Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe -Part 22.

   Before the Age of the Donald - Part 22.


        So far most observers have focused in on what the new Trump administration will do in foreign policy when it takes power in January. I want to make a few predictions on what it will do to domestic programs. It's my belief that the Donald as president will launch an all-out assault on all social programs.
    He will scrap Obamacare as soon as possible. He will also try to privatize Social Security that distributes benefits to close to one in five Americans. If that fails I predict he will slash Social Security benefits by a whopping 25 per cent or more. Or perhaps he will do both. Then he and his Republican cohorts, aided by wimpy Democrats will radically cut back money going to food stamps and Medicaid. These two programs have helped poor people survive.
     As president, Donald Trump may slash funds for Medicare, a program that has paid for medical expenses that many seniors need.
    Public sector workers will lose their jobs or at least lose their job security. Newt Gingrich is one of the Donald's advisors on this issue  and he has insisted that government workers' job security must disappear. Then I believe that government regulation of big businesses will be relaxed or in some cases dismantled completely. All of this will be done against a constant backdrop of threats of war and violence targeted at Iran and China.
    The Donald will also cut taxes way back for high income earners.  "It was the best of times it was the worst of times," wrote Charles Dickens about life in the late 18th century. For poor Americans and the nearly poor, life under the Donald will be the worst of times. Yet for the rich and especially the richest 1 per cent, life will never be better.
     Meanwhile many working people and members of the middle class will have to struggle to hold on to what they already have. Many of them voted for the Donald. They may live to regret that they did.
    
   

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe; Part Twenty One.

   Before the Age of the Donald - Part 21.


    If the present Chinese government took away the number one powerful spot from the U.S., would the world be a better place? This is something that has to concern the Donald when he becomes U.S. president. It's hard to know how China will perform if it becomes the most powerful power on earth. Still China's past doesn't seem to encourage much hope.
     For centuries Chinese emperors ruled their peasant subjects with an iron hand. "The civilization of China," wrote Theodore White and Annallee Jacoby in the 1940's, "rested on the effective enslavement of the common man." And the common woman too.
    Under its communist ruler Mao Tse Tung, the Chinese government promised peasants and others that it would liberate them from the tyranny of the emperors. Yet under Mao's version of communism, most Chinese people saw only modest improvements in their lives. And many suffered terribly.
    Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' in the late 1950's killed over 25 million Chinese from starvation. Mao's 'Cultural Revolution' in the mid-1960's left one and a half million people dead and turned the lives of millions of other men and women completely upside down.
     "Religion is poison," Mao told the Tibetan Dalai Lama in the 1950's. Then Chinese troops killed about a million Tibetans. The Chinese army has also killed thousands of Moslems in the province of Xinjiang. The present day head of China, Xi Xinping, made it clear to the former Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd that he has no time for Western style democracy. Still,  Chinese people have made huge steps forward in the last forty years. According to recent reports over 600 million Chinese are now living a middle class lifestyle. Over 700 million Chinese people are still poor. Yet China's embrace of what some call 'State Capitalism' has enriched many Chinese citizens.
     China's treatment of its own people has improved in the past 40 years. Still, it is no model of democracy. So if the People's Republic of China becomes the number one power in the world there's no reason to believe that it will treat the rest of the world better than the United States has or Britain did or France.
    As the French say, "On verra." Or as we say in English, "We'll see."
    

Before The Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe: Part Twenty

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part Twenty.


          Trading African slaves and making money from this deplorable business sprung to life in the 16th century and only ended in the mid-1800's. Eric Williams was prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago for many years. In his book 'Capitalism and Slavery' Williams claimed that the money British merchants made from the slave trade, enabled them to start the Industrial Revolution.
      True or not, British merchants gained  a lot of money from trading slaves.
     "The sun never sets on the British Empire," my British parents' generation used to say. But the empire that Britain gained was won by force and violence. After defeating France in the 1760's and then the French again between 1793 and 1815, Britain did rule the world for a time. Yet it surely did some terrible things when it was top dog.
     It forced opium from India onto the Chinese and when China refused to allow this to happen, Britain waged two wars against China until the Chinese emperors gave way on this issue. British troops seized India and then brutally crushed the Indian Mutiny in 1857. British troops then gunned down Africans in parts of the African continent and then turned the conquered lands into colonies. It also crushed many rebellions in Scotland and Ireland.
     France was no angel either as its troops went around the world. It grabbed chunks of Africa nd turned them into colonies. Belgium did the same as did Germany. The U.S. as I've shown on some of my past blogs did many bad things as it piled up power and wealth. One episode I haven't mentioned yet occurred near the end of the 19th century.  U.S. troops  crushed the Spanish army in 1898 and then moved to annex the Phillippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. All these countries were revolting at the time against Spain and wanted to be free.
     That didn't bother the U.S.. It simply invaded the Philippines and killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and thousands of Cubans. "America has no colonies," an American historian told me. "We're not like the European powers." Technically that may have been true. Still, the three above countries were basically ruled by the U.S. government and both Puerto Rico and the Philippines are still under the thumb of Washington. Only Cuba has any independence and even here the Cuban government had to fight hard to keep out of the U.S.embrace.
      So it's clear that every ruling power in the world has done terrible things. Yet would China do any better if it became number one in the global power system?
     
   

Before The Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe : Part Nineteen

          Before the Age of the Donald - Part Nineteen


         More than 500 years before the Donald became the 45th president of the United States, the world started to take its present shape. John Judis is an American political analyst. He sees the world as a heirarchy. The U.S., he says, sits at the top of the world as the globe's most powerful nation and all the other countries lie below it.
     Judis is right, at least at this date of late 2016. In the last 500 years the nations at the top have changed places. "In 1492," went an old rhyme, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Christopher Columbus helped start what's called 'The Age of Discovery'. Yet it should more truthfully called 'The Age of the White Man's Imperialism'. Soon after Columbus and his ships landed on an island in the Caribbean, Spain  sat at the top of the global heap. Yet then Holland pushed Spain aside and took over the top spot.
      After that France then led the pack. In the 19th century it was Great Britain's turn to edge out the others. "Rule Britannia," British youngsters used to sing when I was a child. "Britannia rules the waves." But by then in 1950 the United States had strode forward to rule the roost and the waves. Its position at the top seemed secure especially when its main rival, the communist-ruled Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
    "We won the Cold War with the Soviet Union," one American told me. "Now we're number one in the world." Yet maybe the U.S. won't be number one for long. Now China has emerged as the second most powerful nation on earth.  Will this be good or bad for the world's people? If the past is any guide, it may be no worse or better than when other countries headed the pack.
    Let's take a quick look back at things other countries did when they were number one or two or three on the list of top dogs. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish conquistadores sailed all over the globe, colonizing one group of peoples after another. Hernan Cortes landed in present day Mexico and killed thousands of Aztec tribes people. Then he and others turned Mexico into a colony of Spain. A few years later Pizarro conquered Peru for Spain while slaughtering thousands of Inca indigenous people.
     Then Portugal took a huge slice of what is now South America and turned that land into a colony. To-day this former colony is called Brazil.  Spain ended up ruling the rest of South and Central America. Dutch privateers and merchants seized thousands of islands in the Pacific Ocean. To-day those islands are called Indonesia. Holland also became rich from trade which included trading many slaves from Africa. The Dutch weren't the only ones doing this. Business people from Britain, France, Spain and other European countries made fortunes in trading slaves.
     This was truly the Age of European imperialism.
    
     
     

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe: Part Eighteen.

       Before the Age of the Donald -Part Eighteen


          By 1900 or so, most indigenous Canadians had been moved off their territories that they used to wander on. Now the lands of Canada were turned over to other more powerful interests. Canada's natural resources ended up in the hands of rich white men. 12 of the largest resource companies  in the world have their head offices in Canada. Yet the wealth of these firms has rarely gone to Canada's first inhabitants.
    Often First Nations people left their reserves where it was impossible to make a decent living. Many of them today work at jobs like other Canadians. Others have drifted into inner city areas in places like Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Regina and Calgary. Here, many of them end up doing illegal drugs or drown their sorrows in alcohol. They also face racism from white people and violence sometimes from the police.
    Some Indian women who live in the inner cities become prostitutes and white murderers like Robert Pickton in B.C. stalk them and kill them. Meanwhile across Canada, in the 3100 reserves
where many indigenous people live, life goes on. Rodger, a well-travelled Canadian lives on Vancouver Island, near two or three reserves. "I've never seen such poverty and squalor," he said after canvassing for votes on a nearby reserve. "It really shocked me."
   Hundreds of kilometres to the east, across the Salish Sea and over at least two mountain ranges, you can find the Okanagan area of British Columbia.This is where the Westbank First Nation has its home. This is a prosperous community where people run businesses, children attend decent schools and many people have done well.
   Other reserves have also enjoyed the prosperity that has swept across Canada since the Second World War. Still many of the reserves across Canada are mired in poverty and just stagnate. At this time, First Nations people and indigenous people have woken up. They demonstrate, start court challenges and square off against governments and corporations that have hurt them many times. Now there are indigenous lawyers, activists, anthropologists, and other educated aboriginals. These people can go head to head with white officials,
      An anthropologist I'll call Stanley got a Ph.D in anthropology by writing his thesis  on a native band. Then he turned around a few years later and testified against the band's right to get back its ancestral land. "We know of quite a few anthropologists like that," one First Nations activist told me. "But these people can't do that anymore because we have our own anthropologists now."
    Donald Trump nor his government are responsible for the treatment of native Americans or of First Nations people, Inuit and Metis in Canada. Yet it's doubtful he would support their struggles to reclaim their lands or their dignity. We must remember that before the Age of the Donald there was racism, poverty and social justice. He didn't invent these things. He may make them worse or maybe even better. Yet he is not responsible - at least not yet - for their persistence.
     

