Salon.com > David Beers

No Bush, please — we’re Canadian

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 20:15:00 +0000

So maybe you've heard, Canada just got less cool. For some reason (which I'll try to explain) we've gone and elected a guy who's been studying the Reagan playbook all his political life, a Western-bred neocon who'd fit right into the Bush Cabinet (except for the turtleneck, which I'll also try to explain).

Most of the time, Canada is ruled by a party that Canadians are unashamed to call the Liberals. But now the new prime minister is Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party. Dubya's gang has every reason to claim him as one of their own. Many of Harper's closest advisors adhere to the same Straussian philosophy that inspires the fevered manipulations of Karl Rove and company. Harper is against gay marriage, pro missile shield, is eager to scuttle Kyoto, and would have sent Canadian troops to Iraq. In fact, in 2003 when then Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien refused to join Bush's "coalition of the willing," Harper, then the opposition leader in Parliament, published a letter in the Wall Street Journal calling that a "serious mistake" and apologizing. (Some here called that treason, but never mind. And I'll get to the turtleneck shortly.)

Welcome to Canada!

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:28:00 +0000

Dear friends back home,

Hey, sure, no problem, the couch pulls out and it's yours whenever you show up. But so many of you are dreaming of leaving America for the biggest, bluest state of all, Canada, I figured I'd offer a little orientation. I know, we've been out of touch too long. Can you believe it? It's been more than a dozen years since my partner landed that cushy professorship in Vancouver and we transplanted here from San Francisco. But sometimes it takes a little thing like an electoral disaster to put old friends back in touch.

Anyway, your sudden interest in your northern neighbor has not gone unnoticed up here. We've all seen that cute map showing "The United States of Canada," combining your blue states and Canada and cutting loose the red states of "Jesusland." We did note that Canada's main immigration Web site got swamped by U.S. traffic when Bush won. And just yesterday the CBC (sorta like NPR) reported that a local law firm, its phone ringing off the hook, is "planning how-to-come-to-Canada seminars" for "Bush refugees."

Start the World Series without me

Fri, 26 Oct 2001 14:16:00 +0000

"I see great things in baseball. It's our game -- the American game. It will take people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." -- Walt Whitman.
"I'm tired of it. I don't want to hear about it anymore." -- Bill Buckner, the Red Sox first baseman who, in the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, let a ground ball through his legs that allowed the Mets to go on and win the championship.
I'm not watching the World Series this year, not a minute of it. As a son of America, I know this to be widely perceived as sacrilege in this time of national trauma, as if I were shrugging off the wounded tribe's great, timeless ritual of bonding and healing.
I know that the highest claims have been made for the game by sages through the ages. That baseball is pure. That baseball is innocent. That baseball is the embodiment of democratic equal opportunity. That baseball, as political commentator George Will has written, is a great science: "The best baseball people are Cartesian. That is, they apply Descartes' methods to their craft, breaking it down into bite-sized components, mastering them and then building the craft up bit by bit."
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Irony is dead! Long live irony!

Tue, 25 Sep 2001 19:15:00 +0000

Well, isn't this ironic? Just when we need an ironic sensibility to remain cleareyed in dangerous times, we're told irony is obsolete. And this from some people who've made it their business to peddle a cheapened grade of irony over the past couple of decades until we've almost forgotten the true meaning of the word.

I'm thinking we need a profoundly ironic outlook to avoid being swept up in the new jingoism, to see that the best intentions might lead us further astray, to protect ourselves from the manipulative propaganda that envelops us in wartime. I'm feeling, suddenly, very much out of step with the latest "trend."

"There's going to be a seismic change. I think it's the end of the age of irony," pronounced Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and former editor of Spy, his sound bite last week rippling out into dozens of head-nodding Op-Eds. "Things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear."

"Maybe we've just witnessed the end of unbridled irony. Maybe a coddled generation that bathed itself in sarcasm will get serious," self-flagellated 25-year-old Camille Dodero in the Boston Phoenix and on Alternet.org. "Maybe we'll stop acting so jaded and start addressing the problem."

America’s crumbling sense of immunity

Wed, 12 Sep 2001 16:44:00 +0000

As the Pentagon and World Trade Towers crumbled on television, so too did a grand construct of the American psychology. Shattered is the sense that ordinary U.S. citizens are immune from the ruthless rage of any enemy of America. Gone is the disconnect Americans have been encouraged to feel between the overseas actions of their leaders -- their politicians, diplomats, CEOs, generals -- and the personal safety of their neighbors and loved ones.

This psychology of immunity, this imagined cocoon, has been woven over the years from various threads. One assumption is moral: Given the basic goodness of American democracy, no enemy with popular support could stay mad at the U.S. for long. A second is technological: No enemy but a madman would take on Fortress America's high-tech security apparatus. A third rests on a cultural assumption: So sophisticated are America's "best and brightest" technocrats, they could never be outsmarted by wild-eyed peasants living in the world's still-medieval hinterlands.

It’s all good: The appeal of Deepak Chopra

Thu, 10 May 2001 19:00:00 +0000

I am reading "How To Know God" by Deepak Chopra as I sit in Helen's Grill, a greasy spoon near my home in Vancouver, British Columbia. Outside the window in the rain, framed within the newspaper vending box, is the face of a young, beautiful girl. Next to that face is headline type, big and black: "'Amazing' teen killed in Whistler crash."

For some reason the words reinforce the illusion that the little vinyl and Formica world of Helen's Grill is a shared refuge, a place immune to life's random ravages.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Deepak Chopra, the spiritual instructor who appears on Larry King and Oprah, the alternative healer with the handsome looks of a Bollywood movie star, the personal source of inspiration to Michael Jackson, Naomi Judd and Bill Clinton, has sold 10 million books.

Here is some of what Chopra, a former endocrinologist in Boston hospitals, believes and teaches:

Spaced out

Tue, 14 Oct 1997 19:00:00 +0000

as the plutonium-laden Cassini space probe prepares to hurtle beyond our atmosphere, we might do well to bring our gaze back down from the heavens and ponder June Lockhart.

Thirty years ago, she played the planet-hopping mom on the popular kiddy sci-fi show "Lost in Space." In recent times, she has been known to drop into Houston's Mission Control and chat on the radio with the shuttle astronauts as they orbit Earth. It seems a nice thing for NASA to do, granting the fanciful wish of an aging actress. Except, no, it is June Lockhart who indulges the fantasies of a grateful NASA. As she bizarrely revealed to me, "Nearly everyone I meet there -- whether it's a physicist, an engineer, an astronaut or the guy who zips up the space suits -- they all say watching "Lost in Space" made them know what they wanted to do when they grew up."

See, there's the problem in a capsule. Even in this long season of Mir muddling, not just NASA but too many Americans are unwilling to draw a clean line between the extravagant joys of sci-fi and the downright dull reality of human life as lived in space. Until we do, we as a nation won't be able to enter a vital and long overdue discussion about our priorities in space. Namely, whether we really should spend more fortunes to keep propelling people up into a black vacuum.