Hear-Ye, Hear-Ye

Here's a short story from a while ago that you might dig. All rights reserved to the Global Coyote.

Hear-Ye, Hear-Ye

He cracked up when they told him that he couldn’t use a hand at his knee to denote a well-hung man. It was the 8th Annual Physically Challenged Conference. He was in the twentieth row. In the front were the people in wheelchairs. At the back were the blind. The blind weren’t allowed in the front anymore because the guide dogs got nervous when the palsied walked by. The deaf…well, the deaf just had to deal, didn’t they?

His name was Harry, and he could feel his mind splitting down the middle when the officious looking woman behind the podium reached down beneath her hemline and showed him the ‘well-hung’ sign. The interpreter to her left did the same, though it made more sense for the interpreter to do it, because he had the anatomy to make it mean what it meant.

The woman told the audience that the well-hung sign was offensive and was now to be stricken from the language.

Harry fumed. He had, indeed, had enough. Last year, at the 7th Annual, they’d told the deaf that they couldn’t use a limp wrist for the homosexual sign. Then the nose-thing for a Jewish person. Ditto the boob-motion for a woman. And now the well-hung sign.

It put Harry over the edge. Not only was he a proud, deaf man, he was also hung like a moose. The censorship of the deaf offended him almost as much as the censorship of the well endowed. Using the well-hung sign had let Harry feel like a human being these past 20 years. It had been that long since the snowblower accident had taken his hearing. Damned if he was going to let the powers that be take away his manhood.

When he left the convention, he knew he was crazy. Just like that. He’d felt the tear in his brain open wide. His deaf friends had said good-bye the old-fashioned way: saying it aloud for the lip readers, and signing it for the sign police.

It was the sign police that drove Harry nuts. They made him out to be a fashionable Rain Man. They wrote articles about him and how people should feel sorry for him. They shouted at him in Burger King when he ordered fries. They asked him if he needed help opening doors. They mimed icebergs when he ordered scotch straight up, and they flapped their arms like seagulls when he asked where he could take a well-hung leak.

The sign police were everywhere. The sign police were everybody. The second they saw him using sign language, they cooed as if he were a child, then asked if he needed any assistance. Being deaf, he couldn’t hear them, and so the woodpecker would land on his shoulder, tap-tap-tap. He would turn, and there they’d be: the soccer mom, the school teacher, the politician, the security guard, the theater usher, the doorman, the coat check girl. The sign cop.

The sign police knew what was good for him. They loved him as they loved a dim-witted child. They knew, deep down, that he needed them.

But not anymore.

He was quite out of his mind when he committed his first kidnapping. It was a fast food cashier. She didn’t ask him which soft drink he wanted. Instead, she went to the machine and pointed at each selection, one by one, nodding earnestly. When she got to Pepsi, he smiled. When she got off her shift later that night, he bonked her on her earnest little head and put her in the U-Haul.

The next day, the shoe store clerk got the nod. The shoe clerk blew it by holding his hands four feet apart when Harry said that he wore a size 13. Bonk-bonk, in the U-Haul.

Later that afternoon, the Helpful Passerby took a sap to the noggin. The Helpful Passerby had seen Harry signing to one of his deaf buddies on a street corner. When the traffic signal said ‘walk,’ the Helpful Passerby pulled a woodpecker and pointed Harry across the road. Harry bonked him on the head in a parking lot two blocks later. U-Haul.

The hot dog vendor at Shea ran out of luck when he waved at Harry fifteen times to tell him that his hot dog had arrived. Bonk-bonk...bonk-bonk (the vendor was tough), and into the U-Haul.

The week progressed. The U-Haul got crowded. He took three Helpful Passersby and a mime from the park. He bonked a woman after a date because she insisted on clapping along to songs and mouthing the words for him. He went to Hoboken and sapped the woman who had told him that deaf people shouldn’t use the well-hung sign anymore. He U-Hauled a stereo salesman just out of spite.

By the end of the week, the U-Haul was chock full of people. They were trussed up with duct tape and nylon rope. They weren’t going anywhere. Harry gave them sips of water through tiny holes in the tape. He didn’t bother to feed them. He found it fun to watch them try and talk beneath their gags while he pointed to his ears and shrugged his shoulders.

