Today is a historic day. At some point today Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who I normally cannot stand, is making me and other Canadians proud for owning up to the abuses and victimization of the First Nations of Canada through our so-called “residential schools” of old.
A lot of who I am stems from my parents teaching me about the ills against Natives and blacks when I was a child. I was raised on books about things like the Underground Railway and atrocities at Wounded Knee. I was taught that our forebears could make mistakes, but that it was our responsibility to learn from them and to always be better.
Here in Canada, our residential school system destroyed entire generations of Natives, and spawned more than 160 years of social abuses against those least able to fight them: children.
I believe we are too new to the science of psychology to really understand the generational repercussions, the legacy of our systematic ill treatment of others, and we may never understand the true toll taken on Canadian Natives through our schools.
And I believe today’s monster apology, which is expected to be more far-reaching than Australia’s was last year, and has been building up anticipation in the media for days, is a first step toward an entire people healing just a little more.
I love Canadian First Nations’ beliefs and culture, and was lucky enough to have a Nootka Chief, Nick, once carve two totem poles in my basement over the course of a summer, when I was 7, and learned much through that sage old man. With the beauty I saw in their beliefs, I have never understood the venom with which Canadian and American authorities sought to eradicate Native ways.
Today I am more proud to be Canadian, and I too am sorry for the sins of my ancestors.
Category Archives: History
So, Here We Are Again
The whole 9/11 thing is feeling weird. Reminds me of when five years had passed since my mother’s death. Has it really been so long? Boy, was that all it was? Five years?
Grief gets weird when you live with it for a long time and then — poof — it just vanishes, like. Guilt can come on, then. “I should be more depressed. Shouldn’t I?”
I’m watching some of the retrospective stuff. I think it’s important to remember it all, but I just don’t want to face any marathons. I forget sometimes, though, how fucked up it must have been to live in NY in those early days.
I’ve been thinking about that day. The weather today was very similar to the weather then — clear, sunny, warm, with just a hint of fall on the light wind. I remember the silence that morning. I never found out until I got to work — I never saw the news or anything that morning. I was enjoying coffee, sitting barefoot in my deck captain’s chairs, curling my toes around the metal railing.
I remember walking into the office, my closed captioning office, and the radio was turned on for the first time (and last time) ever. All the employees had no headphones on and were numbly editing files that probably needed no more editing. I knew something huge had happened.
“What?” I asked.
“Someone’s flown planes into the two World Trade Centre towers. Thousands of people are dead. They think it was terrorists. And someone hit the Pentagon, too.”
And like that I knew life on the continent had changed. No longer were we untouchable. Quite the opposite.
I didn’t think I could lose any more innocence after that day, but I was evidently wrong. I grow more jaded and disenfranchised with every passing year.
For a time, 9/11 made us all better people. We found the commonality. We had community. We had a cause. And something happened. A chasm. Conflict. Chaos.
Strange how quick that tide turned. Sad, too. Sigh.
AIDS: Another Rant Against the Bush-League
First off, a big thank you to the cute blonde across the way who keeps wandering around in boxers and no shirt. Love those pecs. Welcome to the neighbourhood, neighbour.
Kindness… With Strings
If you attach conditions to kindness, it doesn’t seem to be so much that it’s humanitarianism you’re after, y’know?
So, it was with great amusement – albeit bitter and pissed amusement – that I took note of the sanctimonious stipulations attached to all the “donations” being made by the Bush administration since 2003 in the name of AIDS assistance throughout the world. This was all shown during the brilliant Frontline “The Age of AIDS” documentary I mentioned in an earlier posting.
When it comes to countries like Uganda and Brazil, they’ve stood face-to-face with some pretty grave dangers posed by the horrific disease, and through understanding the culture and society in their nations, they’ve managed to come up with social programs to stem the rate of infections.
In Uganda, they teach abstinence and faithfulness, but they also implore the public to use condoms. There’s an intense movement towards education, and they’ve managed to go from having one of the highest incidences of AIDS to a much more stable number (and I’m too lazy to grab facts right now). The government was providing copious free condoms for the public to use. This proved extremely effective.
In Brazil, they’re not kidding themselves. It’s a very sexual country. They work hand in hand with the sex trades to try and control the amount of unprotected sex going around, and they push condoms onto the public awareness stage. It’s working. They’ve also created a system by which their citizens are ENTITLED to the drug cocktail known to keep HIV in check (most of the time). They’ve struck deals with pharmaceutical corporations and they have in-nation drug-manufacturing plants that allow them to make drugs for their citizens at a reasonable price. This is not a wealthy nation, but they have their shit together.
