was George Orwell Wrong: Part Two by Dave Jaffe

  Was George Orwell Wrong: Part Two




         As George Orwell was putting the finishing touches on his novel 'Nineteen Eighty Four', a communist revolution was about to sweep across China. British troops were clashing with mostly Chinese guerrillas in Malaysia. Communist led Vietnamese were fighting with French troops  who wanted to crush the Vietnamese struggle for independence from France. Meanwhile in Indonesia, Dutch armies were trying to suppress the Indonesian fight for freedom from Holland.
     So Orwell's dystopian novel wasn't about the future. It was about the present. As Dorian Lynskey wrote in  a very fine article on Orwell in 'The Guardian Weekly' in May 2019, "Orwell felt he lived in cursed times." He was right. Now the world has changed again. The Soviet Union has vanished. China has now embraced a type of capitalism. Yet new tyrants and right wing populists like Donald Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and president Duterte in the Philippines win elections and wield power.
    In China President Xi Jinping tightens the lid on his country's people. And in Russia, Vladimir Putin has gobbled up Crimea and parts of the eastern Ukraine. These two men are real tyrants. All over parts of the world, Orwell's prophesies once again seem to be coming true.
    "There are alternative facts," said U.S. president's Donald Trump's aide Kelly Anne Conway to justify her boss's lies. What she said is truly Orwellian. So was Orwell right? Is the world doomed to be run by tyrants and/or far right populists? Yet one trend denies Orwell's pessimism. "It is not wrong to rebel," said the brutal Chinese Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung.. A communist very like Orwell's Big Brother, Mao helped kill millions of Chinese. Still Mao's comment is now endorsed by millions of people.
     In '1984' Winston Smith and Julia are arrested and tortured. In Room 101. O'Brien, who is Winston's main torturer tells Winston that any hope of rebellion is futile.Winston says that 'the Proles' or working class will rebel. O'Brien denies this and finally Winston accepts O'Brien's verdict. He betrays Julia and ends his life a broken man, believing that any dissent in thought or action is hopeless.
      Here I believe Orwell was wrong. People do rebel against tyrants.. In 2015 and later black Americans protested against police who shot and killed unarmed African Americans. In France the yellow vest movement sprang up in 2018 to demonstrate against the crushing taxes that French president Emanuelle Macron slapped on poorer French people. And in 2019 protests against injustice have erupted around the world.
     "Iran gave a glimpse into what might have been the biggest anti-government in the 40 year history of the Islamic Republic," said a 'National Post ' story in November 2019. Hundreds of thousands of people in Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Hong Kong, Ecuador, Chile and many other places have taken to the streets to protest unjust rule. Hong Kong, Iraq, Algeria and Iran are basically tyrannies. Yet in these places protesters have frightened the ruling governments. They and others have given the lie to Orwell's pessimism. Here, Orwell, born Eric Blair was wrong.
     At this time, most  of the governments mentioned above are too entrenched to be overthrown.  Still, people do protest injustice and sometimes rebel. Orwell was wrong here. Yet on most other points he was right. This is why 'Nineteen Eighty Four' is still a best seller and will be for many years to come.

Was George Orwell Wrong? Part One by Dave Jaffe

Was George Orwell Wrong? by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




    In 1948 George Orwell was dying. The tall cigarette smoking author's body was racked by tuberculosis. Still, he continued  to work in the bitter cold of Scotland on his soon to be famous novel called 'Nineteen Eighty Four'.
     When it was published a year later Orwell was dead. Yet to-day 70 years after it came out, Orwell's novel  has once again climbed into the best seller's list. Its terms like Big Brother doublethink, Room 101, telescreen ,unperson, and memory hole live on long after Orwell's death. And the term 'Orwellian' has been used many times to describe total lies put out by brutal dictatorships and sometimes popular democracies.
     Quite a few people dished Orwell's book after it came out and for many years after that. The Marxist author Isaac Deutscher thought Orwell was a complete paranoid. The literary critic Walter Allen saw the book as a pessimistic novel written by an unhappy dying man. Raymond Williams who helped set up modern cultural studies dismissed the book.
      Others later on like Allan Bloom and the Czech novelist Milan Kundera thought 1984 was a poor novel. Anarchists like Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian preferred Orwell's memoir of his time in the Spanish Civil War called 'Homage To Catalonia'  to 'Nineteen Eighty Four'.
   "For every one artist there'll be ten critics" a visual artist said in the Vancouver art studio of 'Basic Inquiry' in the 1980's.  Critics continue to put down '1984' and yet it's still popular For Orwell's novel wasn't just about the future. It was close to the truth about the present he was living in.
     As he typed away, the world was dividing into two great power blocs, namely the United States on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. They had been allies in the fight against German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism. Yet now they were poised against each other. Both had combined to crush Hitler's German Nazi machine and now Germany lay in ruins though only after Hitler had killed close to 40 million people. Japan too was devastated and was defeated though it too had killed millions of people throughout East Asia.
     In The Soviet Union, dictator Josef Stalin was planning another  wave of murderous purges in the Soviet Union and thoughout his Eastern European satellites. Meanwhile in the United States, the federal government was setting up the Central Intelligence Agency and other secret organizations that would help overthrow dozens of governments around the world in the next fifty years.

Two Peiople Who Got the 2019 Election Right by Dave Jaffer: Part One

  Two People Who Got the Election Right : Part One


          Two people, a capitalist and a communist did tell  the truth about the just recently finished 2019 federal election.
   The capitalist or businessman if you prefer, Kevin O' Leary told the truth after all the ballots were counted. O'Leary who has been a star of a t.v. show and a very successful entrepreneur made the comment that if Conservative leader Andrew Scheer had gone to the various Pride parades around the country, he'd now be the new Prime Minister of Canada. I think O'Leary was right but I'm glad that Scheer didn't attend the various Pride Parades. Had he done so I'm sure he would have won the election.
      Of course the Conservatives did win 22 more seats than they'd won in the 2015 election. They also won more votes than the Liberals. Yet that didn't translate into more seats than the Liberals. So Justin Trudeau squeaked back into power and now heads up a minority government.
      I still think that Mr. Scheer would have had to explain a little more his stands on abortion and same sex marriage that he personally was against. Yet there's no doubt that his non appearance at Pride Parades cost him a lot of votes - which was good. And this brings me to the communist side of the story.
      Liz Rowley heads up the miniscule Communist Party of Canada. I've never voted for the communists and don't plan to do so in the future. Yet Ms. Rowley held a meeting in Vancouver long before the election of 2019 was underway. A friend of mine went to the meeting and came away terrified at the prospect of a Conservative victory.
     "She said that if Scheer won he'd take Canada back to 1945," he said. "The Conservatives would make savage cuts to every social program they could." Now I tend to feel that communists can be very alarmist. Yet this time I think M. Rowley was right.
     Long before the election started in earnest I wrote Mr. Sheer a letter. "Are you planning to scrap the universality of the Old Age Security Payment?" I asked Mr. Scheer. I also asked him if the would make cuts to the Guaranteed Income Supplement and also raise the age if retirement from 65 to 67.  I waited a few weeks and received no reply to my letter. Then I sent Mr. Scheer another letter with the same questions. Again no reply came my way. I then sent another letter to the Conservative leader on this issue and once again he sent me nothing back.
    While I waited for a reply to my letters on payments to seniors I did receive a letter from Mr. Scheer  which replied to my concerns about the Conservative policies on the environment. All this lack of answers about cuts to payments to seniors confirmed my belief that the Conservatives were planning big cuts to social programs. Yet thankfully the Conservatives didn't win the election.
    Right now the Liberals aren't planning any big cuts in social programs. This doesn't mean they won't make any in the future. After all, the Chretien Liberal government tore big holes in Canada's social programs in the 1990's. So who knows what Prime Minster Justin Trudeau will do in the future? Yet right now most of the federal programs won't be cut.
     In any case Mr. O'Leary and Ms. Rowley were right.  Two people at opposite ends of the political spectrum told the truth.  In the end,Andrew Scheer lost the 2019 federal election and I'm so glad he did.
      

No Space In A Hosing Co-op by Dave Jaffe: Part One

No Space In A Housing Co-op: Part One.




