying to figure out how make a living, and not so attached to goddamn causes and structures and histories and well yes rules.

Deep breath. (Boy could I go on...)

Year end was easier than usual, we actually had one returning auditor who didn't have to be taught everything from scratch. But there was one overactive newbie, chasing down stupid pointless things, and I thought, why on earth don't they ever go after the good stuff? I mean we are basically honest and good, but if I were auditing an organization like us, I sure know what I would go after, and the auditors never even take a general sniff in that direction. Somebody should hire me to sweat charities for a living, I'd be really really good at it.

And once again, contrary to a half-hearted resolution, I got stuck with putting the Annual Report together. It'll be slim this year, because next year is the biggie. You see, this is our 25th year, we started on April 13th 1981, so its all a big buildup to April 2007. Four or five church ladies in a basement, really; now we got something upwards of 150 paid staff and millions of dollars to play with each year. Quite amazing, really.

And doesn't matter at all, if we are true. Because we are doing what we do because we care, not for the greater glory of the organization. Presumably many of us would do something for the cause even we weren't being paid; I actually think, knowing most of my colleagues, that one way or another, if CCIS died somehow or another, most of us would still be welcoming strangers. It is the great pleasure and joy of working for a not for profit charitable cause based type organization: the goddamn company don't matter a damn, and the company loves you for thinking that.

In other news, I am working on posts about:

• contrariness
• being a male feminist
• things I don't believe
• monopoly economics and the price of CDs
• management koans
• communist infiltrators
• & five or six more

Some of these will see the light of day, or more accurately, the bath of electrons over the 'net.

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Immigrants and other Animals

On the radio the other morning, they had an interview with Paul Watson (followed by an interview with Elizabeth May, one time ED of Sierra Club of Canada and current candidate for Leader of the Green Party here in Canada). He was, as you might expect if you have followed his career at all, incendiary, radical, and not terribly rational (all qualities that I generally approve of in political activists). But I admit to finding some of what he was saying massively irritating.

He has recently quit the board of the Sierra Club in the US, over their attempts to build bridges with the hunting community, which is fair enough although I disagree with him, and over immigration policy. And there he is dead, absolutely, and completely wrong (& in the interview Elizabeth May was entirely right, and very good presentation too).

There has been this claim kicking around, primarily in the US, that US immigration levels need to be kept down or even reversed, for environmental reasons. It sounds reasonable; on the face of it, add more people, bigger environmental footprint, right? It starts to get a little disturbing when you hear from some of the folks advocating this kind of thinking, because alot of the language verges on racism. Well, if not racism, then violent misanthropy, which is reasonable enough in the environmental community I suppose.

But the facts are these: in fact, the geographical footprint of resident humanity in North America is probably shrinking (the amazing return of the deer, coyote, and yes human attacking bears in the Canadian West), with a few localized exceptions (those hungry alligators in Florida). The rural and remote sites in Canada are suffering massive population drains, to the cities, which serve to greatly concentrate human presence. And immigrants are no exception, being a very nearly 100% urban phenomena.

True, the amount of land under cultivation has been increasing steadily if not massively for years now, but this is the result of agricultural economics (a very bizarre subject), which has absolutely nothing to do at all with immigration (very few immigrants take up farming, and very little of the food produced is consumed domestically, ie in part at least by immigrants). Similarly, logging, mining, and here in Alberta oil-sands operations have expanded and had fairly massive impacts on the environment. But once again, immigrant involvement in these industries is notoriously low, and very little of the resultant product is being consumed in Canada.

It's the population in China, India, etc that are sucking the stuff up; perhaps THEY need some lowered population growth (and in fact are experiencing it, with I think, no little pain over the next while as they deal with severe gender imbalances). And perhaps that could actually be acheived by increasing immigration to North America, so that the ecological burden of humanity could be shared more evenly across the globe. This is where the particularism creeps in of course: who gives a damn about the environment in a bunch of coloured peoples' countries? Too bad they wrecked their own, lets not have them come here and wreck ours.