The drive out to the woods was peaceful. Harry followed the speed limit and used his turn signals. He tooted his horn a couple of times just for the hell of it. When he got into the forest he found a space to pull off. He waited a half-hour. Only two cars went by in all that time. Perfect.

It took him an hour to get all of the people out of the U-Haul and into the woods. Some of them fought and kicked and writhed. The ones that hadn’t eaten in a few days were easier to manage. He laid them all on the ground.

It was a nice day. Birds were out, though of course Harry couldn’t hear them. He whistled anyway, while the people watched. He found a suitable tree. He pounded metal stakes into the ground at three-foot intervals. He laid the people down in a row, and tied them to the stakes with more nylon rope, immobilizing them.

He stuck his finger in his mouth and tested the wind. Then he fired up the chain saw. It was a big Black & Decker. He guessed that it was noisy, judging by the looks on the people’s faces. Their eyes were open wide. Harry pointed to the chain saw, then his ear, then shrugged. He pulled the goggles down over his eyes.

He began cutting. Debris flew. The chain saw cut like a machete through newspaper. Harry laughed. This was fun. He was thinking about the dumb-ass riddle. If a tree falls in the forest…

He put his back into it, making more cuts, smelling the smell of gasoline and death. Vengeance from the Deaf Man. Revenge of the Poor Guy In the Corner.

When he was finished, the tree was on the verge. He’d cut a fairly neat triangle out of its side. It was on the brink of falling. The environmental people that always hung out at the Physically Challenged expos wouldn’t be happy, but that was acceptable.

Harry dug his heels into the ground while the people stared at him. He pushed. He heaved. The wood gave way. The shadow fell over the people’s faces as the timber came down to meet them. The tree fell in the forest. It crashed to the ground with an earth shaking thud.

Not a peep, Harry signed.

You Can Be Serious

Most of the people I know are of the multi-culti ilk, the types that sit around and give a little Bush-bashing over supper, talk about how wonderful it is to live in multi-ethnic Canada, and mutter uncomfortably when someone mentions Jesus (unless they're swearing; people that have decided Christianity is for the birds still use it when they spill their coffee. "Christ, that's hot!")

I know so many multi-culti left wing weirdos (and those are the majority of my friends) that I sometimes wonder how Bush, Howard, and Harper managed to get into power. The answer is that the people who voted for them are serious, while the people who bash them all the live long day are not. Serious people don't harp on about things, they get on with their lives and do what needs doing, and then they vote. Unserious people eventually turn into blowhards, railing against their enemies without doing anything about it.

Back in 2004, a girlfriend of mine asked me who was going to win the US Presidential election. I said Bush. She thought I was nuts. She worked in a health spa and saw 14 clients a day. Every one of them told her that they hated Bush and that he was going to get ousted from power. They gave her the usual Alec Baldwin insight into why Bush would blow it: he's dumb. I repeated that he would win.

After he won, she asked me how I could have been so certain. I told her that I hadn't been too sure, but once she'd told me that every gym rat and fat lady in need of a deep cleansing facial massage hated Bush, I knew he was a shoo-in. Serious people go to work, feed their kids, don't want to be blown up by terrorists, and only freak out about their skin if they're caught in a grease fire. Serious people think about serious things. Fat ladies with bad skin read People magazine under the hair dryer and regurgitate whatever the New York limousine liberal writes in the op-ed.

It is ironic that the left wingers who pretend to champion multi-culturalism and a kinder, gentler hand are more unaccepting than the people they despise.

Take the evening news. If Bush comes on the screen, it is normal for the left winger to say, "Look at this moron." Just like that. They don't care who in the room might disagree with them. They take it as self-evident that Bush is a moron, and that you'll agree with them.

The same people that say, "Never talk about religion and politics," are the people that talk about religion and politics all the time. If the Pope gets a write-up in the paper saying that abortion is bad, the person reading the paper will tell the room that the Pope's an ass without any second thoughts whatsoever.

I knew a guy who once showed me a cartoon map of the United States. Instead of being called 'the United States,' the cartoonist had written, 'Jesusland.' When the guy showed it to me, he was chuckling. When I didn't laugh, he smirked and said, "Oh, you're one of those."

One of what? If he meant that I was one of those people that don't laugh at lame gags, he was spot on the money. If he meant I was one of those people that take pity on losers like him, he was right again.

