Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man. Chapter Five Part One.. Elvis the Pelvis.

   Elvis the Pelvis - Part One.


  Before the Beatles, before Dylan, before the Boss, namely Bruce Springsteen, before the Clash, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Smoky Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé or Adele, there was Elvis Aaron Presley. He created rock music, or rock'n roll, as it was first called. "If I could find a white man who had a Negro sound," said the Memphis-based record producer Sam Phillips in the early 1950"s, "and this man had a Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."
    Lo and behold in August 1953 a tall 19 year old man showed up in Phillips's small recording studio in Memphis. His name was Elvis Aaron Presley and he revolutionized popular music.  First off, he recorded a song in the studio and it went nowhere. Then in January 1954 he cut another record in Phillips's studio and it too turned nobody on. Yet then times changed. Presley came back in July 1954. He sang a few nondescript songs. Yet then near night time he sang a song first recorded by a black or African American singer called Arthur Crudup. It was called 'That's All Right'.
    Phillips suddenly realized that this young man was the person he'd been looking for. He recorded Elvis singing Crudup's song.  On the record's other side - the 'B' side as it was then called-  he put Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky'. In both of these songs Elvis Presley fused  together rhythm and blues which was an African American music with country and western music, which was a white person's music. Presley had invented a new music. At first it was called rock'n roll. He was only 19 years old.
     Phillips soon sold his right to Presley's music to a slick agent called Tom Parker for $35,000. Parker also became Elvis's manager. Parker turned Presley into a super star. In 1956 Presley appeared on three top t.v..shows, including the Ed Sullivan show. Presley's songs now soared to the top of the music charts. 'Heartbreak Hotel', 'Don't Be Cruel', 'Hound Dog' and other of his songs added up to one half of all the records that the giant record company RCA sold in 1956.
    Yet Presley wasn't only selling music. He was also selling sexual excitement. His gyrations and twists onstage, threw young girls into ecstasy and heart throbs. They screamed, cried and yelled as Presley performed.  "I think they were having orgasms," one 20's something male said about Elvis's female fans years later. Ed Sullivan, or some other t.v. emcee stopped t.v. cameras from showing
Elvis below the waist. Soon Elvis was called 'Elvis the Pelvis'.
      The authorities were alarmed. In the mid-1950's, the United States was a totally segregated society. yet here was a white  man, barely out of his teens who sang like a black man and could literally move millions of young people especially young girls. J. Edgar Hoover, the then head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sounded off about the Elvis phenomenon. "Presley," he said, " is a definite danger to the security of the United States." In the mid-1950's, the U.S. and the communist-ruled Soviet Union  were locked in a titanic struggle for control of the world. Hoover and many other figures of the establishment were terrified of communism. Suppose Presley was a communist primed to subvert the U.S. What would happen then?

Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe: The Rise and Fall of Freudianism - Part Two

   Chapter Four. Part Two of The Rise and Fall of Freudianism..


     Many of Freud's ideas don't sound too good to-day For instance he believed that women suffered from what he called "penis envy". All young men he said had what he called "An Oedipus Complex.". In other words subconsciously they wanted to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. Freud's claims for these complexes don't stand up to examination.
    In his lifetime Freud had his critics. In the city of Vienna, Freud who was a Jew, faced virulent anti-Semitism. And Freud spent most of his life in this city. Also other psychologists like the behaviourist  B.F. Skinner had no time for Freud's theories. Some Anglo-American philosophers doubted Freud's system from the very start.
    Still, by about the late 1950's Freud was seen as the greatest scientists of all time. Yet then came his downfall. Already in her massive 1949 book 'The Second Sex', the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir had criticized Freud's psychology. In 1963, the American feminist Betty Friedan went after Freudian psychology in 'The Feminine Mystique'. Years later Gloria Steinem a very prominent feminist ridiculed Freud and Freudianism. "Freud was just a straight male chauvinist," a feminists told this author in the late 1970's. "His theories are just being used to oppress us women and keep us down."
   This was how many feminists were now seeing Freud. Freud's theories they asserted were just totally false ands oppressed women.
    Soon male critics appeared and started to trash Freud. Neuroscientists didn't believe Freud's view of the mind. Peter Swales, who at one time had worked for the Rolling Stones band, condemned Freud for his use of cocaine and his love affair with his sister-in-law. Frederick Crews an English professor at Berkeley University, first praised Freud but then turned on him. Crews's latest book called 'Freud: The Making of An Illusion' spends 746 pages charging Freud with one sin after another. Crews's book title echoes Freud's famous book on religion called 'The Future of An Illusion'. 
    Freud's reputation now is blurred. He died in England in exile in 1939, having fled Vienna to escape Hitler's troops who annexed Austria. So he's not here to defend himself. Yet others have. They point out that Freud's methods of healing patients was for the time relatively humane. He didn't use drugs on patients, carry out lobotomies or practice electric shock therapy treatments. Many others did when Freud started his practice. Others continued to do these sorts of treatments long after Freud had died.
     Then, too Freud did not molest, abuse, rape or stalk his patients. He just sat down and listened to them talk. Nor did he put his patients in hospitals where many patients just wasted away. Many women back then suffered from hysteria. This is a very rare disease today. Yet Freud did cure many of his patients. Of course Freud's claim to be practicing a science doesn't stand up to examination to-day. It also seems that he lied about his patients and his cures.
    Also some modern drugs do seem to work faster on mental problems than talking to a psychiatrist. A man who passed away a few years ago was an epileptic. "I had terrible explosions of anger," he once confessed. "But the drug Dilantin calmed me down." Modern pharmacology has helped soften but not cure not only epilepsy but also bi-polar syndrome and schizophrenia. Drugs work much faster than Freudian talk fests.
   Stanley Cavett is a philosopher who admires Freud. "Most philosophers in my tradition," he says, "relate to psychoanalysis with suspicion, habitually asking whether psychoanalysis deserves the title of a science. Still, says Cavett, "Freud achieved an unsurpassed horizon of knowledge about the human mind." Freudianism today is just one of 60 branches of psychology and Sigmund Freud no longer is praised by too many people as a paragon of intellect and a genius.
     Like many past visionaries his flame of inspiration has now burnt out. Or as post modernists might say, "This is just another Grand Narrative that no longer makes sense."

Enda and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Four, Part One.

     The Rise and Fall of Sigmund Freud. Part One




   Whatever happened to Sigmund Freud? In 1954, the well known American psychologist Calvin S. Hall published a book called ' A Primer of Freudian Psychology'. Freud, Hall claimed created what he called "a dynamic human psychology.". This psychology, Hall said, studied the changes and transformations of energy within the human personality...
     "This was Freud's greatest achievement," Hall wrote, "and is one of the greatest achievements in modern history. It is certainly the crucial event in the history of psychology." Yet what was supposed to be true in mid-1950's America seems to be no longer believed in 2017. To-day Freud is rarely mentioned and his theories are mostly ignored.
    Hall didn't stand alone in his enthusiasm for Freud. Writers like the U.S. sociologist Philip Rieff. Marthe  Robert in France and the famous literary scholar and novelist Lionel Trilling praised Freud as a great truth seeker. Few people do this today. So what happened? Well, times change and people change with it.
    Born in what is now the Czech Republic in 1856 and back then what was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud became a medical student and then a doctor of medicine. He visited France and Germany and studied psychology in France. Soon he developed his theories of psychology using what was called "the talking cure".
    Upper middle class men and many women with mental problems came to Freud's office in Vienna to talk to him and pour out their inner struggles. They sat on a famous couch in his study. Freud listened to them and then suggested ways to cure their neuroses. Freud didn't just propose cures. He also expounded theories about why men and women had mental problems. The human mind, he claimed had three main systems.
    First off, there was the id, which should rid the mind of tension. The id was the home of dreams, desires and mental illnesses. Then comes the ego, which should control the id. The ego if healthy, keeps everything going normally in the mental arena. Third, comes the super ego, which has the power to punish the person or approve of a person's actions. Along with these three components, Freud claimed to have discovered other parts of the mind. There was the pleasure principle, instincts and many other driving forces. For Freud, the id must be reined in, and the ego should take control.
     "Where id was," went one of the Freudians's most famous slogans, "let ego be." This was how a person became mentally healthy. Yet Freud was not just a doctor and a theorist of the mind. He was also an author who poured out his ideas in many books. Works of his like "The Future of An Illusion'., "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life', and 'Three Essays on Sexuality'  became well-known. A gifted stylist, Freud wrote in an attractive style. These books and a growing circle of devotees made Freud famous - at least with some people.
    

Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Three

     My Favourite Painters Part One.


