2 years old : Love and Shit

I don’t remember being two. It’s surprising when one considers all that happens in that year.  My earliest memory is of my Mother, my aunt and my Grandma in my Grandmother’s kitchen in Toronto.  She was smiling big time and laughing as were my mom and her sister. My father was holding me. My brother was standing on the big black and white tile floor.  There’d be later memories of dinner at the long dining room table with my grandfather. . Friends of my grandfather’s would be there and friends from the Baptist Church. The family from the United States came up one year. They were ‘well to do’ as my mother said.

My aunt had been the executive assistant to the Canadian ambassador  in Washington during WWII. She’d become close to the American’s in the family as a result.  She once told me of her years in Washington, wanting me to know about war. ‘It was a big party, Billy, the grandest party you could ever imagine.  Important meetings all day and dinner and dancing all night. We’d feel sorry for the men who came back from the war. We could tell they had a difficult time but in Washington it was just a series of parties and a whole lot of money.  I had a grand red coat and noticed that when I cam back to Toronto. I was standing on Youge looking up and down the street. As far as the eye could see I was the only bit of colour. Everywhere there was austerity. But not in Washington.  I just thought you should know.  When you talk of war and peace. I thought you should know about the parties. ‘. .  

 I think I was  2 when I remember being held by my father as we’d be coming and going through Grandma’s kitchen.  We always had dinner as a family back in those early years in Toronto.  The three years old and after memories begin to gel fairly solid ,but that time before two I’m not so sure. 

I knew a man who remembered being in the womb, blue light and steady beat of a drum. I used to do past life regressions with hypnosis with people I was working with in hypnosis but this time I’d just asked the fellow to go back to when he remembered being happy. He was sitting there in my office with a little smile mouthing a bit like a fish, so I told him, ‘You can still speak and answer my questions whatever age you are.’  He didn’t know where he was but he was happy and he’d not been able to recall ever being happy in his life. But here he was happy. He described floating in dark blue surroundings and what was the comforting sound of his mothers’ heart. He was one of the saddest most depressed patients I’d ever treated despite his having gone on to achieve success at university and later in work in finance. He’d never married and never had children and lived pretty much alone following a rather onerous routine with no cheer.  We’d build on his womb experience in the months that followed awakening his positive feelings. I don’t know if he ever achieved joy but he did find a modicum of happiness.

 Most people’s memory kicks in around 3 though a lot with trauma in the early years blot out their whole life of the time.  Walling off the good and bad.  Mentally doing what the body does faced with tuberculosis, walling off both healthy and sick parts of the lung to stop the spread of disease.   Walling off that trauma and past at what cost?The best of therapy is regaining the positive that was lost, exploring the good tissue, once the disease is identified.  It was easy for me to do therapy having begun in surgery. So much is similar. But I didn’t like that counselors with too little training focused in some kind of vicarious delight on the sick and dirty parts rather than moving beyond these to celebrate the healing, the scarring and the life that no longer needs to be forgotten but can be reclaimed.  

My own first trauma was the stray dog that bit me under the street lamp in front of our house. . I was drawn to the little grey terrier because he was shaking and cold.  Being a kid I didn’t realize it was summer and hot out and the dog shouldn’t have been sweating and shaking.   I always loved animals especially dogs. But this one was too afraid even for a little boy of three to approach him. He bit me and ran away. To this day I figure he was telling me to stay away because he couldn’t control himself like a were wolf going into a change or a human losing the last vestige of humanity as the zombie takes over in the horror movie. My parents were really scared. I was crying and bleeding but it wasn’t that bad a bite.  Punctures.  They were scared though and I remember Dad speeding on the way  to the hospital, every one serious.  I didn’t know about rabies.  I was treated for that all summer.  Because I’d told them about  animal being cold and sick and hot  and shaking, a stray that no one could find, I had to be treated.  Who knows if I did get rabies. It might explain things.  Especially to the later ex wives.   It was summer then and the moonlight and scent of flowers was something I remember. Also the hospital smells and the nurses and doctors in white.  My parents anxious that summer.  Everyone told me to never approach strays again. Not only would I approach them I’d make a career out of helping them. Not dogs but humans. Though I treated my share of animals when I was a fly in doctor in Northern Canada, the bush planes and helicopters the taxi service that took me in and out of remote reserves.

