Bibi the ‘no other choice’ candidate

Whatever you might say about Benjamin Netanyahu, and there’s plenty, he’s a brilliant political speaker. And his UN speech was one of his best. A masterclass.

It was constructed in such a way as to appear to be addressed to the gathered diplomats and dignitaries of the 81st UN General Assembly. The ones who hadn’t walked out in protest anyway. When in reality he couldn’t care less about them. He even said so, inviting more of them to leave at the outset of the speech. 

In reality, and effect, it was aimed at a domestic Israeli audience in the middle of an election campaign that will decide his immediate political fate and, for all intents and purposes, his lasting legacy.

The refrain that he repeated over and over, carried by media internationally, was “We have no other choice.” When I mentioned the speech to my wife, she said she hadn’t heard it, but then remarked that she’d heard something about, “no other choice.” I asked her what she thought it meant. She said, as Jews, we have no other choice but to fight to stay alive. 

She had only heard some reports about the speech. She did not even hear the context.

That’s how brilliant the speech was. From a simple, remembered phrase she gleaned a memorable, resonant message. One that was perfectly understood by, and appealed to, a diaspora Jew.

And she wasn’t even the main audience.

The main audience of “We have no other choice” was to voters in Israel. It was that he, Netanyahu, was their only choice in the coming election.

He told the story of his heroic older brother Yoni (Jonathan). Upon hearing that they were preparing for an imminent attack, Bibi went to see Yoni at his military base and asked him what was going to happen. Yoni answered: “We’re going to win. We have no other choice.”

If there was any doubt that the intended audience was actually domestic—a sales job to demonstrate his strength, defiance and competence as a leader who cares only for the security of his tiny country that is in constant mortal peril—it was put to rest when he said:

“Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard, but for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as Prime Minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.”

But would we?

And speaking of peril, what about the peril created by the failures of his government that preceded the catastrophe of October 7? And what about the peril generated by the Gaza military quagmire that has resulted in a humanitarian crisis and left Israel facing unprecedented international condemnation? And what about the consequences of policies that critics argue have contributed to an increasingly dangerous environment for Jewish communities around the world, including the attacks in Australia and, just this week, in Ontario?

Netanyahu had an answer for all that: Lies. Jews have always been hated and will always be hated, through no fault of their own.

So, whatever we’ve been doing in Gaza, in Lebanon, against Iran, we had no other choice.

So vote Bibi, again. The “no other choice” candidate.

Ingenious.

To me, ‘no other choice’ is the motto of an autocrat.

From The Margins

Art has always come from the margins, at least the art that mattered.

The last time Jews had a major artistic impact was about the middle of the twentieth century. In the US, in literature, there were fiction writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley. Poets like Emma Lazarus, Allen Ginsberg, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich and Marge Piercy. In music, composers like the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, Jerome Kern and Leonard Bernstein. In jazz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Stan Getz. In popular music, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carole King and Neil Diamond. In the visual arts, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacques Lipchitz, Philip Guston and Louise Nevelson.

In Canada, the most influential Jewish mid-century cultural figures included A. M. Klein, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman and Leonard Cohen.

It was the last time Jews weren't mainstream.

They were either immigrants themselves, usually born in another country and brought over as infants, or, more often, children of first-generation immigrants. They straddled a cultural divide between the New World and the Old World, between a new language and cultural tradition and the languages and traditions of their ancestors. In effect they were equi-distant from both.

It was that friction, that tension, that afforded them the perspective they needed to develop a new perspective on their adopted culture.

It was from that position, as outsiders, that they were able, to fight their way in, culturally speaking. To demand their place at the table, against a certain amount of resistance, and ultimately to gain acceptance by reinvigorating their adopted culture with what they could offer artistically.

That process of revitalization has played out over and over again. The outsider brings a fresh voice and perspective to a mainstream culture in need of re-invigoration. In Canada, in literature, we've seen it in recent years with African and South Asian voices, and then Asian voices, coming to the cultural fore.

But once they arrive, then what?

Their art becomes part of the mainstream. Part of the existing cultural soup. And like any ingredient in a recipe, blended-in and barely distinguishable from the entire dish.

It's why no one talks about 'the Jewish writers' anymore. They are just writers. 

I began to wonder: if it's art from the margins that re-invigorates the culture, where is the margin of the future? Where will we find the outsider-artists who are positioned to provide the perspective that helps us better understand who we are?

Perhaps, as culture in all forms becomes increasingly dominated by digitization, the margin will be found outside that realm. I don't mean people who simply don't use computers, or artists who insist on painting with oils on canvas rather than working digitally. I mean something more fundamental.

Digitization isn't simply changing the way we communicate. It is changing the way we understand the world.

More and more of human experience is being translated into something that can be recorded, measured, stored, searched, transmitted and reproduced. A photograph becomes an image file. A book becomes a collection of searchable words. A song becomes a stream. It's all data.

The digital world is extraordinarily good at representing things. But art is more than just representation. It's a record of human experience: love, grief, memory, physical presence, silence, loneliness, aging, death, desire, intuition, mystery. 

They can be represented digitally, of course. We can photograph a face, record a voice, write down a memory. But the representation is not the thing itself.

Perhaps this is where the next cultural margin will emerge.

For the immigrant artist, the distance came from living between two cultures. He could see his adopted culture from the inside and the outside at the same time. The future outsider may occupy a similar position between two worlds: the digital world and the world that exists beyond digital representation.

And this outsider need not reject technology. In fact, he may be completely fluent in it. He may use it more effectively than anyone else. But he will retain an awareness of what it cannot contain.

That awareness could become a new source of artistic perspective. Because, by definition, the artist's modus operandi was to see and express what everyone else has stopped seeing and expressing.

The Jewish immigrant saw the absurdities and assumptions of American culture because he hadn't grown up inside them. The immigrant writer could hear the language differently because it wasn't quite his first language. The child of immigrants could look at his parents' world and his adopted world simultaneously and see things that belonged to neither.

Perhaps the artist of the future will do something similar with the digital world. She will live inside it, but also outside it. She will understand the language of algorithms, platforms, screens and networks, but she will also be conscious of the things that cannot be expressed in that language.

She might discover that the unexplored territory isn't somewhere else. It's right here, found in everything that remains stubbornly human after we have translated almost everything else into information.

Perhaps that is where the next great art will come from. Not from a new ethnic group or a new immigrant culture necessarily, but from people who occupy the margin between what can be represented and what can only be experienced.

Every successful outsider eventually becomes part of the mainstream. That is how culture renews itself. The outsider enters, changes the culture, and eventually becomes indistinguishable from it.

Which means that the margins never disappear. They simply shift. For a long time, they were found at the borders between countries, languages, religions and ethnicities.

Perhaps the next border is between the digital and the undigitized.

And I don't mean that traditional art forms like poetry, stories, music and visual arts will be abandoned. In fact the opposite may happen. Digitization may be deemed an assault on the forms of art experience that we have cherished and enjoyed for millennia and that could spur an embrace of those forms with even more relish and vigor, in a protective way, as a mother protects its beloved child. 

But one thing is for sure. Somewhere along the border between the digital and the non-digital, or should I say the human, someone is already looking at the world in a way the rest of us haven't yet learned how to see.

Me And My Harmonica (reprise)

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG 

for Adam Gussow

I learn to play harmonica,

To my wife's eternal dismay.

But play the harmonica I will,

Whatever she may say.

She hates the crying racket,

The piercing whiny whine.

But that's not how I hear it,

To me it sounds just fine.

She says she can't be near it,

Yells take it somewhere far.

Where nobody can hear it,

'Play it in your car'.

Me and my harmonica,

We're both made to roam.

The one place I can't play it,

Is when I'm in my home.

Me and my harmonica,

We both sing the blues.

Anything that you can have,

Is something you can lose.

I blow a tune in four-time,

Pressed up against my lips.

And when my tune is done,

Back in my pocket it slips.

I move on down the road,

A wanderer alone.

With nothing but a song to sing,

Far away from home.

Out and in, in and out,

My body and my breath. 

Shapes a sound into a song, 

From silence and from death.