     Elaine Risley never existed. Yet she's one of my favourite painters.
     She's painted a landscape of a lake where adults are making lunch. Near the paintings's lower end, there are logos from out-of-date gas pumps. Then Elaine Risley did a portrait of two women and one man from the artist's past. And then there's another painting called 'Unified Field Theory' Here a woman dressed in a long black dress, clutches in her hands a glowing blue glassy object while she hovers in the air above a bridge and trees.
    These three paintings and a fourth one I haven't mentioned  don't exist outside of Margaret Atwood's 1988 novel 'Cat's Eye'. "They have been influenced," says Atwood, "by visual artists like Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers, Charles Pachter" and others. The last painting of the hovering woman sort of exists. It was painted by Fred Marcellino for the book cover of Atwood's novel.
     Margaret Atwood is Canada's most famous novelist. She has written millions of words that have been channeled into poetry, novels, book reviews, librettos, and children's books. "Cat's Eye', to no one's surprise, climbed to the top of the best seller's list in 1988.
     In this novel Atwood tells the story of Elaine Risley who now lives in Vancouver. In middle age when the novel opens she's revisiting Toronto where she first lived. There's a retrospective of her work that will be shown in a Toronto gallery. Risley comes back also to confront the ghost of Cordelia, the woman who bullied her horribly when she and Cordelia were children. The novel shuttles back and forth from past to present, from the rough scrappy Canada of the 1940's ands 1950's to the glitzy world of the 1980's.
   'Cordelia' of course, is the name of the only decent daughter of King Lear in Shakespeare's play 'King Lear'. Yet Atwood's Cordelia is a frightful person who nearly gets the young Elaine Risley drowned. Risley by the way calls herself ' a painter' and not a visual artist. In 'Cat's Eye' Atwood confronts various myths and shreds them whole. Many people for instance, see children as innocent beings. Yet Cordelia and her two young allies, Carol and Grace are brutal verbal abusers at age nine and later.
   Nor does Risley have any time for feminists. Feminists have sometimes claimed Atwood as one of their own. Others have sometimes demonized men and held up women as innocent victims of a male dominated world.  Again Atwood tears apart these ideas too. "Women collect grievances" Risley observes. "They hold grudges and change shape. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived or trusted."
     The twice married Risley steps away from feminist groups who surface in 1970's Vancouver. "I avoid gatherings of these women," she says, "walking s I do. I know I am unorthodox, hopelessly heterosexual, a mother, a quisling and a secret wimp." I like Elaine Risley and would admire her art described in the book,. She's a scrapper who gets into a row with her first husband and once throws a radio at him. She's slightly paranoid at times, and like many Atwood characters she takes verbal pot shots at creative people. Also like Atwood she works incredibly hard.
    'Cat's Eye' is a great book that takes its title I think from a marble that Elaine's dead brother once owned. Elaine Risley may never have lived yet she's one of my favourtie painters.

Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe

    My Dad and Me: Part One of Chapter Three.


     Everything my father was, I wasn't. Yet in the end we were alike.
    My father was a short intense working class Londoner who ran after the rich. I ended up many times working with the poorest of the poor. My father couldn't save a penny. I became a real cheapskate.
    "Jaffe, you're so cheap it's terrible," one woman who I liked told me. "You never spend a penny."
     My dad was one of the hardest working people I ever knew. He worked from the age of 13 till he retired at 78. I, in contrast was a complete slacker. I've worked  a grand total of 11 years out of 75.
      "Never take the dole," he'd say. "The dole" is the English expression for welfare. "Never buy second hand clothing or handle old newspapers." I broke all of his rules. I lived on welfare for years on end after becoming disabled. I routinely go to thrift stores and Salvation Army places to buy second hand clothing, books and furniture. I still fish day old newspapers out of blue recycling bins. All of this saved me a fortune.
    Then again my father was a family man who married and had three children - myself and two daughters. I never married. As far as religion goes here again we went in  two diametrically opposed directions. My father was an orthodox Jew whose religion bristled with harsh rules and regulations. I became a liberal Christian who still goes to church and loves to sing hymns.
    My dad was a very good athlete. I was hopeless at sports save for swimming. My father never learned to swim. My father loved to gobble down thick juicy steaks. I became a vegan and rarely eat any animal food save sometimes for butter.
 So put my father and I together and you have two complete opposites. Yet in many ways we were two carbon copies. Both of us were loud, intense, aggressive and sometimes comical laughingstocks and disrupters of the worlds we moved through.
   "Oh here comes Dave Jaffe!" one New Democrat said when he saw me at a friend's house in the mid-1970's. "Just help me." Like my father I argued with many people. After taking therapy I quieted down. Yet I caused many problems in many organizations I was part of.. My father did the same.
    Once my father crashed a meeting on issues of ageing. "Seniors don't do anything progressive," he told the gerontologist who'd given a good speech on how seniors could be organized into a progressive force. "They're just hopeless." The woman gerontologist never forgave him for this unasked for intrusion..
     My dada and I were simply father and son. "They're both peas from the same pod," some would have said of us both. And they'd be right.
    

The Ravings of An Old Man; by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Two, part two. Thank You Mr. Trudeau Senior. Part Two.

       Thank You Mr. Trudeau Senior by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.
 


    Pierre Elliott Trudeau's time as Canada's prime minister had its tough times. All governments do bad things and/or make mistakes and Trudeau's governments was no different. In the fall of 1970 Trudeau proclaimed a War Measures Act  during the time when the terrorist Front de Liberation de Quebec kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered a Quebec cabinet minister.
     "Just watch me," Trudeau said when asked how far he would go in suspending civil liberties. Hundreds of people in Quebec had their homes searched by police and dozens were arrested. Yet Trudeau crushed the FLQ and it never reappeared. Trudeau also did a complete U-turn on wage and price controls.In 1974 he ran against the Conservative leader Bob Stanfield who was proposing a ninety day or three month freeze on wages and prices. The Liberals easily won the 1974 election as millions of unionized Canadians deserted the N.D.P. and voted Liberal.
     Then in late 1975 Trudeau's Liberal government brought in not a three month freeze on wage and price controls but a three year freeze on wages and prices. "Our members lost millions of dollars in wages," Len Guy, then head of the B.C. Federation of Labour said in 1977. Also Trudeau's National Energy Program blew up in his face when the oil rich province of Alberta saw many of its oil rigs close down as the Liberal government of Canada tried to grab part of Alberta's share of oil royalties .
   When his time in power ended in the early 1980's, Trudeau appointed  many of his Liberal allies to cushy patronage jobs. "This is an orgy of patronage," one outraged observer said at the time. "What happened to the Trudeau who in 1968 called for 'A Just Society'?"
   Still, for someone like me Trudeau's time in power was very good. I moved into a housing co-op where I still live to-day. This co-op was develop during Trudeau's time in power. I also benefitted from the more generous unemployment insurance scheme that Trudeau brought in in the early 1970's. And the Quebec sovereigntist party the Parti Quebecois didn't win any sovereigntist referendums. Still, many Quebeckers benefitted from its time in power too. The first PQ government headed by Rene Levesque  did many progressive things. It immediately let the abortion provider Dr. Henry Morgentaler out of prison.
     It also banned businesses and unions from making any contributions to elections. Soon the federal government and other provinces, except for B.C. followed suit. The first PQ government also banned scabs in all management -labour disputes This  ended a terrible practice in Quebec labour history. It also brought in no-fault auto insurance and passed laws to preserve farm land. It also did many other progressive things. Its language law led to over 125,000 English-speaking people leaving Quebec. Yet Quebec's population did increase in the long run.
   Overall Trudeau's time in power benefitted Quebec and Canada. I'm glad he came along. "Quebec" people in Quebec said in the 1950's, "c'est ne pas un province comme les autres" Translation? Quebec isn't a province like the other ones. This is true and Pierre Elliott Trudeau wasn't a prime minister like many other ones. I'm glad he wasn't.

Thank You, Mr. Pierre Elliott Trudeau - Part One by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Two of Odds and Ends

       Thank You Mr. Pierre Elliott Trdeau by Dave Jaffe. Part One.
     


     Suppose the Quebec sovereignty movement hadn't ever some along. Then Pierre Elliott Trudeau would probably never have become Canada's Prime Minister. As far as I'm concerned that would have been too bad.
    "Trudeau in the early 1960's," Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall Newman point out, "was in danger of becoming a rebel without a purpose." A middle aged law professor at the Universite de Montreal, Trudeau suddenly came up against young students who were sovereigntists. They wanted Quebec to leave Canada and form a separate country. The provincial Liberals under Quebec's premier Jean Lesage, were also listening to this separatist tune. So was the opposition party the Union Nationale that would soon be extinct. Trudeau loathed this type of thinking. To combat this strain of thought he joined the federal Liberal party that in the past he had brutally put down. Soon Trudeau was in parliament. Then he became Minister of Justice and in 1968, three years after joining the Liberals, he became Prime Minister.
      "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation," Trudeau said as Justice Minster. In this position he legalized homosexuality and for the first time birth control methods were openly allowed to be sold in pharmacies. Trudeau as Canada's prime minister promoted French Canadians and Jews to some of the highest offices in the civil service and the federal Liberals. He also guaranteed that all Canadians should be served in French or English at all federal offices in Canada. These acts and laws were one big step forward for French Canadians in Canada.
     Once chastened by the election results of the 1972 federal election, Trudeau formed a temporary alliance with the small left leaning New Democratic Party. After this, Trudeau  did many progressive things. He abolished the death penalty. He brought in the Guaranteed Annual Income Supplement that rescued many senior citizens from dire poverty.
      At the end of the 1968 election campaign, Trudeau insisted that Canada would have to change. "I have insisted" he said, "that we must reform and adapt in many ways - in parliament, in our constitution and in many of our laws." Trudeau kept many of his promises. He brought in a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that once amended with pressure from political activists expanded the freedoms of many Canadians. At the same time Trudeau repatriated the country's constitution from London. Canadian governments would no longer have to trek to the British  in London to get a judgement on whether any of their laws violated the Canadian constitution.
    Trudeau oversaw the building of over 600,000 units of social housing during his time of power. This was an unprecedented expansion of social housing. Never before or since had so many units of government housing been built. Trudeau also led the federal government in 1980 when he defeated the Parti Quebecois government of Rene Levesque in a referendum on Quebec sovereignty. When he stepped down as Prime Minister of Canada in the early 1980's, Quebec remained a part of Canada. Trudeau also amended the country's Unemployment Insurance act, making it more generous and accessible to the unemployed.
   Of course like any government, the Liberals made mistakes.

Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter One, part one

      One Hopeless Athlete. Part One


     With one exception I was nearly hopeless at playing sports. As a very young boy I went to soccer games and cheered on my favourite teams. They happened to be the local Barnet soccer team and the north London based Tottenham Hotspurs. Yet I couldn't play soccer for beans. I missed kicks, squandered chances to score a goal and often fell down when I should have run past a defender.
     Once in Canada, my athletic skills shrivelled even more. I didn't learn to catch or throw a football until I was in my early 20's. Even then I always felt awkward on the football field. "You throw the ball like a girl," one of my friends said to me. In the early 1960's this was the ultimate insult that one adolescent could hurl at another.
   On the baseball diamond I was as hopeless as I was on the football field. I missed easy grounders, dropped simple fly balls and rarely hit the softballs thrown at me by canny pitchers. "Hockey is the Canadian game," my father once said. Yet I only learned to skate in my mid-teens and couldn't stick handle the puck or even make a decent pass on the ice, let alone fire a slap shot.
    I loved to shoot baskets on the basketball court. Yet as a team player I wasn't worth a damn. "We can't have you on our team," one player on a community team told me after I'd played  a game or two with this group. "You're not just good enough." I quickly vanished from this team and after that only played in pickup games. Even then I was usually the last player to be chosen.
      In short I was a classic teenage nerd, hopeless in sports, but a reader of so-called "intellectual" books  by authors like Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and George Orwell. Many years later I came across the life of  one of Canada's famous prime ministers, namely Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau, as his biographers Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall Newman point out, "turned his back on populist sports his father had reveled in such as baseball, hockey, lacrosse and boxing." I did the same. The teenage Trudeau boasted that he would only take part in diving, skiing and canoeing. Yet Trudeau was a skilled athlete. I was no athlete at all.
    Yet even back in grade school I would swim in local pools. I loved swimming in these pools as a teenager too and sometimes swam up to an hour or more. Here no one bothered me or expected anything from me. "I did things alone," I told a woman who once headed up the human resources department of the Vancouver Public Library. I told her that I loved swimming because I did it alone.
    "It sounds to me that you were scared of competition," she replied. Once I thought about what she'd said I concluded that she was probably right.
      Yet to-day at the age of 75 I'm still swimming. I became partly disabled at the age of 32. I can walk a bare six or seven blocks a day. Yet in a swimming pool, I'm the equal of many able bodied people. The athletes of my youth have long since vanished. Even great athletes retire or hang up their cleats in their 30's or even their 20's. I on the other hand, will go on churning through the local swimming pools for as long as I can. In the end, a heart attack, a stroke or terminal cancer will bring my swimming to a halt.  Until then I'll pursue the only sport that I was ever competent in. Long live swimming. It's saved me from complete desperation in the athletic arena.

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 45. Part Three.

    The Life and Death of A Canadian Mystic. Part Three.


        Don Graves went to India to deepen his spiritual knowledge. He succeeded. He meditated at Hindu shrines. He met gurus and holy men and women. He also exchanged information with fellow spiritual travelers from the western world. Then he left India and journeyed west to Pakistan. To him Pakistan seemed more dangerous than India. One reporter called Pakistan "India's arch enemy". Pakistan was much smaller than India. Yet its growing population stood at close to 180 million people, and many of them were poor.
    The country's people were divided into different ethnic groups. They spoke languages like Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto or Baluchi. Nearly all Pakistanis are Moslems. Yet the county is racked by conflict, violence and corruption. It is usually ruled by military dictators though sometimes its leaders are chosen by elections. By contrast, India for all of tits faults remains a democracy.
      Graves didn't stay long in Pakistan. He moved north to the small county of Nepal. Here too he found another country in upheaval. He left Nepal after two weeks. Still his six month journey to South Asia had been fruitful. His religious beliefs had deepened. Now he openly told people "I'm a Buddhist." Yet in India where he had spent most of his time hadn't too many Buddhists. Buddhism was born in India. Yet most Buddhists now live in east Asia not India.
      Don Graves came back to India a changed man. He seemed now to be "blissed out" as devotees of eastern religions used to say. He was always smiling. His eyes were now often narrowed but in joy not in fear. On his Indian journey he'd met Isabel MacRae, a  woman in her 40's from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. They moved in together to share an apartment in Port Coquitlam, a growing suburb to the east of Vancouver. Dan went to see his former wife and growing daughter Stacy. His former wife had met another man and the former couple parted on good terms.
      In their Port Coquitlam apartment Isabel and Dan set up a Buddhist shrine. They burned incense, bought a carpet that was made in the Middle East and sat on the carpet meditating for hours on end. Dan read Buddhist texts and to make money he drove a truck for a small trucking firm. "That man's not on drugs, is he?" his boss asked one of Dan's co-workers. "He seems far out." The co-worker assured the boss that as far as he knew, Dan didn't smoke, drank or took any drugs at all.
   At night time, after work and then sessions of meditations, Don would walk alone in the dark along quiet suburban streets, past houses, strip malls and apartment buildings. Some of these streets had no sidewalks and were poorly lit. Don was taking his life in his hands now since many drivers only saw him at the last moment.
     In March 2002, a driver in a late model car drove into Dan and killed him. Ironically, Dan Graves had journeyed through supposedly dangerous areas of the world and had emerged unscathed. It was in Canada, a land that was thought to be one of the safest in the world that he met his end. "Far more Canadians die in traffic accidents every year," says one criminologists, "than get murdered.  About 600 people did every year from  some violent act. Yet over 2000 Canadians die on the roads  and in traffic accidents."
     In 2002 Dan Graves was one of those 2000 people. His death at the age of 54 was a tragedy. His search for truth ended in death on a suburban highway outside Vancouver.
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 45. Part Two.

      The Life and Death of A Canadian Mystic by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.


         Don Graves, like many other young Canadians of his generation, went to hippie enclaves, took L.S.D. and met many women. A tall, blonde, good looking youngster, Don attracted many females. Yet his parents, Matt and Lillian, weren't too happy about Don's new friends. They wanted their younger son to follow his elder brother Edward's path.
    Ed was now studying at the University of Toronto, and was enrolled in mostly biology courses. Meanwhile Don kept bringing home teenage boys and girls who were as Don said, "Just far out." "I'm worried about my son," Lillian confessed to her friends. "He's really into being a hippie. And I'm sure he's taking drugs."
    Yet soon Don tired of drugs. He was turned on by texts on Buddhism and Eastern religions by one of the many self-styled gurus he met in the streets of Yorkville. He read Aldous Huxley's  'The Perennial Philosophy' and books by Alan Watts about Buddhism. Drugs, he realized, weren't what he was looking for. Enlightenment was.  Then he met Felicia, a more conventional woman and they had a daughter called Teresa. They got married and Don left the hippie scene. They moved to Vancouver and Don got a job in a factory that made pipes. Felicia took a job in a bank.
     Overtly Don looked like he'd settled down.  Yet soon he became restless. He kept on reading books on eastern religions and told one of his workmates, "I must go to India and Pakistan." At one time Don got involved with a group of people who were trying to save Kitsilano from developers. At one time he canvassed door to door for the group. Yet in the end, he said, "Politics isn't my trip."
Meditation was. After work and on weekends, Don would sit in his and Felicia's bedroom and meditate for hours. He found great joy in doing this, and sometimes experienced blissful moments..
     Tensions surfaced between Don and Felicia. He started to put money away in a private bank account. Then one day he told his wife, "I'm off to India. I want to leave you." His wife and he now lived in a Vancouver housing co-op. He turned his co-op shares over to his wife, along with two thousand dollars. He was on his way to south Asia.
     In 1985 he flew to India. He saw before him in this huge subcontinent worlds of pain, poverty and starvation. Yet he also saw in this country of nearly 900 million people many inspiring religious shrines. He went into caves where 60 years ago, the British writer E.M. Forster had set part of his novel called 'A Passage To India'. He bathed in the Ganges River along with thousands of Indians. The Ganges river is over 2,000 kilometres long. It is sacred to many Indians who believe that it is the goddess Ganga brought down from the Milky Way.
    It is also terribly polluted. "The Ganges," writes George Black, "absorbs more than a billion gallons of waste each day." Three quarters of the waste, Black points out is raw sewage and the rest is effluent from industry. "It is one of the ten most polluted rivers in the world," Black says. It also stinks to high heaven. Anyway Don bathed in the river and caught no diseases from doing this, except catching at one time a mild flu. He moved through massive crowds and ended up in north east India. He even slept in the streets of Calcutta and no one bothered him.
   

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians. Chapter 45. Part One

   The Life and Death of a Canadian Mystic by Dave Jaffe. Part One.