Two is an incredible time of walking and exploring and talking and opposition.  They used to think that kids who didn’t toilet train according to the clock were obstinate. They’d punish them. There was discipline and regimen in those days.  The military had won the war so all things military were admired. I don’t even remember diapers.  I don’t think I missed the magic time a kid  should stop shitting where I shouldn’t. Years later I’d piss in potted plants.  That’s what happens when you drink too much and there’s a line up at the washrooms in the parties of fancy millionaires and such. Now I’m worried about descending to Depends stage.  Sometimes I dream I’ve shit myself or pissed myself but it’s just a message to get out of the bed and use the toilet.  It’s still a harbinger of times to come.  As a kid though  I was probably okay. It no doubt contributed to my confidence . I was said  by all accounts to be a protege or sorts.  So I can only extrapolate and guess I did well on the big shitting and pissing test that back then no doubt separated the winners and the losers.  . Maybe I was out of diapers early.  I simply don’t know. I don’t remember and everyone I could ask about this is dead. Worse I doubt they considered it important even at the time. I know parents fuss about it but later it’s not all that memorable.  Like trauma that whole stinky diaper period is walled off. Not surprisingly kangaroos and other marsupials, are thought by some, especially males, to be an advanced species.

I carried the oppositional streak throughout my life.  I said no to all manner of things others just kowtowed too.  I wondered if they were beaten into submission as children. Maybe failed the shit piss stage so gave up on rebellion early.  I wasn’t anything but loved and cared for as a kid.. My mother was an incredibly happy red haired Irish beauty whose children, family and husband were the centre of her life.  My father’s father was a rancher and dad loved animals.  To him I was a special hairless kinds that tugged at his heart strings and caused him no end of concern.

My aunt always said I was such a lovely baby and little boy.. This was in contrast to what I’d later become.  My brother was always there. Four years older he was my hero. He did the most unusual things which to him were no big deal but to me were quite genius. Like doing up the buttons on my shirt for me or tying my shoe laces. He cared for me when I was small. There are pictures that tell this truth of the family love but I remember the warm feeling of family then. I remember loving hanging out with him, hugging my dad’s leg and curling up against my mother’s bozom holding her with arms hat didn’t even reach around to the back. I love the scent of my mother.  Lilac and lavender.

I just don’t remember much about two..  MCMLIII was a non descript year for me probably because I was caught up in really important matters like speech and locomotion and shitting on a toilet.  

It’s important now for me that Samual Beckett’s play, ‘Waiting for Godot’ premiered in Paris that year.

I’d had a recurrent dream that I was a bit of light in a translucent bright bubbles flying through the galaxy , stars all around me, with other light filled bright bubbles accompanying me, when all of a sudden, a cataclysmic event of some kind, knocked me off this happy exciting tranjectory and took me down through earth’s atmosphere to earth.   All my own kind, carried on,  on to a further destination, another planet perhaps,  where I was supposed to go with them but I ended up alone on this earth.   I didn’t feel I’d landed on the right planet at the right time. The people here were nice and loving but they were not my kind and my being here was a product of a huge mistake. I wondered when or if I’d ever be re united with my own kind.

A theologian came to teach at Regent College UBC. He was giving a free lecture at the ‘Under the Green Room’ series. He told a story about his second child being born when his first was only two.  The two year old asked if he could be alone with the baby. He was insisting he needed to be alone with the baby without anyone else being there. Having had their share of psychology and sibling rivalry tales  and never seeing the two year old so agitated. they decided to allow this to happen only while they stayed right outside the door having put a camera in the crib.