Now, there is one argument that can be made I suppose: North Americans consume a lot more than people elsewhere, and immigration can be seen as people transitioning from lower-consuming third-worlders to higher consuming first-worlders and thereby increasing their evil numbers. But once again, by implication, you are saying its ok for us to enjoy our SUVs and massive houses, but lets keep those poor coloured people out there in their slums making plastic trinkets for us.

It's an interesting couple of factoids though: while 10% of Americans were not born in the US, and about 17% of Canadian's weren't born in Canada, on a global scale, people don't generally immigrate/emigrate much: only about 3% of the world population is living outside the country of their birth. And the vast majority of these immigrants are not in fact living in North America, or any other 1st world region.

Environmentalism is a Good Thing, and it takes crazy people to move it along. Political discourse is not rational. But immigration just doesn't really figure into the problem, and wishing to restrict it is contrary to everything I appreciate about the one-world global vision of the ecology movement.

I remember reading Paul R. Ehrlich's Population Bomb way back when, and I was appalled by the passage where he explains what brought him to write it: it was the vision of what appeared to him to be a terrible Indian slum. We have to do something about, essentially, or we will end up like Them. As Germain Greer pointed out in Sex and Destiny, he should have taken a little more time to look into the situation, and tried to see the people as people, not, sad to say, animals.

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The Usual Tactic

I've been off-line lately, but partly that is because I'm thinking and writing drafts on more than 10 thingies for this stupid blog of mine.

But also this: in my personal life, and in my professional life, well, there seem to be some logjams. I can't talk about either much, except to say, that for me to do something about either would involve sacrifices I am not keen on making. To put it mildly.

Because in one sphere, I may have to leave to come back. In the other, I may have to tell some uncomfortable truths out loud. And maybe both are true for both, I dunno.

So its back my usual tactic, let's just sit back and see how it goes on its own, until I pretty much bottom out and have to do something, or it goes away all on its own.

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The Beatings Will End When Morale Improves

It turns out that my teenagers have been reading my blog. Bleek. They like it, "except for the politics part."

Better watch the language, I suppose. And no more posting about the beatings I guess.

In other news, saw two really good bumper stickers today.

One was the usual fish logo, except inside the fish instead of something about Jesus, it said "and chips."

The other said, "Holy plastic pigs, Batman! It's all gone pear-shaped!"

I really like that.

(Oh, and updated to say, right now my life sucks, because I cannot expect any family interaction at all for three fucking hours tonight, because its the Survivor finale, don't you understand. Well at least my mum and mum in law will interact with me, instead of just scream at me if I dare to interfere with their tv experience in any way. By the way, I am sure enjoying doing all the dishes and the laundry and guessing which thing goes with what setting, because I am not allowed to Ask Questions Right Now, though I surely will be Blamed if anything goes wrong. And the table has looked pretty fucking poor for about four hours now, but god forbid I should say anything to my son about it. Because its the fucking survivor finale, and that is pretty much more important than Anything Else At All. Fuck you TV, may you smell my fragrant monkey's tail for many years.)

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Mom's Day

You know, friends, spouses, children even, come and go, and will be on your side or not.

But one thing is sure and certain: your mom will always be with you, on your side, while giving you what for as a kind of sideline.

Mom, I do love you, you are always in my corner, my own corner, and can be counted on, always. Far more than I can count on anything else.

I've tried to make this life of mine, and done good and bad at it, and ignored you as much as I had to to make it, but you were always there. You were always there.

Thank you for that, that ferocity of love. Being a parent myself, I know you could do no other, but still, as a parent myself, thank you so much.

I have to pass it down, as much as I can. I hope I can, I am sure trying.

Passing it down, that is what we are supposed to do, right mom?

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The Seas the Sun the Moon and All the Stars There Are

He crassly asked me, “Do you love your wife?” and I did not know what dignified answer I could possibly make. It took me more than fifteen years, to figure out what to say, that I could actually say.

The simple answer is of course “yes, and fuck you very much for asking.” The bigger answer, well, it’s about the biggest things I know of.