   "I couldn't help it, officer," a driver in his 30's, told an R.C.M.P. officer one dark wet night in March of 2002. "This guy was just walking in the road right in front of me. So I didn't see him till my car was right on top of him. My God, is he dead?"
     Don Graves, a 54 year old man now lay flat on his back. He was indeed dead. He had stopped breathing on a highway in Coquitlam, a growing suburb to the east of Vancouver. As the March rain pelted down, the R.C.M.P. officer took notes in her notebook and finally an ambulance with its screaming siren drew up alongside the dead man. It was yet another death on Canada's highways, one of 2000 that happen every year.
     The dead man, Don Graves, was a divorced father of a daughter in her 20's, who now lived in Seattle, Washington. His former wife Felicia, worked in a bank in downtown Vancouver. Don Graves had searched for spiritual enlightenment in several countries, some of which were thought to be dangerous. Yet he had died in a middle class suburb of Canada. Now his searching was over. He was gone for good.
     "Don was a seeker," his older brother Edward said when he heard about Don's death. "He wasn't satisfied living here." 'Here' was Willowdale, an affluent part of Toronto where Don grew up. He went to primary and secondary schools in Willowdale and seemed to enjoy life. He played several sports but golf was his favourite game.  By the time he was 15, he'd play golf with his father, a salesman for an auto parts company and sometimes Don would beat his dad.
    Yet then in his late teens his life changed. He started to read books by Aldous Huxley like 'The Doors of Perception' and 'Heaven and Hell'. Here the nearly blind Huxley wrote about his use of L.S.D and mescaline.  Dan's focus soon shifted from playing golf to using mostly illegal drugs like marijuana and L.S.D. The English-born Huxley had died in California about four years before Dan started reading his works. Yet now it was 1967 and there were other devotees of L.S.D. and other drugs who were out there, preaching the virtues of taking L.S.D. Timothy Leary the L.S.D. advocate was touring North America, touting the virtues of this drug and other hallucinogens.
     "Tune in, turn on, drop out," Leary told North American youth. Meanwhile the Oregon-born novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters  were out in California, handing out L.S.D. as if it was candy. Thousands, then tens of thousands of Canadian youth became hippies, at least for a while. They flocked to Toronto's Yorkville district and the Kitsilano area of Vancouver. They put flowers in their hair and slept or 'crashed' as it was called in old houses, that soon had ten or more people living in these places. They wore jeans, and colourful costumes and openly smoked marijuana and made love in public. It was the springtime of what was later called 'The Counterculture'.
   
    

The Politics of Some Canadians. Chapter 44. Part Five by Dave Jaffe

      Change Your Name, Change Your Status. Part Five by Dave Jaffe

      "Bland is good," said longtime Ontario premier Tory 'Brampton' Bill Davis. By the mid-1980's the long Conservative rule in Ontario was ending. Yet that didn't bother Arthur Ross.
    He was by now a happy very hard working lawyer who moved among some of Ontario's elites. In the federal election of 1988 he supported free trade with the United States while his party's leader John Turner was against it. In that election Ross played no part at all.  Yet he remained a federal Liberal while voting Conservative in the election. He didn't tell people how he'd voted.
      In any case, Ross was now a genuine member of Canada's upper middle class. His motto might have been, "Change your name, change your social status." It worked for him and it worked for many other successful Canadians too.
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians: Chapter 44. Part Four.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status by Dave Jaffe. Part Four.


     Arthur Ross nee Rosen had made it in Trudeau's Canada. He ended up sitting on a number of  boards of  a few small companies and on one or two boards of larger firms. Here he met Liberal Party members and some Conservative Party members too. too. from the 1940's to the late 1980's, the Ontario Tories  ran the province as successfully as the federal Liberals ran Canada throughout most of the 20th century.  Ross decided that he agreed with some of the Conservative opinions that were floated around the board rooms.

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltiocs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 44, Part Three.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status. Part Three, by Dave Jaffe.


           In 1969 Arthur Rosen graduated from the Faculty of Law and soon became a lawyer. Yet though he got a job with an Anglophone law firm in downtown Montreal, the political situation in Quebec was heating up. In Canada's centennial year of 1967, Ross and his fiancé Deborah Steinberg went along with hundreds of thousands of others to the world's fair held in Montreal. They enjoyed themselves at the fair called 'Expo 67' and the fair was a landmark in Canadian history. Yet at the same time, French  President Charles De Gaulle came to visit Canada.
     "Vive le Quebec libre'  or "Long live a free Quebec" de Gaulle told a mostly separatist crowd at Montreal's city hall. By saying this, De Gaulle encouraged a growing separatist feeling among Quebec's French Canadians.
    In 1968, Pierre Elliot Trudeau won the general election for the Liberal Party and became Canada's new Prime Minister. Yet just around that time, Rene Levesque stalked out of the Quebec Liberal Party and set up a separatist political party later to be named the Parti Quebecois.
      "We are Quebecois," Levesque said in his book that was soon published after he left the Quebec Liberal Party. "We are attachéd to this one corner of the earth where we can be completely ourselves."
Levesque's book was called 'Option Quebec' and called for a completely independent Quebec.
      Then in 1969, a big sovereigntist march demonstrated outside  McGill University. The march was led by the Marxist political science instructor Stan Gray, whom Ross had clashed with several times when they were both undergraduates. Bombs also kept going off at anglophone targets.
      In 1970 a violent separatist cell kidnapped the British consul in Montreal James Cross. A second cell kidnapped and then killed the Quebec Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau imposed a War Measures Act on Canada. Troops patrolled the streets of Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City. Some troops came right past Ross's downtown law office. Hundreds of separatist sympathizers had their houses searched and some ended up in prison.
     "Just watch me," Prime Minister Trudeau said when asked by reporter Tim Ralfe how far he would go to crush the terrorist Front de Liberation de Quebec that claimed credit for the kidnappings and bombings. Trudeau did indeed crush the FLQ, which never re-appeared after 1970. Yet the sovereigntist threat didn't disappear. In 1976, the separatist Parti Quebecois led by Rene Levesque won the provincial election. Soon tens of thousands of anglophones left Quebec.
       Ross and his wife Deborah and their two children were among the people who fled.  Ross's mother Leah and his father had told Arthur about the French crowds that attacked Jews in east end Montreal in the 1930's and 1940's. "They hate us the Francoisen," Leah told Arthur and his wife Deborah. Arthur thought that the Quebec sovereigntists weren't as anti-Semitic as the French Canadian fascists of the 1930's. Still neither he nor his wife wanted to take any chances. They moved to Toronto, where Arthur got articled as a lawyer. "I miss Montreal," Deborah said. "But this is a nice place to bring up children.
     Ross remained a federal Liberal. He ended up as the president of Liberal constituency organization. Yet as usual he kept his religion in the background and changed his surname officially to Ross. He rarely went to synagogues though his children, a son and a daughter did go to Hebrew school. In the wealthier atmosphere of Toronto he felt at home. He was now a bond expert and his law practice thrived.
     

     
   
   
    
     

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Dome Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 44: Part Two

  Change Your Name, Change Your Status. Part Two by Dave Jaffe


        Arthur Ross never did find the correct reply to the WASP woman's question demanding to know why Jewish women at McGill University dressed up while Wasp women didn't. At least he didn't find the correct answer to the question when he was young. Still, years later as a successful lawyer he did figure out the right reply. Yet by then he didn't care.
     Still as  an undergraduate he ploughed through many courses in political science, history and economics. He scored high in exams. Also like many young Canadians bent on success, he joined the Liberal Party of Canada.
       Ross had no time for the Progressive Conservatives, who he knew hadn't been very welcoming to Jews in the past. As for the newly-formed New Democratic Party, it leaned too far to the left for Ross. "The Liberal Party is the party of power," a professor of political science said in a course that Ross was taking. "In the nearly 100 years of Canada's life, Liberal governments have usually run the country." For example the professor pointed out that in 1963 which was the time he was lecturing, Liberal governments ruled in both Ottawa and Quebec City.
     Ross knew how powerful the Liberal Party was and soon took out a membership in the party. Then he ran for the university party's executive and ended up on the party's policy committee. Here, he made many contacts and also ended up meeting leading Liberal lights, like Canada's Prime Minister Lester Pearson and Quebec's minister of Natural Resources, the fiery Rene Levesque.
     Ross studied hard too. He graduated from the faculty of arts with an honours degree in political science and then enrolled in the Faculty of Law so as to be a lawyer. He was on his way to affluence. He printed up a business card with his soon-to-be adopted name on it. 'Arthur Ross' it said. Still in law classes the teachers still referred to him as "Arthur Rosen".
     Ross studied French too and became quite fluent in the language. As French Canadian nationalism and separatism were now rearing their heads, he knew that if a lawyer couldn't speak French in Quebec he or she was operating with a big handicap.
    1969 should have been a great year for Ross, and in a way it was. He graduated from the Faculty of Law and was now an accredited lawyer. Yet there were a few speed bumps on his road to success.
     

Right, Left and centre: The Poltiocs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 44, Part One.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 44, part one.


     Rosenbaum became Rosen which morphed into Ross. It was a typical progression in a surname. Many Jews and other ethnics changed their surnames and/or shortened them. Then they could blend seamlessly into the English-sounding Anglophone Canadian majority. No one  would bother you at least with a name like Ross. Or so Arthur Ross, born Arthur Rosen, figured.
      Arthur Ross as he liked to call himself, was a tall dark haired adolescent who went to McGill University in downtown Montreal in the 1960's. Back then many male students wore suits, ties and overcoats or raincoats. Women wore trendy dresses or skirts, coats and cashmere sweaters. Of course the clothes people wore back then, did depend on how rich your parents were.
      A few years later, great cultural and political rebellions swept across parts of the globe. Old dress codes vanished like many other habits. Yet when Arthur Ross first showed up at McGill, those events lay a few years away. So Arthur Ross usually wore a suit and tie.
     He came from the Jewish area of Snowden in Montreal. He was bright and aggressive and like many Jews back then had a fierce desire to succeed. He won a scholarship to McGill University, which no longer restricted Jews from becoming students there, which it had done for a quite a few years before. Art's father was a cutter in a dress factory of which he was part owner. Hyman Rosen, Art's father, had slaved long and hard to sent his only son to McGill. His eldest daughter Rachel became a primary school teacher, while his younger daughter Frances was a legal secretary.
     "Don't screw up Arthur," Hyman Rosen told his son on Arthur's first day at McGill. "We're depending on you." Arthur didn't intend to make mistakes. He knew the road to riches lay through getting a profession. At McGill, he aimed to study to be a lawyer and get a job with a big legal firm. Yet at this stage in the early 1960's, most big law firms were staffed by White Anglo-Saxon protestants, or 'WASPS' as they were called. The WASPs for the most part didn't like Jews and would never hire one.
    At McGill, few Jews that Arthur ever knew  dated  WASPs or vice versa. The smoking corridor that lay just outside the university's main library was called 'The Gaza Strip' . It surely took its name from the strip on Israel's western border. Here, Israeli troops often clashed with Arabs who tried to sneak across the border into Israel and kill Israelis.
      No gunfire ever shook the Gaza strip at McGill. Here, students, both Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
exchanged pleasantries while smoking tobacco. Yet in classrooms and outside them, few Jews and WASPs hung out together. And sometimes the feelings of Christians towards Jews did surface.
     "Why do your Jewish women dress up so much?" one young WASP lady asked Arthur when he first came to McGill. "We non-Jewish girls dress much more simply." Someone could have told this young woman that dressing up was a way for an ethnic minority to assert itself. Yet Arthur didn't have a reply for this question - at least not yet. He was only 18 years old and hadn't yet studied the sociology of ethnic groups. So he remained baffled by the question, at least for now. Yet that would soon change.
    