  

Me and my harmonica, 

Go out for a long walk.

Try the door on my return,

But she done changed the lock.

Me and my harmonica,

We both sing the blues.

With every tune I learn to play,

I also pay my dues.

Droppings From Heaven

I read this slowly in between other books. This one was odd; Layton used a lot of political and historical references I barely understood. Cool title though.

This is quoted from a two-star review on Goodreads of the 1979 poetry collection Droppings From Heaven by Irving Layton.

I'll say one thing about this brief ‘review’. He's right about the title.

At least he's honest about the reasons for his cluelessness: an unfamiliarity with ‘political and historical references.’

I'm re-reading the book myself. It's true Layton does make a lot of political and historical references in his poems, some of them obscure, like Stalin, Mussolini and the German National Socialists. The book is, in part, a fiery indictment of man's inhumanity to man.

Layton takes on the admonishing voice of the biblical prophet Jeremiah. But he's not ranting about the downfall of Jerusalem. He's warning about the moral degradation that allowed the atrocities of the 20th century. And not even God is spared his outrage.

Cool title indeed.

Layton writes: “The battle for the free, independent individual, for his dignity and waywardness, against the hordes of robots and frightened massmen that a soulless technology is creating in ever-increasing numbers, has already been joined. The stakes are high: they have never been higher and the future of poetry rests on its outcome.”

When he says ‘the future of poetry’ he actually means humanity. They are one and the same to Layton. He knew nothing of social media influencers or AI agents. Much less a malignant narcissist like Donald trump or a diabolical megalomaniac like Elon Musk.

And what of these poetry-reading dullards and amnesiacs who have limited knowledge of politics and even less of history? Well, they are ripe for the picking. They are susceptible to believing in any absurd conspiracy theory, but will be especially enamoured by ones that finger the Jews for all their woes and have a special affinity for those that offer an apocalyptic ending.

As for the state of poetry, when it's actually read, Layton wrote: “Its old enemies are still with us—humbug, mediocrity, gentility. And, striding with ever-increasing confidence, a couple of newcomers—machine-tooled professionalism and a bloodless scholasticism lugging a supply of cosmetics to rouge it into the appearance of life.”

It's unsurprising that so little of the stuff gets read anymore.

Layton might have added to his list of newcomer ‘enemies’ the elevation of marginalized identities. The job of the arts since his death in 2006 (the year Facebook was launched)—particularly the kind on public life support like poetry publishing—is, too often, political. Look at the submission guidelines of most poetry publishers these days and you will find a line that says something like ‘BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors are especially encouraged to submit.’

I first came across the acronym BIPOC about twenty years ago in a rejection letter from a publisher to whom I had submitted a novel manuscript. The editor wrote something along the lines of—don't take this personally, but we would have been more open to considering your novel if your protagonist had been a woman instead of a middle-aged man, or if you were BIPOC.

Personally, when I read a book—or meet a stranger face to face—I couldn't care less if the author is BIPOC or LGBTQ+. Nor do I care how they identify religiously, ethnically or politically, or what hockey team they root for.

All I care about is truth-telling and being moved by their humanity. And not your truth or my truth. THE truth. And yes, the truth really is still out there. 

Somewhere.

The Era of Moral Relativism

I've said this before: I was educated as a moral relativist. I'm guessing most of my generation was.

Moral relativism is the belief that right and wrong are culturally dependent. In other words, they differ from society to society, and even from person to person. According to this view, no single moral code is necessarily better than any other. I believe in the Ten Commandments, you believe in honour killing — it's all the same. We should not judge the behaviour or values of other cultures because, if no objective moral standard exists, there is no basis for claiming that our culture is more right than theirs.

Moral relativism became ascendant in academia through the intersection of several intellectual and cultural developments.

First was the decline of religion in education and public life. Second was the influence of Marxist and post-colonial thought, which increasingly interpreted history through the prism of oppressor and victim. Third was the emergence of postmodernism, with its argument that culture, knowledge and even truth itself are shaped by underlying structures of power.

The western elite, particularly the academic elite, having imbibed these ideas, grew ashamed of their privilege and power, and they taught their privileged students to feel likewise.

I thought about this recently as I watched a press conference with filmmaker Alex Gibney, discussing his new Elon Musk biopic, along with two participants in the film. I haven't seen it, but by all accounts it sounds pretty devastating.

I listened to the way they described Musk, and it sounded familiar.

A megalomaniac and a technocrat. Someone who believes every human problem can be solved through scientific thinking, engineering and efficiency. A person who believes in the "great man" theory of history — a Howard Roark-type character, if you've read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead — who equates empathy with weakness, lives by the principle that the ends justify the means, and believes power should be wielded by strong-willed visionaries.

Musk is six and a half years younger than me, so he belongs to my generation and wasn't educated that far behind me. The description of him sounds a lot like some of the people I met in graduate school.

I graduated from McGill University in 1986 and then went to a school called IUHEI in Geneva, Switzerland, now called the Geneva Graduate Institute. It was a postgraduate institute of study and research founded with the mission of promoting international relations as a means of resolving global problems.

You'd think a place like this would attract a lot of very smart people, and it did — present company excepted. The seminar classes were very small, usually 10 to 20 people, and most of the students came from elite universities around the world. In truth, I felt like a fish out of water sitting around the table with graduates of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the like.

You'd also think these ambitious young people would be idealists: people who believed in the school's mission of solving global problems through international relations — problems like Cold War tensions, civil war, mass poverty and economic underdevelopment, global health and so on.

I certainly was. I arrived in Geneva thinking I might eventually find work at the UN or for an NGO. I was bent on doing my part to save the world.

There were some people like me there. But, to my surprise, there were many more who seemed to have other ambitions. Particularly the American students.

They seemed to want to become hedge fund managers, Wall Street derivatives traders, or perhaps get jobs with one of the big commodities trading companies based in Geneva.

In other words, they were less interested in promoting values than in acquiring personal wealth. They were in Geneva because it looked good on a résumé.

The leaders of tomorrow.

I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. After all, these were the 1980s — the heady days of "Greed is Good," when Wall Street traders were making their first million before they turned 25. It was the era that produced what we now think of as the Epstein class: people for whom wealth, status and power became ends in themselves.

Money had become a huge driving force, particularly in education. A generation was beginning to pivot away from an arts-and-humanities-based curriculum toward STEM and business education. That was where the money was.

Universities built brand-new, multi-story business-school buildings and scientific research campuses while their arts faculties languished in old, neglected classrooms.

Philosopher Allan Bloom wrote about this in 1987 in his surprise bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. He documented what he believed would be the cultural, moral and political price of raising a generation of relativists.

Not even Bloom could have imagined a President trump or an Elon Musk.

Both represent, the idea that there is no higher moral authority beyond the individual and his own conception of what works. Wealth and power are their own justification, rule of law an obstacle to be overcome. 

Musk and trump may not have the same pedigree as the misguided student protesters who cheered for Hamas after the terrorist attacks of October 7. But they share the same moral obtuseness, and play the same special interest, identity politics game.

The irony is that moral relativism was supposed to make us more tolerant. Instead, it left us without the intellectual tools to explain why some things are simply wrong — regardless of who does them.

I want to be understood

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

I want to be understood,

like every fool.

Like the wind.

Like the honeybee.

I'm dumb as a meteorologist,

or apiologist, 

not content 

to act the vane, 

or spin with 

the momentum of the planet.

Or to get buzzed 

by the petal to petal,

pollen dance 

tickling my nostrils,

hachoooo!

I want to be understood;

translate it all

into a gibberish of symbols,

a code to breach

the defences of another mind 

like an exploding drone.

Why can’t I just

sit back and jaw-drop

ooh! and ahh!

under the canvas Big Top

along with the other yokels;

watch the lion that doesn’t decapitate 

his trainer, and

the trapeze-idiots doing flips,

catcher swinging 

like a clock

open arms

waiting and

waiting and

waiting

and

to be saved.

The New Rock Stars

Trumpapalooza.

That’s what many called the unprecedented—and unusual—midterm Republican convention held over the past two days in Dallas.