The Seas the Sun the Moon and All the Stars There Are
(Nine Muses)

(all for you of course m’dear)

She is like the sea for me,
With her own rhythms and risings, all her own.
A Muse of sorts, storms notwithstanding.

She is like the sun for me,
With her own glare and glory, all her own.
A Muse of a kind, always burning.

She is like the sea for me,
With her own run and roughness, all her own.
A Muse of surges, salty and trying.

She is like the moon for me,
With her own shadows and shades, all her own.
A Muse of mysteries, tides sidewise turning.

She is like the sea for me,
With her own sense of dieing, all her own
Muse of everything gone. I’ve swum in that hideous silence.

She is like the stars for me,
With her own sense of distance, all her own.
A Muse of fortune, faraway and foreknowing.

She is like the sea for me,
With her own sense of sense, all her own.
A Muse of silence, silently beating:

On the walls of my heart harshly, coolly on the heat of my mind
On the seas of my love and the sun of my regard
And yes on the thin cool care of my moonlight on her heart.

She is like the sea for me,
Holding me up and all around me as I swim. Coming in,
Without end without end without end on the battered ragged shore that is me.

She is the sun and the moon and all the stars there are, for me,
And most of all, she is my sea.

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Cool

Ok, this is just totally cool. (Sound advised, and patience and poking about rewarded.) Them Russians are just damn good at Flash, you know?

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The Rules, Policies, & Procedures

Sometimes you put a bunch of thought into something important to you, and sometimes you just throw something off. More often than not the latter is interesting, and the former is not. This is important to me, so I expect no one will give much of a damn...

I remember way back when, Mulroney was PM, and a famous and of course highly sycophantic business reporter decided to do a year-end interview with him, the gimmick being treating the matter as if he were the CEO of a large corporation rather than a sleazy politician trading favours. It was mostly nauseating, and I think the only reason I watched it was that it was late and I was walking the floor with collicky baby at the time.

But Mulroney said something very interesting: he had found the culture of the civil service to be deeply and profoundly different from what he had experienced in the private sector, in something like the following ways (hey, it was a lot of years ago, and I've thought about it a good deal since, so I don't know what is his and what is mine about the thinking, ok?).

The civil service is essentially organized around not making a mistake, and unfortunately when that trickles down to your basic functionary, that means not making a decision that you can be blamed for. In general this is not necessarily a bad thing, after all we have people in public service making decisions that have tremendous impacts on both broad social streams and on individuals in particular situations. You simply don’t want someone fucking up emission standards or monetary policy or international genocides or criminal prosecution (either way).

But the flipside to that, is a whole organizational culture that is, on an individual basis, simply terrified of making decisions, at least any decision that might be attributed to them personally rather than to the policy framework or the rules or whatever. It just cannot be them personally.

Because a civil servant gets very little credit for being right, but a ton of misery for being wrong. Even when s/he is in fact right by any reasonable standard.Where that way of thinking and behaving leads, well, read up on the Nuremberg Trials.

I've often thought that the most interesting figure after Judas in the Passion was Pilate (well, other than the for once inarticulate Central Character, duh). Pilate is very often portrayed almost sympathetically, a lot of the time you can just see people struggling to get him off the hook, to find mitigating factors. There are a few, a very few, who hang in there with the earliest gospels, and condemn him, but for most, well, he seems to almost stand in for the rest of us, whoever the rest of us you might figure you are. Not Jewish anyway, perhaps not religious, a decent civil servant and all that, at anyrate a man put into an impossible situation he simply doesn’t understand. (That, and he got probably the catchiest ballad in JC Superstar, which probably didn’t hurt his rep any either.)

I’ve felt the same way myself; who hasn’t worried about the consequences of decisions you’ve had to make on limited understanding in highly constrained situations? Poor guy, and all that, thank god it was he and not I in that spot and so on.

The problem is, that is wrong. You see, I cannot abide the washing of the hands, you can’t wash off the unwashable (and we all have some unwashables we carry with us that we try and hide, to be sure). And I am not sure that Jesus let anyone off the hook, saying that Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above... (John 19:11) Because although that might be true from Jesus'/God's/The Churches' point of view, and is every bureaucrat's desperately hidden prayer, for any kind of personal responsibility, it is not so. The story would make no sense if we human beings had not chosen that thing, and I am sure that one of the many points of it is essentially corrective.