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 43. Part Three.

   From California to Canada: One Woman's Journey Through Adulthood. By Dave Jaffe. Part Three.


     Marion Lansbury was a hardworking  teacher. She started out in Vancouver as a substitute teacher. Then she got a permanent position in a school. Soon, she went back to university and got a Master's degree in education.. She then applied for and got a job as a principal in a primary school.  Yet here she ran into problems.
     Politically speaking , Lansbury leaned to the moderate left. Although she had spent time as a child in Louisiana and then Texas, she didn't buy into the conservatism of those states' politics. She favoured strong government programs, single  payer Medicare, and had always opposed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Still, most politics bored her. Robert her partner was a strong supporter of the New Democratic Party. Marion went once with him to an N.D.P. convention and she never went to another convention again. "It was just so boring," she said later about the convention.
    Yet despite her basic liberalism, she was a perfectionist, and had to remain in control of everything that was going on around her. "These are just typical character traits of an adult child of an alcoholic,"said one woman who heard about Marion's personality. This woman's husband taught in the school where Marion served as principal. Lansbury demanded very high standards of performances from the teachers. A teacher at the school remarked, "This woman's a fanatic. Sure this place pays my bills but I've got another life outside this place. You just can't please this lady."
    In fact, Marion Lansbury couldn't please Robert her partner any more either. She now retreated from Robert and spent days alone in the house they shared near the Vancouver waterfront. She couldn't understand why Robert loved her. Soon, they split up and Lansbury went back to teaching, and not being a principal.
      Marion Lansbury's lack of self-worth and some other hurtful features of her personality came straight from her alcoholic mother's inability to be a true and loving parent. After Lansbury retired, she went back to the United States. She journeyed into the south Pacific area and spent many happy hours in the sun. She enjoyed herself there but never overcame the trials and traumas of her childhood. Yet after all, who does?
   

ZRight, Left and Centre: the Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 43, Part Two.

    From California to Canada. One Woman's Journey to Adulthood by Dave Jaffe.


       Marion Lansbury graduated from the state university near San Francisco in the late 1960s. She'd never lived in a big city before. Yet she adapted. She met two men at different times and made love to them both. Yet these casual affairs didn't last. "Why do these men like me?" she often wondered to herself.
      Obviously Lansbury had a problem with her low self- image. Yet this didn't stop her academic progress. Having finished with her undergraduate work, she enrolled in a pre-med course at the same university she'd graduated from. Yet she didn't have the money to pay for all the required expenses. So she joined the Peace Corps.
    "Ask not what your country can do for you," President John F. Kennedy told his U.S. audience in his 1961inaugauration speech. "Ask what you can do for your country." Kennedy set up the Peace Corps to harness the youthful idealism that was floating around the U.S. of A. Thousands of young Americans flocked to the Peace Corps and ended up working  for two years in faraway lands.
     Lansbury joined the Peace Corps in the late 1960's. She took her training on another Californian university campus. She found the preparations and courses tough and grueling. "The psychological tests and exercises were very stressful," she recalled .Along the way a number of her fellow inductees dropped out. Yet  again, she survive and thrived.
    She chose to go to South Korea and for weeks on end she learned Korean, in a course given by a young male instructor. When her training ended, a big military plane whisked her  across the Pacific  Ocean. She ended up in a small village in South Korea where she spent two years teaching children.
    Sometimes she visited Seoul, South Korea's capital city. At one evening meal when she was in Seoul, explosions rocked the  city. North Korean soldiers and spies had sneaked into South Korea to kill the South Korean leader Park Chung Hee. The attempt failed and most of the infiltrators were killed. Marion could hear shooting and see streaks of tracer bullets flash around in the night time sky. "It was frightening," she said.
     Once out of the Peace Corps, Lansbury became a teacher in a primary school in northern California. On a summer trip to Mexico she met and fell in love with a short transplanted Englishman named Robert.  She followed him to Vancouver, B.C.  in Canada and ended up teaching there.
      At times, Canada disappointed her. The weather in coastal British Columbia  was often cold, rainy and dull. Some Canadians she met were hostile to Americans. "Americans run this county," one man told her. "And they don't run it very well." Others questioned why an American like her should come here and take jobs away from native born Canadians. To forestall this criticism, Marion became a Canadian citizen. Yet she also found that Canadians lacked the patriotism of Americans. "Your Canada Day celebrations are very tame," she once remarked.
     
     
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 43, part one.

    From California to Canada. One woman's journey to adulthood.


      Marion Lansbury wasn't happy. In less than an hour another school day would end,. This 12 year old knew what was waiting for her in her family's suburban Pasadena home. Her three younger siblings would be tearing around their southern California home, causing her all sorts of problems.
Their faces would be smeared with jam and food from the fridge. Their noise would fill the house.
      "Oh my God," Marion said as she walked through the front door of her home. She saw her siblings up to all sorts of mischief. "What are you kids up to, to-day? And where's mom?"
    Yet she knew already where her mother was. Antonia Lansbury was no doubt lying down on her a and her husband's twin bed in one of the home's bedrooms on the second floor. She was probably enmeshed in an alcoholic haze. A half empty glass of scotch liquor was usually perched on one of the bedroom's side tables. Next to the bottle of scotch often sat a half empty glass of liquor. When Marion went upstairs to check her mother's condition, she was right again.
     Marion knew before the age of ten, that her mother had serious problems with life. A few years later, she told some of her friends, "My mum's a lush. All she does is drink liquor."
     Now in this spring time afternoon of 1957, Marion had to bring order to the Lansbury home. She had to clean up the faces of her younger brothers and sister.  She had to cook a meal for all of them. Then, too, she remembered she had to do the laundry and clean up the house. She also had to prepare the meals for her siblings to take to school tomorrow. Her father, a big chunky man was far away, steering a big plane across the Pacific Ocean for a private U.S. airline.
     "Fly the friendly skies of United," went one popular airline advertisement of a few years later. Marion Lansbury stood in the living room of her home and asked herself, "Where's the people who will help m and where's my friends?'' She looked out at the house's  small back yard that also needed cleaning up, and sure couldn't see too much help for her. Once again, she was on her own, confronted with problems that no 12 year old should have to face alone.
     So Marion had to grow up early but not always happily. Her blue eyes turned cold. Her blonde hair became grey early on. At first, she bloated up and became fat. Later on, when she reached her adult medium height of  five foot five inches, she slimmed down. Soon she took up smoking cigarettes. It was a necessary evil  but a necessary vice.
       Yet Marion was also a very intelligent young female. IQ tests were all the rage in the 1950's. Marion nearly always scored in the top 5 percent when taking these tests. When she was 17, she won a scholarship to a nearby state university. Here she studied biological sciences and benefitted from the tremendous post- Sputnik surge in spending on science that happened in the U.S. in the late 1950's. When the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into launching rockets into space, science student like Marion Lansbury benefitted. Then in the middle of her academic career she moved to northern California.    
      "I want to go and study somewhere else," she told her family and a university guidance counselor. In fact, she wanted to leave her family and her still alcoholic mother Antonia behind. Which she did.
     

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 42. Part Three.

   A Second Soldier Who Came Home Alive. Chapter 42. Part Three.


      By the time he reached his 50's, Graham Stark had quite an aggressive personality. "It's hard to stop him talking once he's started a conversation," someone remarked after meeting Stark a few years before he passed away. "He doesn't always listen to you."
    One group of people Stark did listen to, were the powerful people in the federal Liberal Party and he knew many of them. They included the powerful Vancouver Member of Parliament Ron Basford, Margaret Trudeau's father and Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau's father-in-law, James Sinclair, and the father of former B.C. premier Christy Clark.
    In later life, Stark left his job in the lumber company he was working for, and tried his hand in private businesses. Here he failed once or twice. Yet he died a loyal federal Liberal, who  after wading through massive amounts of paper work, did get a decent veteran's pension for himself and his wife. Only once was he deeply disappointed when he went to the movies.
     In the mid-1990's, he went to see a film about D-Day called 'Saving Private Ryan'. It starred Tom Hanks and Matt Damon and was directed by Steven Spielberg. It was a great hit and packed in the crowds to local theatres. "Yet there was no mention of the Canadian armed forces," Stark complained. "We just weren't on the screen at all."
      The movie similarly ignored British soldiers (although they were mentioned), Polish troops and fighting men from some other nations too. 'Ryan' after all was a typical Hollywood production that was pro-American and nothing else.
     Graham Stark senior passed away in the early 21st century in Nanaimo, B.C. He was  survived by his wife Lillian and his son Graham Junior. Like many other Canadians who came of age in the 1930's and 1940's, he had helped defeat German Nazism, Italian Fascism and Japanese militarism.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Another Soldier Who Came Home Alive. Chapter 42, Part Two.

    Part Two of 'Another Soldier Who Came Home Alive'.