      Meetings can drive me up a wall. I hate sitting in them and that's one of the reasons I left political parties. Yet there's one meeting I do enjoy going to and that's the orientation meetings at my co-op. Here, often a dozen or so people show up who want to join and live in our co-op. Yet there's a problem  we face as a co-op. We usually have to turn away nearly all the people who show up because we only have one spare apartment in our 42 unit co-op building. 
     At the orientation meeting I and about seven or so others interview our prospective co-op members. But in the end, after the interviews and maybe another hour of discussion after the prospective applicants have left, we have to e-mail most of the people who showed up. The text message usually says "Sorry but you have been refused. We will keep your application on our waiting list for the next year."
     At our last orientation meeting which stretched out over four hours our choices boiled down to two people: a young indigenous male and a an older retired woman. Both candidates were excellent choices to move into our co-op. In the end we chose the senior. Yet all of us felt the indigenous applicant was a good choice too. And there were at least four or five other applicants who could have also fitted into our place .
    So who is to blame for this often agonizing situation I and others find ourselves in? I blame the federal government in Ottawa that hasn't developed social housing in decades. Look at the stats. In 2011 which is the last year I could get reliable figures on, there were about 14 million residences or apartments and houses in Canada. Less than 600,000 or about 4 to 5 per cent of that total were social housing units. This is a very small figure compared to other countries like Singapore or Germany.
   "Nobody's building any social housing these days," one housing activist told me a few years ago.
This was true. The N.D.P. government of John Horgan's in British Columbia has launched a program to build social housing. Yet this is the only government across Canada that's doing this on any scale. Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has pledged to house  the homeless and build social housing and we'll see if the Liberals live up to their campaign promises.
     In the just recent 2019 federal election N.D.P. leader Jagmeet Singh vowed that if he were elected Prime Minister of Canada, his government would build 500,000 units of social housing. Yet Singh's New Democratic Party finished in fourth place and at this time has no chance of forming a federal government.
      After the last three orientation meetings I've ben to, I write letters to the Prime Minister of Canada and urge him to build more social housing. So far my letters haven't had much of an impact. Still, I'm forever hopeful. Anyway who knows? Maybe one day Canadians will elect a government that will build hundreds of thousands of units of social housing. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that blessed day.

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Six by Dave Jaffe

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Six




     Would Martin Luther King  have condemned the movements that sprung up after he died? Some he might have praised. Others he might have shied away from.
     Tamara Burke is  an Alabaman born social activist  She was talking to a 13 year old girl in the 1990's. "My mother's boyfriend is sexually abusing me," this girl said in effect. After this, Burke started a #MeToo movement. It targeted men who sexually harassed women. In October 2017, this movement went viral after one woman alleged she'd been sexually harassed by media mogul Harvey Weinstein Soon scores of women publicly denounced certain men who they claimed had molested them. People like Charlie Rose, Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful men were toppled from power after being accused of sexual molestation.
     The #MeToo movement would never have become so powerful if feminism hadn't been reborn in the early 1970's. King probably would have supported this movement. On the other hand, he might have had trouble dealing with the movement of transgendered people.
     For the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior in some ways was a very conventional man. He grew up in the 1930's and 1940's, in the very conservative U.S. south. His father and smother ran  a very conventional home. And King didn't always get on with assertive women. He clashed with black activist Ella Baker, a brave woman who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
    King didn't stand alone on this issue. "Women's position in the civil rights movement is prone," said Stokely Carmichael the charismatic leader of SNCC. Many women, black and white ones, were repelled by the machismo of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War protestors. That was one reason why women set up feminist women-only groups in the 1970's.
     Nearly all the leaders of the civil rights movement were men. Until the 1970's men ruled the roost in left wing, right wing and all movements of whatever political persuasion. Male domination of nearly everything was the order of the day. This only started to change with the emergence of feminism. Even to-day most of the top people in the world are men.
     Yet that said, Martin Luther King Junior deserves the praise heaped on him. He was an exceptional man. His tactics probably wouldn't have worked to-day For in the past fifty years, the world has changed dramatically from what it was in say, 1965. "I have a dream," he said in his famous speech in Washington, D.C,. in 1963. His dreams didn't all come true. Yet his struggles on behalf of social and racial justice, peace and equality stand out as an awesome example of activism in this age of conservatism.
     He was truly a great American.
    

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Five by Dave Jaffe

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Five.




       It's hard to know whether Martin Luther king Junior would have agreed with some of the groups that sprung up after the civil rights movement appeared.
    Even in his lifetime some African-Americans had no time for his non-violent approach to social change. "Violence is as American as apple pie,"  said H."Rap" Brown,  a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or "Snick" as it was called. Snick in the mid-sixties swerved away from the path of peaceful change and embraced black nationalism. King never denounced Snick. Rap Brown was later imprisoned and is still in prison to-day.
     The black revolutionary Malcolm X. jeered at the 1963 March on Washington , D.C. He dubbed it "The farce in Washington". In 1966 Huey Newton and young other African Americans paraded in some African American areas armed with guns and confronted police. At  one time, Newton who grew up in the Oakland Bay area  went along with some of his friends to California's state capitol of Sacramento to confront the state government. On that day most of the Panthers openly carried guns.
     Police clashed with the Panthers in several cities and killed some Black Panthers. Under these police attacks, the Panthers faded away or then supported moderate African American politicians. At the start of their movement, the Panthers set out ten basic points to lift African Americans out of poverty and free them from white racism. I don't think King denounced the Panthers. Yet I doubt he would have embraced the Panthers who had no time for King's non-violent approach.
     Native Americans were the poorest of all U.S. citizens in the 1960's. I forgot to mention them in the previous parts of this entry. In the late 1960's many of them looked at the civil rights movement and were spurred into protesting their status. Some of them joined with King in 1968 in his proposed march on poverty in Washington. Others occupied the former prison and island fortress of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay. Others picked up guns and had shootouts with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
     The Lakota Sioux native Leonard Pelletier fled the U.S. for Vancouver, Canada in the mid-1970's. Pelletier was charged with killing two F.B.I. agents in a clash on an Indian reservation  at Wounded Knee. He was later deported back to the U.S. where he was tried and then imprisoned. He's still in prison to-day.
      Other people from the white New Left like the Weathermen and some maybe who were African Americans planted bombs at draft boards, companies that made war products, police stations
  and U.S. government  offices. In 1971 alone, over 2,000 bombs went off in the U.S. many of them aimed at political targets. "America was born out of a genocidal impulse," said U.S. activist Tom Hayden.in  effect. True or not, many left wing Americans condemned the U.S. war in Indochina, drawing parallels between the U.S. past wars on native Americans and the prevailing war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
     U.S. prisons were also the scene of many uprisings in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Many of these protests were led by African American prisoners. George Jackson was a black man and prisoner who wrote a best selling book called 'Soledad Brother'. He was killed in a shootout with prison guards. His brother Jonathan also died in a hostage taking incident in Bay area courthouse. The last great rebellion in the U.S. occurred in the Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971. "You're doing a great job," New York state governor Nelson Rockefeller told journalist Tom Wicker who was invited by hostage holding prisoners to the prison.
     Later Rockefeller sent in police and others to crush this rebellion. Close to three dozen people were killed in the shootout that ensued. Among this group were some prison guards.
     The yippie Jerry Rubin went even further in his verbal assault of American institutions. "Kill your parents," he told some of his audiences in the late 19760's. Rubin later modified this statement
     It's unlikely that Martin Luther King would have agreed with Rubin or many other revolutionary groups that surfaced in the late 1960's or early 1970's. He wouldn't have endorsed their open embrace of violence. He was a Christian minister, a believing Baptist and was close to his well-known minister father. King embraced non-violent protest and had no time for bloodshed.

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe: Part Four.

   Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Four




          "I have a dream," Martin Luther King said, in his speech at the great March in Washington, D.C in the summer of 1963. Yet his dream of racial equality and racial justice is still a long way away. This is true not only in the United States but also in Europe, Canada and other parts of the world.
     In the U.S. at this time,  a right wing president Donald Trump slashes one social program after another. The Republican Party, that Trump belongs to, applauds these actions while remaining firmly anti-abortion, anti-gun control, anti-same sex marriage and anti-trade unions. It also has little sympathy for African-Americans even while about 10 per cent of black people who vote, do vote Republican. Meanwhile millions of African Americans live in dire poverty while Hispanic refugees from Central America are parked in camps that are prisons. Many of these people are separated from their children.
     The U.S. remains a country where one in five of its people have no medical coverage or inadequate medical care plans. Many of these people are African Americans and other people of colour. "If all the discriminatory laws in the U.S.," wrote Michael Harrington in the early 1960's, "were immediately repealed, race  would still remain one of the most pressing political and moral problems in the United States." Harrington was right. Despite all the anti-racist laws that were passed in the last 50 years and despite the fact that an African American Barack Obama has been president, the U.S. is still more unequal today than it was when Dr. King was alive.
      The U.S. hardly stands alone here. In Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the events of 9/11 and the great economic recession of 2007 and 2008, have turned many European countries into very unequal places. In Germany, Italy, France and other places millions of voters have turned away from political parties of the centre right and centre left. Instead they vote for racist and anti-immigrant parties. The social democratic parties survive in some Scandinavian countries. Elsewhere they survive on borrowed time or have vanished.
   In eastern Europe, that was  freed from the heavy hand of communism, openly anti-Semitic and anti Moslem governments have taken power in Hungary and Poland.
     Of course this is not the whole story. 1968, the year that Reverend King was shot dead, saw massive rebellions across the world. Yet they nearly all failed. In France, Czechoslavakia, Mexico and other countries the old conservative governments remained in power. In Vietnam the terrible war dragged on, despite the massive Tet Offensive launched in early 1968. Yet in the wake of these failed rebellions, new groups suddenly appeared to claim equality. Feminists, gays, lesbians, environmentalists, Black Power advocates, Quebec sovereigntists and a massive anti-Vietnam  War movement emerged from the shadows.
      In the next twenty years women won the right to abortion, ran for political office and often won. Women became lawyers, doctors, business people, and filled many other professions and jobs. Openly gay people ran for office and sometimes won .In Canada for instance, in 1970 there was only one women Member of Parliament, namely Grace McInnis, whose father James S. Woodsworth. had been a famous socialist. Yet nearly fifty years later in 2015 there were 90 women Members of Parliament out of a total of 238 M.P.s This was still  not true equality. Yet it was a tremendous step forward.
     The rise of the civil rights movement that King was part of, transmitted the elixir of dissent and protest across vast swaths of people in the U.S. and then to other parts of the world. "Let freedom ring," King proclaimed at the 1963 March in Washington. His message was heard not just by African Americans but by many other people in his country and elsewhere. As King's friend and comrade the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the 1984 Democratic convention,the civil rights movement paved the way for many other movements for justice and equality. And the fact that Reverend Jackson was running for the Democratic nomination for president showed how far African Americans had come.