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe. Part Seventeen

          Before the Age of the Donald. Part Seventeen.


         Long before Donald Trump was elected America's 45th president, many people in North America felt the lash of white racism. One group that surely got hurt by this wave of hate were native Americans or First Nations as they're known in Canada.
     Trump's home state of New York had many native Americans four hundred years ago. Today white people and others rule the state.
     So-called explorers from Europe ranged across North America from the 16th century on. In their wake they spread wars, violence and disease among native peoples. Indigenous people fought back. Yet in the end, the white man's weapons crushed most native resistance. Soon white settlements sprung up across the United States on land that once was native Indian territory. Things were no different in Canada.
    "We will be just in our time," Pierre Elliot Trudeau said shortly after his election as Canada's Prime Minister in 1968. Soon after this, Trudeau assigned his eager Liberal ally Jean Chretien to wipe out the status of indigenous Canadians, now known as 'First Nations'. First Nations people, Trudeau believed, should be completely absorbed into the Canadian mosaic. This meant stripping them of any special status they had. Trudeau also aimed to wind down all the First Nations reserves, where many First Nations people lived.
     The First Nations didn't agree with this. They protested and forced Trudeau and Chretien to give up their plans. "You gave me hell," a still ambitious Chretien told a First Nations crowd in effect, when he first ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1984.
    To-day there are close to one and a half million indigenous people in Canada. Some are First Nations people. Others are Metis. Across northern Canada, there are quite a few thousand Inuit, formerly called 'Eskimos'. Like their brothers and sisters across the U.S., First Nations people have been hammered by white racist policies. So-called explorers from Europe used them to find their way across Canada. Then white people's diseases often decimated one nation after another. Soldiers attacked the indigenous people and then herded the survivors onto ever shrinking reserves. As writers Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey have shown, in the late 19th century tens of thousands of young First Nations were jammed into so-called 'Residential Schools'.
      Here far from their homes, children endured loss of their language, molestation, sexual abuse and murder. "Over 60,000 First Nations children died in residential schools," says the defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett. Annett was thrown out of the United Church for uncovering the brutal treatment of aboriginal children at the hands of United Church, Catholic and Anglican clergy and church women. Other experts think Annett's figures are too high. Still, there's no doubt that thousands of First Nations youngsters did die while attending the residential schools. It was just another example of white racism.
      


     

Before the Age of the Daonald - Part 16 by Dave Jaffe

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part 16.


        British Columbia has never needed lessons in how to grow white racism. The Japanese immigrants who started coming to B.C. in the late 19th century learned that quickly enough. In 1907 anti-Asian riots swept across Vancouver as white working people tried to trash the Japanese community. Japanese people fought back and routed the white mob.
     Yet in the 1940's the white racists got their revenge. By now in 1942 the Second World War was three years old and Japan, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were allies in the conflict. Japanese troops swept across East Asia in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Canadians fought alongside British troops in their defense of Hong Kong but the Japanese soon prevailed.
    Panicked by Japan's victories, many British Columbians insisted that native  Japanese could not be trusted. In June 1942 Canadian police rounded up all Japanese-Canadians in B.C. The Japanese were then herded into makeshift camps in the Kootenays. At war's end, they were not allowed to remain in British Columbia. They were scattered all across Canada or were deported back to Japan.
     The Canadian government sold off all the Japanese property and gave them back virtually nothing in return. It took many of the Japanese still alive in the 1980's to get compensation for their lost property.Nor was the Canadian government above causing more problems for their Japanese subjects even after no more Japanese were left in B.C..
    When the government tried to deport another 10,000 Japanese back to Japan, mainstream Canadians protested and the plan was dropped.
    "By 1946," writes George Woodcock, "a general shift in Canadian politics was taking place." The racist policies of the Nazis, says Woodcock, had made British Columbians and Canadians, "uneasy about their own prejudices and discriminatory policies in the past." Also to make up for its past racist policies, the Canadian government finally gave the right to vote to all Asian Canadians. Later in the 1960's, Ottawa changed its immigration policies and opened its doors once again to immigrants from Asia.
     Once again white racism raised its head and by 2015 many people in Metro Vancouver blamed the Chinese immigrants for sky rocketing housing prices. The B.C. Liberal government heard the outcry and slapped a 15 per cent tax on anyone from outside Canada buying a house in Metro Vancouver.
     This didn't halt anti Asian feelings in B.C. "Racism is really hard to fight," said Joyce a Japanese-Canadian said. "I have felt it often." As this part of my blog shows, Donald Trump can't be blamed for racists in B.C. Yet it would be sad if his insults to Mexicans and Muslims would give white racism even more strength in Canada's most western province.
   

Before The Age of the Donald - Part Fifteen by Dave Jaffe

   Before the Age of the Donald - Part Fifteen
     


    The wealthy people of B.C. hired many Chinese immigrants to work in their homes or at their companies. Yet they too didn't like the Chinese. "Their religion, notions of honour and rank, mode of thought, dress, amusement, and sense of beauty are not to our taste," said the famous judge, Matthew Baillie Begbie of the Chinese. "Their language appears to us ridiculous."
      The Chinese, Begbie said, despised the achievements of white people. "Yet they work more steadily, and with better success than white men."
    White working people and some small business people were far more racist than the judge. They hated the Chinese and felt threatened by these people whom they called 'Orientals'. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in Vancouver in 1887 and again in 1907. In 1907 white people also attacked the growing community of Japanese immigrants. But the Japanese, unlike the Chinese community fought back and routed the hostile mob.
     A racist Anti-Exclusion League was founded and lobbied the federal government to act against all Asian immigrants. It also found support among provincial politicians. The federal government slapped a head tax on Asian immigrants that soon climbed to $500 a person by 1903. This was an immense sum  at that time, worth thousands of dollars to-day. It surely discouraged many Asian immigrants from coming to Canada.
     White racism was also unleashed against Sikh immigrants. The Japanese ship the 'Komagata Maru' tried to stop in Vanouver in 1914 and unload its passengers. Yet with more than 350 Sikhs on board, this proved impossible to do. The officials at the port refused to allow the Sikhs to come on shore.
       The Sikhs quite rightly objected to this racist act for as they pointed out they came from India and were British subjects. After fights and violence between the Sikh passengers and police, the Canadian navy ship towed the 'Komagata' out to sea. It left Canada forever.
     In 1923 the federal government passed the Chinese Immigration Act and no more Chinese people came to Canada until the late 1960's, when Canada changed its immigration laws. By this time say the early 1920's, all immigration from Asia was stopped. It only started up again in the late 1960's. Yet more racist acts fell on the Japanese in the 1940's.

Before the Age of the Donald - Part Fourteen by Dave Jaffe

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part Fourteen


        Some U.S. presidents change their country or the world after becoming president. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Ronald Reagan, fit into this category. Others like James Earl Carter, or 'Jimmy Carter' as he called himself, tried to change the world in office and after they'd left the Oval Office. Then there's Donald Trump who may be changing things now even before he's taken power.
    Frances which isn't her real name is a Canadian of Chinese descent. A few days ago she was walking down a Vancouver street on the west side of town. A man approached her. "Go back to where you came from," this young man shouted at her.
    "Excuse me," Frances answered back. "I was born here, right in the Vancouver General Hospital. I'm a Canadian."
    The man disagreed. "We're going to send you straight back where you came from. The Donald's in power now and you people are out of here."
      Donald Trump has promised  to deport over 11 million illegal Mexican immigrants back to Mexico. The 45th president of the United States of America may well do this. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election Trump demonized Mexicans and Moslems. Now no one can prove that Donald Trump is inciting racists in Metro Vancouver . Yet Frances has been insulted at least twice since Trump won the election.
    "I've spoken to the police about two of these incidents," Frances says. "We'll see what they dso."
     I must be fair here. Long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene, B.C. racists unleashed hate on immigrants from Asia. Let's review a little of this history here and it doesn't make for pleasant reading.
     Anti-Asian racism emerged in British Columbia in the 19th century. As historian and writer George Woodcock pointed out in his history called 'British Columbia', white working men became virulent racists in the 1880's and later as Chinese immigrants filtered into British Columbia.. The Chinese men were used as strikebreakers or scabs by their rich bosses in forestry, fishing and mining strikes. The more wealthy British Columbians also hired Chinese people as servants and workers and admired their strong work ethic. Yet that didn't mean that they liked them.
    