       Graham Stark didn't remember World war One. It ended in 1918 and he wasn't born until 1925. Yet he never forgot World War Two. He marched across France, Belgium and Holland, killing and shooting Germans, and being shot at.  At war's end in 1945 he had moved slightly up the army ranks from private to sergeant. Yet most importantly he came home alive. He saw many of his fellow soldiers fall in battle and die.
    Of course Canadian casualties in the Second World War were dwarfed by those of other countries. "Over 27 million people  died in the Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany," one military historian said. And the Japanese armed forces killed somewhere between 10 and 15 million Chinese in the 1930's and 1940's. "My wife hates the Japanese," one transplanted American said about his Chinese-born wife. "They did terrible things in China during World War Two."
     Anyway Graham Stark came home to British Columbia in 1945. He was only 20 and had to find a job, which he did. He ended up working for a B.C.-based lumber company. This son in a family of 11 children got lucky. By the late 1940's, the B.C. forest industry was on a roll. In 1947 a new B.C. forest act granted what later became Tree Farm licenses to lumber companies. These leases, forest industry Ken Drushka asserts, "constituted the bestowal of an immense windfall capital gain on the recipient at no cost."
     As a wave of prosperity rolled across postwar Canada, millions of new and old Canadians flocked to suburbia. They moved into new homes and the need for wood to build these new houses seemed endless. B.C. forest firms thrived. Graham Stark spent a large part of his adult life, working for big B.C. lumber companies. He travelled throughout east Asia and spent some time in Singapore and Indonesia.
      In Indonesia in 1965, a military coup led by General Suharto overthrew the left leaning government of president Sukarno. Suharto's troops wiped out over half a million communists. Suharto had thus made Indonesia safe for capitalism and Suharto and his family became very rich.
     Canadian, American and Japanese lumber firms poured money into Indonesia and other tropical lands. Woods like radiate pine and eucalyptus trees were planted on islands that were cleared of all native vegetation. "The forest industry is no longer the preserve of the north of the world," forestry expert Patricia Marchak pointed out in the 1990's. In tropical and southern forests, trees  like the eucalyptus and radiate pines,can be grown much faster and grown more quickly than say cedars in British Columbia.
      New technologies came on stream to process these trees and investment flowed south. "North American forests are in decline," Marchak pointed out. A good company man, Stark didn't question these changes. What was good for the company he worked for, was good for him. He accepted the free enterprise system. As for his politics, he joined and remained a federal Liberal supporter for most of his life. He met his wife Lillian Waterland in the Liberal party. They had a son also called Graham who acquired a massive knowledge of world politics.
     Stark senior had little time for the Conservative Party of Canada. "It's too much King and British Empire stuff for me," he said. He also kept clear of the New Democratic Party ands its predecessor the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or the C.C.F. "It has little time for our armed forces and I wouldn't vote for it," he said. he was overjoyed when his friend, (later Senator) Ray Perrault won a seat as a federal Liberal Member of Parliament in Burnaby in the Trudeaumania year of 1968. Perrault edged out not only the Conservative contender but also the leader of the N.D.P., namely Tommy Douglas. Douglas, now a left wing icon, had led Saskatchewan for many years and had paved the way for Medicare.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politcs of Some Canadians: Chapter 42, Part One. Another Soldier Who Came Home Alive

     Another Soldier Who Came Home Alive - Part One.


          Graham Stark huddled in a landing craft, side by side with a dozen or more young Canadian men. At this moment he was a scared young Canadian who was only 19 years old. He could hear machine guns crackle, shells explode overhead and soldiers screaming in pain as they lay wounded or dying in the waters of the Channel just off the French coastline.
     For this was D-Day, June 6th 1944. Graham was just one of 150,000 Allied troops who would have to fight their way onto French beaches. Waiting for them were thousands of well-entrenched German soldiers. Thousands of Allied troops died on D-Day and after. Many thousands died afterwards as they fought their way across France, Belgium and Holland On D-day alone over 350 Canadians were killed and hundreds more were wounded. As the commanding general U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower looked on, the struggle began for Allied control of Western Europe. And 14,000 Canadian troops were part of that struggle on June 6.
      Now the landing craft that Graham Stark was on fell open and there was the beach right in front of him. It was a sliver of the French coast even now littered with bodies of dead and wounded men and packed with barb wire. "Oh my God," Graham Stark said to himself. "What a bloody mess." Then he was thrown into the battle for Europe. He grabbed his gun tightly and soon he was another combatant. The Canadians fired on the German troops who seemed to be popping up everywhere, shooting, throwing grenades and killing dozens of Canadians.
  This horrible battle was necessary. It was just another part of the Second World War. This war lasted from 1939 to 1945. In the end, the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States, Canada and other countries defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and a militaristic Japan. At war's end, Germany, Japan and Italy were crushed and lay in ruins. Yet the war's destruction left over 55 million people dead and devastated many parts of Europe and Asia.
      "When I entered Warsaw in Poland in 1945," said the American journalist John Gunther, "I don't think I saw more than two buildings in the entire city left standing."
      Canada back then had no more that 10 million people. Yet over 55,000 Canadians, mostly men, were killed in the war. Tens of thousands of other soldiers came home injured in mind or body or both. This by the way was the second time in 25 years that Canada had been involved in a world war. The First World War lasted from 1914 to 1945 and over 60,000 Canadians died in that war.

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians: Chapter 41, Part Seven. by Dave jaffe.

  A Happy Couple in a Sometimes Conflicted Church. Part Seven.
    


    The Unitarian Church in Vancouver as pointed out in the last two parts had many clever and talented people in its congregation. Yet this didn't always prevent arguments from breaking out from time to time.
     In the early 21st century, Tilda Sweet and Barry Look stayed on the sidelines as another controversy erupted, shortly after Steven Epperson took over as the church's new minister  Epperson was a bearded intellectual who was a former Mormon from Salt Lake City. "Be fruitful and multiply," the Bible said and Epperson and his wife had followed this injunction. They had five children.
    Epperson finally calmed the troubled waters of the church and led it very successfully for many years afterwards. He was still there in 2016. Phillip Hewett had been retired since the 1990's yet he remained a presence in the church. Of course the Unitarian church didn't please all people. "It's just a club," former member Jennifer Wade said about it. Wade was a founder of Amnesty International in B.C. She wanted the church to bring justice as she saw it to the wider world. After many years at the church Wade left the place in the early 21st century.
    Other people dropped out too along the way including Evelyn Riley and Margaret Wilkins. Whatever their disappointments with the place they didn't speak about them. So this church didn't please everybody. Yet it did do important things. It did help the poor by sponsoring refugees and running a weekly food bank. It remained a liberal religion at a time when most other churches were conservative. It also brought happiness and spiritual happiness to many people in Metro Vancouver. Tilda Sweets and Garry Look still enjoy it there. So do many others.
      "Religions endure," said Rodger Garbutt a former social science teacher and talented visual artist. The Unitarian religion is close to 500 years old. This time frame is dwarfed by other religions like Hinduism which is 5,000 years old and Judaism which has been around for over 3,000 years. Catholicism has been around for over two millennia.
     When the Unitarian came to the corner of 49th and Oak Street in the late 1950's, the Social Credit Party ruled the roost in British Columbia and the Union Nationale ran the province of Quebec. Both political parties have vanished. Strong Canadian presences like Eaton's department stores and Simpson Sears are now defunct. Other signposts have also vanished. Yet the Unitarian church is still there. It's a success story and has carved out for itself an important place in Vancouver.
     
     
                                 

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: :Chapter 41. Part Six.

    A Happy Couple in s Sometimes Conflicted Church. By Dave Jaffe. Part Six.


     The Unitarian Church of Vancouver didn't only attract talented musicians and visual artists. One of Canada's well known novelists, Margaret Laurence came to this church in the 1960's. Later she returned to Ontario.
      The church also had among its members some very clever people. "David Donaldson is a brilliant economist ," Jennifer Wade said about Donaldson. This was true. Donaldson taught for many years at UBC. Then there was John Smith, a tall talented mathematician who worked with  mathematically challenged youngsters at the B.C. Institute of Technology. A married couple, Merva and Wally Cottle both taught histology or the science of tissues at UBC.
    Wally Cottle was a scrapper who told the minister Sydney Morris, "I'm going to get rid of you." And he did. Another clever teacher was Joyce Griffiths who had many children. "I don't bring them all together at one time," she once confessed. "If they all get together, they usually end up arguing." Griffiths had a Master of Science in physics and taught for many years at the B.C. Institute of Technology.
     Randy Mackinnon had a Masters of Arts in the social sciences. This ambitious man from Alberta found a true outlet for his talents by setting up philosopher's cafes at the Unitarian Church on Friday nights. They proved to be very popular. "This church meets all my needs," Mackinnon said as his philosopher's cafes were in full swing.
     

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadisn by Dave Jaffe: A Happy Couple in a Sometsimes Conflicted Church.