And trump, who, if you believe the polling, is the most unpopular president ever at this point in his term, proclaimed that he should be on the ballot in November. To make sure he was the star of the show, he spoke on both days of the convention.

There was a lot of news coming out of the event. But the biggest announcement, delivered by the star of the show himself from the stage, was that if Republicans win both the House and the Senate in November, every American adult would receive a cheque for $5,000.

Don’t think of it as bribery to get your vote, which would be illegal. It’s a dividend, trump said, on an economy doing gangbusters.

Except the economy is not doing gangbusters. Far from it. But put that aside for a moment. And put aside the fact that paying every American adult $5,000 would add somewhere between $1.15 and $1.35 trillion directly to the national deficit. And put aside the fact that it’s essentially trump using Americans’ own money to pay them back for his political benefit.

Trump has made BS promises like this before. Remember the DOGE dividend? You know trump is lying, especially when he starts with, “I promise.” The more grandiose the promise, the bigger the lie.

Still, I’m sure some Americans are dumb enough to fall for this ruse. Like they've fallen for so many others.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the obviously corrupt scheme of a blatantly corrupt politician. It was the show, the spotlight on the main-stage headliner.

Trumpapalooza.

When I was growing up, we looked up to musicians and actors as idols. Rock stars and movie stars occupied the spotlight of our young imaginations. Usually there was the same movie that everyone was going to see and talk about. There was the same rock concert that everyone wanted a ticket for.

As rock stars became more popular, rock concerts got bigger and bigger. First they filled clubs. Then theaters. Then hockey arenas. By the end of the 1970s, they were filling football stadiums. By the 1980s, rock concerts had grown into multi-stage, multi-day extravaganzas.

Yes, there was Woodstock and the Monterey Pop Festival in the late 1960s. But Woodstock was a massive money loser, and Monterey was a nonprofit event; most of the artists weren’t even paid to perform. 

The first Lollapalooza came along in 1991 and helped establish the template for the next generation of this kind of event.

But something else happened along the way. As the concert became bigger, the event itself became the attraction. People weren’t necessarily going simply to see their favorite performer. They were going to be part of something. The focus shifted from the performer to the spectacle.

You weren’t just attending a Pearl Jam concert. You were participating in an event. And that distinction matters more than many realize.

In subsequent years, the dilution of attention away from individual performers only accelerated with new technology. Streaming services for movies and music put another nail in the coffin of the old star-making machinery as Joni Mitchell famously sang about it in Free Man in Paris.

Or has it? Maybe it just changed. Maybe the new star-making machinery is social-media-driven politics.

Trumpapalooza got me asking myself a question: Are politicians the new rock stars? Is this what trump understood before anyone else did? Is this why he seemed able to seize the moment with his shtick in a way that no one else could?

Think about his political rallies. The arena. The giant screens. The music. The merch. The chants. The performance. And finally, the headliner takes the stage and feeds the dreams of thousands of fans with what essentially amounts to a fantasy world.

Trump understood the model. The political party is becoming the record label. The campaign is becoming the tour. The rally is becoming the concert. And the politician is becoming the rock star.

The Democrats are beginning to recognize the new culture. They are looking for their own rock star. Is it Gavin Newsom? He’s got the looks and the charisma. AOC? She’s got the following and the chops, but is she singing the right song? This new kid in Texas, James Talarico, seems to have the right image?

But Democrats still don’t fully understand the model. They are looking for a the rock star. But trump understood something else.

The rock star isn’t successful because he is the best musician in the world. He is successful because he can create a connection with an audience. He can make people feel something. He can make them believe that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

And rock stars don’t deal in truth. They deal in dreams. They deal in fantasies, something to believe in. That’s why they are called fans.

And perhaps that is the most important thing trump understood about the new political culture. A politician used to be judged by his policies, his accomplishments and whether he kept his promises.

A politician-rock star is judged differently. A citizen asks, did you do what you promised? A fan asks, do you still represent the fantasy I put my faith in?

A citizen changes his mind when the facts change. A fan changes the facts to preserve his faith in their idol.

That is the danger of turning politics into entertainment. Entertainment requires fans. Democracy requires citizens. Citizens evaluate. Fans cheer.

And trump may have understood before everyone else that, in the age of social media, the politician who can become the biggest star can also become the most powerful politician.

Trumpapalooza, this bizarre mid-term event with fantasy promises wasn’t just a political convention. It was an example of what American politics has become.

China

My big brother has become a big fan of China. He lives in the U.S.

It started after a business trip. He imports a product from China that is made for his company, like so many American companies. He visited to meet with his manufacturer and talk about a new product they were developing.

He was impressed by what he saw. Huge modern cities. Well-run transportation. Clean public spaces. Automation everywhere. Courteous, disciplined, hard-working people providing efficient service. No apparent crime.

He came home to see dirty cities with people living on the street. Infrastructure in disrepair. Rude people, seemingly angry and complaining about everything.

Last week he texted me that the SWAT team had surrounded the residential building next to his. It was on the local news. A man had apparently murdered his girlfriend and was now armed and holed up in his apartment. The police managed to extract him with tear gas.

China, he said, is at least twenty years ahead of the West right now. It's the future.

If that's the case, then why are so many people leaving the country? And why are they still clambering to come to the West?

He said that's a lie. Most people who leave China go back. They are flooding back in the hundreds of thousands.

I doubted it, so to verify, I asked Chat. According to the most recent statistics, China is experiencing negative net migration—that is, outflow vastly outpaces inflow. Recent UN-based estimates put net migration at roughly minus 319,000 in 2024. 2025 statistics seem to indicate that the trend is slowing, but it's still negative in the hundreds of thousands.

Anecdotally, my brother's contention sounded plausible to me because one of my Chinese work colleagues recently moved back after working with our company for eight years. She was being groomed to take over as the Controller, so her decision came as a surprise. But her circumstances seemed unique. Her family owned a successful manufacturing company in China, and her father had recently struggled with serious illness. There was no one else in the family who could help run the business, thanks to China's one-child policy from two decades ago.

Over the years, this colleague and I had many conversations about China, and she was a staunch defender. I always understood her attitude as more an expression of pride in her heritage and culture than an argument about the relative merits of Chinese society and politics.

I have worked with many Chinese colleagues for a long time. They are typically young women who came to Canada to get an education, found work, usually in the accounting department, and stayed. I enjoy talking to them about why they came to Canada and chose to stay, especially considering the weather here.

It always starts with education. That doesn't mean China doesn't have great schools. It's through an education visa that these migrants gain access to potential residency. So they are coming for the quality of life, not just the education.

I've heard several reasons for coming: to get away from an overbearing, demanding family; to get away from congested cities; because Canada has lots of space, lots of clean water, and lots of clean air; for the adventure and sense of personal liberty.

I rarely hear economic reasons, because most of these migrants come from relatively well-off families. If they can afford to come here for an education, it signifies that they already have means.

I never hear about politics. And from that I conclude that either it doesn't play a part in their decision or, more likely to my mind, they are simply conditioned not to talk about politics.

One time, my colleague and I were talking about her use of WeChat, which is China's main social media platform, sometimes likened to their version of Facebook. But WeChat is much more than Facebook. It's not just a way for people to stay in contact with their old high-school chums. It's also a banking system, a mobile payment app, and even provides access to government programs.

I argued that WeChat was more like a government surveillance system and a mechanism for social control than a communications platform. I asked her, "Can you criticize Xi on WeChat?"

She answered, "Why would I want to criticize Xi?"

When I told this story to my pro-China brother, he defended her answer. He said that I had a blind spot because I was indoctrinated to believe that criticizing the government represented an important value. "You don't understand," he said, "because of your conditioning."

I suppose he's right about that. I can't help but think that criticizing the powerful, holding them to account for the power we give them, is important.

"If you understood her point of view, you'd see that she trusts the government to have the public good in mind, because that's the basis of their system. And it's working well. She sees no reason to criticize the government."

"Is it that she sees no reason to criticize because it's working, or because it's futile, and potentially dangerous, to criticize?"

My take-away from my conversation with my brother is concern for the future of democracy.

I'm having more and more conversations with people who have lost confidence in what democracy represents—in terms of freedom, values, prosperity and security. The collapse is primarily happening in the United States, which drags the rest of the world down with it.