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe: Part Three

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Three..




       Martin Luther King Junior was an apostle of non-violence. All his campaigns were based on the ethic of never meeting violence with violence. In his lifetime King was imprisoned. handcuffed, tear gassed and assaulted. He and other members of his organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were committed to never lifting their fists to reply to violence, King himself was nearly killed twice before he was shot dead.
      African Americans paid a terrible price for their campaign against racial injustice. Medgar Evers was one of the American south's promoters of racial justice. He was shot dead in his house in the summer of 1963. A few months later a bomb went off in a church mostly attended by black people and killed four African American children. Arsonists burned down many churches in Mississippi where black people  came together and planned to tear down white racism. Police frequently sprayed protestors with tear gas, hosed them with water cannons, unleashed attack dogs on anti-racist marchers and clubbed many of them to the ground.
    "I don't believe in this non-violence," one black man told me tin the summer of 1963. To this man it only meant that "we black people get hurt. Nobody else does." Three people were killed in the Mississipp Summer of 1964, two of whom were white and one who was black. Two people were killed in the middle of the 1965 demonstrations in Selma. And when King was assasinated, major rebellions broke out across the United States and involved mostly African Americans
      When the fires of this revolt were crushed, close to 170 people nearly of whom were  black, had been killed mostly by police or national guard troops. King was a believer in non-violence. His faith in this tactic was grounded in his religious faith and his study of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian struggle for independence. "I haven't been elected as the King's first minister," said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill "to negotiate independence" with what Churchill called "a half naked fakir". This  was Churchill 's name for  Gandhi. Yet in the end Gandhi's non-violent campaign did win India its independence. King thought he could use Gandhi's tactics to win equality for African-Americans.
   Unfortunately many white people in the United States reacted to King's nonviolent campaigns with terrible brutality. They were anything but apostles of non-violence. Even before King was killed police and others killed black people. The great riot in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965 was triggered by police violence. The great Detroit riot in 1967 was met by police and National Guard force. Over two dozen African Americans were killed in this rebellion.
    The Reverend King's hopes that he could win his campaigns for racial justice didn't always get respect from American forces of law and order.

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe: Part Two.

   Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior : Part Two.




    The officially approved story of Martin Luther King Junior's life usually ends in 1965. By the middle of this year King had won the Nobel Peace prize, played a major role in the desegregation of the American South and had created tremendous pressure on then president Lyndon Johnson to pass a Voting Rights Act. This act for the first time in  a hundred years enabled many African Americans, especially those in the south to vote in elections.
    After this, King's later acts aren't mentioned. Then under the very conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan, King's birthday on January 15th was proclaimed a national holiday.  "King's elevation to national sainthood during the 1980's and 1990's," writes historian Tom Adam Davies, "was freighted with political purpose."
     Davies is a lecturer in American History at the University of Sussex in England. He notes  that the struggle for black equality in the U.S.A., from about 1954 to 1965 is celebrated by many Americans. "These moments of U.S. history," Davies writes, "are woven into a story of racial enlightenment." It's a soothing morality tale, he points out "in which King's noble civil rights movement opened white America's eyes to racial injustice."
     After 1965 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, everything just great. There's no need for any more marches or the militancy of the Black Panthers or the Black Power movements of the late 1960's. The U.S. is once again a perfect equal society that Reverend King and hundreds of thousands of black  male and female protestors, and some white allies had created. Or so goes the officially approved version of King's life.
      Of course people should remember that Martin Luther King Junior didn't create the civil rights movement.  Let's recap some of the highlights of this great tide of protest that flowed across the U.S. after World war Two. The 1954 Supreme Court's decision in 1954 in Brown Versus Board of Education struck a big blow in favour of equal education for black and white students. Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus where black people were forced to sit in Montgomery and other southern cities that had public transportation. Parks helped trigger the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 that propelled Reverend King into a leadership role in the civil rights movement.
     Black and then some white youth sat in at white only restaurant counters in the American south in 1960. The protestors refused to move even when white assaulted and beat them. Young African Americans and some whites rode on buses into the segregated south in 1961. White mobs beat these protestors viciously. Then the Freedom Riders as they were then known as,were thrown into prisons where they were treated terribly. Black people helped create the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 where white and black people tried to register African Americans in the most racist state in the union.
   Reverend King was only part of this great movement for racial equality. Yet all movements need a leader and he became the most important leader in this struggle. His assassination in 1968 was a major blow to the African American struggle for justice.

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Juniosr by Dave Jaffe. Part One

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe.




   Come. Let us now praise Martin Luther King Junior a very exceptional American.. So many people in the United States have done so. This short dark skinned minister shook America to its foundations between 1955 and 1968. His struggle for justice for African Americans and later for others ended when he was shot dead while still only in his late 30's.
     In fact whatever your politics are you can praise King. Hard core conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other right wingers have done so. So do American liberals. Yet there's a crucial difference that looms between the two political camps in America. The left wingers and liberals point out that their county is still a very unequal place and that white racism still thrives.
Limbaugh, Beck and others say no. America, they argue is a post racial country which people like Martin Luther King helped create.
     Yet why do right wing pundits and politicians praise King? For the reverend King in the closing years of his very life leveled many tough words at the U.S. of A. In a famous speech at a New York church in 1967 he denounced America's war in Vietnam. He even went further than this. My country, he told the congregation, "is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world."
     The year before in 1966 he led an unsuccessful campaign to desegregate the northern city of Chicago. "Chicago," he said in effect at the time," has few lessons to learn about racism from Mississippi." The state he was talking about was back then the most racist region of America.  Yet in Chicago King faced bitter and sometimes violent resistance from white people.
     And when he was shot dead in March 1968 in Memphis Tennessee he was in the middle of supporting a civic workers' strike of mostly black people. This supportive role was part and parcel of his anti-poverty campaign to wipe out poverty in America. In fact, Martin Luther King in 1968 was planning to lead a poor people's march on Washington, D.C. King vowed that his non-violent army of the poor would not end their sit in until poverty was abolished in America.
     So how could such a left leaning courageous man be praised by white conservatives? It's quite simple. This great man is dead and his earlier deeds are praised. The later King's actions are forgotten or smoothed over. Then after he was killed, his birthday was made into a national holiday.
     Let's just recap some of King's great deeds. His great campaign in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and the March on Washington in the same year, led directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act abolished parts of the terrible white segregation regime in the southern United States. Then this father of four led a march through Selma and the state of Alabama in 1965 that gave the U.S. the Voting Rights Act. This act finally allowed many black people and other people of colour  the right to vote. Today many black people and others sit in the halls of power which they were kept out of for many years. These were two awesome changes in the United States.
     In the middle of his campaign in Alabama King won the Nobel Peace Prize and his face and his struggle achieved world wide coverage. As people might have said  back then, if the internet had been around "King and his struggle for racial justice went viral."

Andy Warhol Kept Me Drawing: Part Three by Dave Jaffe.

Andy Warhol Kept Me Drawing: Part Three.




    The more I read about Andy Warhol in his biography by Victor Bockris the less I liked him.  And even when he passed away in 1987 I was sorry but hardly overwhelmed by grief..
     Yet a few weeks ago I was on the point of giving up all drawing and painting. Then I came across
a book on Warhol by Trewin Copplestsone and I was impressed. I have now taken up some of Warhol's art style and I realize how important he was.
     His style is easy to copy. I simply find a photo, change the photo a bit and then draw the changed photo on paper three times or more. Then I lightly draw an abstract painting over the photos. As Andy Warhol might say about my finished work, "Wow" or "It's great." Or more likely he might exclaim, "I can do a lot better than that."
     For Warhol was a brilliant artist. I have only a tiny fraction of his talent. My art work is competent but no more than that. Even so, his work has inspired me and kept me drawing. So I'm grateful to Andy Warhol no matter what he was like as a person.