     Chapter 41. Part Five by Dave Jaffe


    Like any other organization the Unitarian Church of Vancouver was a hierarchy. At the top of the pyramid stood women like Patience Towler, Dorothy Goresky, Evelyn Riley and Art Hughes. Towler was a sometimes stern police type who kept troublemakers in line or got them out of the church. She came from England and showed up at the church in the 1970's. In the 21st century she went back to England.
     Evelyn Riley was a thin elegant woman who had a great love for opera. Dorothy Goresky had been a medical doctor from at least  the 1950's to the 1990's. This was a rare accomplishment in an age when women were routinely kept out of lucrative male-dominated professions. She was a skilled bureaucratic practitioner who kept the church functioning efficiently.
      Art Hughes was a tall military veteran who was always collecting money from many organizations. He always defended the Canadian military against any critics. "I don't trust him," said one woman who at one time invited Hughes into her house. Yet this was a minority opinion in the church. After he passed away, Hughes received a glowing obituary in the 'Globe and Mail'.
      The Unitarian Church attracted some very talented people. The Saskatchewan born Harold Douglas Brown played classical music on most Sunday mornings at the beginning of the church service. This is the way many newcomers and longtime members of the congregation were welcomed to the church.  The Boston-born Jeanni Corsi was another talented musician who often played the piano at Unitarian services. She not only played music. She also composed songs and operas. The tall Elliott Dainow took over Harold Brown's job of playing music every Sunday, when Harold Brown retired in the 1990's.
     Along with these talented pianists , many other gifted people came to the church to perform. Carol Davis sang some beautiful music as one of the lead singers in the Unitarian choirs. Davis was a very fine singer who at one time tried unsuccessfully to get a job with the Vancouver Opera. Still, she had a great voice and the Unitarian choirs performed some fine music. "The choirs kept the church together through some very difficult times," said former choir director Sally Novinger.
      A fine actress Susan Chapple appeared at many Unitarian services. So too did another talented actor namely Joy Coghill and her also very competent actor and daughter Debra Thorne.
        Not only actors flocked to the church. So too did visual artists. A wonderful artist named Don Slade often had shows at the church. Margaret Wilkins was another talented visual artist who painted beautiful abstract works. As some of these people mentioned got older, new younger persons came along.  Meanwhile many brilliant academics came to the church also.
     
     
     

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Chapter 41. Part Four.

    A Happy Couple in A Sometimes Conflicted Church. Part Four.


        As the Unitarian church progressed into the 1990's, the surrounding neighbourhood changed its character. Many Asian Canadians, who were Chinese in origin, bought up many of the nearby houses. Some of these new and old Canadians worshipped at Buddhist temples. Others flocked to the evangelical  and Anglican churches. Most of these churches preached an unyielding conservatism.
       Filipino newcomers meanwhile ended up in Catholic churches that had little time for women needing abortions or same sex couples. "We're just not wanted in this church," one gay man whose partner was HIV positive said about one Catholic church he used to go to. The Unitarian church welcomed many gay and lesbian people and contrasted sharply with other more conservative places of worship.
     The Unitarian church was at times also a haven for people with personal problems. "People come here who have problems," said Merva Cottle, a histologist or tissue expert, who taught at UBC's Faculty of Medicine. "Sometimes they solutions to their problems here and sometimes they don't. If they don't ,they often leave."
     A number of disturbed men showed up at the church from time to time and then left. One man who arrived in the 1980's, used to look obsessively at well dressed women who had dark or brown hair. He walked past one woman's house quite a few times. Then  he wrote a letter of apology to the woman. He then wrote a memoir of his time in the church and then left.
      " There's too much information in this work," a church member named Virginia said about the memoir. The memoir vanished down the memory hole. Yet Virginia soon left the church too. Another man showed up at the church with money problems. He was paid money by the church to officiate at some services. Yet then he went out into the larger world and clamed even more money from some other people. He also persuaded a church member who'd inherited money to buy him a car.
        This man vanished from the church also after someone disagreed with what he was doing.
       Some ministers ran into problems at the church and had to leave. Sydney Morris was a young Midwestern American minister who came to the church in the 1990's. She was forced out of her job after pressure from irate members. Another minister came but was also forced to leave. "Where's a Canadian minister?" one congregant asked. "They're all Americans coming up here." Another American minister showed up in the 1990's. Andy Backus was a tall American who had lived for some time in upstate New York. He put his Ph.D. after his name and this riled up some church members. The Vancouver Unitarians had many Ph.D's in their midst and most of these people didn't advertise their degrees. At last in 2002 the church got a permanent minister again, namely Steven Epperson, a bearded former Mormon from Salt Lake City, Utah.
    
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Chapter 41, part three.

      A Happy Couple in A Sometimes Conflicted Church; Part Three.


    More upheavals lay ahead of the Unitarian church in Vancouver in the 1970's onward. One good thing that happened was the founding of the environmental organization 'Greenpeace' in the church's basement. Very few churches back then would have allowed such a gathering of environmentalists in their place of worship, let alone found an organization to fight for environmental issues.
    Yet then came two problems. One was a male minister who ended up sleeping with a number of Unitarian women. He was fired when someone uncovered his exploits. Another dispute arose in the 1980's that was harder to solve. By now in the 1980's, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States of America. His aggressive rearmament program provoked anti-U.S. demonstrations across parts of western Europe and North America. Protestors stood foursquare against Reagan's plans to plant Cruise missiles and Stealth bombers in the heart of Europe. These new weapons of course were aimed at the then-Soviet Union.
     In the Vancouver church several women from the pro-peace group 'The Voice of Women' came out in favour of the protestors. They urged the church to support the anti-Cruise missile and anti-Stealth bomber marchers. "They're just a bunch of old Commie women," someone said contemptuously about these older females.Yet the women were right to point out that U.S. president Ronald Reagan was dangerously raising tensions again and renewing the Cold War.
     Still, quite a few people in the church didn't agree with the women's politics. "The Unitarian Church is socially progressive," says Barbara Taylor, who with her husband John, ran quite a few prize winning Bread and Breakfast hotels. "Yet the church isn't economically progressive." In other word, Unitarians are all in favour of gay or lesbian ministers, same sex marriages and a woman's right to choose. The controversies that roiled the United Church  of Canada in the 1980's, about gay ministers for example, never happened in the Unitarian church. Unitarians quickly accepted gay and lesbian ministers and same sex marriages, some of which were performed at the church.
     Yet many Unitarians at the church don't support making trade unions stronger, raising the minimum wage and governments taking a stronger role in the economy. Also many Unitarians were quite hostile to the Soviet Union. Tilda Sweet supported the Voice of Women on the issue of  opposing Stealth bombers and Cruise missiles. Barry Look sided with Ronald Reagan.
     In the end after much debate, the church took part in the huge anti-war demos that took place in Vancouver in the early 1980's. Yet it took some arguments for this to happen before the Unitarians joined the demonstrations. By now, the Unitarian Church stood out a  beacon of liberalism among Vancouver churches. It invited into its church  speakers like Murray Dobbin , Linda McQuaig  and the fiery Canadian nationalist Maud Barlow all of whom were definitely on the left, and often to the left of many Unitarians. It married same sex couples. It also married people and performed memorial services for those who had no religion. "They do things we can't do," a member of  another church not  far from the Unitarian Church said later. This was true.
     

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 41, part two.

  A Happy Couple in a Sometimes Conflicted Church: Part Two.


     What is the Unitarian faith? Basically it was yet another religion that came out of the reformation in 16th century Europe. Unitarians believed back then that God, the Son and the Holy Ghost were all one being. This of course smacked of heresy to the Catholic and Orthodox churches back then. They attacked the church's doctrines and the Unitarians that worshipped there. Still, the Unitarians managed to survive in places like Transylvania in present day Romania. The  Unitarian doctrines later trickled out to other parts of Europe.
    In the early 19th century it came to Canada and spread westward. By the 1950's, most Unitarians were  liberal believers. "Unitarians believe in the dignity of the individual," one clergyman said. Few Unitarian sermons contain references to Christ, the Holy Ghost or God for that matter. Nor do their hymns. No crosses grace the walls of any Unitarian church. And there are no stained glass windows in any Unitarian church either. "God is noted by its absence," says one Unitarian .
      Yet all of this freedom didn't always lead to harmony. "There's really no theology in Unitarianism," said Sally Novinger, a former choir director at the Vancouver church. "So there's plenty of disagreements." The first outbreak of dissent hit the church in the 1960's. If the 1950's was an age of innocence, the 1960's was an age of rebellion. Dozens of groups came out of the woodwork to claim a place in the sun.
   Feminists, Quebec sovereigntists, anti-Vietnam war protestors, First nations, environmentalists, hippies and yippies, and gays and lesbians demanded social justice in Canada.  Religions faced challenges too. "A cultural revolution was under way in the 1960's," writes the American socialist Michael Harrington. "It challenged moral certitudes and practices with the authority of  centuries behind them." Organized mainstream religions, Harrington points out, declined in importance and many Eastern and pseudo religions sprung up. Casual sex, casual drugs, and casual dress became commonplace.
    Cultural and political challenges surfaced in the Vancouver Unitarian church too. Many of its members tried L.S.D and marijuana which then as now were illegal. A few members left their wives or husbands to practice what they called back then "free love". At one Unitarian conference held in Canada in the late 1960's, American black  power advocates demanded social justice and money as reparations for what they said were centuries of  oppression of African-Americans.
   As this age of dissent faded somewhat in the early 1970's, it left some scars behind. Yet the Unitarian Church of Vancouver, like most other churches survived. Tilda Sweet and Barry Look came here to the church in the 1970's, and stayed. At this time it had a congregation of about 600. It went into the 1970's on a firm footing. It still had a future ahead of it.

    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politcs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 41, part one.

A Happy Couple in A Sometimes Conflicted Church. Chapter 41, part one.