And China is the winner. With every American failure, it looks better and better. Even to a person like my brother, who is educated, has a BA in political science, and understands what's at stake.

To me that's the scariest part.

You’re Gettin Old

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

You’re gettin old and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you're old.

You’re gettin poor and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re poor.

You’re gettin dumb and you don’t even notice (x 3) 

Then one day you’re dumb.

You’re gettin bald and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re bald.

You’re gettin fat and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re fat.

You're gettin ugly and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re fat.

You’re gettin old and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you're old.

Susan Moss z'l 1968-2026

Susan Moss was a stubborn woman. She was also cranky, sardonic, uncompromising, funny and totally lovable in her Susan Moss sort of way. Pretty much everyone who knew Susan loved Susan, and that's a lot of people. But most of all Susan was very very talented and committed to her art. She was the preeminent photographer of the Montreal music scene for the past three decades.

Susan passed away yesterday at the age of 58. She'd been diagnosed about a month ago with metastatic pancreatic cancer, and decided she was going out on her own terms - exactly how she did everything in her life - with MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying).

The Gazette's obituary calls Susan a "Montreal music scene legend." She was certainly that. To me she was my closest friend David's little sister, who I knew probably since she was about 10 years old. When we were growing up I can remember her older brother complaining about how Susan drove the family crazy with her stubbornness. 

As far as I can tell she never changed. And I mean that in the best way possible. 

The last time I saw Susan was at David's 60th birthday party, almost two years ago. The whole family was there and the warmth and love in the room was overwhelming. Before that it was at a Joe Jackson concert a few years earlier. It had been a long time since I saw Susan and I was almost as excited to spot her next to the stage with her camera, as I was to see Joe and his band on stage. By that time Susan's legendary status was firmly established. 

I haven't been a big concertgoer since getting married and having kids. And it was at concerts you were guaranteed to bump into Susan. I went mainstream. Susan never did, and never could. It just wasn't her.

It was that single-minded, uncompromising nature that drove Susan to perfect her craft. She loved what she did and loved being around the ragtag community that grew around the music scene, along the Main (Saint-Laurent Boulevard). I'm not sure 'ragtag' is the right word. But there's no doubt Susan was attracted to the edgier side, the artists and barflies who challenged convention. Musician Patrick Watson is quoted in the Gazette as saying "She’s very rock ‘n’ roll... She’s gritty, very punk rock but elegant. She’s part of everything that embodies this city, part of the city history.” 

I'm not sure 'elegant' is the right word, it's not what comes to my mind when I think of Susan. The words that do come to mind that go with 'punk rock' are 'honesty' and 'integrity'. Susan embodied that. 

I might speculate about her interest in musicians. I would have loved to ask her about it, as you would any artist about their subject matter. What fascinated her about it. Whether it was the spectacle of the show, or the persona of the performer. The fact that, like her, musicians have individual visions and refuse to conform.

It can't be overstated how much she loved what she did, and there was no compromising that. As it should be. 

Her untimely death comes as a devastating blow to family and friends. She told the Gazette in her final interview, “Other people are like, ‘I want to live to 100.’ Why? That sounds awful. Retirement didn’t seem that fun to me.”

Susan had fun. A lot of it. A 'ridiculous amount', she said. She considered herself incredibly lucky to have lived her dream. We can find some solace in that.

Canada On The Same Side As Iran?

It’s not a nuclear Iran. It’s not a nuclear North Korea. It’s not a globally dominant China.

The thing we have to worry about most in the world today is that not enough people take the United States seriously anymore.

And I don’t mean its military or economic power. I mean its word.

The ultimate source of power and authority is your word. And trump has debased and squandered that power for the United States. When your words carry weight, you don’t have to rely on missiles and sanctions to get people to listen.

And when your word is strong, you can rely on something even more powerful: silence.

When the world respects what you represent, your reputation precedes you. Your mere presence embodies power and authority.

It’s why the United States never needed a military parade on the Fourth of July. It didn’t have to show what it had. Everyone already knew.

Until trump ordered one that is—a clear sign that he did not understand this basic principle of international affairs, or the power of the office he had inherited.

Think about it. Since World War II, the United States has never faced a sustained conventional military challenge from another major power. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran were all wars of choice.

The times the United States has been directly attacked have involved terrorists, as on 9/11, or proxies, where responsibility could be obscured or plausibly denied. No major country would openly challenge the United States. That was the power of American reputation.

Now that reputation is in shambles. And that creates a slippery slope.

First, America’s presence is no longer taken seriously. Then its word. Then its sanctions. Then, eventually, its military.

When you are no longer taken seriously, you have to use more military power, impose more sanctions, and issue more threats and demands just to accomplish what once could have been accomplished by a phone call.

That’s a very dangerous place to be. And there is another consequence that may be even more important.

Countries begin preparing for a world in which the United States can no longer be trusted.

Iran and Canada are, in very different ways, responding to the same fundamental problem: what do you do when your relationship with the United States becomes uncertain and unpredictable?

Both have become highly motivated in their conflicts with the United States because trump has made those conflicts existential. And when a conflict becomes existential, victory is no longer necessarily about defeating the other side. It's about surviving. A question of will.

Iran will outlast the United States. 

Canada will outlast the United States. 

Because both countries understand the basic calculation. They simply have to survive long enough for the political circumstances to change.

Iran is already maneuvering to take advantage of a changing balance of power, consolidating its influence around the Persian Gulf and positioning itself for a future in which American power is less decisive.

Canada is doing something similar in its own way: distancing itself from dependence on the United States and strengthening its relationships with Europe and Asia.

Trump is bankrupting the United States in its most valuable asset: its credibility.

Something that took decades for the United States to build can take only a few years to destroy.

Once countries stop believing that American power is permanent, they begin making decisions based on the assumption that it isn’t.

Alliances change. Trade changes. Military relationships change.

And the world changes with them.

And unfortunately, if history is any indication, those periods of global transition come with tremendous costs.

Costs that we will all have to pay.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The American poet Wendell Berry passed away yesterday at the age of 92. I always liked his work for its gentle wisdom, plain lyrical language, and common touch that, I think, derives from working on the land. Berry was a farmer in Kentucky. I would say that he was in the mold of Robert Frost, except that unlike Frost, who was born and grew up in San Francisco, Berry was the real deal. 

He was also a bit of a throwback to an earlier time. The vast majority of the poetry that was published and became popular in the post-war era was largely urban-based and cosmopolitan in sensibility. Berry's poetry stayed stubbornly close to his agrarian roots. 

This is not to say that he didn't write about pressing issues over his many many volumes. He did. In a poem called Against The War In Vietnam he wrote: Believe the automatic righteousness of whoever holds an office. Believe the officials who see without doubt that peace is assured by war, freedom by oppression. The truth preserved by lying becomes a lie. Believe or die. 

Berry's poetry often carried a strong political edge and social critique. With the social, political and economic upheaval of modern technology, and environmental degradation brought on by climate change - these "despair for the world" provoking times -  his poetry feels more necessary today than ever. 

I love this one too. Especially the lines:

make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration,   

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time   

to eternity. Any readers   

who like your poems,   

doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came.

Who Are We, Really?

I think a lot of people are scared to be who they really are.

That simple statement raises some complex questions. For one thing, is anybody really anything?

I think there is a 'real' person inside each of us. Another way of saying it is the 'authentic' person. In the nature-versus-nurture debate, the 'authentic' person is the one closest to our unique individual nature and character. It is primarily determined by the particular mixture of genetics and biochemistry we are born with. These express themselves in our physical and emotional traits: our dispositions, capacities and abilities.

We are complex life forms. But if you think of it in plant terms — at the risk of oversimplifying — it's essentially everything that is already in the seed. A package of potential that will grow into the flower it is capable of becoming. And every flower is a little different.

Obviously, the environment plays an enormous role in determining how close the plant comes to realizing the potential contained in its seed. For plants, that environment is relatively easy to manipulate to achieve good results: water, light, nutrient-rich soil and so on. But there are environmental factors that are harder to control: climate, weather, disease, predatory insects.