The two year old then walked unsteadily up the his brother and said quietly, ‘Do you remember Him?  I’m forgetting what He was like. »

The baby burbled some while the 2 year old went on,, ‘I used to see his face and hear his voice but it’s going.  Please tell me what’s He’s like again. I’m afraid I’m going  to forget Him.’ 

There was no more except the parents had this tape and the profound sense the child was speaking about God.

It’s would be a few years later I’d dreame of  a shining mother and father god comforting me in my bed, their faces hovering over my bed and speaking softly to me about my being on earth. It was a place to be and a time to spend but it was clear from what they were saying this was just a temporary place. Like the child’s place before and the world we were going to. Here we were just passing through.

Waiting for Godot really.  When I studied that play at University of Winnipeg in my first year of English studies I was immensely moved by it. We acted a bit of it and later I’d be blessed to see a live performance in England.  The existentialism of the war years.  Long before my birth. I was a post war baby.  My father had been in the Air Force.  He married my mother wearing his blue RCAF uniform.  My mother kept the jacket folded in the bureau.He wore it on very special occasions like Remembrance Day.  He never gained weight like I did. He was as slim and fit in his 90’s as he’d been when he first wore that blue RCAF jacket and went to war.

1953 was also the year that the CIA sponsored Robertson Panel first met to discuss the UFO phenomena.  Naturally that seems significant to me knowing what I know. James Watson and Francis Crick announced their discovery of the structure of the DNA. Something I’d study some 20 years later in depth. I’d love the movie Gattaca.  I ‘d study the history of Canadian women doctors research in eugenics later taken forward by the Nazis’s for their Final Solution. At the age of 2 knew no more of the double helix than I did of Stalin who had a stroke that year.  Without his doing so we’d never have had the great 2017 movie comedy, Death of Stalin.   

Dag Hammasrskjold and Nikita Khrushchev would come into prominence that year and both of them would be significant to me in later years. I’d hear of the Mau Mau in later years  but not really know they were a genocidal tribe in Kenya.  I’d mix them up with a wrap around skirt from somewhere else in the world.  

 More important to me personally was Ian Fleming publishing Casino Royale,  the first 007 James Bond book.  I read all his books and saw all the movies several times over, starting in my teen years after the Hardy Boy years. I still love Bond. My friend and I look back on our lives and wonder if we haven’t simply tried to emulate this fictional character.  The drinking, the fast sexy women, the PPK, guns, fast cars, fast boats, scuba diving, skiing.  The movies were an advertisement  for a kind of sophisticated masculinity that we fell hook line and sinker for. We’d read the books as they came out and watched all the movies over and over again, bemoaning only that we didn’t have a’ license to kill’. Thanks to Ian Fleming I learned at an early age the difference between freedom and license.  I’ve always had the freedom to kill. All I lacked was the license.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norqay became the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest. If I’d been more than two at the time this would have impressed me. At two I was scaling my own Everests climbing up anything and everything that took my fancy.  Mount Everest now is  regular freeway to the top with tourists companies vying for the business. That didn’t matter. When I met a doctor at a wilderness medicine conference I was attending I was thoroughly impressed that he’d climbed Mount Everest. I learned a lot from our casual conversations and have quoted him for years. A gorgeous girlfriend of mine had been the doctor to the base camp of Mount Everest. I loved that my doctor friends from Winnipeg liked to hike in Nepal and Tibet taking their little children hiking at the base of these peaks. It didn’t surprise  to learn later of the the daughters  outstanding athletic and academic achievements. 

At two, I simply wouldn’t have known that Queen Elizabeth II had her coronation in Westminster Abbey in 1953.  I’m sure my mother’s would have mentioned it because in Canada’s the Royals , as they were called, were given a lot of attention. The Beatles themselves would even write a short song in Queen Elizabeth’s honor, ‘Our Queen is a very nice queen, though she hasn’t got a lot to say’ Coronation news is  not something that comes up when one is focused on toilet training and climbing out of cribs. Apparently I was a daring escape artist at that age. There was considerable doubt that I would survive those years as I was forever climbing and falling down and climbing back up again.  Definitely I was focussed on intensive training for later life.