The US has attached stipulations to both these nations. In Uganda, the government provision of free condoms for the masses has apparently dropped by 80% since the Bush administration intervened, favouring instead the preaching of abstinence. In Brazil, they were insisting the Brazil government condemn prostitution (as it’s legal there), which prompted the Brazilian government to say, essentially, “Fuck you” to the money so they could maintain their autonomy.
Brazil’s aggressive approach to controlling AIDS, which includes HIV treatment, massive condom distribution and explicit HIV education, has produced one of the few success stories in the developing world: In the early 1990s experts projected 1.2 million infections in Brazil by 2000, but the interventions cut that number in half.
Read the source here.
As the Brazilian government rep said to the documentary’s producers, “This year it’s prostitutes, and maybe next year it’s homosexuals. Where do you stop?”
That’s a very good question. Where do you stop?
You stop when it’s your moralizing that is limiting the potential for other nations to save the lives of their citizens. You stop when it’s your failure to realize that husbands and wives get AIDS and, thanks to their marriage vows, they should expect to be able express their love in physical terms, and telling them to abstain, and not to use a condom is something that will get you laughed out of most bedrooms. You stop when your vision is so narrow that you’re not even seeing the dangerous ramifications of your moralizing. You stop when the disease has afflicted more than 5 million people in a single year (2005). You stop when the total number of dead now exceeds 25 million in just 25 years. You stop when more than 40 million people are living with it worldwide.
You stop when your sanctimonious beliefs mean you’re being a hypocrite to the very faith you profess to believe in. It’s about saving lives. It’s about letting people live, helping people live, and, if you happen to believe in an afterlife, letting God do the judging at the end of those lives.
You just fucking stop. You help. You do whatever the fuck you can to end the deaths. Because that’s what a good person does. They help in the face of all adversity. They help when they’re called upon. They don’t put conditions on it. They don’t judge those needing help. They just help.
If, in fact, AIDS (as Pat Robertson and his ilk believe) is an epidemic unleashed by God in an effort to punish the immoral, then why has “He” given man the tools to treat it even the least little bit?
I despise hypocrisy. More importantly, I despise the knowledge that 40 million people on this planet will more than likely die from this disease that we seem unable to find a cure for, but that many of them will die far sooner than they need to, and more will contract it than are necessary, all because of to many governments who have been too ashamed to admit they need help, or those who are too fucking sanctimonious to offer help without strings.
The United States wants to be a world leader? Then fucking lead from the trenches, not the pulpits. Get in there and get dirty, and don’t worry how the fuck it looks. Be like Nike, and just do it.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I just read this, and it blows my mind. YOUTH, AGED 15-24, ACCOUNT FOR MORE THAN HALF OF ALL NEW HIV INFECTIONS WORLDWIDE. More than 6,000 are infected daily. Wear condoms, kids! Fuckin’ hell!
Lenny Bruce, Obscenity's Legacy, and Today's News
I wrote this late last night, when I should have been in bed. I was out for coffee this morning when The Guy emailed me with a link and said, “This will make you very angry.” Rightly so. It turns out the Supreme Court of the US has decided not to hear a case on internet-based obscenity, meaning that internet obscenity laws are to be decided on a local basis. IE, small towns can decide what’s “obscene” on the internet.
Think about this for a minute. REALLY fucking think about the ramifications of this, people. This is huge. You’re going to have Buttfuck, Idaho deciding on whether or not materials that are being used and seen by people AROUND THE WORLD are obscene… in the land of “free press.”
It all comes back to you. Your vote. It comes down to voting for leaders and politicians because you’re looking for a fucking tax break, but you fail to realize the implications of what that leader’s choices for life-long appointments to the Supreme Court are. Life-long: Meaning decades of deciding the interpretation of YOUR constitution.
You want to tell me that America’s passion for freedom of speech is greater than any other nation’s. Not anymore. Never has been. That’s the greatest lie ever told, my friends.
This year’s the 40th anniversary of the death of Lenny Bruce — a guy who met the wrong end of every obscenity law ever passed in the US. Four decades have passed, and this is the bullshit that’s starting to cycle back into action.
AGAIN, I ask you: Where is your voice?
The timing of that news is just strange, since I’d planned to post this today anyhow. A sad fucking day for freedoms, my friends. Know that.