Because none of the above examples are serious. They're not arguments, they're opinions put together using the Frankenstein technique: a little David Letterman, a little CNN, a little CBC, and voila: Bush is a dummy, the Pope hates women, and the United States is a collection of Bible thumping imbeciles.

I am always nervous whenever too many people believe the same thing, and I am extremely nervous when their views on a subject can be wrapped up in one statement. "Bush is a dummy." Okay, but he beat your hero Al Gore in all of his college grades, so does that mean I don't have to believe in global warming anymore? Because Al Gore, by your definition, is a dummy?

Serious people look for answers. They seek them out. If they see a word in the paper that they don't understand, they don't complain that the egghead who wrote the piece uses too many 'big words.' They look it up.

Unserious people believe anything that is repeated often enough, and feel it is their duty to repeat it, too. And when they run up against someone who doesn't know the mantra, they feel confused and frightened. And, as these bleating sheep are so fond of telling us, we fear what we don't understand. Unserious people cannot face their own pathetic irony.

Unserious people are afraid of issues that can only be discussed, never acted upon. Global cooling in the '70s becomes global warming in the '80s, which becomes climate change in the '90s. That's three major shifts in the argument in as many decades. How are we supposed to act on it if we can't even make up our minds what it is we're acting upon? The unserious people aren't concerned with that. They're concerned with the idea that they're concerned. They merely want to talk. It makes them feel good. Action takes guts. Unserious people don't have them.

But what about the congressional elections, you ask? Yes, what about them. They're being trumpeted as a victory for the left, and a backlash against Bush. Or, more specifically, as a backlash against Bush's ideals. (Never make the mistake in thinking that someone dislikes another person because they know the person. I don't know Bush personally, and probably neither do you. It's his ideals you like or dislike, not the man himself; put Clinton's words in Bush's mouth and, with the exception of Monica Lewinsky, people would change political parties overnight).

I'm not so sure about a leftist victory in the election, per se. The Democrats gained the House and the Senate, but not by very much. The country is still coming up 50/50. If Bush had fired Rumsfeld before the election instead of after (the biggest gaffe of his presidency), the Republicans would have taken it in a walk.

But they lost, and it would be easy to assume that the Party of the Unserious (that would be the Democrats) are proven correct: that the country should pull out of Iraq. Really? Is that what the election said? I don't think so. I think the election results showed that people are just a hair more ambivalent about the war, not about being there in the first place, but with how it is being fought.

I was at an interview a few weeks ago, where someone was asked what they thought of the Hiroshima bomb site. The answer was, "If we did stuff like that more often to people that screwed with us, we wouldn't be having this problem in Iraq right now." The whole room got uncomfortable, and people cleared their throats, and somebody changed the subject.

But what about that? You don't hear too much of that stuff in the man-on-street interviews produced by CNN. But the opinion must be out there. Dig deeper. Do your homework. Look around.

The Iraq question has a magnifying effect on people, showing them to be serious on the one hand, or unserious on the other. Anyone who thinks Iraq is not intrinsically tied into the war on Islamic fascism is either incredibly ignorant, or pro-fascist. This is the supreme war of our generation. This is bigger than the Cold War, and bigger than Nazi Germany.

In the Cold War, some relatively sane guys had their hands on the button, and they were prepared to use it only if the other guy did first. With Nazi Germany, at least we knew where these guys were, and we were pretty sure that if we knocked over Berlin, they'd surrender.

It's interesting to note that back during the Cold War, there were marches against nuclear weapons, movies made about the world going up in smoke, and pop stars making anti-nuclear statements between bong hits.

Today, with Iran saying they're going to wipe Israel off the map, and the North Koreans test firing rockets into the Sea of Japan, nobody gives a damn about nukes. Why? Because the people who yawn at the idea of Israel being obliterated aren't serious Western citizens. They are, in fact, pro-fascist, and anti-West. There can be no other explanation. All of Israel's enemies are racist, totalitarian regimes, bent on her destruction. To not care what these regimes plan on doing, to not march against them for the first time in history, shows that you implicitly support what they stand for.

Can there be any question of this? Imagine sitting in your office in Iran. You watch as hundreds of thousands protest against Bush sending troops to Iraq. You watch every news agency from CNN to Al-Jazeera rake the Americans over the coals for tying a leash to a prisoner's neck. The outrage and condemnation are far louder than when an insurgent's prisoner has his head sawed off. In Italy, the rainbow flags drip from the windows, with Pace ('Peace') written across them. From New York to Sydney to London to Tokyo, the unserious march shoulder to shoulder, decrying their own governments.