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russel starred  in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that year.  The Korean War ended. The Rosenburgs were executed at Sing Sing and USSR got its first Hydrogen Bomb. The Korean War ended.  Kinsey published the second of the Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female.  This continues to disturb men especially in Africa and the Middle East till today.  

John F. Kennedy married Jacki O. in Newport. REM and RAM were in the news. MACH II was reached by a manned aircraft.  The name MACH II, is used  today for a penile balloon type prosthesis implant, presumably for marketting reasons. Hugh Hefner published the first issue of Playboy with Marilyn Monroe as the centrefold nude. Hank Williams dies.

The trouble is I don’t remember any of this. . A whole lot was going on but I was not atypically satisfied to play in the bathroom, walk, run and fall, climb things and learn to speak so I could swear, something it was noted and brought to my attention I did at a very young age.   My fondest memory still remains my family in my Grandmother’s kitchen with the black and white tiled floors.  

  .    

Moscow War Museum

"This was built to remember WWII,” he told me.  Barett’s friends had picked us up at the apartment, taken us for pancake breakfast and would later take us for lunch.  With their son we were walking through the beautiful fountained plaza before the monument to the victory of the Russians over the Germans when Hitler invaded Russia.
“You’ve not been invaded in America. Here there’s been a war every 50 years of so.”  he said, realistically.  It’s a fact of life in other parts of the world not protected by Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Another monument we’d seen earlier, celebrated the Russian Victory over France when Napoleon invaded Russia. This very intelligent young gentleman with a wry sense of humour and passable English, would tell us that he worked in the production of military uniforms.  “I”m just a businessman.” he said.
I told him, through Barrett’s translation, the plot of William Gibson’s book in which there is “industrial espionage” surrounding a new military fabric that not only is excellent camouflage but also attractive so that itassisted recruitment. Whoever had the fabric could get the richest contracts considering how many men and women were in the military.  Despite translation everyone laughed especially as I’d synchronistically only told Barrett about the book hours before meeting them.  He told us that their fabrics had to wholly Russian made that he wasn’t in design but production. And it really was a production making sure all the parts of the uniforms came together and everything was wholly local.
I told him the story of the English having their Tank Opticals made in Germany when WWI broke out and what trouble that caused.  “That happens a lot,’ he said. “All the uniform must be made in Russia.”
We walked through the museum together. I appreciated how he told his son about the reality of the wars. There were school tours going on and I thought how busy this museum was compared to the Canadian War Museum.  “Lest we forget,” came to mind.  It was clear how much he honoured the soldiers.  The museum showed in terrible detail the worst battles the Russians fought in. Barrett and his wife, her friend, followed and talked of mutual friends and changes in Russian. Barrett asked him to explain the details of one campaign.  I told them how my father had been in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Dad took my brother and I often to the Canadian War Museum  to remind us of the cost of peace and the sacrifice the military makes. We all enjoy the peace and prosperity but rarely think of the real politics.
I told Barrett later how living in London years back I’d heard often how the Brits were irritated by the American Hollywood portrayal of the war being all about them. Indeed the brits thought the Americans  were ‘johnny come late lies’ to the European front. Mostly they were in it for the money, the Brits having to pay in land and pounds for their initial support.  The Pacific in contrast was the American war despite the cost to the Australians.   I’d just read an account of WWII by a non aligned historian who pointed out the greatest theatre of the war and the one that truly broke the Nazi had been the Russian. The cost in lives to the Russians was overwhelming. It explains even to today to some degree the concerns that the Russians have about security.  Even Freud said, ‘sometimes the paranoids are right’.
Later we’d have lunch in a fine Ukranian Restaurant. It was a magnificent meal and the Ukranians were delightful hosts.  Naturally Russians were partisan to their cause.  Barrett had learned from other friends that the Crimea was formerly Russian.  It was Russian from 1783 till 1954. Barrett asked our host about that and he said, “Yes, we gave it to Ukraine. A lot of Russians were always against that. ”  That explained to some extent the Russians now Crimea. It seemed a bit like  marriage and divorce. Nobody is ever happy but we make the best of a bad lot.   The Quebec Separatists have never been too happy with what Ottawa thinks they can ‘take’ if  they want to leave Federation.
I’ve got Russian and Ukranian friends in Canada.  They’re the best of Canadians.  I further appreciate the west’s position is against Russia. But it’s all above my pay grade. As far as I could see both the Russians and the Ukranians wanted peace as much as the next one.  In Russia there’s no evidence of hostility I could see. Whenever we heard of the dispute the tone of voice was always that of ’sadness’.    No one we spoke with was against Putin except a Chetyn moslem who didn’t like the Russian military at all.  He seemed to like Russians just fine, indeed he preferred the Soviet Union to the new cosmopolitan and orthodox Russia.  Naturally I couldn’t say.   What  I certainly saw was that Russians were happiest when they were with their children or when they were eating out at restaurants.  My favourite hockey has always been when Russians played Canadians.
Ironically, itt was National Jewish Day in Russia.  I couldn’t help but think walking through their War Museum,  seeing the extraordinary lists  of people killed, the widespread damage to the country and city, that to Russians, WWII is as close to them as Auschwitz is to Jews.  Every family had lost someone close.  In Canada, despite Afghanistan, I like, the vast majority of Canadians, have no experience of war, famine,  chaos or the clean up.  The Ukranians and Russians and indeed Europeans in general have a proximity to the insanity that we in North America have thankfully be protected from
Thanks to Barrett I had the  pleasure of the company of this generous friendly and humorous Russian family. A really informative and very  pleasant day.  Barett and her friend laughed a great deal. Her husband dolted on her and their child. Not understanding most of what was said I was just thankful to be included.  Everyone was talking a mile a minute in Russian. Then they’d sot, .share a phrase in English with me then  and off they’d go,  talking of cottages, dances, friends and families. Barrett talked of Alaska and Hawaii.  I know t because both Alaska and Hawaii were said in English.
I enjoyed the sculpture of King George slaying the dragon.  It was incredible in the museum to see the soldiers and tanks in the pictures of the Red Square I’d just seen lovers kissing in.