And plants have virtually no means of effecting their environment to optimize their potentiality. No agency. Whereas we do. We have the ability to extensively shape our environment.

That, essentially, seems to be one of the purposes of consciousness. We don't merely respond to our environment; we can reflect upon it, alter it, and create new environments in which we can live.

And this is where education comes in.

I once had a teacher explain to our classroom that the reason it was important for us to learn the skills we were being taught was so that we could make a living. It was possibly the most jaded and reductive explanation for education I had ever heard. I remember him saying something like, "I am teaching you how to spell like the bankers spell."

Of course, learning the skills necessary to earn a living is important. But that isn't the reason for education.

The Latin root of the word education is educare, meaning to rear, nurture, nourish or bring up. Nowhere in its meaning is the idea of earning money.

The reason for education, in my view, is to nourish the sense of self: to learn how we think, how we learn, what interests us, what we are capable of, and ultimately what we might become.

In that sense, education is really an expansion of consciousness.

Early education should certainly focus on thinking skills and the basic abilities needed to function within society. But during those formative years, children should also be learning something equally important: that what comes naturally to them has value, and that part of growing up is learning how to recognize, develop and trust what they already possess inside themselves.

Instead, we often teach them to distrust it.

We teach them to look outward for the standards by which they should measure themselves. We teach them to adapt to the demands of an external, constructed world, even when those demands conflict with their own inclinations and capacities.

This is isn't accidental.

The modern education system developed alongside the Industrial Revolution, and it inherited an industrial conception of human value. It established a hierarchy of abilities based largely on their economic usefulness. Mathematics and science were highly valued because they produced measurable, practical results. Technical competence was rewarded. Standardization, efficiency and conformity became virtues.

The arts and humanities, meanwhile, were increasingly treated as secondary — worthwhile, perhaps, as a sideline, but not essential or critical.

There is a great irony in what is happening now.

The very abilities our society has spent generations telling us are the most valuable — calculation, pattern recognition, information processing, technical analysis — are precisely the abilities that machines excel at.

And so, strangely enough, the AI revolution may be forcing us to reconsider the very hierarchy of human abilities that helped produce it.

We aren't particularly alarmed when AI is used to perform scientific calculations or analyze enormous quantities of data. But when it begins writing poetry, composing music, creating images or producing human-like conversation, something feels wrong, even threatening. Because those activities were never merely useful to us.

They were how we recognized ourselves.

The AI debate is therefore ultimately a debate about how we define ourselves — about who we really are.

For many decades, we have increasingly thought of human beings as wealth-generating factors of production. We have measured ourselves by what we can produce, how efficiently we can produce it, and how much economic value we can generate.

Perhaps AI will finally force us to confront the poverty of that definition.

Because if a machine can perform more and more of the things we once considered evidence of human intelligence, then what remains uniquely human cannot simply be our ability to calculate, process information or even produce things.

Maybe the answer lies somewhere closer to the seed. Our individual nature. Our particular sensitivities and dispositions. Our capacity for experience, meaning, love, imagination, curiosity and creation. The strange and unpredictable combination of qualities that makes one person different from another.

We spent centuries reshaping our environment in order to make life better, only to begin reshaping ourselves to fit the technological environment we created. We were on track to do more than reshape nature. We were beginning to replace it altogether with a technological alternative.

And now we're starting to freak out about a full-scale takeover.

But perhaps what we're really afraid of isn't that machines will become too much like us. Perhaps we're afraid that, after generations of teaching ourselves to become more useful, more efficient and more productive, we may finally have to confront the possibility that those were never the things that made us human in the first place.

AI isn't just challenging what humans can do. It's challenging us to remember who we really are.

Choosing the Right Frame

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A painting bought cheap at the thrift store,

The cloth matting soiled with oil and grime,

Stains of another place, from another time,

By others who beheld and loved it before. 

A Montreal winterscape when life was hard,

Painted in ‘38 by an artist long-ignored,

The gathering sorrow of Europe is fore- 

Shadowed, our city rendered in graveyard

Tones; rust, muted blues, greens and greys,

Rooftops swathed in thick chimney smoke,

Ramshackle wooden balconies bent and broke,

Tenements of sacrifice and malaise. 

Today our preoccupation is decor,

Choosing from an assortment of frames,

Columns of hung parentheses, many the same,

Initial thoughts of matching walls and floor. 

Then a word surfaces about what the artist meant,

His travails, a certain responsibility moves us

To deeper levels, we begin to discuss

Other dimensions—take of ourselves a measurement.

The framer waits impatiently as we mull our choice.

I lean in, share with my wife our sweet secret,

She smiles, the framer fails to interpret.

She tells him to make us an invoice.

The Monetization of Life

There used to be something we did called work.

Work was how you made money to pay for life’s expenses.

These days, work is increasingly being replaced by the concept of monetization. The reason is simple: almost anything can be monetized. The things we used to call work, but also the things we used to call leisure, entertainment, friendship, attention, personal expression—and increasingly, even our bodies.

In fact, monetization is gradually taking over more and more aspects of our lives. It is encroaching on everything.

I started thinking about this because my brother sent me an Instagram link that disturbed me to my core. It was a man talking about the blood-products industry, particularly plasma.

The United States is the global powerhouse in the supply of blood plasma and plasma-derived products. It supplies a huge proportion of the world’s plasma, up to 70%, in large part because people in the United States are permitted to sell their plasma, unlike in most other countries. Blood plasma is a commodity in the United States.

There are more than a thousand commercial plasma-collection centres across the country, many of them operated by for-profit companies. Studies have found that these centres are disproportionately located in economically disadvantaged communities, where the financial incentive to sell plasma is presumably greatest.

The point of the Instagram poster was that capitalism is an exploitative and inhumane economic system. When it is done with your labour, it takes your time (and your soul). When it can’t suck anything more out of you, it comes for your blood. And it relentlessly seeks out those who are most economically vulnerable.

It is an important perspective. And it raises many more complicated moral and ethical questions.

How can we condemn the commercialization of blood products when the need for them is so great and the demand is not being met by voluntary donations? If people need plasma to survive, and there isn’t enough of it, then paying people to provide it does solve a real problem. But it also means that one person’s economic desperation can become another person’s medical supply.

As a Canadian, currently feeling angry about the economic pressure being brought to bear on our sovereignty by the Trump administration, I was particularly shocked to learn just how dependent Canada is on the United States for plasma-derived products. We important 83% of our blood product from the US. 

Canadian law does not permit the commercial sale of human blood and plasma in the same way that it is permitted in the United States. The underlying concern is that once we begin treating parts of the human body as commodities, where do we draw the line?

And yet we import American plasma products to meet our needs.

Isn’t that hypocritical? More importantly, isn’t it a national-security vulnerability?

A country should probably think carefully about depending on another country for something as fundamental as the biological material required for its own health-care system—particularly when relations between the two countries have become as unpredictable as they are today.

But the larger point is more instructive.

The story of modern life is, to a considerable extent, the story of the monetization of everything.

Our labour was monetized long ago. Now our attention is monetized. Our preferences are monetized. Our personal data are monetized. Our identities are monetized. Our relationships increasingly become content. Our private lives become brands.

The monetization of our bodies and blood seems to be a logical extension. The separation between the personal and the marketable has gradually disappeared.

There used to be boundaries around what we considered appropriate to buy and sell. Some things were simply not supposed to be commodities. Human organs, for example. Intimacy. Friendship. Personal identity. Perhaps even leisure.

But those boundaries have been under relentless pressure.

Remember leisure time?

Since the Industrial Revolution, it has gradually been squeezed out of our lives. One of the great labour debates of the past century has been about reducing the working week—from six days to five, and now, increasingly, from five to four.

How quaint.

What if I told you that medieval Europeans had something like 140 religious feast days and holidays every year, according to the nineteenth-century historian Pierre Émile Levasseur? That is an astonishing proportion of the calendar devoted, at least officially, to celebration, worship and communal life.

The picture gets even stranger when we go further back.

This comes from an interesting essay by Ted Gioia, who cites the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s argument that some hunter-gatherer societies spent only around 15 to 20 hours a week obtaining food and meeting their basic material needs.