You tip back your chair, shoot your aide for some insult or other, and flip the channel. It only gets better. Your enemy's newspapers expose classified information. The UN, based in the city where two buildings were knocked down by people you call martyrs and heroes, invites Hugo Chavez to attendance. There, he calls the President of the country he is visiting 'Satan,' then hops the next plane home without fuss.

You yourself step in front of the cameras and declare that Israel must be destroyed, that Jews should move back to Europe, and that the Holocaust never happened. And you mention in passing that you want to develop nuclear technology to bring the electric bill down.

In France an average of 80 cars a day are burned by Muslim 'youths,' who just never seem to get old. In Madrid, boom, in London, pow.

Death and mayhem, and blood running through the streets. Then, perhaps to test the waters one last time, to see just how hypocritical and ignorant the Unserious of the West are, you pull out the big guns. While the lesbian Rosie O'Donnell on the View tells the American housewife that Christianity is as bad as Islamic fundamentalism, hundreds gather outside in Kermanshah, Iran to watch a homosexual man hang for the crime of sodomy.

And after all of this, the world and Rosie say...nothing. At least, not to each other. But to you, the racist, fascist, immoral dictator, the silence is deafening approval for the words you say and the acts you commit. How could it be taken otherwise?

His name was Shahab Darvishi, by the way, the homosexual man who came up against Islamic justice. Sodomy, like rape, murder, adultery, blasphemy and espionage, are capital offences in Iran. And before the ladies get too happy with the death-for-rape deal, you might want to know that you need four eyewitnesses to prove rape. And even then, as happened recently to a gang rape victim, the woman might receive 96 lashes for reporting said rape, because it means admitting she was alone with a man not her husband.

It should be plain that this is a battle of ideologies. This is Freedom vs. Fascism, and Good vs. Evil. Serious people know this. The Unserious should too, because it is summed up in one little line that even their feeble minds could grasp, were it not for their blind hatred of the man in the White House.

No matter how many clitorises are clipped from the crotches of young girls, no matter how many heads are cut off, no matter how many cars burn in France, no matter how many Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims themselves are gunned down in the street. The Unserious have tuned out this information. They receive their orders from the fascists, and they march accordingly.

Until, perhaps, it's their cousin or sister that gets blown to smithereens on a downtown bus. Which is exactly why the Americans and others (we Canadians chickened out) are in Iraq right now. It's the oldest lesson in the book. Fight in someone else's backyard. I don't care if the Americans are there for two hundred years, I just hope they have the willpower to stay there. Better that volunteer soldiers slug it out in Iraq, than scores of women and children are decimated at a shopping mall in Philadelphia.

If the Americans were to pull out of Iraq, it would be the singular greatest defeat in the history of the world. Do the Unserious really believe that 3000 dead soldiers requires a Super Power running away from bands of murderers and thugs bent on knocking down our buildings, hacking off our heads, and mutilating our children? Nevermind what they would do to the Iraqi civilians immediately after an American withdrawal. Can they be serious?

This is a battle of wills. A car bomb here, a car bomb there, and sooner or later the Yankees and the Brits will run away. But how far do you run? If you aren't there to keep an eye on your enemy, exactly how long is it until they have their eye on that shopping mall in Philly? Tell me where you run to then.

Seriously.

Thanks for the Refresher, Mr. Donne

So here I am at 33, and there's lots of things I should be thinking about. When am I going to settle down? When am I going to raise a family? When am I going to get some responsibilty? There's probably a lot of good answers to those questions, but I've only got one: "Screw you." Everyone might want the UN to run the world, but they don't run me. I'm a Canadian man. I have a God given, red-and-white right to live the way I want to live.

Can somebody tell me what the hell I was thinking with that last article? And not one of you wrote to stop me.

Here's what went down. I was feeling high and mighty when I wrote that. Top of the world, ma, and all the rest of it. I posted the article, then went down and cracked a beer. I ended up playing an all night game of Texas Hold 'Em poker. Yes sir, just me and boys on my birthday. Beer, poker, and rock 'n roll on the box. Absolute perfection for an independent tough guy like me, huh?