The Great Raid - the movie

The Great Raid, the movie, is based on the book, The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by William B. Breuer.  Made in 2005 and directed by John Dahl it is a true to life depiction of the most successful rescue in American military history.
552 POW’s were still imprisoned in Luzon having survived the Bataam Death March after being captured when MacCarthur retreated, on orders.  The allies would focus on Europe first before turning back on the Japanese. The years between were a horror for the POW's and the people of the Japanese occupied territories.  The brutality and sickening perversity of the Japanese is legendary.  133 US Rangers and 250 Filipino guerrillas attacked 220 Japanese guards with 1000 Japanese troops nearby.  Only 2 Rangers were killed. 2 prisoners and 21 Fillipinos wounded. Nearly a thousand Japanese were killed in addition to four tanks destroyed.
The movie depicts the resilience  of the prisoners in the camp, the inhuman callousness of the sociopathic Japanese, the extraordinary bravery of the Fillipino guerrillas and the exceptional soldiery and leadership of the Rangers. In addition,  the men and women of nearby communities and Manilla, who risked and sacrificed their lives to bring intelligence and aid to the Americans was shown.  The priests,doctors and nurses were especially penalized by the Japanese.  The movie is true to history.  The action is exciting but not so distracting as the normal hollywood action thriller with modernized dialogue and innuendo.  The historians touch is evident throughout.  This required the most sensitivity and skill by director and actors.
Benjamin Bratt plays Lt Colonel Mucci , while James Franco plays Captain Prince. Joseph Fiennes plays Major Gibson.  Robert Mammone plays Captain Fisher and Max Martini 1st Sgt Sid Wojo.  Connie Nielsen plays Margaret Utinsky and Natalie Mendoza plays Mina.  There are so many stars.
The cast is large.  All the acting was first rate and moving.  The movie also had footage from the actual events.  It’s a military re enactment, really, but with an artists mind for action, romance and drama.
I’ve watched it twice now.  Each time has been a truly richer experience. First, it was a war story with lots of action and play.  This second time the characters stood out most: the people of the Phillipines, the episodes in Manilla, the guerrillas themselves, the fillipina nurses, the executions of the locals.  First time round Lt Colonel Mucci left the most impression whereas this time round it was Margaret Utinsky.  An amazing historical film with real depth.
It was truly inspiring, the story and the movie.

