Paul Harris Column

by Paul Richard Harris

Long before scientists learned to harness the power of atoms and build nuclear bombs, mankind had perfectly adequate weaponry for killing. Regular explosives were quite capable of blowing a building to small pieces and killing large numbers of people. Fear of those weapons was real, and everyone understood their awesome destructive power. Yet when even more powerful and brutish nuclear weaponry was finally born, and an arms race ensued, scientists and governments told North American parents that their children would be safe underneath their school desks if ever we were attacked. They told us to hide under kindling.

Early in the twentieth century, a movement that had been born some fifty years earlier really came into its own. It was the ‘science’ of eugenics. Most otherwise sane scientists, politicians, writers, social critics – just about everyone ‘intelligent’ – supported eugenics and loudly shouted down those few who argued against it. Eugenics flourished in the United States, where social and political activity was channeled into preventing the ‘inferior races’ and the ‘feeble-minded’ from reproducing. The movement was predicated on the idea that these inferior humans were out-breeding the intelligentsia and would eventually water down the human gene pool and turn us all into imbeciles. On that score, you must sometimes wonder if they were right.

While the eugenic movement predates the era when anyone really understood what a gene is, it was a scientific movement fully supported by government, industry, and educational authorities. With absolute certainty, universities taught the science of eugenics and governments made social policy based on a need to cull the herd. The movement reached its zenith in the 1930s when its focus was relocated to Germany. You know the rest.

by Paul Richard Harris

Canada’s Role in the World

By almost any measure, Canada is a minor power. Never seen as a threat to anyone, most people around the world view us favorably. Despite the winters. But there are some very real cracks appearing in our veneer and we are starting to lose our shine. How dull and unattractive our cloak might become is still not predictable but Stephen Harper is doing his best to accelerate Canada’s depreciation.

It is generally recognized that, although Canada fought well above its weight class in two world wars, our strongest role has been that of the peacemaker – an honest broker far more interested in talking through disputes than reaching for weapons. We have operated what is sometimes called a ‘3D foreign policy’ – diplomacy, development, and defense – with the clear emphasis on the first ‘D’. In that regard, we have often seemed like a very distant neighbour to the United States, despite having such a wide range of common interests.

Over the years, we have provided peacekeepers in numerous places around the globe where our task was to keep the warring factions apart long enough for dialogue and cooler heads to prevail. In fact, one of our previous prime ministers, Lester Pearson, is often considered to be the father of peacekeeping, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize.

By Paul Richard Harris

Since the arrest of 17 alleged ‘terrorists’ in and around Toronto on June 3, Canadians have been bombarded by pundits telling us we should have seen this coming, that we are too naïve for our own good, that this should be a real wake-up call for us. Naturally, the know-it-alls in the US who previously couldn’t have pointed to Canada on a map (the world’s second largest country -- hang a left at the Great Lakes, folks), are all instant experts on how lax we have been and the superb effort by our security forces to execute this ‘apprehended insurrection’ (a phrase that might be recalled by Canadians of my generation).

Well, it should be a wake-up call … but I’ll get to that later.

So, where’s the real threat? Let’s have a look at who got arrested, how those arrests came about, and what machinations might have led to the arrests at this time, rather than during the past two years ago when the alleged plot was allegedly brewing.

Police swooped in and arrested 17 misguided punks. They all appear to have been born and raised in Canada, many of them are still teenagers (some too young even to be named in the media), and with the details behind the charges dribbling out slowly, it isn’t hard to see that this is a group of phenomenally stupid young men. That’s not to say they might not have done some real harm, and putting an end to that threat is certainly a good thing. But how serious might this threat have become if not for the able assistance of the RCMP and CSIS?

Much of the story about this plot is still obscure because, as of this writing, police still have not provided much detail about the charges against these individuals, nor about the evidence. Lawyers for the accused are apparently stymied because even their clients have not been presented with the evidence against them. The lawyers say the accused are all being held on fairly vague charges related to belonging to terrorist groups, though police are quick to point out that actually they do not belong to terrorist groups. In short, the charges against them are that they have committed the crimes of being stupid and not very nice guys. I do hope the Crown has more up their judicial sleeves than that but, to date at least, that’s about what the charges amount to.

by Paul Richard Harris

What on earth could possibly be wrong with those Muslims? Are they unable to appreciate humour? Sure, the cartoons published in Europe that show the Prophet Muhammad unfavourably are cheeky, rude, and maybe even insulting. But jokes are often made at the expense of religious figures without provoking the reaction we have seen from Muslims across the world. It’s hard to imagine that devout Christians, for instance, would not have been offended (numerous times) by Monty Python routines; but I don’t recall priests and acolytes hitting the streets to call for the death of Great Britain.