There are obvious qualifications to this comparison. Life expectancy was brutally low, infant mortality was extraordinarily high, and “work” is not necessarily an easy thing to define across radically different societies.

Still, the broader point is worth considering.

For most of human history, the objective of economic activity was not necessarily to maximize economic activity.

The Industrial Revolution changed that.

We made extraordinary gains in sanitation, medicine, food production and life expectancy. We became wealthier and, on average, lived much longer.

But somewhere along the way, we developed the strange idea that the additional time we had been given should be spent producing more wealth, consuming more, and growing the economy.

In the age of tech, that has transformed into the invasive and ubiquitous concept of monetization.

The new technologies ensure that virtually everything can be monetized, even leisure.

We go on vacation and take photographs for Instagram. We exercise and post the results. We have hobbies that become side hustles. We turn our opinions into content. We monetize our attention by watching advertisements and monetize our creativity by building personal brands.

The Industrial Revolution gave us more time alive. The modern market has spent much of the intervening period figuring out how to put a price on that time.

And perhaps that is the real paradox of modern life.

We conquered scarcity, increased our life expectancy and acquired more leisure than almost any generation before us. And then we built an economic system that taught us to regard all of it as an opportunity cost.

The question is no longer simply whether we work too much. It is whether there is anything left in our lives that we are allowed to do for no economic reason at all.

Two Gut Punches

Two gut punches this week: the passing of two cultural icons, Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. Both died at the age of 80, and that's about all they had in common on paper.

Dolly was the daughter of a sharecropper, born in a small cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, the fourth child of twelve.

Tim was born in Grappenhall, Cheshire, UK, the second child of a naval chaplain and a school secretary. He was boarding-school educated.

I wasn't going to post about Dolly. I mean, everybody—literally everybody—is mourning her passing publicly. I didn't think I had much to add until the news of Tim Curry's passing came the same week.

What's the connection? The trans community loved them both.

And so did most everybody else. The phrase I've been hearing about Dolly this week is that she was beloved from NASCAR to drag queens.

Of course, Tim Curry rocketed to stardom in the mid-1970s playing the "Sweet Transvestite," Dr. Frank-N-Furter, in the cult-classic film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

When I was growing up, Dolly confounded me. The big dumb blonde hair, the big curves, the enormous chest, and the outlandish costumes, which always accentuated her chest. And that was contrasted by a sweet singing voice and an "aw shucks" innocence. She was sort of country music's version of Marilyn Monroe (or Jayne Mansfield), but with a glam-rock taste for fashion, minus the drugs and pretension. I didn't know what to make of it.

She always seemed like a bit of a joke during an era when pretty much every performer took themselves way too seriously. She was the butt of untold numbers of comedy routines. But here's the thing that made her different: she seemed to be in on the joke. She didn't seem to take herself seriously at all.

And yet she was very serious about her craft, her career and her business acumen. Look up Dollywood—one of the most profitable and high-yielding regional theme park resorts in the United States—if you want to get a sense of what I mean. It turned out the joke was actually on us.

She successfully made the transition from country star to the mainstream with her appearance in the comedy film 9 to 5, for which she also wrote and sang the smash-hit theme song. Now everyone was taking Dolly seriously.

Dolly was always a tireless worker. She cemented her status as a cultural icon with her philanthropic work. She's donated and raised hundreds of millions of dollars for various causes, from literacy programs to disaster relief to medical research.

And what everyone saw in Dolly—beyond the crazy appearance, the makeup, the glitter and rhinestones, the plastic surgery—was a huge heart. Dolly clearly loved people. All people. Republican and Democrat. Urban and rural. Gay, trans and straight. She made no distinctions. That was no performance. And they all knew it and loved her back.

Admittedly, Dolly was not my cup of tea growing up. But The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a cultural touchstone in my upbringing. I might argue that Dolly's appeal across gender, socioeconomic and cultural boundaries was made possible, at least in part, by Tim Curry playing a bustier-wearing, sex-obsessed alien.

Rocky Horror is a lot of things. It's a spoof of the science-fiction and schlocky B horror movies of the 1950s, the gothic novels of the 19th century, and it also draws on Broadway musicals, rock-and-roll youth culture, and even the theatrical revues of the Ziegfeld Follies and the so-called aqua-musicals of Esther Williams.

And people from all walks of life responded to it. So much so that they came back over and over again, and didn't just want to sit in the movie theatre passively watching. They wanted to be it. They learned all the lines and lyrics, dressed up as the characters, brought props, and interacted with what was happening onscreen.

They took literally the title of the final musical number: "Don't Dream It, Be It."

Rocky Horror is a wonderful cultural hodge-podge of outlandishness and joy. But at its core, the message is one of love and acceptance.

Exactly like Dolly.

The Sea Glass Collectors

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Sea Glass 

The sea glass collectors of Inverness,

Pace the sandy shoreline of Cape Breton,

Like musing philosophers hoping to express,

A sentiment in words they chance upon.

Their aim is to glean some shining moment,

From the detritus coughed up by the Atlantic tide,

The mounds of smooth pebbles and seashell fragments,

Washed-up seaweed and kelp, slimy or dry.

To find a sun-caught shard, clear or creamy white,

Lantern green, cola brown, or rare azure blue,

They scrutinize the beach with granular sight,

And bend as if gathering drops of crystallized dew.

They are women absorbed in walking meditation—

A practice known to Buddhists for centuries;

Measured breath, measured step and contemplation,

Unacknowledged members of an ancient sorority.

They walk to leave behind, for a time, chores,

Their men, children, the world; and return to themselves,

The treasure they comb from the ocean shore,

Lies beyond jars of colour displayed on kitchen shelves.

Sea glass is as much imagined as it is real,

A product of the spirit and nature’s artful way,

To beautify used bottles from the town’s old landfill,

Polished and palmed like beads for praying.

An Online Reputational Lynching

As we increasingly substitute virtual lives for real lives, we have to reassess and reevaluate how we are being changed—not just our sense of what is real and what isn’t, but also the way it exploits the dark recesses of our hearts.

As we know by now, online activity tends to bring out the worst in us. Algorithms are designed to encourage outrageous behaviour and pander to all our biases and prejudices. We can respond unthinkingly to our worst impulses, with minimal consequences.

And sometimes we find out how others pay the price for that.

I think that’s something we can learn from the tragic death of Jason Arday.

If you don’t know who he is by now, I’d be surprised. I didn’t until two days ago. Now it seems everyone wants to have a go at him, at Cambridge University, at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and to promote their own political agenda and demonstrate their own moral superiority.

What I see is a tragic story of an online reputational lynching, in which the media and a million random commentators are only too willing to join in. Villagers with torches and pitchforks, banging on Dr. Frankenstein’s door.

If you don’t know the story, Jason Arday was a professor at Cambridge University, the youngest ever appointed in the prestigious university’s history. He was also Black. He was also severely neurodivergent and apparently didn’t speak until he was 11 years old and didn’t read or write until he was 18. His story is pretty incredible.

And it has come to light that quite a bit of it was untrue, or at least exaggerated. Not the neurodivergent stuff. But, starting a couple of years ago, the work that earned him his academic position and reputation came under scrutiny for plagiarism.

I don’t want to get into the details. You can look it up for yourself, because there’s plenty about it online. What there isn’t plenty of is compassion.

The accusations and online kerfuffle resulted in Arday resigning his Cambridge position and, a week later, apparently taking his own life.

First I felt deeply sad. Then I took some time to process the sadness. It is not the time to react, especially not to prove a point.

Upon some reflection, I came to realize that I couldn’t care less that Cambridge hired him, for whatever reason. That’s their business. If they screwed up, that’s their problem to deal with. If they fail, too bad for them. They will lose out. Let’s not exaggerate the ramifications for the rest of us.

Let’s presume Cambridge hired him because they wanted to virtue signal. They wanted to make him the poster boy for their enlightened policies.

How is the irony lost on people that the online piling-on is motivated by precisely the same virtue signalling they are accusing Cambridge of engaging in? Diminish Arday and Cambridge to elevate themselves.

