Don't Trust Anyone Over 70*

We're not 70 yet, but most of the way there: in Whistler last summer.

I watched some coverage of the Democratic debates this week. That Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris emerged as the clear leaders gives me hope. As for the one actually leading the polls, Joe Biden, nothing I heard changed my first reaction when he declared his candidacy: "Really? Is another old white guy the best we can do?" 

Thinking of Biden made the title of today's post pop into my head. I wondered if the phrase had any currency, so I googled it. Only one solid match came up: the title of an 2013 Foreign Policy article by Gautam Mukunda, written when Trump in the White House was just a joke on The Simpsons.

Here are a few passages: 

Power itself has profound, and usually toxic, effects on those who have it. CEOs are so pampered that comparing them to babies is surprisingly illuminating. What is true for a CEO is, in this case, even more true for the men and women who lead nations and can literally have power over life and death... 

... Even worse, power tends to make those who have it more sociopathic. They become more impulsive, more Machiavellian, and more willing to dehumanize those who lack power....  

... aging can have pronounced effects on personality. Put simply, in general people really don’t mellow with age. Instead... they tend to become exaggerated versions — almost caricatures — of themselves, with their normal tendencies and patterns becoming intensified. This tendency is particularly likely to affect foreign policy. ...

Of course, 'way back in the lost innocence of 2013, I could read stuff like this and think this kind of insight might prevail. 

Maybe it still can. Go Harris. Go Warren.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Canada Day!

Karen

Pat and Cliff: Whistler last summer.

*Excepting, of course, any readers of this blog who are over 70. I trust you guys with my life.

Wreck-It Doug

The march of the fifty-story towers: each new one taller than the last.
The view from the Allan Gardens of the corner of Jarvis and Dundas.

Luck put me in the immediate vicinity of the massive Raptor celebration in Toronto on June 17. I was at something called the Electricity Summit at the Sheraton hotel on Queen Street, right across the street from Nathan Phillips Square. I had to quit the conference early to get back to the office and wondered exactly how I was going to do that.

When I got to Queen and Bay at 8:30 that morning, the crowd was already huge. I could barely get into the hotel. While speakers droned on at the conference about the grid of the future, I watched a live feed of the crowds on my phone like I was checking the weather for updates on a monster storm. The party was supposed to be over by 2:30, when I had to leave, but the NBA champs weren't going to get to Nathan Phillips Square until well past then.  

I gave myself an extra half hour and left at 2:00. I took underground paths leading from the hotel to Queen and Yonge and was forced above ground when I couldn't get past the guards at the Queen subway station. On the surface, on Yonge Street, a full block away from the main madness, there were so many people, I thought I might just have to stay there for the rest of my life.

Fixed as my attention was on getting past the mass of humanity and back to work (which I did finally manage to do), I missed the reports of the shooting and the tales of how the Premier was booed.

It was hard to miss, however, what came mere days later - Doug's Big Shuffle, where half of the provincial cabinet got a new job. 

Loyal supporters in the press accept the Premier's assertion that the problem is he hasn't been getting his message out, and he's moving fresh talent into key files at a critical juncture. Those less loyal, or even those just paying attention, aren't buying that. The unprecedented, panicky move by the Premier is just further proof that Ford has no idea what he is doing.

But then, why would he? He's a former drug dealer who ran a sticker factory. He has managed to fool himself into believing that because he ran a business he knows how to run everything. 

Clearly that ain't the case.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Pride!

Karen

Disinfotainment

I'm six months away from the end of my tenure as a public servant. In the meantime, Bruce and I think up bad business ideas, so that we may have something to do as the grave creeps up behind us.

One idea is "Misleading Toronto Walking Tours," to cash in on the trade of squiring around credulous out-of-towners for twenty bucks a head. We would perform as a squabbling married couple, one telling incorrect stories about Toronto landmarks (the CN tower has a ray gun to ward off meteors) and the other interrupting but still getting it wrong (no, Scotia Place has the ray gun. The CN Tower was built on a plague pit; ghosts ride the elevator). The tour would end only after the last despairing tourist had wandered away, feeling equal measures of exasperation and disgust. 

Put Me In Coach

On the same day that the Raptors became NBA champions, the team I coached through the Leadership Development Program held their graduation ceremony. I've written about these folks before. I helped them with their "Action Learning Plan" - the term applied to an impossible task to be completed by an under-resourced and mismatched team.

None of them know of my impending departure, but they were sweetly appreciative of my small efforts on their behalf. One asked if I would coach another LDP group. I looked him in the eye, smiled and said I had already signed up. Technically I wasn't lying. I have not taken my name off the list. 