But while the present reaction to the cartoons is astonishing to some, and expected by others, these were just jokes, right?

No, they weren’t just jokes.

Leaving aside whether Muslims are stiff-necked and unable to appreciate a joke, at least one at their own expense, these cartoons were not published to be funny. Nor were they published, as claimed by the chief editor of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, to “examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues.” They were published to inflame, to denigrate, to anger, to humiliate.

by Paul Richard Harris

It’s not good, but it could have been worse.

On June 30, 2004, Vive le Canada carried my article entitled ‘Aftermath Blues’ which addressed our near-miss in an election that might have moved us squarely into the elite group of neo-conservative brutes who hold so much of the world in thrall. Whether by good luck or good judgment, we chose instead to elect a corrupt bunch of familiar clowns who, while utterly inept, were still marginally on the positive side of humanity.

At least we were not disappointed: the familiar clowns continued to be inept. But what we had always suspected was a corrupt ruling party eventually imploded in a sea of scandals leaving no doubt as to their integrity.

by Paul Richard Harris

With Canada’s winter election presently in a holiday season hiatus, perhaps it’s time to have a good look at what we’re going to end up with when a small number of us venture out to vote on January 23. We know the turnout will be paltry, that’s been the trend in recent years; and it’s Canada, there’s a good chance the weather will affect the vote in at least a few places across this vast and frozen land. Besides, we know already the resulting government is going to be either Gang of Thugs A, or Gang of Thugs B. It is astounding to me that anyone could find either of those alternatives to be even mildly palatable, but that’s Canada for you.

I think, however, that we might be well advised during this election hiatus to put aside the eggnog and give some thought to the future, to the election that will come after this one. It is too late now to make fundamental changes to our system of government before January 23, but we can certainly start planning for further down the road.

Long a master of persuasive writing, albeit not always in the pursuit of truth, Thomas Friedman has finally revealed his inherent barbarism. He is a ‘Foreign Affairs’ columnist for the New York Times--although his most recent gig, lasting almost five years, is as an unembarrassed apologist for the White House.

Many readers will remember his book From Beirut to Jerusalem as a wide-ranging, if somewhat biased, perspective of an American Jew reporting for ten years from the hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment. Most recently, his The World is Flat has enjoyed stellar sales figures. That book carries on some of the specious writing he began with The Lexus and the Olive Tree, wherein he wrote a popular justification for the rich of the world to suppress the poor. That’s not the way he put it, of course: he actually argued that economic globalization is the cure-all for the world’s ills in a kind of ‘trickle-down’ effect like that fostered by US president Ronald Reagan. He conveniently ignored the relativity of wealth: if some of the crumbs trickle down to me, it is only because someone further up the chain got a much bigger piece of the pie – the result being the gap between top and bottom becomes an ever-widening abyss.

Friedman is a persuasive writer. His technical ability to put sentences and paragraphs together is impressive and he has learned well how to touch on the individual fears, desires, prejudices of the American public, the largest consumers of his writing.

But, intellectually, he is such a lousy writer and so full of rubbish that one hardly knows where to begin to criticize. So I’ll simply quote from New York Press writer Matt Taibi in his rant about The World is Flat:

by Paul Harris

The ‘shunning’ of an individual is the act of deliberately avoiding association with him or her. The historical punishments of ostracism and exile were forms of shunning. Today, shunning in an official, formalized manner is practiced by only a few religions, although it continues to be practiced informally in every sort of human grouping or gathering.

Shunning aims to protect a group from members who have committed acts seen as harmful to the shunning organization, or who violate the group's norms.

For some religious groups, shunning might be seen as the ultimate act of rejection by disconnecting an individual from the group. Historically, the practice is sure to have been initiated for spurious reasons from time to time – but as a social agent to ensure civil behaviour, it is a powerful tool. It serves a function similar to the amputation of a right hand in Islam.

by Paul Harris

Everyone who is supposed to know about these things, knew that Katarina was coming. They didn’t know her name, and they didn’t know when to expect her, but they knew she was coming. They had known it for years.

Among those who are supposed to know about these things, the responsible ones had predicted with a chilling accuracy what would happen when that unnamed category four or five hurricane finally took direct aim at New Orleans. Weather experts, engineers, environmentalists, anyone who had lived through a category three hurricane in New Orleans, knew that when the big one came there would be hell to pay. Because they knew they weren’t ready, they knew with a grim certainty that the levees would not hold, that the sea or Lake Pontchartrain would rush in through those levees and the city foolishly built below sea level would learn what ‘below sea level’ really means.

In a report released August 2, 2005, Greenpeace has alerted the world, and thereby God, to the fact that Monsanto is about to challenge God’s patent rights to his creations … again. This time, it’s the pig.