Before The Age of the Donald - Part 13 by Dave Jaffe

       Before The Age of the Donald -  Part Thirteen

     Anyone who's been patient enough to read this blog, should know by now that the U.S."s foreign policy isn't going to change when Donald Trump becomes America's 45th president. The U.S. of A.'s foreign policy workers will still work overtime to topple any left wing government anywhere in Asia, Africa or Latin America. The Donald hated Fidel Castro' loathes progressives in Venezuala and will be happy to see most progressive governments vanish from the face of the globe.
     Mexican refugees in the U.S. will be shipped back home, Moslems will be demonized and so on.
The wars in Syria and Iraq may be wound down but the U.S. will remain the number one military power in the world. The Donald is planning to boost spending on the country's $540 billion annual military budget.
    The Donald is also planning to make big cuts to taxes on the rich and the super rich. These people are folks just like Donald Trump. If his administration slashes spending on Medicare, Medicaid, social security and food stamps, no one should be surprised. Past Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan on, have done this also.
     Yet in contrast to when previous Republican presidents were in the White House, anti-Trump protestors will have nowhere to go but into the streets. Republicans now run everything at the federal level: the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Presidency and soon the Supreme Court. Judging from the promises Trump made on the campaign trail, a Trump presidency will be brutal and totally top-down.
     "America has imposed some terrible governments on people around the world," a friend of mine said. "Now the U.S. could get a government as bad as those ones." Donald Trump can do a lot of bad things. In any case he now runs the most powerful company in the world. It's called the United States of America. And he is now its CEO.
       
    
    

Before The gae of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe Part 12

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part 12
 


    On November 8, 2016 Republican Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election over his Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. Many people on the left just freaked out. How could this man whom many called a foul mouthed, racist, misogynist candidate beat a brilliant centrist woman? It seemed to some to be impossible.
     In fact it was very easy.
     Trump cobbled together a coalition of business friendly people with many white working people. These working people weren't poor but they didn't like the new diversity of white, but also brown, black, and yellow skinned Americans that they could see in the streets of any U.S. city.
     These people also didn't trust Hillary Clinton or her husband the former U.S. president Bill Clinton.
      Trump's debating style also turned off some people. He spoke the way the main characters in many t.v. reality shows mouthed off. Hardly surprising since he'd starred in a t.v. reality show himself called 'The Apprentice'. "The man's never been in politics," one American I know said. "He knows nothing about the way the country's run." Yet Trump's lack of any political experience played as a plus for him. Right now many Americans loathe politicians and being a non-politician gives you a great advantage.
    Then,too, Trump is worth billions of dollars. "I'm worth three billion dollars," he once said. Whatever his net worth, Trump is very rich. Many Americans and many Canadians too worship the wealthy. Finally many Americans felt angry at the new world of free trade agreements, changing technology and the seemingly inbred world of high tech billionaires, political insiders, lobbyists, spin doctors, and Washington, D.C. politicians. Hillary Clinton seemed to symbolize this world that most people could never join. Trump called these new rulers "the elites"
      "Make America great again," the hotel magnate declared again and again, to applauding  crowds. His anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican rap harked back to supposedly simpler more virtuous time when America ruled the globe or at least seemed to. All of this was enough to win him the presidency even though Hillary Clinton won 2 million more votes than he did.
     So how good or bad will a Trump presidency be?
        

      
     
    
     

Before the Age of the Donald by Dave jaffe - Part Eleven

    Before the age of the Donald - Part 11.

     As Vladimir Putin tightened his hold on the Russian Federation, the Cold War was restarted. Violence broke out in the former U.S.S.R. republic of Georgia, that was now a new country. In Georgia there were many Abkhazians, an ethnic group that now wanted to secede from Georgia.
      The Georgian army crushed this rebellion. Yet in 2008 Russians supported the Abkhazians. And then Russia moved to help South Ossetia, a region of Georgia that also wanted to leave Georgia. As tensions mounted in Georgia, trouble also broke out in the Ukraine, another former republic of the U.S.S.R. that now like Georgia was an independent country. Both Russia and the United States tried to bring the Ukraine into their orbit.
     The U.S. through the National Endowment for Democracy funded pro-western groups in the Ukraine. With the establishment of this fund U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in 1986,"We in the U.S. can now do legally what we used to do illegally through the C.I.A."
     In 2013 the then pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych suspended completing an agreement with the European Union. A group called Euromaidan took to the streets and drove Yanukovych from power. He fled to Russia. A new pro-western leader Peter Poroshenko who made himself rich in making chocolate, took power.
    The Ukraine nearly split apart. Pro-Russian and Russian speaking groups in the eastern and southern Ukraine clashed with pro-western and Ukrainian speaking forces in the western Ukraine. Over 8,000 people died in the battles.Then Vladimir Putin launched a counter stroke. He sent Russian troops into the Crimean area of the Ukraine and later annexed it after a referendum approved of the Crimea joining Russia. Russia had ruled the Crimea up to 1954 when then-U.S.S.R. leader Nikita Khruschev had handed it over to the Ukrainian republic. In the Crimea was the port of Odessa where many ships that were now part of the Russian navy were stationed.
    "Putin wanted a warm water port for his navy," one western observer said. "And now he's got it."
      The Cold War was definitely back. Eastern European nations that had once been part of the U.S.S.R. dominated Warsaw Pact were now scared of a Russian invasion. So were former Soviet republics. Meanwhile tensions between the U.S. and Russia were also on the boil in the Middle East. The U.S. and some other U.S. allies and their troops tried to overthrow Syrian leader Bashir Assad. But Russia backed Assad and sent troops to Syria to support him. Meanwhile conflict simmered in the Ukraine.
    Putin wasn't Stalin. He didn't kill millions of people like Stalin had. His troops probably killed 50,000 people in Chechnya. He is a tyrant like most of Russia's past rulers whether they were czars or communists. In any case Russia's brief flirtation with democracy under Mikhail Gorbachev was long over. Russian politics were just back to normal.
    
      
    
   

Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Eleven

The Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Ten

      The Age of the Donald - Part Ten by Dave Jaffe


    "The Cold War is over," people around the world said in 1991. "And the United States has won the war," Americans chimed in.   Yet by 2016 everything had changed. The Cold War was back and once again the U.S. clashed with not the Soviet Union but its biggest republic namely Russia. How had this happened?
      It was simple really. The more Russia swing towards the western world and the U.S., the worse things became for the Russian people. Under Boris Yeltsin the head of the Russian Federation the country started to come apart. Massive inflation tore into people's savings and shrunk the savings to nothing. Crime in the streets skyrocketed. Chechens rose in revolt in Chechnya and Russian troops couldn't suppress the uprising.
     Oligarchs, many of whom were former communist leaders took over mines, mills and factories and made millions of dollars. Also Yeltsin unleashed soldiers on the elected Russian politicians in the Russian parliament when they defied his will. People in Russia started to get angry. Of course not all people did.
    One woman in her thirties named Marina lived in Moscow during this time. She saw no great changes. "There were more people sleeping in the street," this woman said. "There was more crime. But overall I didn't notice much change at all." Other Russians didn't share Marina's view.
     In 2000 Vladimir Putin a former KGB or secret police agent took over as president of the Russian Federation. "Putin imposed order," a Ukrainian visitor to Russia and Canada said. "Not law and order. Just order." Putin sent troops back into Chechnya and crushed the Chechen rebels. He cracked down on all dissent. Television stations, newspapers, radio and the government messages on the Internet, gave out one consistent message: Vladimir Putin is your new president. No criticism is allowed.
      Common criminals were thrown in prison. Some dissidents were killed. Oligarchs who defied Putin were imprisoned or fled the country. After 9/11 Putin co-operated with the U.S. and other countries in fighting terror. Yet as Putin cracked down on dissent, tensions rose between the U.S. and Russia.
     By 2010 many former satellites of the former U. S.S.R like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland Bulgaria and Romania had joined the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO.  The United States planted nuclear missiles in many of these former communist countries. Also some former Soviet republics had also signed up into NATO and gratefully accepted nuclear missiles from the U.S.too.
     Russia's rulers claimed that these missiles broke a non-nuclear promise made to them by U.S. president George H.W. Bush to Russia in the late 1980"s. Maybe so, but the missiles remained. "They're pointed at Iran," some U.S. officials claimed. Still, this wasn't true. They were aimed at Russia. Then came more problems. And soon the Cold War started up again.
    