I recently took some time to organize my bookshelves, and this book in the photo, my tattered copy of Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty & Influence People, still stands up on display, right behind my grandmother’s 1955 rotary dial phone, which still rattles and rings anytime someone dials me up. Next to it, a first-edition of the Arrow paperback version of HST’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
When I was 18, my narrow, protected view of the world was shattered by HST, but then came Lenny. Like HST’s classic tome, it gets off to an unforgettable start – particularly if you’re an 18-year-old kid. Unbelievably, I had the balls to recommend this to my 14 year old student last week.
“Filipinos come quick; colored men are built abnormally large (“Their wangs look like a baby’s arm with an apple in its fist”); ladies with short hair are lesbians; if you want to keep your man, rub alum on your pussy.
Such bits of erotic folklore were related daily to my mother by Mrs. Janesky, a middle-aged widow who lived across the alley, despite the fact that she had volumes of books delivered by the postman every month — A Sane Sex Life, Ovid the God of Love, How to Make Your Marriage Partner More Compatible–in plain brown wrappers marked “Personal.”
She would begin in a pedantic fashion, using academic medical terminology, but within ten minutes, she would be spouting her hoary hornyisms. Their conversation drifted to me as I sat under the sink, picking at the ripped linoleum, day-dreaming and staring at my Aunt Mema’s Private Business, guarded by its sinkmate, the vigilant C-N bottle, vanguard of Lysol, Zonite, and Massengill.
At this tender age, I knew nothing of douches. The only difference between men and women was that women always had headaches and didn’t like whistling or cap guns; and men didn’t like women – that is, women they were married to.
Aunt Mema’s Private Business, the portable bidet, was a large red-rubber bulb with a long black nozzle. I could never figure out what the hell it was for. I thought maybe it was an enema bag for people who lived in buildings with a super who wouldn’t allow anyone to put up nails to hang things on; I wondered if it was the horn Harpo Marx squeezed to punctuate his silent sentences. All I knew was that it was not to be used for water-gun battles, and that what it was for was none of my business.
When you’re eight years old, nothing is any of your business.”
Lenny Bruce, if you’ve never heard much about the dude, was a pioneering comic who broke all the rules. The Jim Morrison of comedy, he had his ass busted for obscenity more times than Dick Nixon would proclaim he was not a crook. It was on his heels, on his ground-breaking sacrifices and legal hassles that Richard Pryor and every other comedian would follow. Without Lenny Bruce, there might not have been a Pryor, or a Hicks, or a Rock, or a Leary. Lenny Bruce said fuck you to the man, and he said what was on his mind.
These days, there’s something still admirable about someone with the balls to say “What you think is obscene is what others do behind closed doors.” As someone I quite like recently said, let’s meet at the corner of The 21st Century and Get Over It.
Laws of acceptability are drawn by people with the courage (or the accidental happening) to push envelopes in defiance of what accepted norms are. For instance, fucking can now be used as an adjective after 10 pm all because Bono accidentally said it as such during a broadcast of (insert irrelevant music awards ceremony name here).
But the ones who discover whole new lands, they’re the journeymen like Bruce because they’re the ones who consciously know what the accepted is, but choose to go far beyond it, consequences be damned.
You open to any fucking page, anywhere, and there’s something that even today is relevant. Me, my copy’s so fucking tattered it’s permanently mated with an elastic band, the only thing that holds it together. The page where the spine breaks clean in half, page 91, yielded this pearl from 1963, 10 years before my birth.
“Why don’t religious institutions use their influence to relieve human suffering instead of sponsoring such things as the Legion of Decency, which dares to say it’s indecent that men should watch some heavy-titted Italian starlet because to them breasts are dirty?
Beautiful, sweet, tender, womanly breasts that I love to kiss; pink nipples that I love to feel against my clean-shaven face. They’re clean!”
So many of us sex bloggers, we’re up in arms against this Moralizing of North America; the legislative attempts to arbitrate morality; this pitiful attempt to turn back the clock and eradicate sex and desire from the consciousness of the average person.
Got news for you, folks. We’ve been fighting this battle for decades. Whether it’s a brilliant writer and commentator like Lenny Bruce or a filthy fat fuck like Larry Flynt, the battles ain’t new, the war ain’t new, and the blood’s long from dry.