Well, the fates love that kind of of talk. They wait in the wings and cackle and laugh, and they fall all over themselves while we tempt them ever closer to the stage, until they say, "This must be our cue. I mean, how long can we let the fool go on?"

The poker game broke up, and I ended evens. I hit the sack and went to sleep feeling like a man's man. I got up and went to the computer to check the mails. And wouldn't you know it, an email from the first love of my life. University sweetheart. I hadn't heard from her in a long, long time. When I think of her, I still get a smile on my face.

So I open the mail and there it is in the first couple of lines. It's a happy birthday note. Yup, the ladies still like to write me on my birthday. Damn, I'm good.

Then she gives me some news. She's had a baby. A little girl. And I'm happy as hell for her...and then it turns bitter-sweet...and then I start thinking about life. You know, like all of the family and responsibility stuff I said "Screw you" to about eight hours before.

So I saunter down the hall, mulling it over. I'm thinking to myself, "I must be right. I couldn't have written all that unless I was right. Right?"

I bump into my buddy Chris. He was at the poker game the night before. He's another man's man. Complains when there are no hot girls around, doesn't let anyone get too close, enjoys telling a dirty joke over a double shot on the rocks, has shoulders like a linebacker.

We go get a cup of coffee. I lay out my story for him, how the fates have done me in just as I was thinking what a cool cat I was. I thought Chris would be the perfect pick-me-up. He'd set me straight. He'd tell me another one of his awful jokes, and then he'd say, "Chicks suck," and punch me in the arm and I'd feel all better.

"Me and my buddy promised that neither one of us would get married till we were 32," he says. "Then my friend went and got married at 28. I'm 31. I've been thinking for three years, 'Did he outgrow me? And when am going to grow up? And what's this all for, anyway?'"

So we sat there for a half-hour, two men's men, and talked like sissies.

Thanks for cheering me up, Chris. Way to go.

I know what happened. I dropped too many names in that article. Nietchze, Hemingway, MacDonald. You'll think I'm crazy, but one of them heard me. They were up there in one of the exclusive literary pubs, the kind of place where Dan Brown would get his ass kicked if he walked in.

They were all sitting around a table and MacDonald says, "Hey, get this. There's a guy down there who thinks he's got it all figured out."

"Idiot," Nietchze says. "I figured it out, but I went insane to do it."

"Well," MacDonald says, "he thinks he's got it licked. And get this, he calls himself 'independent.' Wears it like a badge right on his sleeve. And he quotes us to prove it."

That draws a bunch of laughs from the whole pub. Shakespeare sighs, and Twain spits.

"Huh," goes Hemingway. And he leans his chair back and calls out, "Hey, Donne. Guess this guy didn't read your piece on no man being an island. You know, 'in and of himself,' and all that crap."

And John Donne wanders over, looks way down at me holding my pair of jacks, and says, "Oh, he's read it. Shall I send him a reminder?"

I got it, Johnnie, I got it.

A Coyote Looks at 33

So this is what it looks like, the view from floor 33. When I was 13, I remember being pissed at my parents for something or other. I remember telling my brother (who's five years older than me), "You're lucky. You can move out anytime you want."

Eighteen seemed like a lifetime back then. When I was 17, I thought 30-year-old women were as ancient as Ghandi. When I was 22, I thought I knew what Hemingway was talking about, and I was pretty sure that I had the world by the ass.

Nietchze was no dummy. He had a line that went something like this: "When you're thirty, you look back at your youth and laugh at how young you were. Then you're sixty, and realize that 30 was youth."

That's well put. A friend of mine was mad at his girlfriend the other day, and I asked him how old she was. He told me she was twenty-five, and I said, "Well, she's young."

But when exactly does "young" stop? When I was twenty-five and in love with an outright bitch from LA, it sure felt like love to me. I didn't feel that young. Indeed, after going through a few months of hell with her, I felt plenty old. Then I got to 27 and fell for a dancer with long-long legs. When I jerked her around, nobody asked how old she was (22), they simply told me I was a goof. Youth is the excuse of idiots. Age is the excuse of idiots who haven't learned any better.

John D. MacDonald probably said it best. "The heart stays young." I have no doubt that a 70-year-old man still looks at a young lady's ass with the same eyes he had on five decades ago. I know I will. Hell, with what the teenage girls are wearing these days, the cops would lock me up if they could read my mind.