    

Before The Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Ten

Before The age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Nine

      Before the Age of the Donald - Part Nine


     In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.  A communist revolution overthrew the ruler of the country. Yet then the new communist rulers started killing each other. And the vast number of people living in the countryside rose in rebellion against their new rulers based in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul.
     "The tribesmen living in Afghanistan outside Kabul," a friend of mine said who visited Afghanistan in the late 1970's, "are really tough people. The Soviets are in for a hell of a fight."
Soon the whole of Afghanistan was a war zone. The U.S. president Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski saw an opportunity to hurt the Soviet Union. They started to funnel arms and guns into the hands of the rebellious tribesmen.
   Yet the Soviet invasion had restarted the Cold War. In the 1980 U.S. presidential election, the long time anti-communist Republican Ronald Reagan beat Carter. Reagan loathed the Soviet Union which he dubbed 'The Evil Empire'. "Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev," Reagan said when he visited the famous wall in West Berlin. Here East German police had shot dead hundreds of East German citizens when they tried to jump the wall and get into West Berlin.
      Reagan also presided over a massive U.S. arms military buildup. This placed great pressure on the Soviet Union. Yet  Mikhail Gorbachev now headed up the Soviet Union and to everyone's surprise he started to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the U.S.S.R. By the late 1980's it seemed that the Soviet Union was transitioning into a real democracy.
  Nearly all censorship was scrapped. People spoke out in the media about all the many flaws and faults they were living under. And soon the Eastern European satellites were in revolt. Communist ruled countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland and East Germany threw off their communist dictators and Gorbachev let it happen.
      "They're doing it their way," a Soviet spokesperson said, echoing Frank Sinatra's famous hit song called 'My Way'. Genuine elections were held in some republics in the U.S.S.R. and Boris Yeltsin took over as head of the republic of Russia in a fair contest. He unleashed a torrent of criticism at Mikhail Gorbachev who didn't respond with violence.
       Only in Romania was there real violence. Over 5,000 people died when Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceceascu sent his troops to crush protestors. The crowd then got hold of the dictator and  killed him and his wife. Democracy seemed to be flourishing in Russia and Eastern Europe.
     Yet this moment of reform didn't last too long. An ugly nationalism started to surface in some of the republics. The food distribution system started to fall apart. And hard line communists  were outraged at Gorbachev's liberalism. In 1991 a group of these people launched a coup and tried to restore the old days of top down rule. Boris Yeltsin stood up to their army and the coup failed. Then Yeltsin proclaimed the end of the U.S.S.R.
   The Soviet Union now splintered into 15 separate republics with the republic of Russia as the biggest one of them. All these republics became separate countries. The U.S.S.R. and communism were now history. "Socialism is finished," conservatives all over the world said as they rejoiced in the demise of the Soviet Union. And for now they were right.
      A few years before this, the Soviet Union withdrew its army from Afghanistan after killing 600,000 people. The Afghani tribes people had helped defeat the Soviet Union and bring it to an end. 1991 was truly an amazing year in the history of the 20th century.
     
     

Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Eight

    Before The Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe continued


           World War Two devastated the U.S.S.R. . In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. killing over 20 million Soviet people. The U.S.S.R. survived and played an enormous part in defeating Germany. For a time in World War Two the U.S.S.R. was allied with the United States, Great Britain, China and Canada. In 1944 it pushed the Germans back and its troops entered Eastern Europe.
     There's no doubt that the U.S.S.R. and China took the most casualties in the second world war. "You gave us time," Stalin told Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1944. "You gave us money," Stalin said pointing to the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "And," he said pointing to himself and his advisors, "we gave blood."
      Stalin kept power in the U.S.S.R. until his death in 1953. The U.S.S.R. at the time of his death was a ruthless top down communist dictatorship that had killed millions of its own people. Yet at the same time it was now also a world power second only to the United States. The two countries were locked in a world wide struggle for power. This was the Cold War. Never before and never since was the Soviet Union so powerful and so feared.
      The downside of being one of Stalin's assistants was well explained by his successor Nikita Khruschev. "You never knew when you went to see Stalin," Khruschev said in effect," whether you'd emerge alive." When Khruschev took power as one of Stalin's successors, he and his associates killed Lavrenti Beria, who had been one of Stalin's most murderous henchmen.
      Later Khruschev ousted all of his rivals to emerge as the Soviet union's top leader. Yet Khruschev didn't kill his defeated rivals. In 1956 he addressed a secret communist meeting and denounced Stalin for his crimes. He closed down the terrible gulag prison camps and freed their 3 million prisoners.
   Yet there were limits to change in the Soviet Union. The Hungarian Revolution in 1956 was drowned in blood as Soviet troops and their Warsaw Pact allies rolled into Budapest and other Hungarian cities, and crushed the uprising. The U.S. tagged Khruschev with the title, "The Butcher of Budapest."
    In 1964 Khruschev himself was removed from power but he wasn't killed. Leonid Brezhnev emerged as the U.S.S.R."s new leader of the Soviet Union. He tightened things up but there was no repeat of Stalin's terror.
   Brezhnev cracked down on the 1968 revolt in Czechoslavakia and the emerging dissident movement in the Soviet Union. Yet life in the Soviet Union improved for most people as it did in most of the Soviet-dominated countries in Eastern Europe. Then there was the United States that was the U.S.S.R.'s formidable rival. Despite its war in Vietnam its economy boomed. Thanks to U.S. aid the countries of western Europe and Japan had become prosperous lands.
     By this time in the late 1960's the U.S.S.R. faced another formidable foe namely the Mao-ruled Communist country of China. In the late 1960's China and the U.S.S.R. were mortal enemies and nearly went into a full scale war with each other. In Yugoslavia to the U.S.S.R's west , Josip Broz or "Tito" as he was called remained in power. He was a communist who had stood up to Hitler, Stalin and Khruschev. Yet he remained in power. So life in the world of the richer countries kept improving.
       But then came Afghanistan.





    

Before The Age of the Donald - Dave Jaffe by Dave Jaffe

     Before the Age of the Donald - Part Seven


         "War is the midwife of revolution." the communist leader V.I. Lenin said. In 1904 and 1905 Lenin's statement nearly came true. Japan and Russia went to war. The Japanese inflicted a bloody naval defeat in a great sea battle. Peoples all across the Russian empire rose in revolt. Yet this revolt was crushed.
    Then came the First World War. The German army smashed the Russian armed forces in one great land battle. Once again the Russian people rose in revolt. This time they succeeded. The Russian czar stepped down and handed power to a social democrat named Kerensky in 1917. Yet Kerensky insisted on keeping Russia in the war. Life in Russia just got worse. Soldiers deserted the front, peasants revolted in the countryside, and workers in factories formed themselves into soviets.
     Then in October 1917 Vladimir Lenin overthrew the elected Constituent Assembly. "We need peace, land and bread," Lenin's Communist Party proclaimed. Yet soon White armies formed to crush the Revolution. Russia descended into civil war. Millions of Russians were killed in the fighting. Meanwhile western troops invaded Russia. "We must strangle this baby in its cradle," Winston Churchill said of the revolution.
     The Communists finally defeated their opponents by 1921. Yet Russia, now renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  was a bleeding waste land. The U.S.S.R.  had a problem. It was the only communist country in the world and it was surrounded by hostile nations. How would it survive?
    Lenin allowed for some capitalism to flourish with the communist party in control. Yet Lenin's successor Josef Stalin had a more brutal solution. "Socialism in one country," he said. World revolution that could rescue an impoverished U.S.S.R. was off the table for now.
     In the late 1920's, Stalin purged his rivals and launched a ruthless program of industrialization. Grain was taken at gun point from Ukrainian peasants to feed city workers. The farmers protested and Stalin had many of them killed. Then his army herded the peasants into collectives and millions of them starved and died. Stalin then launched purge after purge of the U.S.S.R. No group escaped his wrath. "Stalin killed everybody," one British journalist said. Robert Conquest claims that Stalin killed 20 million people. This figure may be too high. Yet other estimates put the number of Stalin's victims at somewhere at between 8 and 11 million people.
     Then came another disaster for the U.S.S.R. It was called the Nazi invasion.
    
     

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe: Part Six

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part Six



        "Russia," Winston Churchill once pointed out, " is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Churchill was talking about the Russian Empire or the U.S.S.R. as it was known under communism.
     Yet perhaps Churchill continued, there was a key to understanding Russia. "That key is Russian national interest." Churchill here told the truth. Russia's national interest trumped all of its other concerns. And to survive throughout its long history, Russia was and is ruled by tyrants.
    So far this story of the world before the rise of Donald Trump has focused on the United States and some of it bad deeds. Yet Russia's rulers have also done some terrible things. Russia first pops up in the history books in the 9th century as the Kievan Russ. Here in what is now the Ukraine, a Slavic duchy was founded. It soon cleaved to Orthodox Christianity.
     For the next 900 years it spread eastward, conquering, absorbing and subduing one ethnic group after another. By the 19th century it had reached the Pacific Ocean. As the U.S. and Canada moved westward, crushing one First Nations group after another, Russian soldiers did the same on the other side of the world.
    As a result, Uzbeks, Tartars, Kirghiz, and many other peoples ended up living under the Russian heel. Russia also sometimes moved westward. In the 18th century it sliced off part of Poland too and absorbed many Polish people into the Russian Empire. Yet unlike the U.S. and Canada, Russia never developed into a democracy. The czars ruled Russia with an iron hand and often tyrannized their subjects. Many times their subjects rose in revolt, led by people like Stenka Razin, Bolotnikov and Pugachev. Yet the czars crushed all these uprisings in blood. Czars like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great were not warm and fuzzy rulers. They were tyrants whose word was law.
    One exception to these rulers was Alexander the Second who in  the 19th century freed the serfs. He did this at about the same time that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln freed the African American slaves. Yet like Lincoln, Alexander received no thanks for this. He was killed just like Lincoln was. Yet his killers unlike the killer of Lincoln, namely John Wilkes Booth, the czar's killers were not pro-serfdom. They belonged to an anarchist terrorist group called the Zemlya Volya, or the People's Will. They wanted a revolution in Russia. They were caught for their crime and then executed. By the end of the 19th century the czars still ruled the roost.
      Yet then came the First World War.
    