What’s different now, though, is the medium. Enter blogging. Enter podcasting. Enter streaming video. Now we have a voice. Now we don’t have to wait any longer for a voice crying out in the night, for a black-as-hell knight to ride in with a filthy leer and a winning argument. Now the undersexed, underfucked, randy-as-hell, crop-flogging, chain-wearing, paddle-using, nymphomaniacal, cross-dressing, same-sex fucking, porn-loving, and swinging folks, NOW they all have the ability to have a voice.
The thing about activism is that it’s not about ground breaking wide open in one fell swoop. Like any hole, it start with one push of the shovel. And another. And another. There will be rocks and boulders that limit progress, but with persistence, it all comes out. The greater the chorus of resistance, the harder it is to ignore. The greater the groundswell, the more ground we can break.
Unfortunately for the battle, Lenny Bruce died too fucking young. He should’ve died right around now, in his 80th year. Instead, a needle in his arm, he toppled off his toilet, and crashed to his death – a disgraced, bloated man who was mocked and ridiculed out of the mainstream, and instead, placed post-humously upon a pedestal by those who would continue to wage what was known as his crusade against semantics.
“One last four-letter word for Lenny.
Dead.
At 40.
That’s obscene.”
And it was. It is. Few people ever have the balls that Lenny Bruce lugged around with him, and it’s a crying fucking shame. And still, here we are, fighting for the same things, dreaming of the same freedoms as this long-dead Jewish-American comedian, in this, the 21st century.
Love Will Conquer All, Baby
I was reading something just before bed, stated by the venerable clothing designer Karl Lagerfeld, in answer to the soon-to-come fashion onslaught of heavy, dark clothing that’s to be replacing the light, fun, and airy lines we’ve been enjoying of late. Lagerfeld said, “If you read the daily papers, you are not in the mood for pink and green.”
If you are what you wear, are we as a society becoming depressed? Valium and Lithium and Prozac, oh my.
I’d lay my cash on a big, fat yes, but hey, what do I know? I’m just a formerly depressed not-even-yuppie who’s an observer, not a player.
Depression’s out there. Hell, even the upcoming ankle-length hemlines are screaming it. We’re depressed. As a people, we need to get happy. This war shit’s bringing us all down. We got Vice Presidents running around shooting good citizens. Gas prices are nuts. The Canadian economy’s strong enough to be a steamroller. Clearly, it is the end of times, and our nerves are a tad frazzled.
Me, I say the cure is sex.
Okay, let’s look at this, then. Stress and self-esteem issues, as well as external factors (thus the stress) cause depression, as do biochemical issues. Right? Sex is good for the nerves, great for the self-esteem — (especially if you can get ‘em to scream your name. Hmm. I really have to stop falling for the strong, silent types. My ego’s taking a hit.) – and releases endorphins.
In all seriousness, studies have shown we’re all at an all-time touch deficit. I’ve been hooking up with some guys of late, lots of great dates, no seconds, but I’ve kissed (uh, to coin a phrase) every one of ‘em. Life’s too short not to share a kiss (or something) or stretch it out over three or four hours. Sex? Nice but not needed. Making out does wonders for the self-esteem. Gets the juices flowing, the pulse racing. It’s the very definition of alive. No one should have to go without. I’m going into withdrawal, days without a kiss. A necking session would hit the spot, but I know what else would, too.
In a world where there’s famine and war and natural disasters and poverty and stupid religious extremism and pettiness… shouldn’t you at least be getting laid?
I for one applaud the relatively recent revival of the “Make Love, Not War” campaign. I need to get me a button, man. I’m willing to sacrifice myself to the cause. I will have sex in the name of peace, and soon. Afterwards, we’ll spoon, smoke a joint, drink some absinthe, and listen to Imagine, followed by White Rabbit, and some Dark Side of the Moon. Is there anybody out there?
Maybe this whole Iraq thing was just what the Sexuality Movement needed. Drop some bombs, shed some innocent lives, get the tempers flaring back home, have the pacifists realize they’re really pissed off but since they’re pacifists, they can’t go out back and shoot beer cans off the fence, so, instead, they smoke fatties and fuck.
Who knows. Maybe Bush did the right thing after all. I don’t fucking know. I do know that everyone getting a little more action would probably be not such a bad thing. Me, I always liked the fact that Clinton was getting head in the Oval Office. I figured he’d at least be relaxed enough to make the rational choice in any scenario that unfolded.