My great-gandmother lived until she was 106. She saw the first automobile, the first airplane, the first lunar landing, the first compact disc. But I'll bet she didn't feel that old when she cashed it in. I'll bet she looked back on her life and, when her heart started to fail and her feet turned black, she thought exactly what John D. did following the "heart stays young" stuff: "Please, not yet. Oh, please. Not yet."

I've been accused of being a fairly independent person, and I guess I'll stand by that. Sentimentality feels good when I've had enough vodka, but it bothers me during family holidays. It shouldn't. My family never fights, and in fact my entire extended family is probably the poster child for how people should act over Thanksgiving. I guess I just never really liked holidays this past decade because (with the exception of my immediate family; and doesn't that say something?) everyone asks me questions about when I'm going to get a real life.

That's a good question. I'm 33 as of tonight, and I still have no clue. Gordon Lightfoot's songs are probably a fair description of how I look at life, and I make no apologies for that. I have more money than the guys in Gord's songs, but like them, I can easily answer some asshole over turkey dinner, "You don't know me. Son of the sea am I. If you find me feeding daisies, please turn my face up to the sky. Whatever I was, you know it was all because, I've been on the town, washing the bullshit down."

I harken back to Travis McGee (and in case you haven't guessed, my father and the writers he gave me are the biggest influences on my life), where he scolded himself for something stupid, then shrugged and said, "Well, you chose to live on the underbelly of life. Get used to it."

That's healthy. I think that's a lot more healthy than going with the flow and toeing the party line that modern days have handed us. I really don't give a damn who clubs a seal in the head, and I enjoy veal more than you'll ever know. When a ship spills oil and the SUV-driving soccer mom sings the blues, I yawn and have another beer. Sue me. I've done a lot of yawning and drinking in my time, and loved every minute of it. Most of my memories involve the nighttime, and my education of life has come at the hands of a taxi driver around 3 AM. And I'm all right with that. In fact, though I can get down on myself, I'm probably the luckiest sonofabitch alive.

I'm 33, but I've seen more than most men will in their lifetimes. It wasn't on purpose. Nobody gets lucky on purpose, ask your average movie star. Good luck, like everything good, is unpredictable. Nobody walks into a bar thinking they'll land the nicest blonde in the joint, but when it happens we don't say we're sorry.

Here's to me and mine. I don't feel old. In fact, I don't feel young. But I do feel. And I know a lot of people who don't, from people in their teens, to people with one foot in the grave.

Me and my father stopped by a graveyard a few months ago. There was row upon row of graves dated in the early 1920's. It was obvious evidence of the Spanish Flu. Kids aged six months were dropped into the ground and buried over. They never got to taste whiskey. They never made love. None of them got the chance to see how beautiful Venice is, or how bad it smells.

The dude in prison who screwed it up at 21 by robbing a liquor store, the guy who knocked up a girl at 16 and worked the rest of his days in the mill to raise the child, the woman who married at 18 and regretted it for the rest of her life. Those are the people I live for, drink for, see for, love for.

And man, have I loved. Truly loved. And been loved back. Sometimes it hurt, but mostly it was wonderful. I've dropped a lot of names, so I won't stop now by ripping off Kurt Vonnegut's epitaph from Slaughterhouse-Five: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." We all know that's a lie, but those of us who have lived a decent life know that it feels true.

I have an uncle who likes to hop on his high horse now and then. He heard my tales of adventure and fun, and he replied with a stern, "Well, when is the point of no return?"

I got his drift. He's a lawyer, a politician, so forth. What he wanted to know was, "When are you going to knock off this crap and get a real job?" My immediate answer is that the point of no return is between a Swedish girl's legs, but I doubt he'll find the humour. My diplomatic response is that I try to be as kind as I can while I live the life I want to lead, for as long as I want to lead it.

The reason I love America is that they invented the phrase, "It's a free country." You can do whatever the hell you want, as far as they're concerned. That's right up my alley. Canadians more or less live by it, but they feel guilty for it, which is completely beyond me. It's probably because they don't want to be Americans. I often feel sorry for my country. We try so damn hard not to be the people we are most alike. I have been to every Commonwealth country there is, and I will tell you now that we don't drive like them, speak like them, think like them. We are so akin to our southern neighbours that it's a joke. Our national guilt would be laughable, were it not so disapointing. Still, we try. We do.