   
    

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe: Part Five

    Before The Age of the Donald - Part Five


        In 2013 the Gross Domestic Product of the United States stood at nearly 17 trillion dollars. Only China's GDP came near to that figure,though to-day in 2016 its economy's size has surpassed that of the U.S.A.'s. With this tremendous economy the U.S. has weighed in heavily on the lives of other countries. It is the controlling power in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As a result when countries fall into economic hard times they have to go to the IMF and the World Bank to rescue their countries. Often the U.S. demands that these countries slash their social programs to pay their debts, and these debtor lands have to do what they're ordered to do. This is yet another way that the U.S. has inflicted pain on poorer lands.
      Yet there's not doubt that the U.S. has influenced the world in a positive way too. It was the first country in the world to invent the mass market. To-day hundreds of millions of people in the world, maybe billions, live in an affluence that our great grandfathers and grandmothers could never have imagined. This affluence is due to the United States that showed the way to the rest of the world.
      "I'm living in a style that the kings and queens of the past would have envied," a friend of mine said in his later years. My friend lived in a small apartment in Vancouver's West End. Yet he had hot and cold running water, electricity, access to modern medicare and modern ways of travel. He had visited many countries, and ate meals that were nourishing and tasty. In nearly all the western countries of the world most people live as he does and the U.S. did help make this happen.
      The U.S.,as president Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed years ago,  has another advantage on the rest of the world: It invented mass culture. When the late  Gore Vidal was asked why he called his one of his novels 'Hollywood', he replied, "Because that's all that America will be remembered for." True or not, the American film industry that's based in Los Angeles has been turning out films for close to a century. And when television came of age in the late 1940's millions of Americans along with many other people were soon watching American t.v. programs.
       The United States also invented jazz and then rock'n roll now called 'rock music'. During the Cold War the U.S. government subsidized modern art that many people in communist countries and capitalist ones found hard to understand. Yet Eastern European and Soviet youth didn't want to look at abstract expressionist paintings. They wanted to listen and dance to rock music. Back in the Cold War days they couldn't do this. Now they can. In fact American mass culture to-day rules the world. It is another weapon in the arsenal of the U.S. of A. and gives it another immense advantage over rival countries.
      So like billions of people worldwide I have been heavily influenced by the U.S. of A. I don't hate America as that woman  that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece claimed. I just wish it would be more progressive in its politics.


     

Before The Age of the Donald - Part Four: by Dave Jaffe

       Part Four of Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe
          


               There's a brighter side to the United States and that's one thing I haven't mentioned yet. There's the economy of the U.S. of A. and it  has turned America into the most powerful nation on earth.
 America's economy is still moving ahead despite the fact that China's G.N.P. now surpasses that of  the U.S. of A.'s. Now some big businesses  for instance may be going down the tubes.Yet older more traditional firms like General Electric, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company are still raking in the profits.
    In the late 20th century and the early 21st century, a host of new firms based on the   new information technology  have soared above the economic horizon. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and other firms have changed the face of the economy and the world. Unbounded by feudal or socialist restraints,  American entrepreneurs have always been on the cutting edge of technology. They still are. And the CEO's of these new firms and older ones have become billionaires. Their super wealth has sometimes helped other Americans become modestly rich too.
     America invented the mass market and many people appreciate this. "I'm going to the States this afternoon," one of my neighbours told me recently. "I'm going on a shopping spree." This man and his wife aren't alone. Every weekend thousands of Canadians wait in endless car lines to then pour into border towns like Blaine in Washington State. There they load up on food, gas and even clothes.
      "Even with the lower Canadian dollar, I'll still save money on gas," my neighbour tells. me. The U.S. market still delivers many bargains. Two women I know go farther afield to seek out American bargains. Every few months they fly into San Francisco to buy clothes in the huge Bay Area malls. "The Americans have clothes that are awesome," one of the woman tells me.
    Of course in recent years, the American economy hasn't been a bonus for many Americans. Wages and salaries for most people have remained flat for the past thirty years. One study showed that in recent years,  two groups have gained in the world economy. That's the middle and rich groups in East Asia and the richest one per cent in the U.S. of A,. and around the world.  The rest of the world hasn't seen many gains at all.
    Yet America's economy still keeps it immensely powerful.
     


    

Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Three

                Before the Age of the Donald - Part Three


       One of my blogs on poetry horrified a woman who read it. "You're so full of hate and anger," she told me. "You're so anti-American. Just stay away from me." I never did speak to that woman again. But I get her point. My writings on the U.S.A. scared her as they scared a landlord I knew who read my writings.
     Now so far this story on the U.S. of A. has trashed this country of 300 million people. Yet to be fair to America part of its problems come from the fact that it's a great power.  Many of the Americans like the ones who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, think that their country's declining in power. In fact it remains the most powerful nation in the world.
    There's three or four reasons for this. First off, America's military power is still awesome to behold. It has 1.3 million people in its armed forces and spends about $650 billion (U.S.) every year on its military and weapons. The U.S. also has 750 military bases around the world and has at least 46 counterintelligence agencies. As a result of these and other government agencies, U.S.  leaders often know more about certain countries than those countries' own leaders know.
    America's violence at home and overseas has sometimes been exaggerated. Yet this streak of violence does exist. And it was there right from the county's beginnings. The South African writer Ronald Segal claimed that America was born in violence. Here, Segal was referring to the American Revolution of 1776 to 1783 that threw out the Americans' British overlords and set up a new country. "America," said the late American activist Tom Hayden, "was born out of a genocidal impulse." Hayden was referring to the fate of the First Nations of the U.S.A. White people slaughtered indigenous people by the tens of thousands as the white people moved across the continent.
     So the U.S. like other great powers often uses war to get its way. To-day U.S. forces are fighting, killing and dying in Iraq and Syria. If you have what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called ' a military industrial complex' you tend to use it and America surely has done that. America's armed forces have laid waste to many lands and this makes the country still the most powerful nation in the world. In the last ten years of more, it has killed Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Libya's Moammar Gaddafi. All of these men were hostile to the U.S. of A. and now they're all gone.The U.S. military machine wiped them out.
     Their fate tells the world a message. "Don't mess with the U.S.A.," it says. "Or you'll pay a price." The American war machine still makes it a very powerful nation.
      
        

Before The Age of Donald - Part Two by Dave Jaffe

          Before The Age of Donald - Part Two by Dave Jaffe


        What took place in Brazil in the last 50 years wasn't an aberration. It's part and parcel of U.S. foreign policy. Wherever the United States goes in the world its government works to overthrow or undermine all left wing governments and even slightly left tilting leaders.
     Republican and Democratic governments alike often conspire to overthrow leaders who don't respect U.S. governments or American owned businesses.. If elected governments often financed by the United States, can do the job, so much the better for America. Yet if that doesn't work, the U.S. will push for the military in most countries to do the dirty deed. And if the country's military aren't up to doing the work, then U.S. armed forces will invade a country and kill many people.
     "The destruction was mutual," former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said about the U.S. backed war in Vietnam and later in Indochina. Yet here Carter wasn't telling the truth. The U.S. lost close to 60,000 troops in this terrible war. Over 180,000 Americans in uniform were wounded there. These are huge casualties by any measure and even at the time I lamented these terrible statistics.
     Yet the U.S. forces in Indochina killed close to 50 times as  many people. Between 1954 and 1975 the U.S. armed forces killed over 2 million Vietnamese, 650,000 Cambodians, and 300,000 Laotians. To-day nobody I know of talks about this. When U.S. president Barack Obama visited Laos, he didn't even apologize for the U.S. war in Laos that killed one tenth of the Laotian people.
      The communists in Cambodia, known now as the Khmer Rouge, took power in 1975. They then killed over one and a half million people. This was genocide and was a terrible act. Everybody or at least many people know about this., for the media publicize this fact again and again. Yet very few media outlets mention the U.S. killings in Cambodia or in Vietnam or Laos.
     From 1954 to the present day, the United States government  helped overthrow leaders in the following countries: Cambodia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia (twice), Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil and the Congo. These are the ones I remember or found through my own research and the work of others. Yet there may have been other places that I haven't mentioned.
      Once in power many of the leaders of the countries mentioned above, plundered their countries's treasuries, tortured and/or murdered left wing people, crushed all unions and throttled all democratic movements. They also opened their country's borders to unrestricted U.S. investment.
    "They want we've got," U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson told American troops at the height of the Vietnam War. "And they're not going to get it." Whatever President Donald Trump does to some of his citizens it will have been done before by many governments who owe their rule to U.S.- backed money and power. I truly hope it won't be as bad.
      