Ethics and Morality

Morality is knowing right from wrong.
As put forward by the Definition of Morality, by the Oxford Dictionary on line, "Morality" -mass noun - principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour"
- count now - " particular system of values and principles of conduct of a bourgeois morality"
- "the extent to which an action is right or wrong.

Bill Cosby, the great American comedian did a particularly funny sketch about a couple of cavemen eating bushes. One day these vegetarians decide to eat meat. Bill Cosby has them starting by trying to eat a saber tooth tiger. This begins the long search of 'trial and error' that has lead to the 'morality' of our cuisine today.

"thou shalt not kill" or as the Evolution of God writer said, given the understanding of the day, "thou shalt not kill Jews or members of your tribe." At the other end of the spectrum is the great African Christian physician Albert Schweitzer who took this to mean thou shalt not kill living creatures until he understood that even as he stepped in the woods he was killing countless bacteria and other beings of the microscopic world.

Society collectively espouses a morality, the laws of the land decided by the parliaments and congresses as practiced by the courts of the day and undertaken by the police and citizens of a community. Individual morality may be that of my Baptist Aunt, once executive assistant to Canada's ambassador in Washington during WWII. She said she never thought you should say bad about another. And frankly I and the family would be hard pressed to cite an example of her doing this which she called 'back talk' and saw as a grave sin of the very first order. Trungpa, the great Buddhist philosopher said that North Americans had great difficulty with 'systems' of 'law' and 'conduct' as they were forever treating all collections of laws, including spiritual laws, as a smorgasboard where one picked or chose.

90% of the world's lawyers are congregated in North America and at the core of the Christian religion Jesus is seen as an advocate. In the rest of the world by contrast a person speeding pays a penalty when caught. It is not open to dispute. There is no court of appeal where lawyers can get a person 'off' yet another drunken and driving charge. There is a law and the mitigating circumstances are few. Of course laws can be broken especially by the powerful but the charade of the legal proceedings is to a large extent circumnavigated and costly child's play. Judges take bribes of course but they do that in North America as well. The laws are more etched in stone perhaps than written in sand on a beach at low tide.

Ethics, for contrast and comparison is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as
1. " moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity" eg 'medical ethics also enter into the question'
2. "the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles" eg 'neither metaphysics nor ethics is the home of religion'

It seems hard to consider a person having morally correct behaviour without at the same time being ethically correct. However, this is the present day problem of wearing many hats in a rapidly transforming society. In a person's personal life they may have a high standard of morality and yet feel compelled to work in a government position where there is a low standard of ethical conduct. Sober, non drinking and non drug using, pro life physicians had the misfortune of practicing in a community where the majority of their colleagues had serious problems with addiction and ascribed to a pro abortion stance. Having taken a Hippocratic oath these physicians were faced with increasing encouragement to include euthanasia as part of their practice, covertly rather than overtly. Much of the dialogue was derailed from the matter of 'ethics and morality' to 'budgetary constraints while the administration in these communities were "fat cats" and personally saw 'altruism' as evidence of weakness and immaturity.