If the Eden story of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil makes any sense at all (and I think it profoundly does), and if it is an accurate account of the human condition (and I am pretty sure it is), and if there is a close connection between that story and the Passion (and I agree there is), and if the message of Jesus includes the fundamental principle that you do have power over your own life and choices, well then, that poor Roman functionary’s handwashing is deeply ironic. Which is, I have always believed, the point.

Because either you are responsible for the decisions you make, or you are not. You can’t be a little bit responsible any more than a little bit pregnant. Sartre called it Bad Faith, when you suppose that the Rules of your position obviate you from responsibility and turn you into a machine, free from responsibility. It is the worst human characteristic, when we say "this is not my business" because you are part of a machine, because you have to follow Rules; because it is always your business.

"I am willing to do bad things to you" for this or that, my family, my street cred, my understanding of good and evil, for money, whatever, is one thing. But, I am willing to do bad things to you because there is some larger system? Wash your hands all you want, I ain't buying it.

In all my years of watching various functionaries having to make awful choices, and I have seen a more than a few, I have never once heard one make either statement:

1) Admitting the truth: I actually don't have any choice, the decision is fixed and I am just a messenger boy; and/or

2) Putting themselves on the line: I personally think that this is the right choice (or, god forbid, the wrong choice).

Never, not even once.

There is no unspeakableness in the history of human cruelty that has not been justified by I had no choice and/or I followed the rules. There have been so very few instances of a participant saying I can do nothing, or I think this is necessary.

What set this post off, is that while the Little Man bullied a client in front of me, and while this necessarily outraged me, what really really pissed me off, was his appeal to The Rules, and the necessity of conformance with them and more importantly public respect for them, lest there be anarchy and various Bad Things. I cannot express how much I hate that kind of thinking.

I am put in mind of one of passages in the Gospels that moved me from the first time heard it in Sunday School, Mark 2:27: "And he said unto them: the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath." Which is precisely how I feel about Rules and Policies and all their ilk.

You know what I did pretty much all day today? I sat around in a committee crafting policies, procedures, and yes, rules. God help me.

If continued....

Modern Apartheid, Modern Slavery

You know, it is awfully nice when someone not in your line of work, suddenly Gets It (Salon link, you may have to go through some adverts) about something you care passionately about: "There's a moral stink to granting different rights based on criteria that are becoming increasingly arbitrary."

I could not have said it better myself.

"From a global perspective, modern immigration policy isn't much different than apartheid, with the passport replacing the racially classified pass card."

or

"In this view, the biggest difference between apartheid and our current system is that the South Africans wanted to draw the boundaries and assign the nationalities. We make do with existing ones."

and

"Abolishing visa restrictions may be an impossible political sell. The poor and unskilled in Europe and America would confront competition from new immigrants, who would bring with their willingness to work a host of cultural change. But the same argument could have been made against the abolishment of slavery or apartheid..."

Yep. Slavery. That is what our current immigration systems amount to. Keep them in chains, and away from us, because we can, because we have the guns.

As I've said before, borders are fundamentally immoral.

The only quibble I have with the article is that it is all economics. Where is there any allowance for love and family which no immigration system at all really accounts for, which amount to the iconic slave mother seperated from her children? Let me assure you, those seperations are going on all the time, with the enthusiastic participation of all Western governments, my own Canadian government most especially not disincluded.

We live in cruel times, you know? We like to pretend that we are all modern and non-barbaric, but we do live in cruel times, and I often think that Attila or Hitler or Simon Legree would feel pretty comfortable nowadays in some ways. Bureacracy tries to hide but does not make cruelty more palatable; you can wrap atrocity in Rules all you like, and it will remain atrocity. That was Nuremburg, right?

Wanna argue with me about the extremity of that? Please do. I got stories that would make a statue cry.

If continued....