Andy warhol Kept Me Drawing: Part Two by Dave Jaffe

   Andy Warhol Kept Me Drawing: Part Two




      Andy Warhol told people in effect in the mid-1960's, "I'm retiring from painting." In fact Warhol never did stop painting. Yet soon he was making films that often bored people. Then he sponsored a rock band called 'The Velvet Underground' and started to write books. He set up a work space in New York City called 'The Factory' where he painted, wrote and filmed movies. The Factory was soon overrun with disturbed speed freaks and heroin addicts. Even so, Warhol had by now become one of the most famous visual artists in the United States.
     Warhol showed himself indifferent to the deaths and/or suicides of some of the unhinged people around him. Then in 1968 Warhol himself nearly died. On June 3,1968, a disturbed feminist named Valerie Solanas shot Warhol twice in the stomach as well as one other man in The Factory. "He had too much control over my life," Solanas said after surrendering to police.
    Warhol survived but he went around in great pain for the rest of his life. Warhol then went on to discard most of the disturbed people that had cluttered up his life. In the 1970's, he moved into the circle of celebrities. As a child Warhol had adored the film stars of Hollywood like Judy Garland and used to send them fan letters. Now in the 1970's, he hung out with celebrities like Judy Garland's daughter Liza Minelli, Elizabeth Taylor, Bianca Jagger, the wife of rock star Mick Jagger and Lee Radziwill. He danced at Studio 54, an exclusive dance hall where only celebrities were allowed in.
     "It's hard to get in to Studio 54," Warhol wrote. "But once you're in you could end up dancing with Liza Minelli. At 54 the stars are nobody because everybody is a star."
      Warhol also befriended families of loathsome dictators like the Shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.  He got to know the Shah's sister and also Imelda Marcos, the wife of Ferdinand Marcos. Imelda Marcos, the wife of Ferdinand later became infamous because of her massive shoe collection. While tens of millions of Filipinos eked out a bare existence the Marcos family lived high off the hog. Later the Shah and Marcos were overthrown by revolutions.
     Warhol also painted many portraits of Mao Tse Tung, another brutal dictator who ruled China with an iron fist from 1949 to 1976. Warhol never met Mao. He just used an official photo as a guide to his portraits. By now, Warhol was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by doing portraits of the rich and famous. 
      In 1981, Warhol attended the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as U.S. president. He also taped an interview with First Lady Nancy Reagan for his now flourishing magazine quite rightly called 'Interview'. Left wing critics like Alexander Cockburn raked Warhol over the coals for breathlessly listening to Nancy Reagan and never once criticizing her or her husband for the uncaring lives they were living. As U.S. president Ronald Reagan cut social programs to the bone making millions of poor Americans even poorer. Meanwhile his government shoveled out huge tax cuts to the rich.
     The 'Time' magazine art critic Robert Hughes had never liked Warhol's art. Now he went after Warhol again. Warhol, he said, " was the shallow painter whose entire sense of reality was shaped like Reagan's sense of power, by the television tube."  All of this was true. Warhol by the way was gay and had many close male friends. Whether he made love to any of them remains an unanswered question.
    

Andy Warhol Kept Me Drawing by Dave Jaffe: Part One.

    Andy Warhol Kept Me Drawing: Part One




    It's possible to like an artist's work but dislike his or her character. Andy Warhol's an example of this.
    A few weeks ago I was going to stop painting and drawing, which I've done as a hobby for decades. Yet then I came across a small book on Andy Warhol, written by the British artist and writer, Trewin Copplestone.
     After thumbing through Copplestsone's book called 'The Life and Works of Andy Warhol'  I decided to copy Warhol's painting style and go back to drawing. Warhol's art inspired me. Warhol's life was a classic American rags to riches story, that also interested me.
     He was born Andrew Warhola to a poor immigrant family from Slovakia in 1928. The next year the Great Depression started and wrecked the world economy. Warhol's family was hit hard by this terrible economic collapse.
     So Warhol grew up in a poor blue collar family in Pittsburgh, a tough provincial city of steel mills in the American heartland. Yet Warhol's family in the end struggled out of poverty.  His father, who passed away when Andrew was quite young, left a sizeable sum of money behind to help his son. For there were some fine educational places and schools in Pittsburgh. Warhol ended up going to the Cranegie Institute of Technology. Here he got a good education in the visual arts.
      "If anyone had asked me at the time who was the least likely to succeed," said one of his teachers at the institute named Robert Lipper, "I would have said Andrew Warhola."
    Warhola, as his last name was then, was shy and had problems doing academic work. He had, he later claimed, three nervous breakdowns before the age of ten. His skin often erupted into some form of acne. And his hair fell out at a very young age. People, including his older brothers, taunted and bullied him.
      Yet Warhol had a great drawing ability and some self-confidence. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute in the late 1940's, he went along with another soon-to-be-famous visual artist called Philip Pearlstein to New York City. He came there with only $200 in his pocket, which is about $2,000 to-day.Yet by 1956, he'd become one of the most successful commercial artists in the United States. By now he'd dropped the 'a' at the end of his name and was simply known now as 'Andy Warhol'. Also his mother had moved to New York City and stayed with her youngest son for the rest of her life.
    Though now rich and successful Warhol still wanted more. "I want to be Matisse," he told his friend Charles Lisanby when they took a tour around part of the world in 1956. Lisanby thought Warhol was really saying, "I want to be as famous as Henri Matisse."  Back in 1956 Matisse and Pablo Picasso were seen as the greatest artists of the day.
     Still by 1966, or ten years later, Warhol was even more famous than Matisse. He painted than silkscreened pictures of Campbell soup cans, the U.S. dollar bill, the by now dead Marilyn Monroe, the soon to be dead Elvis Presley, and car crashes, race riots and electric chairs. Warhol was now acclaimed - or detested- as one of the founders of the art movement now called "Pop Art".

A Tale of Two Churches: Part Three by Dave Jaffe.

   A Tale of Two Churches: Part Three.




      If you're like me you may attend the Canadian Memorial United Church or the Society of Friends, more commonly known as the Quakers. Then you might tell yourself, "Canadian churches are very liberal." Many of the people who go to the churches I've just mentioned usually support a women's right to abortion. They worship a compassionate caring God - that is if they believe in the divine. They have no problems now with same sex marriage. Many of the people in these churches believe in helping the poor and welcoming refugees to Canada.
      Yet not all Canadian or North American churches cling to this type of religion. Nor did all ever do so. Lucien Pope, an American sociologist found out over 80 years ago that many groups favour a much harsher religion. The U.S. sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset came to the same conclusion  a few years later. "The poorer working classes," Lipset wrote in the 1950's, "want ministers who preach hellfire and damnation."
     This is still true today. In her recent book, 'Strangers In Their Own Land' Arlie Russell Hoschchild found the same thing. In Louisiana, Hoschchild studied, mingled with and befriended supporters of U.S president Donald Trump. She found that these mostly white working class Americans believe in 'the rapture' or time when the Book of Revelations says, "The earth will burn with fervent heat." Until that time though, the devil is on the rampage.
     Along with this harsh theology, these white citizens had no time or sympathy for black Americans, feminists, gays or environmentalists. God, says Derwin Arenos, a young white worker, will fix the polluted bayous of Louisiana. "And that will happen shortly," he says. "So it doesn't matter how much man destroys now."
     A woman I'll call Clara may share the same viewpoint. She lives in Vancouver in a one bedroom basement  suite, alongside three other neighbours who also live in one bedroom places. Clara is bipolar and survives on a small handicapped allowance. She doesn't have much money and sometimes asks people to buy her a cup of coffee. When Donald Trump was elected U>S. president Clara was overjoyed. "He''ll fix the elites," she said. "They're too powerful."
    Clara goes to an east end church that preaches that the world may be doomed and damnation awaits all sinners. In Metro Vancouver there are quite a few churches preaching this sort of message. One many I met was a strong supporter of the Anglican Church he went to. "We don't believe in abortion here," he says. "And we have no time for same sex marriage." Another man I know is a churchgoer who totally is against any new social programs.
     One Sunday morning I slipped into the pews of a Baptist church and heard a strong  message. A big powerfully built preacher  took an American senator to task for saying that he enjoyed going to church on Sunday. "You don't go to church to enjoy it," he thundered. "You go to church to feel God's presence. Your enjoyment is not important."
     At the service's end, one church usher asked me if I'd come back. "not me," I replied. "the sermon was powerful but it's not my trip. I'm a bleeding heart liberal." Even so I put a few dollars in the dish that was passed around. For I don't go to churches without leaving some money behind.

A Tale of Two Churches by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.

   A Tale of Two Churches: Part Two.