The Age of the Donald - Part One by Dave Jaffe

                 Part One by Dave Jaffe


     During the just recent 2016 U.S. presidential campaign a friend of mine looked south and said, "If Donald Trump wins the election, the United States will get a government like the ones they've imposed on many other countries."
     My friend may be right or wrong. Yet on November the 8th, 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump led the Republican Party to victory over Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Many Americans are already started protesting about a Trump presidency. Still, hundreds of millions of people around the world live or survive under terrible governments that would never have taken power if the U.S. government hadn't helped these rulers take control of their country.  And sadly enough most Americans don't even care or know about what harm their powerful country has done to so much of sthe world.
       Take Brazil for instance which is the biggest country in South America. In 1964 a group of Brazilian generals overthrew a democratically elected government in this Portuguese speaking country. For the next 20 years or so they ruled the men and women of Brazil with an iron hand.
    They slashed social programs to the bone, crushed strikes, throttled all democratic movements, and handed large parts of the country's resources over to big businesses many of whom were American-owned. The United States government back in Washington, D.D. helped the generals come to power.  The American government had already set up the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia where Latin American generals were taught how to seize power and also inflict torture on political prisoners.
     In turn, the Brazilian generals helped the U.S. government overthrow mildly leftist and straight socialist governments all across Latin America in the 1970's. At last due to the struggles of unionized workers and union leaders like the famous Lula, democracy returned to Brazil and then later to the rest of the continent.
     Yet when Lula led his Workers Party to power in a democratic election in the 21st century, then U.S. president George W. Bush didn't like this result at all. And for the last five years at least, the U.S. government has openly plotted against Lula's successor., Dina Roussief. At last in 2016, Roussief was removed from power by the Brazilian legislature. Now Brazil is run by elected conservatives who want to put Roussief in prison.
     "This is a constitutional coup," one Brazilian legislator  said. And there's no doubt that the C.I.A.
 and the National Endowment for Democracy helped the Brazilian right wing take power.
    

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe .Last Part - Part Eight.

               Part Eight


     Books can sometimes predict your future.
     In the early 1960's John Updike's book 'The Centaur' was published. It told a story about a high school teacher in a small town in Pennsylvania. The book took place in the late 1940's, and the male teacher with a young son to support and a wife and mother to feed, couldn't quit teaching though he hated the job.
     I first read Updike's book in early 1964 and didn't understand the story. It seemed too complex for me at the time. Plus the plot took part of its framework from Greek mythology. This made the book even harder for me to understand.  When I was asked by one of my classmates at McGill University whether I enjoyed the book, I said, "There's some good writing here about a basketball game."
     That was the only part of the book that I connected with.
     Yet about ten years later I came across the book again and enjoyed it immensely. "This is the story of many teachers," I told a friend of mine after I'd finished reading it. Of course, Powell River was wedged in between the sea and the mountains, while 'The Centaur' took place in eastern America's farm land. And it seemed that B.C. teachers in the early 1970's were paid a lot more than American teachers of 30 years before.  Still these differences aside, I  saw parallels between my ten months in Powell River and the teacher in 'The Centaur'.
      So ends my story about my attempt to be a full time teacher.

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Seven.

           Ten Months as A Teacher:  Part Seven


     Although I'd left behind me the career of regular teacher in a regular school, I still had some contact with Powell River and did do some teaching long after I left this coastal town.
       I revisited Powell River twice after I left it in 1970. I visited it for a couple of days in 1972 and then again for a day in 1987. On the second time I found that the town had indeed changed for the better. Now there was a mall there. Also the town had a regular bus service as well as a community centre and a library. Still, as said before I found Powell River to be isolated and hard to reach except by plane.
      In the 1980's I started to teach ESL or English as A Second Language. I did this as a volunteer and never got paid for doing it. Still, there were rewards. In this volunteer job the students were mostly from east Asia and Eastern Europe. No Chinese Leanna Leakeys or Slavic Rick Malimas showed up to disrupt my classes. Nor was I teaching sometimes rowdy students crammed into classes with 30 desks or more.
      Instead I taught one student at a time and the students were grateful to see me and learn from me. I gave them lessons in speaking English in the students' living rooms and they said nice things to me. "You are one of the best teachers I've ever had," a thirtyish Chinese mother of a very young son said after I'd taught her for about three months. "I've learned so much from you."
       A blind Russian man welcomed me every time I came to teach him. "We are always glad you come, here," his wife told me. What a difference this was from the way some of the students in Powell River had talked to me. Of course not everything went smoothly. A young Vietnamese who'd been imprisoned by the communist government in Vietnam, pushed another young man off his apartment balcony breaking a few of the victim's bones. This young Vietnamese fled his apartment and came to me to ask for help. I referred him to a lawyer.
     Another one of my students frightened his wife, who confessed her problem to my supervisor. Yet despite these events I always felt gratitude from my students. As time went by I started to pick up skills and one of them was learning to write as a journalist. I also discovered the world of phonics. Now I realized that I could have used this knowledge of journalism and phonics to teach my English classes in Powell River. Yet it was too late. The opportunity to do this had long passed.
     So as I aged I was learning to regret what I had and hadn't done in the past. Yet as time went by, my ten months in Powell River shrank in significance. New events filled my life as time  and overshadowed my earlier life Still I call my time in this mill town ' a growth experience'. Or as young people say today about something positive, "It was all good."
 And so  despite my complaints, in the end I did learn many things from my ten months as a classroom teacher.
      
      

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe - Part Six

             Ten Months as A Teacher - Part Six by Dave Jaffe


    My teaching days in high schools were definitely over but what lay ahead for me? Here I was an ill at ease 28 year old who didn't belong as a teacher in a classroom or maybe anywhere else. What was I going to do for the rest of my life? Suddenly the answer popped up.
     In July or August 1970 I wrote a story on a cinema chain in Canada after a group of  yippies protested against the high prices of tickets that were charged for viewing the movie 'Woodstock'. I sent the story to 'The 'Georgia Straight'. The Straight printed the story. "You could be a writer," my dad told me. I was staying with my father as I searched for another job.
       About five years later that's what I was. I wrote for small papers criticizing powerful men and standing up for the underdog. I was now launched on a sometimes paid career. Goodbye teaching in classrooms. Hello left wing propagandist! So ended my very brief career as a classroom teacher.

Ten Months As A Teacher - Part Five, by Dave Jaffe

        Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Five


     The superintendant of the Powell River School system showed up in my classes in the spring of 1970. I'd thought when I first spoke to him in 1969 that he was a sympathetic person. He may have been but now he judged me as a teacher and his report on me was anything but positive.
     "This man is not a good teacher," the report said in effect. "This teacher is inefficient and doesn't know how to fulfill his duties." This is how I remember the report. Yet whatever it said precisely it was surely negative. The report didn't surprise me because I certainly didn't do things that other teachers had like get involved in after-school activities.
     The superintendent made his report in May I think. With less than two months left in the school year I just about signed off from teaching. I'd tried to teach my classes Shakespeare's 'MacBeth', William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn' and some mainstream poetry. Obviuosly I'd failed at my task.
     After I'd read the report, I read a play with a Grade Ten class. The play was on the Grade 12 cirriculum but who cared? "It passes the time," I told a fellow teacher. "And the students seem to enjoy it." Sometimes with other classes I would tell the students about poverty in The Third World. Most students got bored and some of them even went to sleep as I droned on.
     When the school year ended I got a present from my home room Grade Ten class. I was surprised and even kissed the young lady who gave it to me. Yet before that happened and school closed up for the summer, I'd clashed with about four students in one of my Grade 11 classes. They threw eggs at my basement suite windows one night. So some students liked me. Others surely didn't.
     Then it was all over for me. So for the very last time in 1970 I hopped on a Greyhound bus one June day and made my way back to Vancouver. I felt relieved to leave Powell River. Yet I also felt defeated. After all, I had failed at my first big job of being a teacher.
    When the bus dropped me off on Denman Street in Vancouver's West End late in the day I shuffled back to my father's apartment . For the next two months I once again plugged back into the joys of living in a city. I watched one film after another, some of which I'd seen before. And how nice it was to sit in a restaurant or a library for hours on end and never worry about upcoming classes. I felt lucky beyond belief to live in a city with its nice gyms, shopping malls, swimming pools, well-stocked libraries, buses and trolleys, tidy beaches and lovely manicured parks.
    And there was another positive feature of living in Vancouver. "No one knows me here," I explained to a friend. "I want to live anonymously. I couldn't do that in Powell River." For a while I did feel happy.