Canadian readers might remember the plight of Percy Shmeiser, a Western farmer who lost a Supreme Court battle against Monsanto in 2004 over their genetically modified canola seed. People the world over have sat up and taken notice.

Shmeiser’s troubles began in 1997. He was routinely spraying herbicide along a ditch and discovered that some of his canola plants appeared to have become herbicide resistant. It turned out that his canola had been contaminated by pollen from Monsanto’s patented herbicide-resistant canola that was being grown in a nearby field. Shmeiser wasn’t impressed to find his canola tainted but he continued with his normal crop cycle, which includes harvesting and replanting some of the seed from his field. He also sold some of the seed he gathered.

In 1998, Monsanto sued him for patent infringement. They alleged that he had acquired and planted their patented seeds without obtaining a license from them, and that he then sold his harvested seed and further infringed their patent. Ultimately, Monsanto had to take Shmeiser all the way to the Supreme Court where, in a stunning 5-4 decision, Monsanto earned the right, for themselves and all other corporations, to patent life.

Polls are only as good as the pollsters, the questions posed, and the mood of the respondents. Poorly done, a poll might only generate a 62 percent agreement that today is Friday (with a margin of error plus or minus two-to-four percent). But a poll result released by the Pew Research Center in June 2005 has some interesting findings, and is based on a large enough sampling that it bears consideration.

by Paul Harris Maybe all the lawyers should be shot; there is certainly popular sentiment to support that. But they should be the second group up against the wall: first, we do the damned accountants. There are those who will say accounting is an dependable profession, that its practitioners are largely decent and honest people. I would not be among them. While that may have been more or less true at one time, it is now but a distant memory. The idea of accountancy as the bogeyman has been eating away at me for many years: for a long time, I thought the biggest man-made problems could be eliminated by getting rid of all the MBA grads. But it isn’t just them; it’s the very nature of what accountants do and how they do it. But before I get into a further explanation of my thinking, let me tell you what precipitated this article, at this time. Obviously, the Enron and WorldCom and Human Resources Canada fiascos are old news but something happened recently, of a personal nature, that reminded me of my long-held disrespect for the world of number crunching.

Canada helps crush Third World, not Third World debt by Paul Harris Bob Geldof and Bono may have screwed it for the world’s poorest countries. These are two well-meaning guys, and they certainly deserve kudos for the attention they have helped to focus on the plight of the world’s poor. But when they offered flippant sound bites last week about plans to relieve some of the debt of poor nations, they set back the path to economic justice by huge strides. It must be assumed they did not do so deliberately, but their fame and their ability to buttonhole the leaders of the wealthiest nations may have clouded their judgment enough to prevent them from remembering that they are spokespeople, not experts. On June 11, the finance ministers of seven of the world’s leading industrial nations, which includes Canada (the G8, minus Russia), agreed to write off the debt of the 18 poorest countries (14 of them in Africa). It is expected that a further nine African countries may qualify for similar relief over the next 12 to 18 months. Although the agreement still needs formal approval at the G8 Summit to be held in Scotland in early July, it sounds like good news and a noble humanitarian gesture. But is it? And what is actually to be written off?

[Editor's note: This piece uses sarcasm and humour as a device to make a point. Some people may not share this sense of humour.] by Paul Harris

In sleepy backwater London, in even sleepier backwater Ontario, there is an area known as Sifton Bog. It’s a small area, less than a hundred acres, that the city has grown up around and as the Bog has been confined, so has the wildlife that lives within it. The property is actually owned jointly by the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority (UTRCA) and the City of London.

As an urban space, the Bog is not much use to anyone. You can’t build anything on it and it just sits there, full of green stuff and non-taxpaying wild animals. Of particular concern to city officials is a grouping of deer. Not dangerous killer deer, not the kind who prowl the streets carrying weapons and threatening our very way of life; just the cute kind who have, unfortunately, earned the dislike of some of their neighbours.

by Paul Harris

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times magazine (part of the Sunday edition that they sell by the pound), carried an article entitled ‘Watching TV Makes You Smarter’. I put it aside, initially, because I assumed it was a humour piece.

Imagine my surprise when I came back to it later only to find that the writer, Steven Johnson, wasn’t kidding. Not only that, this essay is adapted from a whole book Johnson has written entitled ‘Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter’ which is to be published in May.

For those of you who don’t watch enough television to be getting smarter, I am going to simplify Johnson’s argument. Essentially, his premise is that the current dramas ‘24’ and ‘The West Wing’, along with several others, have plots that are so complicated when compared to programs of even a decade ago that the audience has obviously gotten more intelligent. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to follow the story lines. And it is this very programming that has engendered this evolutionary enhancement.