   Churches have their uses which is something that the new aethiests like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Adams and Richard Dawkins sometimes ignore. To be fair to Hitchens, he did mention the positive role churches played in the U.S. civil rights movement. Yet even the hard core right wing politicians
sometimes realize that churches can help people.
    In late 1975, William 'Bill' Bennett became premier of British Columbia ousting Dave Barrett's short-lived New Democratic government from power. The hard-nosed, tough Social Credit premier at once started cutting the social programs the Barrett's government had set up. Eight years later, in 1983 Bennett wiped out the rest of Barrett's reforms.
      When confronted by irate demonstrators  in the B.C. legislature, Bennett gave no ground.
     "What will people do when you get rid of all the social programs?" Joe Arnaud, a demonstrator demanded of Bennett in 1975.
     ""Why they'll go to the church basements," said Bennett, a very wealthy son of a wealthy former premier, W.A.C. Bennett. "That's what they did when I was young." Maybe we'll need church basements again to feed many more of us as some church basements do now. If so, I recommend Canadian Memorial United Church and the Vancouver Quaker worship house. I like both these places and I've often eaten at both of them.
      Yet right now we live in  an age when most right wing governments often stay in power for a long time and shred one social safety net after another. Who will protect the poor and the homeless against the Bennetts, the Thatchers, the Trumps and the Doug Fords? Churches can play a small but useful role here. The United Church of Canada was formed after the first World War from three separate churches: the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists and the Methodists.
      As a result  of this merger, the United Church has often played a progressive role in Canadian history. Before the First World War, Methodist ministers like James Shaver Woodsworth pushed what was called 'The Social Gospel'. This was a religious platform with a progressive bent. Unfortunately after World War One, a right wing wave swept across the world and buried the Social Gospel. Woodsworth left the newly formed United Church and went on to sit in Parliament and then  help found the left leaning Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or C.C.F. in the 1930's.
       Despite the vanishing of the Social Gospel, United Church ministers have often spoken up for peace and social justice. To-day for instance, the First United Church still does wonderful work in the now slowly disappearing Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.  It certainly helped the poor after the right wing Liberal government swept to power in the 2001 B.C. election.
     "It was an aberration," one high level N.D.P. organizer said about  this event as he saw the Liberal party grab 77 of the 79 seats in the B.C. legislature. The N.D.P. government had run the province for the past ten years. Once in power, the tough, hard-nosed new premier and Liberal leader Gordon Campbell did what former premier Bill Bennett had done nearly 20 years before. He slashed social programs to the bone, fired thousands of government workers, and gave big tax cuts to the rich.
      Thousands of welfare recipients had their monthly cheques slashed or reduced to zero The amount of homeless people in the streets soared.  Yet many of the homeless huddled in the pews of the First United Church on the corner of Main and Hastings.
     "It's really crowded in there," one Downtown Eastside resident said at the time about the First United Church. "Without that place many people would be a goner." At this time in 2002 and at many others times, the United Church has saved many people from starvation and even an early death.
 

A Tale of Two Churches: Part One by Dave Jaffe

   A Tale of Two Churches: Part One..




   One church is tiny. One church is reasonably sized. The small church has about 10 to 20 people come to it every Sunday. In the bigger church hundreds flock to its services once a week. The tiny church has a n annual budget of close to $30,000. "Our budget," the forty something head minister of the big church proudly told me, "is close to $850,000 annually." 
      The big church has lots of stained glass windows, a full throated choir and is staffed by four full time ministers. The tiny church has no minister, no choir and no ordinary service. It's surrounded by evergreen trees that circle the tiny house and protect it from the elements. I go to both these churches from time to time. For both of these churches support a liberal version of Christianity which is now my favourite religion.
    The tiny church  is a Quaker worship house that sits at the edge of southwest Vancouver. Few people come to this place of worship. When they do, they sit in silence in  a circle of comfortable chairs.for about an hour. Once I counted the amount of persons in the room. I don't think the total came to more than 30. Some times there are an  even dozen in this house.  At times there may be even fewer people in the small upper floor of the house that is the worship space.
     "Don't get hung up on numbers," a political organizer told me years ago. And at the Quakers I forget crowds or masses of people. I sit in silence and happiness, often recalling what the Quakers' founder George Fox discovered in 1650's England. The divine light is within everybody Fox said. To worship the divine you don't need big churches, massive choirs or even expensive places of worship. All you need to do is focus on the divine light within you.
      I agree with all of this and have spent some lovely hours in the Quaker worship space. Yet sometimes  I tell myself, "I need a regular church service." Then I head off to the Canadian Memorial United Church where there is everything that most people think of when they mention the word "church". A wonderful set of stained glass windows with a social theme line three of the church's walls.  A big choir belts out hymns in the fall, winter and spring. In the choir three or four wonderful young women singers sometimes come forward from the choir to do solo turns. As one woman once said to the church congregation after the choir stopped singing, "You couldn't get this music anywhere else."  She was right.
     As for numbers of people who come to this church, the crowd sometimes swell to over 300. people. This is a huge contrast to the Quaker congregations.
    The church's regular minister Beth Hayward often gives sermons, explaining parts of the Bible while giving inspirational twists to her comments. Lonnie Delisle, the music director and minister
works long and hard to keep the choir and solo singers on track. And all kinds of groups and people work on program and committees.. There's a healing centre in the church's other building that 's right across the alley from the church. This building is called the Peace Centre for reasons I'll explain below. Some people do meditation before the church service starts. The church serves meals once a week to street people. And the list of church committees goes on and on.
     The Canadian Memorial United Church on Vancouver's west side was founded by a Canadian veteran who came back from World War One determined to remember those killed in that terrible event. He set up the church as a memorial to those that had passed away. 90 years later the church still has a strong social conscience and a liberal and pacifist outlook that not all United churches share. The church holds many of its political events in the Peace Centre. Many of the stained glass windows in the church refer to wartime events as well as Jesus and the apostles
     Churches are still important in Canada, even though less than one in four Canadians go to churches on Sunday. I'm one of those that do and I'm glad that liberal churches are still around. I've not joined either church but I have given money to both. They have enriched my life in many ways.
   "This is a magnet church," one of its loyal members Susan tells me. "It draws people from all across Metro Vancouver."  Susan herself comes from the outer suburbs. Her loyalty shows that the Canadian Memorial Church has put down deep roots in people's hearts and minds.
   

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Ten by Dave Jaffe

  History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Ten




         Despite all the favourable conditions I was living with, in the 1970's, my life tumbled on a diownward slope. Then I was lucky again. I met a man who taught me survival skills. He taught me how to access social prgrams. He guided me into an unorthodox therapy that cured me of my sadness and damped down my ferocious temper. He also taught me how to write journalism. And this helped me get jobs.
     "This man was the greatest guidance counselor I ever had," I told a woman who also knew this man too. When his grip fastened on me too tightly, I escaped into the world of anti-poverty movements. Once in this milieu I met two other men. One man guide me to apply to live in a housing co-op. Another helped me get a handicapped allowance. A third man gave me a book on drawing that transformed my life. All of these events and people turned my life around.
     In my early 30's, I was a depressed abusive handicapped man. Ten years or so later I had become a more stable balanced human being who felt happy and secure. In the film 'Match Point' the tennis pro Chris Wilson over a dinner in an upscale London restaurant agrees that hard work is mandatory for any success in life. Yet luck and fate, he insists, counts most of all if you're going to thrive. I agree with Wilson and now in the closing days of my life I tell myself and others, "I've sure been lucky."
      Henry Ford may well have been correct when he said, "History is bunk. Yet I now see that luck has enabled me to escape the terrible events that clutter up history books.

History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part Nine

History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part Nine.




      One thing has let me live to the age of 77 and it's not events from history.. It's just plain luck.
"It's better to be lucky than good," tennis instructor Chris Wilson played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers says in effect in Woody Allen's film 'Match Point'. At times I've tried to be good. Yet near my life's end, I realize how important luck is.
    First off, both of my parents were nearly killed by German flying rockets in World War Two England. Yet luckily they weren't hit and they both survived. So I grew up with two parents. Not all children in post World War Two England were as lucky. Then for the first eight years of my life, I lived a middle class lifestyle and went to a private school. Soon my parents lost all their money. With me and two sisters in tow, my parents trekked across the Atlantic Ocean and through poverty stricken times in 1950's Montreal.
     Yet even when we were poor neither my mother or father descended into drug addiction, gambling or alcoholism. My parents never abused me although a nurse I had as a baby did hurt me. My father hit me twice through my entire life. My mother never hit me and nearly always supported me. The British psychiatrist Donald Winnicott said his work had been driven, "by the urge to find and to appreciate the ordinary good mother. " My mother wasn't a very warm person. Yet she gave me love and many gifts. She was a good mother.
    In the world outside my sometimes unstable family, I was lucky too. For in the end I was living in very prosperous times. From the 1940's to the late 1970's, the western world went through one of the greatest economic booms in history. This boom in the end, at last lifted my family out of poverty again.
     Then, too, in the 1960's, the federal Liberal government built up a welfare state. They set up a national medicare plan. a Canada Pension Plan for seniors, a Canada Assistance Plan that guaranteed five rights for welfare recipients and two other payment systems for the aged. Under  prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Elliot Trudeau the Canadian government helped build tens of thousands of units of social housing.
    In Quebec the so-called 'Quiet Revolution in the 1960's, the Quebec government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into post secondary education. If they hadn't done that, I never would have gone to McGill University.
      "The age of big government is over," U.S. president Bill Clinton said in the 1990's as he hacked away at programs that helped the poor and the lower paid working class. Yet in the 1960's when I was young governments all over the western world built up social programs. In the 1990's many governments tore holes in the social safety net. Yet the programs set up in the 1960's helped my survive and grow.
     Another thing helped my immensely and that was the so called 'miracle drugs' that came on stream in the 1940's and later.  Penicillin, streptomycin and the polio vaccines extended my life and saved me and  many others from an early grave.

History May Be Partly Bunk: Pat Eight by Dave Jaffe

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Eight by Dave Jaffe.