I don’t want to say anything more about Arday at this juncture. Probably not ever, actually. I can imagine how devastated his wife and loved ones are and how brutalized they must feel by all the exploitation of their tragedy and vitriol.

It feels appropriate simply to say that this is a moment for reflection on how social media has scrambled our collective moral compass. 

I Went Looking For An Audience

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I went looking for an audience for my poems,

Found one nearby at the old folks home.

The bars bustled with games on large screens, and the cafés 

Were packed with patrons glued to laptops sipping lattés.

But at the old folks home they appreciate true entertainment,

Especially the kind that doesn't ask for payment.

They put me on the events calendar, top of the bill,

Reserved me a mic, a pitcher of water, and a room to fill.

I appeared the day after a guitarist who sang Yiddish tunes,

Slotted-in before bingo, and a man who made animal balloons.

And on the appointed day, at the appointed hour,

My audience shuffled in, mostly under their own power.

Some were wheeled in chairs, a few still in their beds,

Most with sleepy eyes and others with foggy heads.

They parked their metal walkers next to Filipina attendants,

It was as quiet as a courtroom and I was the Defendant.

I'd guess they ranged in age from eighty to one-o-five,

They all seemed more or less happy to still be alive -

Alive they were, they’d seen the Great Depression,

And had made to life's demands every possible concession.

Some I could tell had even known Auschwitz One and Two,

The evidence marked indelibly on a forearm tattoo. 

This was my audience, experts of the most tragic kind,

Forgetful and forgotten, mostly deaf and semi-blind.

Now fixed to this place, they waited obediently,

For a pisher like me to recite his precious poetry.

And there I stood before them offering my paltry rhymes, 

Lacking in perspective but possessing abundant time.

What came over me was an indescribable shame,

As if my mere presence had insulted the Holy Name.

Still, I read, as they sat there, cold as rows of stone, 

Utterly unmoved, and utterly alone. 

When done, I gathered my scraps and thanked them profusely,  

Knowing that not one of them would have changed their place with me.

Have The Philistines Won

I've been on a bit of an Irving Layton kick lately—reading his poetry, watching films and interviews. Whenever that happens, a mood and a hankering overtake me, and I find myself reflecting on it. Why Layton, and why now?

He died on January 4, 2006 at the age of 93. The last years of his life were spent at the Maimonides Geriatric Center in the Montreal suburb of Côte Saint-Luc, where the pugnacious, sharp-witted, rapier-tongued, self-described genius slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's disease.

Layton was undeniably a genius. He was also, in my opinion, the greatest poet Canada has ever produced. 

It took a while. He only published his first important poem, The Swimmer, in 1945 when he was 33 years old. After that he was off to the races.

During the postwar period, Layton dragged Canadian poetry kicking and screaming into the 20th century. His greatest poems belong in anthologies of the English language's most important poetry, alongside Yeats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost and e.e. cummings.

He said he had two missions with his life's work as a poet and educator: to fight Puritanism and to fight Philistinism.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s largely took care of Puritanism. It seems to be making something of a comeback in the United States these days, with the conservative push to reinstate patriarchy, restrict abortion and return women to traditional roles. My guess is that it won't last. That horse has left the barn and isn't coming back.

Philistinism, on the other hand, is positively flourishing, aided by new technologies that are designed to make us less knowledgeable and less curious about the world. We appear to be outsourcing wisdom and experience.

I suspect Layton knew he was already riding an anti-Puritan wave in the 1960s as his popularity grew nationally and internationally. He was also a savvy and charismatic self-promoter who understood how to use the media to amplify his persona.

I also suspect Layton knew he was fighting an uphill battle against Philistinism. In Donald Winkler's wonderful 2003 film, A Red Carpet For The Sun, poet and teacher Seymour Mayne—who is also my friend and co-editor—recalls having Layton as his high-school teacher in the mid-'50s. On the first day of class, Layton wrote a series of enormous numbers across the blackboard: 99.999999. He asked the class if they knew what it meant. He then explained that it was the percentage of people who were ignorant Philistines. He was determined that his students would not be part of that number.

By the mid-1980s, Layton already saw the writing on the wall, even though he could never have imagined the impact technology would eventually have on the debasement of culture. He understood that poetry was on its way out.

In a TVO interview to promote a volume of published letters, Layton said: "I believe that poetry no longer has a future. There will be poems written, but there will be no poets... Because the language has been debased, commercialized and so on. And the whole sensibility that once produced these outrageous and wonderful mad men has gone smash. It's dead."

By "there will be no poets," Layton meant in the sense of figures possessing stature and cultural authority. He was really talking about the audience for poetry—the culture that once made such figures possible.

Layton was always concerned with cultivating his public persona, in the mold of the Jewish biblical prophets. Audiences were hungry for his fresh, iconoclastic, irreverent opinions. That hunger reached its peak in the early 1960s. A decade later, it was waning.

When I first went to hear Layton give a reading at McGill University Hillel in the mid-'80s, he could still draw a crowd. Layton's presence was an event, and the affection and esteem of young, interested audiences were still there. His poems were on the syllabus of virtually every Canadian literature survey course at major universities across the country.

But the culture was moving on, and Layton was no longer the mainstream figure he had once been.

In 2026, what Layton said 40 years earlier about poems continuing to be written while language was being debased and commercialized sounds prophetic to my ears. There is no doubt that more poems are being written now than ever before. And 99.999999 percent of it is self-centered, whiny dreck.

When you read Layton's poetry, you are struck not only by the precision of his craft but by the universality of his concerns: the dignity and magnificence of the human being; the daily injustices and inhumanities of politics; the beauty and truth of art; the physical ecstasy of experience; the necessity of freedom to exalt the human spirit.

Philistines, who are concerned with life's banalities, appearances, wealth, social status and conformity, have no appreciation for any of it. 

Maybe that's why Layton is hardly mentioned anymore, except of course, in university classrooms. And even then with some trepidation. The 5-times married Layton was also known as a womanizer, which these days makes him a target for cancel culture. 

Have the Philistines won?

Notably Layton himself didn't think so. He thought the poets would be replaced, by filmmakers or another type of artist. 

But then Layton didn't know about social media and AI.

Compliments

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I trusted only my mother

to offer them:

Not the screen-shot

responses ordained

by my preferences

to make me feel good

about what I think

and feel.

I hate feeling suspicious

about feeling good,

hate wanting

to feel bad,

but these days

it’s the only answer.

Housefly

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Insignificance buzzes 

Like housefly wings;

Beating its body

Against the tempered pane

As if another world beckons.

Meeting Across the River

I started playing bass guitar when I was a teenager, like so many kids with dreams of rock stardom. I played in a few bar bands, doing covers. It didn't take long for me to realize that the rock 'n' roll lifestyle wasn't for me.

I continued to play on and off. The last band I played in was short-lived. I was thirty, married, and had a real job.

Then I had children, and I stopped playing music. I also stopped listening to it.

It wasn't a conscious decision. It's not as if I woke up one morning and decided I didn't like music anymore. It happened gradually, almost naturally, as my priorities shifted toward responsibility and putting my family ahead of personal concerns and distractions.

There was a part of me that seemed to believe I had to grow up, and music was something that belonged to being a teenager.

That stage lasted about twenty years. It ended around the time my eldest child was starting university. I had two others in university and my youngest was about to enter high school.

And then, one day, as if a switch had been flipped, I wanted to listen to music again. More than that, I wanted to play it.

Call it a midlife crisis if you want. There is a familiar phenomenon among men in their forties and fifties: the sudden need to get reacquainted with the irresponsible youthful part of themselves that had been abandoned somewhere along the way in the name of adult responsibilities.

That's probably part of what was happening to me.

But it felt like something more important, too. I was allowing myself an emotional reconnection with a part of myself I had left behind.

I dug out my old bass guitar and amplifier, which had been stored under the stairs, along with my old stereo and record collection. I also found the cheap Yamaha acoustic guitar I'd bought from my brother's girlfriend when I was in high school.

Music became my favourite hobby again. And what a great time for that to happen.

When I started playing bass around 1979 or 1980, the options for a self-taught amateur like me were pretty limited. You could buy instructional books or take lessons.