    
    

Ten Months As a Teacher - by Dave Jaffe: Part Four.

                  Ten Months as a Teacher.  Part Four by Dave Jaffe


     I faced classes and young faces that were sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile but usually indifferent. The fault might have been mine. "You were a lousy teacher," a partner of one of my students said. "My girlfriend said you were the worst teacher she ever had."
     Although this young man's comments angered me at the time he said them, he was probably right. I was a lousy teacher. I often didn't prepare for many of my five classes, three grade 11's and two grade 10's. I didn't read about the background of the novels, plays and poetry I taught. I often went into classes thinking, what am I going to teach right now? And I took no part in any of the extra cirricular activities that teachers usually headed up. I was supposed to help produce a play but I didn't even start the production. This was a major mistake on my part. For most teachers in the school coached sports teams, started new activities or did other things after school with the students. I did nothing.
      So while I struggled on with my teaching, life in Powell River outside of Max Cameron just went on. There was a whole social world out there that I never got in contact with. Young people paired off into couples and then often got engaged. Singing groups, choirs, churches, political gatherings, and soccer and hockey leagues kept on going. I knew nothing about any of this. Yet it was a whole side of life that I ignored.
    "You should come to school dances," one teacher told me. "If you show up at them, it can make your time in the classes easier." I didn't follow  this advice, yet I should have. Like the true recluse I was, I stayed away from crowds. Every time I could, I sneaked off to Vancouver. I usually arrived in the city at night time, and came back to Powell River on a Sunday. I loved these two to three day breaks and spent hours wandering in Stanley Park, going to movies, and browsing in book stores and the Vancouver Public Library. In the library I did look for things and projects I could do with my classes.
    These weekend jaunts kept me sane as my classes and teaching went downhill. I yearned to move back to Vancouver and soon I did.
      One man who helped shovel me out of teaching and back to Vancouver was the superintendent of the Powell River school system. I went to him in November of 1969 and told him of some of the problems I faced as a teacher. He listened to me with some sympathy. But going to him may have been a mistake as I found out later.
    

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe

    Ten Months As A Teacher  - Part Three


          I soon realized that there were very few places to hang out at in Powell River once school was out. I was used to going to libraries, gyms and movie theatres in Vancouver. Yet in this town there were no shopping malls, no regular bus service and no inside swimming pools. As for a library, a woman opened a library for three hours once a week in a church basement. The high school I taught at, namely Max Cameron High School had a small library where I did find some books I liked. Yet compared to small cities that I'd gone to in the past, like Vernon in the Okanagan, Powell River struck me as a culturally deprived area.
      So where did people hang out? If they were adults they ended up at local hotels that had a liquor license. I wasn't a great drinker so once the school day ended I would walk down the hill to my basement suite I rented in a house. There I would put pop records on the record player I'd brought with me. Like many lonely people, music became my close companion.Still, very soon I started to feel bored and shut in, especially after the rains came.
     This town of about 10,000 had only one big main road that ran north for a few kilometres and ended at the fishing town of Lund. "There's not much to do around here," one of my students told me. He was right. I'm a city person who'd by now in 1969 had lived in three cities, namely London, England, Montreal and Vancouver. Powell River struck me as a barebones of town. Also the people there quickly saw me as a freaky character.
      "My grandmother thinks  you're really weird," my landlord's granddaughter said to me. "You don't have a car or even a television. She's never met anyone like you." The lady was right: I was a weirdo then and now. In the cities I'd lived in till now, I could hide my strangeness. Yet in Powell River I stuck out like a sore thumb.
    The pulp mill kept churning out its products day and night. This was the reason for the town's existence. After two months in this town, I felt I was living at the ends of the earth and was thinking of quitting my job and vanishing back to Vancouver. I didn't do this because of some of other teachers. Sue was a transplanted American who taught English just as I did to grade 10 and 11 students. Like me she faced some hostile students.Tony was a man from Britain who sometimes felt frustrated by the young people he met in his socials classes. I've already talked about Rodger in another part of my blog. We became friends and this short but very knowledgeable British-born teacher was invaluable in his advice and encouragement. Another teacher who helped me was Cliff, a somewhat older person than me, who gave me topics to discuss in my classes.
      Without these people around I wouldn't have finished my ten months of teaching, that's for sure.
    
   

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Two

         Part Two of "Ten Months As A Teacher'


    "Powell River is 100 kilometres and five days from Vancouver," one student at Max Cameron High School where I was teaching in the fall of 1969 told me. He exaggerated a bit but certainly it took time to reach this mill town of about 10,000 people. The town was named after Israel Wood Powell, who in the early 20th century was the superintendent of Indian Affairs in B.C. In 1908 a pulp mill started up and people flocked to the area to work in the mill.
     To get to Powell River from Vancouver  in 1969 usually took time. If you drove to the mill town you drove up to Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver. Then you got on a ferry that took you to Langdale. The rain usually pelted down as you drove off the ferry and headed north. As you drove or sat in a bus as I did, you could look to the left and gaze out at the waters of the Georgia Straight. Or you could look to the right where mountain and trees towered above you.
     This twisting, turning drive along what's called "The Sunshine Coast' took some time. One man who stayed at Gibson's a then small but now growing town on the coast, said way back in 1967, "I sure didn't see much sunshine when I stayed  for the winter in Gibson's." After at least a two hour drive you got on a small ferry at Earl's Cove .This ferry ride left you at Saltery Bay. Or have I named the ferry terminals the wrong way  around? I can't remember now.
     Once your second ferry ride ends you've arrived you're in the township of Powell River. Another short drive would take you near the mill and the town.
    The whole journey from Vancouver to Powell River usually took over five hours. Now of course you could have taken a plane ride from Vancouver Airport to Powell River and in 25 minutes you'd be in the town. But of course that trip cost a lot more money than taking the Greyhound bus as I usually did.
      Another entry point to the town  was from Vancouver Island. Here you could take the ferry that went from Comox to Powell River.  The ferry churned through  grey or blue waters to the town. I never came to Powell River from this direction so I can't report on this journey.   Still which ever way you came, delays or or obstacles to the ferries running, like storms or mechanical ferry failures could stretch out your travelling time even more. And when the winter fog settled on top of the town the plane rides in and out of the place were cancelled.
       So that was it. Truly Powell River was a long way from Vancouver or Victoria. On the map though it looked close by. Yet travelling time could stretch out to six hours or more. Year later when I re-visited Powell River I was asked what I thought of it now. "It's still pretty isolated," I replied. "That unfortunately hasn't changed."

Ten Months as a Teacher by Dave Jaffe - Part One

     Ten Months as a Teacher - Part One


     Leanna Leakey (which was not her real name) was a pain in my behind. A blonde attractive 15 year old, she was one of about 30 students in a Grade 10 English class I was teaching in the fall of 1969 in Powell River.
    Every time she came to class she caused me problems. She would talk loudly, gossip to her friends, ignore my asking to be silent and made fun of me.  "You are a strange weird sort of person," she wrote in effect about me in a story which I assigned her to do. I thought that if she wrote a story about why she didn't like my class, she would stop causing me troubles in my. Instead it just made things worse between us.
    At last I persuaded her to leave my class and go to the school library to read the books I assigned.
She agreed with this and so did another unhappy student in the same class. Rick Malima (again this wasn't his real name) was a big strapping hockey player who starred in one of the local hockey leagues. He was taking Grade 10 English for the second time.
     "It's just a waste of time for him," one teacher told me. "He doesn't want to be in an English class period. He's still angry that he failed English last year." At times I felt like Leanna, Rick and Ronald (which again wasn't his real name). Ronald was a big tough guy in another and smaller Grade 10 English class I was teaching. "I don't want to take this class," he told me in the first class I taught him. "I hate English. It's just junk."
     (Naturally I'm citing all these statements from memory. So the words hurled my way may have been a little different. Yet that's how I remember them). Now after a bare two weeks teaching English in the two story Max Cameron senior secondary school, I often felt frustrated. I had endless pieces of paper to fill out, attendance forms to get right and what it seemed was a whole lot of work to do.These never endings tasks I felt had nothing to do with teaching English to Grade 10 and 11 students.
     Anyway here I was, a 27 year old slacker who really didn't want to teach period. I wanted to stay in Vancouver, and lounge around in some old rickety rooming house. And there were plenty of such rooming houses  in Vancouver in 1969. In these relatively low rent places I could read progressive and/or new age books as well as novels from many countries.
     Yet I'd ended up teaching in Powell River because I needed money, and I became a teacher because I thought it would be an easy thing to do. But it wasn't easy and I quickly saw I didn't belong in a classroom and certainly not as a teacher. "I'm a learner, not a teacher," a middle aged teacher tells his son in John Updike's novel 'The Centaur'. That was me. Yet I ended up in the mill town of Powell River, a few hundred kilometres north of Vancouver. I was out of place here and out of sorts.
       (End of Part One).
    