   The great depression of the 1930's led to massive upheaval and great suffering. It also triggered the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Japanese militarism. Both events led to World War Two. As the economy fell into a very steep downfall in the years 2007 and 2008 the U.S. government came to the rescue to avert a massive world economic downturn.
     In 2009 the new Democratic president Barack Obama pushed his agenda of spending trillions of dollars to save the U.S. and the world's economy. Though Republicans balked at spending these massive sums, Obama and his Democratic government won the day. "They are too big to fail," some people in the U.S. said about the big financial firms that may have started the whole mess.
    President Obama spent trillions bailing out these big firms and helping other big firms survive. For a time the U.S. government and the Canadian government  owned parts of General Motors and the Chrysler auto giant. Workers in these firms endured savage cuts to their wages and benefits. Yet without government help these auto giants would have gone under and the North American economy would have been destroyed.
     In Europe, the U.S.A also spent trillions of dollars and saved Europe from economic collapse. By 2010, the western economies started to move forward again. Yet the pain for many people still went on. Over 11 million Americans lost their homes. In European countries like Spain, youth unemployment stood at 30 per cent in 2018. "A whole generation of Spanish youth," one British economist pointed out, "have grown up and never have worked." The big banks just got bigger while ordinary citizens suffered. There's no doubt that the Great Recession - as the economic collapse was called- helped trigger the rise of the far right in the U.S. of A. and Europe.
   Left wing groups in the U.S. formed Occupy Wall Street to protest the rescue of big banks and the great gap between rich and poor. On the far right in America, a massive Tea Party movement sprung up and denounced Barack Obama as a socialist.
    As all this unfolded, I wasn't even touched by any of it. In fact I got richer. Every month after turning 65, I received three small government cheques . Small as they were, they far outstripped  the tiny handicapped allowance I had subsisted on for the previous ten years. For the first time in years I started to save a growing amount of money.
     "History is bunk," said Henry Ford whose Ford Motor company survived the Great Recession without any government help. Maybe Ford was right or wrong. Yet I managed to survive most of  the great upheavals of the 20th and 21st century without being scarred or traumatized. I lived in what John Berger called "pockets of exemption" and I realize in the closing years of my life that I have been incredibly lucky. I also hope that billions of others have also been as lucky as I have been.
     

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Seven by Dave Jaffe.

  History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part Seven.




    In 2007 I turned 65 years old. As this happened, the world economy nearly went into a death rattle.
It survived but only after drastic surgery. Meanwhile I hopped on  a plane and flew into the growing city of Kelowna a few hundred kilometres east of Vancouver. Then after a few days under a warm sun, I drove home in a Greyhound bus.
     On the bus I chatted with a young seat mate. "Things look bad," I recall telling him. "We'll see how it all works out." In fact the world economy was falling into its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930's. Yet once again this economic collapse seemed to have no great impact on me. In fact my life improved. Once again I realized that I was living in what John Berger called " a pocket of exemption." Or was it true as Henry Ford once said, "History is bunk." ? In other words the great events written down by historians never had the impact on most people that the recorded histories claimed?
   Wherever the truth lies, I realized soon enough that the world economy was in terrible shape. The big American banks stopped lending to each other and soon stopped lending period. Lehman Brothers a huge American financial institution went bankrupt. And millions of Americans lost their homes.
     What caused this great economic crisis? Robert Reich, a U.S. economist and onetime Labour Secretary in the Clinton administration blamed the rising tide of inequality for the economic collapse. Others fingered the semi-fraudulent financial trades on Wall Street of worhless bonds that were made up of mortgages lent to low income people.
    Yet whatever caused the crisis, the whole problem started on the U.S. financial centre  on Wall Street in New York City, and then surged across the world. This is exactly what happened  at the start of the Great Depression in 1929. In that crisis tens of millions of people suffered and lost their jobs. The newly elected U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt who won the 1932 presidential election tried to stimulate the American economy by bringing a whole swath of new government programs that he called 'The New Deal'.
     "We tried the gold standard," Roosevelt told his aide Raymond Moley, "and that didn't work out. Now we may try the silver standard. And if that doesn't work we'll try something else." But Roosevelt assured Moley that in the end the U.S. government would finds a solution to the world's economic problems.
    Roosevelt's New Deal only applied to the U.S. of A. Hit hard by the Great Depression, Germany ended up under the rule of dictator Adolf  Hitler. Hitler prepared for war and the invasion of most of Europe. Japan embraced militarism and invaded China. In Italy the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini unleashed his air force against Ethiopia and then conquered it.  All over Europe and parts of the Americas, racist and anti-Semitic groups flourished and grew. "The lights are going out all over Europe," said  British diplomat on the eve of World War One in 1914. Yet he could have said the same 25 years later. The Great Depression triggered wars and preparations for war.
     Would the same thing happen now in 20007 in the midst of what was soon called 'The Great Recession'? Time would tell.
     

History I Partly Bunk: Part Six by Dave Jaffe

  History Is Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe; Part Six.




   In 1983 Social Credit premier Bill Bennett swept away many of the social programs that Dave Barrett's N.D.P. government had put into law in the early 1970's. A massive group of protestors took to the streets in Vancouver and Victoria and tried to pressure the premier to withdraw his tough programs of restraint. Yet premier Bennett remained defiant and finally won the day. His program of austerity stayed in place.
   At this time in 1983 I worked as a volunteer in the Vancouver Unemployment Action Centre in the heart of the hard scrabble Downtown Eastside area. So the Action Centre which was set up to help the jobless sat smack dab in the middle of the anti-Socred protest that was now called the Solidarity Coalition.
     Upstairs was the office of the United Fishermen's Allied Workers Union or UFAW. And in that office you could find the tough talking and young UFAWU organizer George Hewison. Hewison had helped create the Solidarity Coalition. As the talk in the centre became more intense, I would exit the centre and get on a bus that would drive into the Kitsilano area of the city. Wandering along Broadway, one of the main east roads of Vancouver. I sometimes ended up in small greasy spoon restaurants or laundromats. Most of these places have now vanished, swept away by the rising tide of gentrification.
     After settling into a seat I would take out a sketch book and start to draw trees outside in the streets. For 1983 for me was not just the year of the Solidarity Coalition. "Protest and survive," said the well-known British historian Edward P. Thompson as he and many others in Europe protested the escalating arms buildup and the resurgence of the Cold War. I surely wanted to protest premier Bennett's cutbacks.
     Yet in 1983 I had just discovered the magic of drawing and the history of the visual arts. I spent hours drawing again and again. I realized with great joy that I had the power of creativity within me. This was for me a great moment. Still  to be sure it doesn't belong in any history of B.C. in the 1980's. Yet in some way my drawing helped soften the blows from Bill Bennett;'s austerity program.
       "Success turns an artist who continues to claim exemption(from history) as an escapist," wrote John Berger. I am not a successful artist. Yet in the summer of 1983, I still enjoyed escaping for a few hours the heavy politics of the moment, and in this way I managed to be partly exempt from history. History was not bunk as Henry Ford once said.  Still, drawing in a sketch book helped lift its heavy hand from my back.
     

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Five by Dave Jaffe

  History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe: Part Five




    Did Henry Ford really say, "History is bunk." ?  Some writers say he did. Others writers disagree. Yet wherever the truth lies, Ford was a true innovator. His Model T Ford car opened up the auto as a mass method of transit to millions of Americans. He despised tradition and most of the past and paved the way to a consumer society and mass affluence.
     Most historians I've read do seem to stress the negative. Wars, plagues, depressions and famines fill their books. Yet these afflictions don't tell the whole story. "To-day there are still liable to be pockets of exemption from crises anywhere," wrote the British writer John Berger over 50 years ago.
In other words no matter how bad things look, there's always places where good things occur.
    In the early 1980's, I lived in one of these pockets of exemption. Interest rates had soared to over 20 per cent and the British Columbian economy nose dived. The jobless rate climbed to more than 15 per cent as one sawmill after another shut down. Next door in Alberta, dozens of oil wells closed down and many oil workers were left without jobs. I didn't blame these people and others for feeling bad. Yet I felt immune from the general suffering.
    At that time in the early 1980's, I moved into a spanking new housing co-op and had never felt better. I was working for an organization that served the disabled and for the first time in years I saved money, instead of living on welfare. "Life is sweet," I told a friend of mine back then. "Though it's not the same for many others."
     In the early fall afternoons of 1982 I would rent a car or get on a Greyhound bus and ride through the Fraser Valley. For the first time since I had moved to Vancouver in the mid-1960's, I explored this beautiful area that stood a bare hour from where I lived. I marveled at the beauty of this land whose mountains and lush forests looked lovely in the autumn months. Ten years later the valley started to fill up with shopping malls, suburban tract homes and high rises. Yet in the early 80's, I moved through Chilliwack, Langley and parts of Surrey, thinking how these small places were surrounded by scenic beauty.
   Once again as in the late 1950's, I felt truly happy and fulfilled. History was not bunk. I knew that some people would look back at this time as a time of torment. Yet for me I felt happy and fulfilled.  Yet times did change and soon I felt history's sharp edges.
    In 1983, history or the age's politics moved in on me. In 1983, the B.C. Social Credit premier Bill Bennett led his right wing party to a third election victory in a row. In the  summer of 1983 he swept away the reforms that Dave Barrett's N.D.P. government had brought in from 1972 to 1975. The premier fired over 10,000 government workers, scrapped one social program after another and told the public as he justified these sweeping changes, "We are facing a new reality." Now I couldn't escape history.