Left to right: Mehul, Mark, Corey, Mike, Sandra, me.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Proud accountants, Bloor Street East

True Crime

Red Embers (detail): Just installed in the Allan Gardens

The first I heard of the June 4 raid on Unit #18 at 280 Sherbourne Street (where we live) was when a neighbour e-mailed later that day to say that police had forcibly entered the property.

Then another neighbour e-mailed to say how his young family had been traumatized by the sight of heavily armed plainclothes policemen (7 of them) swarming the courtyard.

That neighbour had often speculated that the tenants in Unit #18 were dealing drugs. The signs were all there: a $5000 bike, no visible means of support, frequent visitors who never stayed long, emergency vehicles full of paramedics dropping by to deal with possible overdoses ....

And now this, an actual raid, in a neighbourhood where the drug dealers across the street have operated with cool impunity for the ten plus years we have lived here. Still, if the cops were going to take down only one drug dealer, it might as well have been the one living in our condo complex. 

The owner of #18 has posted an eviction notice on the door of her unit. I wonder who she'll rent to next.

Genocide

I have not read the report of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, but I have read a lot of hand-wringing articles about its use of the word "genocide." To sum up, people say that while it is unquestionably true that very bad things have happened, what has happened is not genocide. To earn that distinction, actions need to be state-sponsored, deliberate, targeted, violent - you know, like Rwanda. And to confirm that point, Romeo Dallaire has weighed in. In an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Erna Paris says the report conflates the culturally genocidal actions of governments in the past with the fate of the women who have disappeared and been killed more recently.

So here's the thing for me. I think I get why the inquiry did not see a difference. It's not conflation. It's a continuum. The terrible violence against women in these communities - plus social dislocation, poverty, teen suicide and substance abuse - can be traced to the history of deliberate, targeted violence against Indigenous people in Canada that no one (well, mostly no one) denies.

A couple of articles fret that Canada, now that the PM has accepted the word "genocide," has joined a small group of global pariahs and can no longer invoke the moral high ground to decry the human rights failings of other countries. 

How about this: until Canada openly acknowledged the crimes it committed against Indigenous peoples, it had no legitimate claim to the moral high ground. 

Now that it has owned up, it can start its long slow climb.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

No More Sleep Deprived Fridays

I've come to the end of Roxanne Snider's eight week, Thursday night writing workshop. One of the last assignments was to write a story about the person in the above picture. Other people have brought in stories about this woman and murder, rape and child abandonment. I had a different idea.

************************

      It happened like this. Jennifer and I were on the subway headed downtown. We were just pulling into a station when I felt something hit me, like with a pillow. Jennifer said I let out a yelp then I jumped up and slumped down in a seat across from her, my left hand to my head, my right hand holding my middle.
“And your eyes were twice the size of normal," she said, "you looked crazy."
         I felt crazy. There was like this voice in my head. It was telling me to get off the train.
“We’ve got to get off,” I said to Jennifer. I grabbed her arm really hard. I was super strong, like not normal strength at all.
“OW!” said Jennifer, “Let the fuck go of me. What is wrong with you?”
“Come with me NOW,” I said, sounding mostly like me, but there was something else. The train stopped. I dragged Jennifer with me and practically ran up the station stairs. I felt super amped like I’d taken a million hits of cocaine. 
  And I was starving. Fucking famished. Like I could eat a boxcar of Big Macs. But not Big Macs. I needed pizza. 
“Have you got money?” I demanded in my new, mean voice.
“Ya. I got money. You do too.”
“I do?” 
Jennifer told me it was like I didn’t know myself, or her. Like whatever had grabbed me brought her along in case she had something it needed. We charged down the sidewalk and found a pizza place half a block from the station.
I ordered all the pizzas under the heat lamps in the window and ten more extra large. More than $300 worth. I ate for what seemed like hours stuffing slice after slice into my mouth. Jennifer hung around and watched me. I don’t remember breathing while I ate.
But as soon as I’d swallowed the last slice, I felt the thing inside me, like, dissolve. It came in with a wallop, but left with a sigh. And I think it took its pizza with it. I felt hungry.
“What just happened?” I asked. 
One of the kids from behind the counter came to clean the table, a murder scene of tomato sauce and gobs of cheese.
“Robert says it’s a hungry ghost,” he said. 
“Who the fuck is Robert?” Jennifer asked.
“He works here. His folks are from China.The last time this happened he told them and they said it was a hungry ghost.”  
“The last time this happened?”
        “Sure. Couple of weeks ago. Guy comes in, eyes like small moons, orders all the pizza in the window and more. Eats it all and then acts like he’s just woke up from a dream. But he couldn’t pay the bill. That’s why we got you to pay up front.”

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Ancestry.ca connections: Me and Daryl Hepting.
 We share great-grandparents on my maternal grandmother's side.