     
    
   
    

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Seven by Dave Jaffe

        Part Seven


    There are thousands of diets out there but if you're looking for one way to extend your life the best way is become a vegan. It does seem that vegetarians live longer than those who eat meat, chicken, eggs and butter. By doing this you'll not only help yourself, you'll also help the planet.
     About 20 per cent of global warming comes from raising cattle and other animals. In his book 'Diet For A New America'  one author praised the virtues of vegetarianism and points out  that switching to a plant diet is a very good thing. I am a vegan now and rarely eat any animal food. There are other diets that may lengthen your life but a vegan diet I conclude is one way to avoid an early death.
   This is the last part of my posting 'Death and How To Avoid It'.

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Six by Dave Jaffe

    Part Six


          In part five of this story I told of how I met a rich man who boasted that he got to his present affluent state all on his own. Like many successful people he refused to acknowledge how lucky he'd been.  Suppose now that this man had been born into a First Nation family. Once again he wouldn't be living as long as many Caucasian Canadians do.
    Half of all First Nations children are poor. And many of them as they grow up die long before they turn sixty years old. Attawapiskat is yet another impoverished First Nations reserve in Canada. Its chief once went on a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions that many of the reserve's 2,000 people were living in.
     In April 2016, 11 people in Attawapiskat tried to kill themselves. First Nations people, not just women but men too often live in the most deplorable conditions. They huddle together in very crowded houses. Many of them drop out of school before they graduate. Some sniff glue, shoot up heroin, drink themselves to death, and often die violent deaths. Not all First Nations people are poor or violent. Many aboriginal Canadians work hard and do get an education.Yet far too many die at an early age, especially if they're living in isolated communities in Canada's north.
     The cause of their despair is the Caucasian men who flooded into Canada from the 17th century on. They pushed a side the First Nations onto ever shrinking reserves and later herded young natives into terrible residential schools. "When the white man came to Africa," the U.S. writer James Baldwin wrote, "the white man had the Bible and the black man had the land. Soon the white man had the land and the black man had the Bible."
    The same thing happened in Canada to aboriginal groups. One day these people who were the first inhabitants of this country will be full citizens of Canada. Yet that days hasn't so far arrived. Right now a First Nations person is far more likely to die at an earlier age than most other Canadians.
    All the world's people live in a hierarchy. How long you live depends upon where you're lodged in the hierarchy. Many of the 7 billion people who live in this world live on the lower rungs of the ladder. They were just born in the wrong time in the wrong place. So death hovers over them much more closely than those born in a different time and a richer place.
     

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Five by Dave Jaffe

               Part Five


     Eduardo dos Santos is getting on in years. He's head of Angola, a sizeable African country whose western border hugs a large part of the south west coast of Africa. Angola is yet another African country whose history is full of conflict. Dos Santos's party the MPLA or in English the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been in power for many years. It took power in 1975 when the MPLA finally threw out the Portuguese colonizers.
     To get in power in Angola,the MPLA had to fight a vicious war against the Portuguese rulers.Then it had to fight off two other mostly black groups. Last it ended up fending off a U.S. backed army that ravaged Angola for at least ten years.  Final death count from all of this conflict? About two million people.
     "Anatomy is destiny," the famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud once said. Freud's brand of therapy once was called 'The talking therapy and' is no longer so popular. In any case Freud was wrong about anatomy. Anatomy isn't destiny: Geography is.
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    If you're born in Angola you're not going to live a long time. You're probably going to die at about the age of 51. The average Angolan in short has a life span of less than two thirds of the average Canadian. Angola's not alone here. Alongside Angola there are 12 other African countries whose citizens don't live much past 50 years either.
      Now Angola shouldn't be poor and if it wasn't,  its citizens would live a lot longer. It's a country chockful of oil, diamonds and other valuable minerals. Its government alas is one of he most corrupt governments on earth. And its rulers who were once gun toting Marxists, are very rich and now support free enterprise to the hilt.
In Luanda, Angola's capital city, millions of people just struggle to survive. Meanwhile Angola's small ruling clique are very rich multi-millionaires. The 21 million people of Angola teach us a valuable lesson: Luck often determines whether we live a long life or don't.
      "I go to where I'm at,  all by myself." one rich man told me at a political meeting. "I worked hard to make my money and no government has the right to take it away from me." Like many other rich and not so rich Canadians, this man ignores how lucky he's been. If he'd have been born a black Angolan, he'd either have been dead by nowor would be eking out a bare existence in some impoverished village or just surviving in an urban slum. Instead he's driving around Vancouver in an expensive Audi. Luck doesn't figure in his calculations. Yet it should.
    
   

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Four by Dave Jaffe

              Part Four


           Smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol will lop years off your life. And so does  using certain types of illegal drugs. Marjorie, which is not her real name, was the mother of a heroin addict. "My son caused me many problems," Marjorie told me one day. "He used to steal doctors' prescription pads, hang out with thieves, and was often getting stopped by the police."
     Marjorie lived into her nineties. Her son's still alive too, but he's taking methadone these days and not injecting heroin. Mark, which isn't his real name wasn't as lucky as Marjorie's son. He started injecting heroin in his late teens. He overdosed in his late 20's and  died. Another man told me that he became a killer because of heroin. "I needed money for my drug habit," he told me. "I killed a man to get the money."
    Illegal drugs are very expensive because they're illegal. Once someone gets addicted to heroin or cocaine, they have to find some big money to feed their habit. Many addicted women become street prostitutes which is a very dangerous profession. Serial killer Robert Pickton boasted of killing 60 women. I'd bet that many of these women were cocaine or heroin addicts and sold their bodies on the street.
    Men addicted to heroin or cocaine usually turn to crime too. They steal from stores, try to hold up banks, deal illegal drugs or turn to fraud. All these activities can shorten your life.
     Of course, not all people who try heroin or cocaine get addicted to them. These people may shoot up heroin or snort cocaine once in a while. Yet even here casual use of these drugs can shorten your life. In the first nine months of 2016, close to 450 people died in British Columbia after injecting heroin. Both cocaine and heroin are often laced with fentanyl that can kill a drug user right away.
     One man told me, "Heroin addicts are human beings too. They should not be demonized."  This is true. Still, if you want to keep alive and healthy, it's a good idea to stay away from hard illegal drugs. They're nothing but trouble.
     
    
    

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Three by Dave Jaffe

     Part Three



     He was one of Canada's most famous novelists. And he disliked the man who became one of Quebec's most famous premiers.
     The novelist was Mordecai Richler, a Montrealer born and bred. The man whose policies Richler really disliked was the very short Rene Levesque who was born in Quebec's Gaspe area. A famous journalist, Levesque devoted most of his political career to setting up an independent Quebec. Richler never learned to speak French, disliked Levesque's politics and distrusted his nationalism.
    "From the beginning," Richler wrote, "French Canadian nationalism has been badly tainted by racism."
A secular Jew, Richler pointed out in his book 'O Canada, O Quebec', that many French Canadians loathed Jews in the past and that some French Canadians still do now. Richler saw a direct link between the  anti-Semitic nationalism preached by the early 20th century writer Abbe Lionel Groulx and the sovereigntist nationalism embraced by the Parti Quebecois that Rene Levesque headed up for many years.
     Nor did Richler like Levesque personally. "My enduring feeling about Rene Levesque," Richler wrote, "is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope around my neck, he would have complained how humiliating it was for him to spring the trap door."So Richler didn't like Levesque for pushing Quebec to separate from Canada and Levesque probably didn't like Richler. Yet these two opponents did have two fatal habits in common. They both smoked tobacco and drank alcohol. And because they did this, they both died long before they should have.
    Levesque was born in 1922 and died in 1987. He was only 65 when he passed away and was rarely seen in public without a cigarette in his mouth.  Richler who was born in 1931 died in 2001. He too smoked continously and drank alcohol nearly every day at one of his favourite watering holes in Montreal. Even after he had been operated on for cancer, Richler kept on smoking and inhaling deadly cigarillos. He never stopped drinking alcohol either.
     Both men's lives point out what is now obvious: If you want to live a long life don't smoke or drink. They're both poisonous. Smoking cigarettes lops at least nine years off your life. Every year 19,000 Canadians die from lung cancer and most of these people got this deadly form of cancer from smoking. Also if you smoke cigarettes you're far more likely to get a stroke or be crumpled up by a heart attack.
     Drinking alcohol also cuts years off your life. Every year more than 4,000 Canadians die from alcohol abuse. These alcoholics die in car crashes or in drunken brawls. They're also far more likely to be men than women. Or they pass away from cirrhosis of the liver or other illnesses caused by alcohol. Over 3 million Canadians are risking death by drinking. And close to four and one half million expose themselves to risk when they down  alcohol . Drinking can shorten anyone's life. It's deadly. Then there's other dangerous drugs out there that I'll talk about next time.