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Four by Dave Jaffe.

  History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Four by Dave Jaffe.




    Pierre Elliott Trudeau had a great time in the 1950's, despite denouncing that period as "The Great Darkness". I didn't have a bad time either in the city of Montreal in the era of the Union Nationale premier Maurice Duplessis. Still, not all French Canadians were as fortunate as Mr. Trudeau, our future Prime Minister. "We are the white negroes of America", proclaimed  the French Canadian revolutionary Pierre Vallieres in a book with that name.that he wrote.
     Here Vallieres was exaggerating. Still, many French Canadians in the 1950's did live in poverty. So did many other Canadians living outside Quebec. Canada in the 1950's was a deeply unequal country. John Porter in his 1965 path breaking book called 'The Vertical Mosaic' exposed a Canada of vast wealth at the country's top of the social ladder and many poor people at the bottom. Canada was no utopia in the 1950's despite the growth of a middle class.
      Yet for a time I enjoyed myself back then and I think many other people did too. So despite what some historians have written about the 1950's and other periods, some of them have been too pessimistic. Henry Ford may have been partly right. I would amend his statement to say "History may be partly bunk."

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Three by Dave Jaffe.

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Three.




     During most of the 1950's in when I was in my teenage years, I didn't see any signs of what later historians  and writers, who were mostly Quebecois called "The Great Darkness' or "Le Grand Noirceur". They were referring to Quebec during the reign of Union Nationale premier Maurice Duplessis,.
     Yet when I ended up at McGill University in the early 1960's my rosy view of the world started to crumble. At university, surrounded by very clever and rich people I soon saw how poor my parents were. Soon I travelled across North America and saw some horrible places. I also sat on lovely beaches, drove through prosperous suburbs and strolled through shopping malls stuffed with consumer goods.
    Soon I tired of life in Montreal and by the mid-1960's I left Montreal for the west coast. Yet whatever the 1950's was for others in Quebec, it wasn't a time of a great darkness for me. I was young and healthy and optimistic.
    Now Pierre Elliott Trudeau often referred to the 1950's as a time of "The Great Darkness".  Yet Trudeau, a future prime minister of Canada had a great time in that era. He lived with his widowed mother in the wealthy suburb of Outremont. He travelled to the Soviet Union in 1952 and to Communist-ruled China in 1960. Going to the Soviet Union in 1952 could have exposed Trudeau to the wrath of Maurice Duplessis whose government sometimes imposed the so-called Padlock Law on communists and their sympathizers. Police could padlock someone's residence and lock that person and their family out of their home.
   "In the 1950's," one left leaning man told me," the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the western world was in full swing. Many communist and their allies were in Canada lived under constant police surveillance and many were harassed by the law. I know I was." Yet Trudeau's great wealth and his family connections shielded him from any penalties.
     As mentioned,  Trudeau also went to China with his friend Jacques Hebert. At this time the very leftist communist government of China was a virtual outcast in the western world. Still Trudeau and Hebert came back to Canada without any great fear and no one bothered them. They even wrote a book about their China odyssey called 'Two Innocents in China'. By 1960 Duplesis was dead and the new Liberal Quebec government lifted or scrapped a lot of heavy handed Union Nationale laws.
Still, Trudeau and Hebert did take risks going to China.
     As well as travelling around the world, Trudeau also led a very active social life. He took out one well-connected French Canadian woman after another. He also of course wrote many articles that slammed the Quebec government of  Duplessis. Yet he had a great time in the 1950's. There was no darkness in his life great or otherwise. He certainly enjoyed the good things of life then and later.



    

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Two by Dave Jaffe.

History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe: Part Two.




   Michael Bliss was just one historian that wrote books on Canadian politics. Another man who wrote a lot about Canadian politics and history was Canada's Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Yet Trudeau wrote his most incisive essays on Canada before he became prime minister. And most of his articles were written about the province of Quebec.
         What was Quebec like in the 1950's when Trudeau wrote many of his articles? "The province of Quebec," wrote Stephen Clarkson and Sandra Gwyn in their biography of Trudeau, "had attained a measure of prosperity and social calm under the firm hand of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis." Allied to the Catholic Church hierarchy and Anglo-American businessmen, Duplessis and his Union Nationale government ruled Quebec with an iron hand.
     Workers who went on strike in industrial towns like Asbestos in 1949 and Murdochville in 1957 faced terrible violence and repression from scabs and the Quebec Provincial Police. Duplessis also refused to take any federal money for universities and hospital insurance. Bribery of politicians was widespread and Duplessis starved social programs.
     Trudeau as a young man bristled with anger at the Duplessis government. After studying in the U.S. of A. and in England and Europe, he teamed up with people connected with the small magazine called 'Cite Libre'. Here he and other members of the magazine's staff called for many much-needed reforms. They later called the era of Duplessis who ruled Quebec from the mid-1930's to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959 "Le Grand Noirceur" or "The Great Darkness".
    Yet I lived through this period that lasted into the 1950's and I enjoyed myself a lot . In fact my teenage years that took place in the 1950's were some of the happiest times of my life. Not until I reached my 40's, was I  as happy as I was in my teenage years. If someone had come up to me and told me in the late 1950's that I was living in "The Great Darkness", I would have replied "You must be kidding."
     Now at that time, my family was dirt poor. My father landed in Quebec City in 1953 with a measly $160 in his pocket which today would be about $1,000., and he had  a wife and three young children to support.  For the next twelve years, my mother and father just struggled to survive. "Your family was poor when you came to Canada," an economist cousin told me years later. "And in Canada you just got poorer." Bailiffs, lawyers and bill collectors hounded my parents for unpaid bills that usually remained unpaid. Irate landlords kicked us out of one apartment after another when we fell behind in paying the rent.  Yet because I was young and healthy and hopeful, I was happy.
      For others life was good, or at least an improvement on the Depression era of the 1930's and the war years of the 1940's. Inflation was tamed and unemployment remained low. "The 1950's were an age of innocence," B.C. premier Dave Barrett once said. This was true. The ugly side of the 1950's such as residential schools remained out of sight and out of mind. Corruption in politics and business often went unexplored
      Hardcore drugs like cocaine, heroin, and crystal metamphetamines didn't appear in any district where I lived. Even marijuana didn't show up. The 1950's truly was an age of innocence.
      
      

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part One by Dave Jaffe.

   History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




    Henry Ford was one of America's most important 20th century innovators. Ford helped create the mass production of cars at the giant plant he set up near Detroit. In fact so successful was this mass production plant at River Rouge that some social scientists called the methods and the age that he pioneered 'Fordism'.
     Ford and his cars helped change the way North Americans travelled, made love,  shopped and many other things.Yet he had little time for intellectuals or progressive movements. He was definitely anti-intellectual. "History is bunk," he once said. Now near the end of my life, I realize that Ford may have had part of the truth. For some historians' account of the 20th century do seem to stress the negative and not the good things that happened.
     Many historians of the 20th century write  histories chockfull of wars, purges, massacres by leftists and rightists as well as endless suffering. In fact much of the pop history I've written on my blog, is just like those more professional accounts by trained historians. Yet if someone asked me how I'm doing right now, I'd reply, "Never felt better. The first part of my life had its problems. The last half of my life has been very good." And I think most of my friends would give a thumbs up to their lives in the 20th century.
    Let me zero in on two Canadians who've written about 20th century Canada and may have given us misleading impressions of the country's life and times. Michael Bliss was a conservative who wrote a number of books about Canada. One of his books dealt with Canadian prime ministers. It just about trashed every prime minister save for the country's founder, John A. MacDonald. Yet anyone reading Bliss's account of Canada would miss some very important points.
       First off, life got way better for most Canadians between 1900 and 2000. Life expectancy shot up from about 45 to 75. Miracle drugs swept away polio, tubercelosis, whooping cough, and scarlet fever. Public health improvements wiped out cholera, plagues and typhoid fever. Living standards rose dramatically. In the late 1940's and after millions of new Canadians and native born citizens moved from inner cities to prosperous suburbs. And the list of improvements in people's lives goes on and on.
   Governments for the first time built up social programs. Somehow these things and a great burst of Canadian culture that started in about 1960 slip under the radar screen in Bliss's history. They do the same by the way in many other writings by historians. The next writer who I'll look at is Pierre Elliott Trudeau who wrote a lot about 1950's Quebec and its history before that time. He became a prime minister who was judged an expert on Quebec, which he was. Yet he too painted a very dark picture of 1950's Quebec that was only partly true.

No Smoking: THe Movies of Nicole Holofcener by Dave Jaffe. Part Three.

   The Movies of Nicole Holofcener versus 'Mad Men' by Dave Jaffe.