Where religion and ethics were closely bound throughout history, morality was internalized as part of this quasi religious background. In Communist Regimes, the first and most prevalent of the 'areligious' and 'aetheistic' political systems, mass murder on a scale grander than ever known throughout history, beyond any religious based killings through out time, more individuals killed by Communist Russia, Communist China and the Pol Pot than killed in the history of all religious wars in a matter of decades.

This 'failed experiment' continues to plague society globally. In contrast Western worlds did not deny religion by according to Jeffersonian principles separated religion from state. However this was before "multi culturalism" and "culture" contains elements of relgion as central to the morality and ethics of the individuals who share in this experience. That said, 'multiculturalism' has only known a few decades of 'trial' and the leading countries of the western world who espouced it as an ethical principle have rejected it because of it's failure. It remains smouldering but has given rise to the realization that a 'culture of religion' is comparable to a 'culture of secularism.'

This idea is explored in the New York Times Bestseller novel "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman. He creates a combat scenario between the old gods of the old religions carried over by American immigrants to the new lands from all their original destinations with the new 'gods of america' which he describes as the 'television' , 'casino' , 'mall' , 'radio' , etc. He sees us praying to these and imbuing the ideas of them into mythical possibilities with powers and magic.

Indeed today it's recognised that Americans, though political, are not particularly well educated as a group in sciences or mathematics.

In Celtic Religion the morality derives from the earth sciences and the spiritual insights and cultural traditions. It is a mind, body soul religion that encompassed the whole individual and demanded a scientific approach to matters of traditionally considered religion.

It is morally and ethically celebrated today by the quantum physicists who saw that at the 'nano' world of 'cosmic uncertainty' religion and secular belief overlapped. In this regard the new ideas of science suggest the nano reality, the quantum phenomena seen previously at the edges of reality indeed shape the reality.

Deconstructionism before it was deconstructed as merely negative criticism of the Occam's Razor sort did make mockery of all western morality and ethical pretention. It was to some exent merely bourgeoisie but lingers in the desire many of the leaders have for the golden era of leadership 'pre magna carta'. Then there was a two tier moral and ethical system, one for the masses and another for the leaders.

Out of this came the notion that 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".




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Jake's Gift

Jake's Gift is playing at Pacific Theatre (www.pacifictheatre.org) Hemlock and 12th. Written and performed by Julia Mackey with Director Dirk Van Strallen and Lighting Designer Gerald King.  The story is of a French girl meeting an elderly Canadian WWII vet who has returned to the 60th Anniversary remembrance on the Juno Beach landing.  He was one of three brothers who fought there, 2 survived, one was left on the beach. It is a survivor's story. A story of remembrance and regeneration.  I wasl rivetted to my seat  by the extraordinary acting and transformation in this moving one woman show.  At then end, the standing ovation, silenced the sobs and sniffles.  It seemed we were all crying.  Tears of sadness. Tears of gratitude. Tears of joy.  As we left we saw an white haired man wipes his eyes.  It was only last month I breakfasted with my father and his 3 friends, all WWII vets, air force, army and navy. I believe they all would have liked this play.   Julia Mackey honoured them with  her writing and her remembering.  I would recommend it to all who have like Canadians been touched by war.
http://members.shaw.ca/junobeach/index.htm
http://www.junobeach.org/main.html

Dad, RCAF Lancaster Bombadier

Almost every time I visit Dad he says he'd like to go to the Canadian Aviation Museum. Then he wants to see the Lancaster Bomber.  He was a bombadier in this plane but that's not what seems to keep bringing him back.  His neighbour growing up, where they shared a one room school house in Swan River, Manitoba was a fellow Bill Attlesee.  I don't even know if I have the spelling right.  Well, every time we go Dad wants to see the rear gunner position of Lancaster. He himself was midships.  "Billy went on two or three tours as a gunner....he'd sit right in there....the German planes would come right up under the plane."  I like the exhibit at the Vancouver Aviation Museum.  Dad's always sad though after we visit and then needs to rest some before he perks up again.  Something about the memories.  Nostalgia being what it is.