New Media

I wore a poppy today.

The pin kept coming out of my sweater and I continually had to pick up the red plastic flower, dust it off and put it back on. My international students noticed it and asked about it. I told them that we wear it to remember our soldiers who fought for Canada in war.

Of course, that was pretty much all I could say. Most of my Japanese students are probably not even aware that Canadian soldiers fought Japanese in bloody battles in the Second World War. I certainly wasn’t going to say much about it with the German student. And any discussion of this topic with my Korean students present was likely to touch off a firestorm that might end up destroying friendships they’d formed with their Japanese colleagues – friendships that one by one are helping to reduce some of the traditional emnity between their countries.

Despite our ongoing mission in Afghanistan, or perhaps in part as a result of it, Canadians have an impression of war as being something that happens to other people in distant lands. Canadians only go to war because they choose to, not because they have to (notwithstanding Canada’s conscription debates of the First and Second World Wars).

Remembrance Day will likely boost coverage of our Afghanistan mission. That’s a good thing. Hopefully, the information overload will help reduce some of the overblown comparisons by leftist spin doctors of Afghanistan and Iraq. People in this country are free to criticize any of our military interventions overseas – but they should at least have all the facts on hand before they agree to leave Afghans to the medieval thugs who terrorized the country and turned it into a haven for Osama bin Ladin’s terrorists.

An unusual number of bed-sheet ghosts and rubber-masked monsters are roaming the streets of Vancouver these days. It’s Halloween time again.

Growing up, Halloween was always my favorite holiday of the year. It had no religious or national significance of any kind; in fact, most people couldn’t give a straight answer why we celebrate Halloween at all. It’s just a good time for fake-scary fun and lots of sugar highs.

It’s also the biggest time of the year for horror movies, of course. Unfortunately, in recent years the line between what I would consider to be a horror movie and a blood-and-gore splatterfest has been blurred… and the line for common sense has been crossed.

Saw 3, the prequel for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the relatively new on DVD Hostel are just the latest examples of a genre of cinema that bares more resemblance to criminal snuff films than Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Sleepy Hollow. These kinds of films are not only in bad taste – they may provide inspiration for deranged individuals to act.

There is no evidence that watching these films causes the average audience member to turn into a bloodthirsty serial killer. On the other hand, human behavior is learned. To say that no one could possibly be influenced by these films to carry out copycat torture-slayings is just ignorant. Stanley Kubrik’s A Clockwork Orange inspired copycat crimes based on the actions of the film’s brutal protagonist and his accomplices.

Censorship is not compatible with a free press and freedom of thought. But film-inspired violence is not compatible with individual security, which allows for those freedoms. Would we really be losing all that much by banning these splatter-fests from our theatres?

An injustice was about to happen. No one would accuse them of “just following orders”.

The high-minded resisters in question weren’t soldiers in Iraq refusing to carry out attacks in civilian areas against dug-in insurgents. It was far more local: Vancouver-area postal workers refused to deliver a pamphlet, The Prophetic Word, because it contained an article entitled “The Plague of this 21st Century: The Consequences of the sin of Homosexuality (AIDS)”.

Judging just from what’s in the Canadian Press report, it seems likely that the postal workers’ concerns were justified; the article in question is likely homophobic, if that term carries any generally accepted meaning.

The problem is, mail carriers aren’t allowed to determine on their own what constitutes “hate mail”. Even if they were, there is no regulation on the books that actually allows postal carriers to use their own discretion to deliver or not deliver any kinds of materials. There are laws governing what is considered to be obscene material – but in this case, The Prophetic Word didn’t violate that rule.

Was this a case of the street-level employees overreaching their responsibilities, or of the lower-rung workers making up for the ethical-professional lapse of the corporate-higher ups? It seems as though it wasn’t their call to make. In this case, they really can blame the messengers.

David Suzuki is a momma’s boy.

Of course, the momma I’m referring to would be Mother Nature. Canada’s most celebrated environmentalist was certainly the most dutiful sort of offspring, plugging green thoughts into our collective consciousness for decades in books, TV shows and myriad press conferences. But today Vancouver’s 70-year old sustainability icon is hanging up his shingle. And even though he did everything he could, his guilt at not achieving more for his “mother”is still apparent:

“Nobody any longer knows what a sustainable future is… I feel like we are in a giant car heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour and everyone in the car is arguing where they want to sit. For God’s sake, someone has to say put the brakes on and turn the wheel.”

That said, Suzuki’s uncritical support of the Kyoto Protocol is one little thing that bugs me. Kyoto is an agreement that does very little to improve the environment while giving governments that signed the agreement an excuse to seem like they are doing something – and giving the world’s biggest polluters (who didn’t sign the agreement) a free pass. In the minds of the public, signing an agreement has somehow been confused with taking action. When the Conservative government in Canada repudiated such two-faced enviro-diplomacy, they ought to have gotten more active support from Suzuki and his ilk.

But on the whole, Suzuki has a legacy to be proud of. Raising awareness of environmental issues may not have gotten us to a greener world just yet, but these things take time. Hopefully, we still have enough left to make a difference before the polar ice caps have drifted down to Burrard Inlet.

Hollywood actors lobbying for a good cause is not something I ordinarily pay attention to or even give them much credit for, for that matter. People who work a few months of a year for insane paychecks ought to be giving back to society anyway, in my book.

But former Vancouverite and Back to the Future star Michael J Fox’s foray into the politicized stem-cell debate in the United States made me sit up and take notice. As most people who grew up watching Family Ties and the Back to the Future movies will already know, Fox has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for years. He’s managed to cover up the symptoms for years, but on the campaign support ad shown above, he let’s it all out. It’s shocking to see.

I wish Fox, like-minded celebrities, supporters, the scientific community and the legislators that are trying to allow stem-cell research in the US the best of luck. It’s still too early to tell whether stem cell research is a viable path to a cure for Parkinson’s, paralysis and other diseases or just an ethical minefield leading to a dead end; but what is arguably the greatest concentration of scientific minds and resources in the world ought to at least be given the chance to find out.