      They looked like a happy couple and they were. He was a tall heavy set man from the state of Delaware. She was a short thin woman who grew up in Saskatchewan. They weren't on the same political page though. Tilda Sweet stood on the left politically speaking. Her father was a staunch New Democrat. So was she and all of her siblings. She taught English as a second language in the public school system.
     Barry Look was a civil engineer who worshipped free enterprise. "The market is the magic," U.S. President Ronald Reagan used to say. Barry Look agreed. He loved Ronald Reagan. This couple stayed together despite their political differences. They rarely fought with each other and they live in a comfortable home on Vancouver's west side which they bought before housing prices went through the roof.
    Yet the church they went to was often divided on issues of politics and some theological points. And unlike Tilda Sweet and Barry Lord's view points, these differences sometimes swelled into open if nonviolent conflict. The church they went to for years was and is the Unitarian Church of Vancouver. It came to its present place on the city's west side in the late 1950's.
      "It was an era of church building," one observer pointed out. It was also the first real age of mass affluence. For many Canadians, the 1950's, gave them their first taste of the good life. Millions of Canadians, new and old ones moved out to the suburbs. They bought, houses, cars and t.v. sets for the first time. They raised children, usually two or three of them and they were happy. Or so the history books tell us.
    Of course there were millions of Canadians who weren't affluent. Yet even many of these people later went on to enjoy the good things of life. "The 1950's was an age of innocence," former premier Dave Barrett said. Groups like the First Nations, feminists, ands others weren't on the radar screen back then. They showed up later.
     Still, to make the Unitarian Church of Vancouver really take off, you needed a strong take charge leader. Philip Hewitt was that man. He came out from England in the 1950's, a tall, angular graduate of Oxford university. . He breathed new life and ambitions into the then Unitarian congregation that worshipped in a small church near the corner of Granville and Tenth Avenue. He persuaded some Unitarians to take out mortgages on their homes and lend the money towards building a new church.
    Vancouver, he noted was spreading out north, east and south and the church should move with the times. The Unitarians for the most part agreed.  So on one Sunday in the late 1950's a new big Unitarian church with three buildings opened up on the north east corner of 49th Avenue and Oak Street.
      "I was a bit worried," one Unitarian member recalls., "because I'd taken out a mortgage to help pay for the church property. Yet in the end it all worked out."

    

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Part Four.

   The Soldier Who Came Home Alive by Dave Jaffe. Part Four.


          In 1952 Lenny Soames went to Korea and came as a soldier to this war torn peninsula. He was shot at and fired back. He  killed communist troops with his rifle and grenades. The killing disgusted him. "I can never forget the stuff I saw," this tough street fighter said. Once his army tour was over, Soames left the army and never went near it again.
    "I have no time for military parades, medals or any of that stuff," he said. "After what I went through in Korea I won't go near war and armies." Yet though his time in the Canadian army embittered Soames, it had taught him some skills. He had learned how to kill and disable anyone with his bare hands. Once back in Toronto, he was soon on the move. He headed west to Vancouver and tried to get a job there as a longshoreman. When that failed , he shuffled for a while from job to job. Sometimes he worked as a bouncer in night clubs. This job had its dangers.
      Drunken youth in night clubs sometimes attacked Soames in fights, seeing him as an easy target, since he was usually the shortest bouncer on the floor. They soon found out they'd made a mistake. Soames often made mincemeat of these foolhardy youngsters. He usually threw them onto the floor, and sometimes broke some of their bones.
      Then Soames tired of this work. After his daughter was born, he took a job as a security guard at a local private golf club. "The people there are well-heeled and a little snooty," he said. "But it pays the rent." Lenny and his wife split up in the 1970's. Yet he got together with his daughter every weekend and always kept up with his support payments.  Soames was one tough man but he was also a dutiful father who was kind to his daughter. In the 1980's he often met her at the Kingsgate Mall on East Broadway on Saturdays and listened to her as she told him about her schooling and other experiences.
     "Soames was a tough guy," said someone who knew him from the old weight room at the Y.M.C.A.  on Burrard Street. He surely was. He died in the early 21st century in Vancouver, a fighter to the end.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe:Chapter 40, part three.

     The Soldier Who Came Home Alive by Dave Jaffe. Part Three.


     The Korean War was another horrible conflict in the Cold War between communists countries and capitalist  ones. Yet it was in this war that Lenny Soames fought and killed. In Canada in the early 1950's he had no job, no money and he hungered for adventure. He saw a poster in a Toronto street urging young men to join the army. So he went to an army office and signed for the Canadian army.
     Once at the army base at Pettawa in central Canada, he realized he'd made a mistake. The officers in the Canadian army demanded total obedience. Soames spent his days marching, polishing his shoes, making his bed and obeying all orders from above. Yet the officers saw in Soames the making of a real fighting man. Soon he was out on the firing range, learning how handle guns and mortars. He was also taught to kill with a bayonet and his bare hands.
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 40, part Two of 'The Soldier Who Cam Home Alive'.

  The Soldier Who Came Home Alive. Part Two. by Dave Jaffe


    The Korean War changed Lenny Soames' life. It started in 1950 when the North Korean dictator
Kim Il Sung launched an invasion of South Korea. South Korea was then ruled by a right wing dictator Syngman Rhee. For 50 years the Japanese had ruled the whole of Korea with an iron hand. Then in 1945 the Japanese invaders were defeated in the Second World  War. The Japanese then vanished and the Great Powers took control of Korea. The Soviets backed Kim Il Sung who ruled the north. The U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee ran the south.
    Both Rhee and Sung were tough dictators. Neither man gave a fig about human rights. Both threw their political opponents in prison and/or had them killed. Yet there was a key difference between these two strong men. Rhee had collaborated with the Japanese rulers of Korea. Sung had fought the Japanese. He also tilted some of his programs towards the workers and the poor.
    In the late 1940's, Sung went to see Josef Stalin, the unchallenged communist ruler of the Soviet Union and most of Eastern Europe. Sung told he wanted to invade South Korea and unify the peninsula under his rule. "If you get kicked in the teeth," Stalin told Kim Il Sung, "I shall not lift a finger." If Sung ran into trouble, Stalin told him, China would help him and not the Soviet Union. Yet Stalin didn't disapprove of Sung's plans.
    So on June 25, 1950 Sung launched an invasion of South Korea. The invasion took South Korea by surprise and North Korean forces soon gobbled up large parts of South Korea including the nation's capitol of Seoul. Yet then the Americans counter-attacked. Led by their famous general, Douglas MacArthur they entered the war . They landed troops at the waist of the peninsula near the 38th parallel.
    The mostly American forces and their allies including Canadian soldiers pushed back the North Koreans and started to march north towards China. China led by Mao Tse Tung had just completed its communist revolution.. Mao did not want to get involved in she Korean War. He and his generals were planning to soon invade Taiwan and reunite all of China. The Chinese government warned the Americans to stop advancing on China. The U.S. ignored the warnings and allowed MacArthur to keep marching north. MacArthur said that he would help liberate China from communism.
     In the just completed civil was in China the U.S. government had heavily backed the right wing Guomindang. When the Communist defeated the Guomindang it fled to Taiwan. Kim Il Sung pleaded for help from China and the Chinese government came through. "We will get the troops home by Christmas," MacArthur said in effect. The Chinese troops played havoc with that prediction.
     In November 1950 Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River which was the border between North Korea and China. They inflicted a massive defeat on the Allied forces who then fled south. The war ended up at the 38th parallel. Below the 38th parallel, Syngman Rhee ruled the roost. Above the 38th parallel, Kim Il Sung held the power. Hostilities went on until 1953 when the war ended.
     Korea was now a devastated land. "When the elephants clash only the grasshoppers get hurt," the Vietnamese used to say. Like Korea to its north, Vietnam was a small country sandwiched in between great powers. Vietnam was a grasshopper. China and the U.S. were the elephants. 1 million Koreans died in the war. So did 50,000 Americans, 300 Canadians and over 130,000 Chinese.


    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 40, part one: The Soldier Who Came Home Alive.

  The Soldier Who Came Home Alive by Dave Jaffe. Part One.


         On warm summer mornings in the late 1960"s, Lenny Soames would often come to Vancouver's English Bay. He came with his attractive dark haired wife and their baby girl. As the day heated up, Lenny would lie on  a blanket in the sand gazing out to sea. Then when the clock hit midday, he would get up and run for half an hour or so around the sea wall or jog into Stanley Park.
     When his run was finished, he would come back to lie beside his wife and child. "It's a lovely day," this very short, incredibly muscular man would often say.
     His wife Aviva often didn't always agree. Lenny Soames was often out of work and then the whole Soames family would end up at the welfare office.  Mrs. Soames didn't like going down to the welfare office at all. "They ask you all sorts of questions," this 20's something woman would complain. "And then they give you a pittance to live on. Lenny doesn't mind living on welfare but I hate it."
     It keeps us alive," Lenny Soames would say." It'll do until I find a job."
     "You can't keep any job you get,' his wife would say. "That's your trouble." Then the two of them  would end up squabbling. To be fair to Lenny Soames, once his daughter came along, he did stop losing or leaving one job after another. Still, Aviva couldn't forget the times he just got up and quit a job.
      Lenny Soames met Aviva Rapaport on a dance floor in Vancouver.  He was one tough guy who grew up in the streets of Toronto. "A sanctimonious icebox," the visual artist and writer Wyndham Lewis once called Toronto. Others referred to it as "Hogtown'. Regardless of its nicknames, or the slighting references to it, Toronto then and now was and is Canada's largest city. It was where the big banks and large industrial firms had their head offices. For a times it was also home to fanatical Irish Canadian Protestants who loathed Catholics, especially the ones in Quebec.
      "I hated it there," Lenny Soames would say in his later life. His father was a warehouseman who worked hard and drank hard. His mother was a no-nonsense housewife who had four children to look after on her husband's modest wages. The family lived not far from where Morley Callaghan set his Toronto novels. Lenny Soames dropped out of school at the age of 15. "Never did me any good," he said about his school days. Like many others who didn't like the education business, he forgot that it was in schools where teachers  taught him how to read, write and do some mathematics.
     Now he was on the loose, a tough sometimes wild teenager who may have been heading for jail. Yet then up popped the Korean War. It  changed  his life.