     Despite the politics she displayed in the film she directed called 'Please Give' I still like the films of Nicole Holofcener.There's no smoking in her flicks which I think is wonderful.
     Now let's compare her films to the very popular t.v. series 'Mad Men. It ran on t.v. from 2007 to 2015. Millions of viewers watched 'Mad Men' in the U.S. and Canada. 'Mad Men' said the Los Angeles Times created " a strange and lovey space between nostalgia and political correctness." This maybe true but from the series' first scene to its last take, people smoked and smoked and smoked.
     'Mad Men ' is about an advertising agency named Sterling Cooper based in New York City of the 1960's. The program unfolds in upscale offices and many bedrooms. At the start of the series, the lead man, Don Draper played by Jon Hamm sits in a crowded bar and smokes 'Lucky Strike' cigarettes. He questions an African American waiter who prefers another brand of smokes why he prefers his type of cigarettes.
     Nearly everybody in the bar is smoking. To be fair, in the 1960's over 70 per cent of Americans did smoke. Here, the series does reflect reality. The mysterious Draper's main job is to keep Sterling Cooper's biggest client which is a big cigarette company in good shape. This looks like a tough task since a recent article in 'Reader's Digest' has revealed that cigarette smoking endangers lives.
     The actors in the series weren't smoking real tobacco. They smoked herbal cigarettes. "You don't want actors smoking real cigarettes," Mad Men's main writer Matthew Weiner told 'The New York Times'. "They get agitated and nervous." I felt good to hear this, but I wondered whether many young people watching the series started smoking after tuning into 'Mad Men'. For make no mistake about it: smoking tobacco endangers lives. Sources I've tracked down say somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 Canadians die every year from smoking.
     "100 Canadians die every day from smoking," said an even more alarmist web site. This puts the yearly total of deaths from smoking in Canada to about 35,000. Yet whatever the true figure of Canadian smokers is, many Canadians will die prematurely from heart attacks, lung cancer and strokes because they smoke tobacco every day. 
    Nicole Holofcener has complained that not many people know about the films she's scripted and directed. She goes to parties and tells people, "I direct movies." Yet most people, she says, have never heard of her films. This is too bad. The popularity of her films may never match that of 'Mad Men'. Yet so what? In her films, unlike the "Mad Men" series, nobody smokes. And that right now makes her my favourite film director.

The Films That Have No Smokers In Them: The Movies of Nicole Holofcener: Part Two by Dave Jaffe

     The Films That Have No Smokers In Them: Part Two




        It's great that nobody smokes cigarettes in the movies I've seen that are scripted and directed by Nicole Holofcener. Yet her politics don't turn me on.
      Holofcener is not a progressive which is too bad. Her film 'Please Give' features Catherine Keener as a middle-aged mother who runs an antique and furniture store in New York City. Keener, like myself is a liberal who gives sometimes big sums of money to the poor and the homeless. I give fifty or thirty cents a time to panhandlers. Keener gives away sometimes twenty dollars a time.
     Now in the film no one thanks Keener for helping people, and some like her teenage daughter just dump on her. An older neighbour throws the birthday present that Keener gives her into the garbage. An African-American man refuses part of a leftover meal that she offers him. He explains that he's waiting outside a restaurant to get a seat inside the place. Keener's daughter tries to stop her giving $20 to a homeless man.
      "You never give me $20," she says to her mother and she grabs the $20 and keeps it.
    At one point in the film Keener breaks down and cries when she sees mentally challenged teenagers playing basketball. Yet afterwards she doesn't volunteer to work with them. And at the movie's end everything turns out well, as Keener finally forks out $235 dollars to pay for her daughter's jeans. All of these events shouldn't surprise anyone.
     "I don't think you'll find too many left leaning films coming out of Hollywood," one film critic told me years ago. How many American film makers lean consistently to the left? Maybe there's three or four. Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and John Sayles come to mind. In Britain there's the great Ken Loach. And that's about it.
     Like most film directors Holofcener's a conservative. The main message of 'Please Give' is: Give money to your loved ones and you'll do fine. It's a waste of time and money helping the poor and the homeless. Few powerful or wealthy people will disagree with this message. So though I like parts of Holofcener's films she's not my favourite  film director.
    I like the fact that no smokers pop up in her flicks. I just don't like her politics.

The Films That Have No Smokers In Them: The Movies of Nicole Holofcener by Dave Jaffe

   The Movies of Nicole Holofcener: Part One.




    Nicole Holofcener has become one of my favourite movie directors. Holofcener is in her late fifties, lives in southern California and sets some of her films in New York City. "She's a bit like Woody Allen," some people say about her films. I don't think so, though she knows Allen very well. After all, her mother's second husband was Charles H.Joffe who produced dozens of Allen's movies.
      Hiolofcener's one of my favourite directors because so far in all the films I've seen that she scripted and directed, nobody smokes tobacco. People drink a bit in her flicks and in one of her films, namely 'Walking and Talking', two people smoke pot together. Sometimes they drink alcohol. yet they don't smoke cigarettes.
   Now Holofcener may or may not be as great a director as say Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, Atom Egoyan, Lena Wertmuller or even Woody Allen. Yet in nearly all the films I've seen people smoke cigarettes. And smoking is dangerous. Every year 15,000 Canadians die from smoking. Smokers have strokes, or get cancer or their hearts just stop ticking. So they die often in their sixties or even earlier.
     "Cigarettes are dangerous," one of my previous doctors told me. "Stay away from them."  Holfcener's characters do.
     That doesn't make Holfcener a great director for some critics. Her films are mostly about women interacting in families or friendships and sometimes they hate each other or hurt each other. "There's no story line," one woman told me after seeing the film 'Please Give'. This may be true but the interactions that women have are the story. Still, whatever the flaws or lack of action in this woman's films, her flicks don't show glamorous film stars smoking. That can turn young people onto this most dangerous activity.
    I like this woman's work. Her films aren't violent, bloody or physically brutal. People hurt each other but mostly through words. Holofcener's main star Catherine Keener never lights up a cigarette in any of the films I've seen her in. For that, I thank them both. And I also than Ariel Levy a writer for 'The New Yorker' who turned me on to this woman' work. Holofcener is I believe an advocate of not smoking. Her films are anyway.

Inside Unity: A Poem by Dave Jaffe.

  Inside Unity: A Poem by Dave Jaffe.




    There's no kneeling
    Only healing
    Inside this church.




   No talk here of the Gospels
  Or Moses or much of Christ.
  If there is a God
  Who has trod
  On this earth
  This Creator's light
  Splashes down on our faces
   From a blue sky
  That hovers way above the church's roof.




  The words of the minister
  Aren't sinister.
  They stroke my scarred face
  Stitch up the epidermal surface
  Where a week ago
  A surgeon's knives
  Scraped cancer away
  From the dark floor of my mind.


  This minister talks of healing
  Not sealing
  Away stark memories of the past
  In locked vaults of times gone by.
  His words gently touch my skin.
  "Life if good," he says.
  To me this means
  There is no sin.



   Outside
  The city clears its throat
   From the mouths of a million cars.


  I'm sorry.
 I can't worry anymore about poisons
 That scud around in the earth, the air and the water
 Or the starving billions
Or those led  to slaughter
 In Syria or elsewhere.
 For now I am healed.
 No need to steal
 Fragile moments of happiness
 From the present of my life,
 Or look in fright
  Toward its end.


 "In unity," someone said,
  "there is strength."
  In this Unity Church I have found happiness.
  Just enough to return for another day.


 

The Elites: A Poem by Dave Jaffe.

    The Elites by Dave Jaffe




    The elites
    They don't sleep in the streets.
    They run the world
     They weren't hurled
    Into the harsh universe of to-day
    To struggle from pay cheque to pay cheque.
 


      Their eyes rest calmly
      On the huge landscapes they own.
      They want to cut
      Social programs to the bone.
      And they do.


      They run the world.
      Men and women
      Armed with endless bank accounts
     And countless stocks and shares
      They proudly climb society's stairs
       That lead to the top
       Of the block.


       They're the elites.
       They love to meet
       At Davos Bohemian Grove
       And other retreats.
       Here these few thousand few
       Plan how to subdue
      And rule the world forever
      They usually do
      They're the elites..

They Are The Young; A Poem by Dave Jaffe

  They Are The Young.
     


    They are the young,
    I am the old
    An irritable aging scold.


    They are the young
     Their hopes aren't hung
     From dying branches
     Or wrapped in brown leaves
     That scuttle in the wind on the cold cold ground
    
       Their energetic noise
        Pushes against playground walls,
       Flies through upscale malls.
       Delights itself
       Worries teachers, tense sales staff
       And preachers.


     They don't moan or cry
      Over the crimes of Stalin or Hitler
      Or the deaths at My Lai.
       They know nothing about these things.
       Or anything thank God
      About the sod beneath the grass in Vietnam.
      Where unexploded bombs,
      Some made in Canada
      Still lie and wait to explode
      In innocent human hands.


     They clutch cell phones
      Text messages of joy and sometimes hate.
      See pornography on the web
      Have names like Seb
       Melissa, Ariana Caleb and Eden.


      They don't worry
      About shrinking social programs in Sweden
      Or elsewhere.
     
       They are the young
        Immersed ion fun
        In sports, noise
        And toys
        And other girls and boys.
        They are the young
         Forever moving.


     
       
     








 
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