I think anyone in power with lives in their hands should absolutely be on a sex quota. They must be gone down on once every eight days, minimum, and are entitled to sex twice per week, minimum, with no less than 28 minutes foreplay each time. Sure. As a start. With time on the job, age, and increased responsibility, the sex allotment increases. Like a health plan or any other benefit.
Yeah, I don’t know what the hell the problem is, but I know sex is the solution.
Pity the new fashion scene’ll be here soon and skin will be a thing of the past. But, brothers and sisters, we shall overcome. Right?
*Yeah, I’m a pinko lefty with a loathing for the war and a disdain for both the American and new Canadian regimes. I mean, does it sound like I have conservative sex? C’mon! Get real. You knew this. You like me anyway. I’m the good kinda libertarianish type.
Early Sexual Memories
One of the things I pondered on the weekend as I rode the bus to avoid getting drenched on my scooter, was early sexual memories.
I’m not talking about first kisses, first fondles, that sort of thing. I’m talking about a few particular memories I have that sort of crystallized some of the really stupid hang-ups I’ve worked hard to overcome over the years that have since passed. There are two I’ll share here tonight. I sometimes wonder how those early moments shape who we are in the decades to come, so I suspect I might take a look at this theme more in the future.
The first was when I was seven or eight, standing in the bushes behind Tyler & Devin’s house, with a round of “you show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” After proposing the afternoon’s antics, Tyler got things rolling and tugged his jeans down around his ankles. I dropped my little shorts. He pulled down his Y-fronts. I dropped my little pink panties. We looked at each others bits and parts. But then…
The woods served as a shortcut to most of us kids in the neighbourhood, particularly en route to the Holy Land – 7-11 and Dad’s Ice Cream Shop. Except, of course, the portion with the haunted house. We all avoided that, of course, its broken windows and battered wooden siding, that constant smell of mold and must, all of it warding us off before we’d land foot in that unkempt yard.
It was just when we had revealed our bits and parts that a few kids in the ‘hood came crunching through the forest and discovered us in our exhibitionist glory.
“You’re a dirty girl!”
“Ew!”
“Ha-ha! I’m gonna tell!”
“Oh, I hate girls. Gross, Tyler!”
We shimmied our pants back up, blood rushing to our faces. Tyler started grinning, wandered over to the other kids, and me, I scurried out of the forest, ran under their treefort, and raced that half-block on home.
That lesson taught me that showing your body was something to be ashamed of, something I’ve kind of gone through the motions of explaining how I’ve gotten in touch with it since.
The second “profound” moment was a Friday night when I was about 12 and my friend Meghan was sleeping over. We were in the kitchen, popping popcorn the old-fashioned kettle-on-the-stove way, never a quiet venture, when I had to run upstairs to ask my parents a question that has long since escaped me. I barged into their bedroom only to discover my hefty 300-lb father rolling back and forth on top of my mother, naked, in bed, like a beached whale trying to will itself back into the wet folds of the ocean.
The light streamed in from the hall, illuminating the horror on my mother’s face and the amusement on my father’s.
“Oh… shit.” I muttered, slammed the door, and bounded down the oak staircase to the kitchen. “Forget it,” I told Meghan. “Let’s watch TV.”
About three minutes later, my dad rather unsubtly wandered into the kitchen in his robe and nothing but. “Popcorn ready?”
Unbeknownst to him, Meghan was far more savvy about sex than I was then. I didn’t have to tell her what I’d just witnessed, but we’d exchange horrified tales in the dark of my bedroom as the night progressed.
This was the first time it’d ever occurred to me that I wasn’t a test-tube child or a present from a stork. The notion of my parents fucking wasn’t something I couldn’t comprehend, but instead one of those thoughts I never wanted to entertain. Meghan, though, had no choice. Her parents never realized the amount of noise that came from their bedroom when they’d fuck, nor how thin their walls were, and every Friday night, without fail, they’d go at it. Which, of course, was part of the reason Meghan began staying over at my house, every Friday night, without fail.
There were more formative memories… many, many more. When you’re raised Catholic, I assure you, they come in droves. But that’s all you get, for now.
I’m having a rare moment: I have no idea how to wrap this up. But there it is. Funny now, but psychologically-scarring then. Part of the reason for this sudden “I don’t know where to go” is that I’ve just remembered something my mother once said to me about sex with my father, something that fucked me up and made me dread ever having sex, something that left me angry at her for a time. There can be issues with becoming friends with a parent, and this was one of them. It’s incongruous with the above, so I won’t share it tonight, but it’s fodder for another time.