I did both.

My bass teacher was a guy named Paul Harwood, the bass player from Mahogany Rush, a fairly well-known Montreal band. The emphasis was mostly on technique and the basics. I only took a few lessons with Paul. Each time I went to see him I remember thinking that I should introduce myself again because he probably doesn't remember me. I learned enough with Paul to get by in a cover band. 

As for the songs, I learned them by ear from the recordings. Most of what I played was not exact, but it was a passable approximation.

These days, YouTube is an absolute bonanza for learning music. Music theory, instrument technique, songwriting, production, how to play virtually any song you can think of—you can find it all, usually for free.

For the past ten years or so I've been relearning guitar, not so much bass, although it's astounding how popular bass guitar has become on YouTube. One bass player, Davie504, has nearly fourteen million subscribers and billions of views.

Another music YouTuber I follow is Rick Beato. Beato has been a musician and professional music producer, and was previously a college-level music teacher. I started watching his channel when he had a series called What Makes This Song Great, in which he dissected and demystified some of the best and most beloved songs of our generation.

He's a few years older than me, so there is a strong element of nostalgia there.

But his channel is more than nostalgia. It's music education—music theory, practice, production—and above all, it's an expression of his love for music.

Since re-embracing music, I've concentrated mostly on acoustic guitar. I've learned songs I've dreamed of knowing since childhood and explored different techniques and styles, from fingerpicking and alternate picking to folk, country, bluegrass and old-time Delta blues.

These days I'm particularly interested in the pre- and post-war American blues masters.

I've even treated myself to two new guitars: a classic Gibson J-45 and a Gold Tone resonator, which I use for open tunings and slide.

I got a great deal on the resonator that I couldn't pass up, which is exactly the sort of rationalization a person makes when he has rediscovered a teenage hobby in middle age.

For some people, YouTube is a way of monetizing their skills and expertise. For others, it's a way of seeking attention. For others still, it's a way of sharing their enthusiasms with like-minded people.

More than twenty million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. More than five hundred hours every minute.

I've been thinking about what this says about the state of our culture, and particularly about our sense of community.

Rick Beato made an interesting observation recently. He was in a park on a warm, sunny day in Salzburg, Austria, and noticed that he didn't see a single person with a musical instrument.

When he was growing up in upstate New York, he said, on a day like that you were likely to see several groups of friends sitting around with one or two acoustic guitars.

Think Saturday in the Park by Chicago.

It can't be that people aren't playing acoustic guitars anymore. Guitar sales have been growing for years and boomed during the pandemic.

So where did the guitar players go?

Beato thinks it has something to do with the individualization of musical taste brought about by digital music services.

Put simply, we're all listening to different music now.

We each have our own algorithmically generated playlists, tailored precisely to our individual tastes. Music used to be something we shared because, to a large extent, we were all listening to the same music.

Now there may be a hundred people sitting in the same park, each listening to a different soundtrack through a pair of earbuds.

No one is sitting around playing the songs we all know anymore because we don't all know the same songs.

This might be a phenomenon that even predates digital playlists.

Last weekend I went fishing with my wife's first cousin. He's fifty years old, only a decade younger than me. We were chit-chatting, as men in a boat waiting interminably for a bite will do, when the subject of music arose. He's a big music fan like me. He claims to love music from the '60s and early '70s.

I mentioned Glen Campbell. He said he thought he knew who I was talking about but couldn't name one of his songs. So I said, "What about Wichita Lineman?"

Never heard of it.

I said, "It's only the greatest contemporary song ever written, according to both Bob Dylan and Billy Joel."

Still hadn't heard it.

[Aside: Wichita Lineman was the first song I learned to play from a YouTube video after I picked up the guitar again. I was so proud of myself I even posted a video of my rendition to YouTube, my very first YouTube post. I should probably take it down.] 

Back to Beato's point. There may be another reason no one is playing guitar in the park anymore: The general decline of songcraft.

Think of the great era of the singer-songwriter—the Beatles, Dylan, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Cat Stevens.

People sat around singing their songs because the songs themselves mattered. The lyrics were savoured, memorized and passed around. They spoke to something inside us. I'm not sure contemporary popular music does that to the same degree.

That's one of the less encouraging things about music on the internet.

Another is that the medium rewards spectacle. YouTube favours the astonishing guitar solo, the impossibly fast fingerwork, the trick, the gimmick, the person doing something you can't imagine being able to do yourself. Technique is impressive, but it isn't the same thing as great music.

And yet there is another side to all of this. YouTube is also a community of enthusiasts.

There is something undeniably intoxicating about having access to a potentially enormous community of people who are interested in the same things you are. Especially when, like me, you spend a lot of your time sitting alone in your basement engaged in what is essentially a group activity.

Music cries out to be shared. Not necessarily in a look-at-me sort of way. More in a sing-along sort of way.

That's why, about a year ago, I uploaded my first guitar tutorial to YouTube. It isn't really a lesson. I'm not a guitar teacher. It's a tutorial on how to play a particular song.

Initially, I wondered whether there was any point in adding yet another video to the hundreds of hours being uploaded to YouTube every minute. One more contribution to the endless stream of content being processed by the world's energy-hungry data centres.

But I convinced myself there was a point, because I'd wanted to learn a particular song and, amazingly, I couldn't find a decent lesson for it on YouTube. The song was Meeting Across the River by Bruce Springsteen, from his classic Born to Run album.

It's not one of Springsteen's best-known songs, which is presumably part of the reason there wasn't a good guitar lesson for it. Also, the song is played on the piano. So I figured it out myself, at least a reasonable facsimile of the album version, and arranged it for guitar, which offers something a little different.

And then I decided that if I had spent the time figuring it out, there might be other guitarists out there who loved the song as much as I do and would like to know how to play it on guitar. So I uploaded it. 

I've since uploaded a couple of other songs, for similar reasons. Either an arrangement I haven't seen online, or a different way of playing a song. I'm not trying to add to the noise, just trying to fill a gap.

I spent twenty years thinking that music was an indulgence I couldn't afford.

Then, when I finally allowed myself to have it back, I discovered that the thing I had missed wasn't simply listening to music or playing an instrument. It was sharing it.

When I was a teenager, that meant figuring out a song by ear, getting the band together in my basement to jam and practice, and then performing it in a club.

Now it means figuring out a song in my basement, and then uploading it to the internet for other players. Kind of like meeting across a digital river.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

Except that it leaves me with a residue of sadness.

The Cantaloupe

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I always imagined that someday

My life would be perfect.

And by perfect I mean exactly 

As I want it, outside matching inside.

I was going to the barber at the mall

When my wife asks me

To pick up a few items

From the grocery store next door. 

She’s meticulous, my wife,

Pulls out the colourful flyer,

Expertly scrutinizes the weekly specials

Making a detailed list.

Twenty items in total. Added at the end 

‘Also get whatever else you want’.

She knows how lost I am in the aisle,

Like a robot I need precise instructions.

 

We review the list together,

Prices, sizes, brands, and don’t forget

To check the expiry dates she insists.

From my infrequent experience I know 

How tricky grocery shopping can be.

You think you’re saving fifty cents 

But get hoodwinked into purchasing

A $10 loaf of bread (with raisins).

I wander like a nomad between stocked shelves,

Reading the list, over and over, nervously 

Checking and double checking, planning my escape

Through the check-out line, like it’s a prison break.

At home, my wife unloads the bags.

Palpates the cantaloupe. It’s soft.

Extracts two zucchinis and waves them at me.

They had mysteriously morphed into cucumbers.

Why’d you buy the Diet Dr Pepper

Ten for $11.99, Diet Coke is on sale 

Twenty cans for the same price?

She repeats it three times like I’m hard of hearing.

Lifts the cantaloupe again. Looks perfect to me.

Puts it to her ear like it’s talking,

Pronouncing judgment. I have violated some law, 

My shopping cart license is being revoked. 

I plead my innocence in the most esoteric

Way I can think of: This is just to say

The plums in the icebox were delicious,

Sweet and cold. Forgive me.  

She and the cantaloupe are speechless.