So here I am at 33, and there's lots of things I should be thinking about. When am I going to settle down? When am I going to raise a family? When am I going to get some responsibilty?

There's probably a lot of good answers to those questions, but I've only got one: "Screw you." Everyone might want the UN to run the world, but they don't run me. I'm a Canadian man. I have a God given, red-and-white right to live the way I want to live. If you aren't happy with that, then you aren't Canadian or American, in which case I don't give a damn what you have to say. With the exception of the Aussies, the rest of you sold out on your heritage and your beliefs. Leave me and my friends alone. Or we'll tell you to. Firmly.

So here I am, guys (and yeah, this is probably for guys; you morons who got married kept telling me that you live vicariously through me so often that I finally went and looked up what 'vicariously' meant), and I wish you were with me. We're getting old, but for me, it gets more fun all the time. Of all the lessons I've learned about aging, I think Hank Williams Jr. taught me the only thing that can't be denied: "Hangovers hurt more than they used to."

Gotta go. Working on one now.

Lest Neil Forgets

I don't have much time tonight, as I'm kicking back with some rum and listening to music. I was enjoying the reverie for a bit, when an old song came up on the shuffle. It was Neil Young's Keep on Rockin' in the Free World.

The lyrics he sings are pretty good, if you hate yourself for using toilet paper and styrofoam. In Neil's book, mentioning these things count as social commentary, as if I am supposed to feel guilty for wiping my ass with anything but a handful of pine needles.

Anyway, the Rockin line that struck me the most was:

I Don't feel like Satan,
But I am to them,
So I'll try to forget it anyway I can.

That is a perfect summation of the West today, isn't it? And Neil wrote it back when he was supposedly 'cutting edge.'

I watched a documentary today that showed me all kinds of ways that Islamic facists think I am Satan, and want to kill me and you. And I thought, "These guys are nuts." But the thought crossed my mind that we'd stand up to them, or at least hold them off. I thought, "Sooner or later, your oil wells are going to give one big burp, we'll move on to sunflower oil or some damn thing, and you can go back to being....well, whatever you were before you made the headlines in 2001. Hopefully by then you'll let a doctor look at your wife's flesh before she dies of some common ailment."

But that's not going to happen. This documentary showed me how exactly like Nazi Germany the Islamic fascists are, with the added bonus of religion to back them up. Jihad, like life, is cheap. So they're here to stay.

Especially when one of our brave social commentators says, "I'll try to forget it anyway I can," when someone calls him Satan.

"Anyway he can." Meaning what? Getting drunk? Can't do that, they'll chop your head off for throwing back a Budweiser. Getting laid? Prostitutes are buried up to their necks and stoned to death for practicing the oldest profession. Praying to God? Which God, my friend? Because unless it's the dude that told Mohammed he was descended from Abraham (talk about 'hijacking' a religion a thousand years later), you're going to be sent to the mass grave with the other infidels.

Listen: if someone calls me or mine Satan, I'll kick their ass. If they step on my flag, I'll give them a knee that will bother them for the rest of their life. But who's going to speak for me?

Not our popular front. Not Neil. He's too busy forgetting it when someone calls him Satan.

Not me. Not ever.

See You Later, Alligator

P.W. Botha died last night, on All Hallow's Eve, at age 90. If the South Africans were the sort to observe Hallowe'en, they might find that ironic: one more demon coming out to bow before disappearing into the night.

Botha was the South African leader during Apartheid's heyday, and helped to sing the first few bars of its swan song, though not by choice. He came from an Afrikaner background, and had the peculiar Afrikaans accent: not quite English, not quite Dutch, not quite anything. When a person with a heavy Afrikaans accent speaks English, it is impossible to tell if it isn't some warped form of German.

He entered politics at age 20, going on to become defence minister in 1966, and finally Prime Minister in 1978. His run for election that year is notable in that he made promises to alleviate Apartheid, even going so far as to tell whites that they would have to "adapt or die."

It sounded pretty good, but it never amounted to much. Reading about him today, you'll find a lot of blame placed on his cabinet and his National Party, that they wouldn't let him accomplish his anti-Apartheid goals. It's a historical axiom that blame and evil fades with time, until they are more or less painted over with the expression, "Those were the times." Caesar, Khan, Attila, Napoleon, they have great publicists today, but in their "time" they were ruthless men. Stalin's getting better press every day. Hitler may take a while. Botha, for his part, should have a pretty rosy portrait in a few years.

Described as pragmatic nowadays, one looks back and shivers at his major accomplishments. In 1983, Botha pushed through a new constitution (voted on, as always, by whites-only) that turned him from Prime Minister to President. As a sop to the coloreds and Indians, he gave them a House of Representatives, and a House of Delegates, respectively. The whites got the House of Assembly. Matters of "national responsibility" (whatever that might mean) and racial issues were left solely in the hands of the President and his cabinet.

He formed a special forces unit to conduct covert operations against anti-Apartheid groups. He passed anti-freedom of speech legislation to suppress criticism of the government. Under his watch, two thousand people would die, and around twenty-five thousand people would be detained without trial. Many of them were tortured on infamous Robben Island, just off the coast of Cape Town.

During his tenure, Botha came to be known as Die Groot Crocodile (Afrikaans for the Great Crocodile), and had a penchant for finger-wagging when he talked. Depending on which articles you read (again, history beginning to cloud over), the Croc nickname is a tribute to his stubbornness, or an allusion to his ferocity.

It is a laugh to hear of him described as a man who would have done more if only he could, or as any sort of people's man. When it comes to freedom, there is really only one factor that matters: the vote. The fact that he wasn't prepared to give it blacks is really all one needs to know about the man. He took that belief with him to the grave.

If you aren't reading this in South Africa, or have never visited the place, you may be confused about what black means. Black is not black in the North American sense. It is more tribal than racial in meaning. In South Africa, black is considered African. Colored is a mix of anything, whether it be black/white, white/Indian, and so forth (it can even be quite specific: Cape Colored means you're a person of mixed race that comes from the Cape). Indian is, of course, Indian, descendents of people from the sub-continent who came over for jobs in agriculture. In South Africa, the entire population uses terms that would get you punched in the jaw in Canada.

In any event, nobody of any hue beyond white had it good under Botha. I remember talking to a South African who told me that it floored him the first time he sat down next to an Indian man in a movie theater. This was after Apartheid ended. He was shocked not because he didn't like Indians, but rather because he had never seen anyone but white people in a movie theater. He was 60 years old. It was 1994.

Hubris eventually caught up with Botha. The US, the UK, and the Commonwealth passed sanctions against South Africa, and the economic punishment was telling. In the late 80's the rand went through the roof, riots were becoming the norm, the world recoiled at scenes of violence, Artists Against Apartheid made South Africa a rock 'n roll whipping boy.

In 1989 Botha suffered a stroke which would give him a limp for the rest of his life. Then his political side turned against him. He made a statement saying that since his cabinet no longer agreed with him, he would step down as President.

He was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, the man that would free Mandela and oversee the first real democratic election in South African history. The National Party took a beating at the polls, leaving the African National Congress (ANC) in charge of virtually everything. Overnight, the political landscape of South Africa went from white to black. Botha must have struggled not to have another stroke.

He faded into obscurity after that, bobbing up only a few times in the press. He was called before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People were to come forward, confess to crimes, give witness to others, and generally expose the truth behind Apartheid. Botha declined the invitation. As President, he had been head of the State Security Council until his resignation. His confession probably would have been a long one.

He never showed up to testify and was cited for contempt. He didn't pay the fine, and the conviction was overturned on appeal, the courts perhaps playing Ford to Botha's Nixon.

It didn't matter much. The Crocodile moved to a town called Wilderness, and lived out the rest of his days in seclusion. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission blamed him for a ton of human rights violations, but he was unapologetic. His last public statement about the Commission was that they merely wanted him to be a symbol of "his people," and that they wanted to humiliate him as that symbol.

Perhaps it never entered his head how lucky he was. The Truth Commission was set up so there would be no punishment. That was Mandela's deal: get the truth out, and move on. New constitution, new flag, new national anthem. They could have hanged Botha, but they let him walk without a fuss. Was that more of a disgrace for him? That he wasn't an enemy worth hanging? That he and his ideals could just be forgotten? He never said.

Married twice, he had two sons and three daughters. When asked for a statement about Botha's death, the ANC decided to think of them: "The ANC wishes his family strength and comfort at this difficult time."

A short statement, but enough.