Elan: Cultural and Political Reflections

Harper's Magazine: The finest English-language general interest magazine

2011-12-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I finished reading the August 2011 issue of Harper’s Magazine (http://harpers.org/). True - four months is a long time to take to finish a single issue of a monthly magazine. In part, I’ve been too busy to read material not directly related to my working life. But mostly I took so long because I didn’t feel rushed. Harper's is simply a pleasure to savor. Further, months after publication its contents retain a remarkable currency. Indeed, the mainstream newspapers that I also read continue referencing issues explored in Harper's months ago. Here, in any case, are some highlights from the August issue:

Petra Bartosiewicz’s “To Catch a Terrorist” will shock those not yet acquainted with the shadowy workings of the Intelligence world. For starters, Bartosiewicz’s reveals, only one person, according to U.S. Department of Justice records, has attempted to commit a terrorist act on American soil and been convicted since 9/11. At the same time the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) claims it has “amassed more than 1,000 federal ‘terrorism-associated’ prosecutions” during the same ten years.

Why the totally divergent statistics? Because, Bartosiewicz explicitly states, the FBI is running a de facto ‘protection racket.’ Its details are unknown to most Americans or are otherwise classified on the grounds of 'national security.' It targets so-called ‘pre-terrorists,’ using informants (conscious, arms-length FBI allies) to rope so-called suspects (defined however the U.S. government wishes) into attempting terrorist acts, or else into merely associating with alleged terrorists, terrorist rhetoric, or loose terrorist networks. The article cites the telling example of the Miami Seven, an alleged terrorist cell said to have been busted by the FBI in 2006 for planning an attack on the Chicago Sears Tower. The plot, along with its rhetoric, as well as the opportunity for the attack, were all developed by two FBI informants.

This pre-emptive ‘racket’, moreover, predominantly targets Muslims. Indeed, they are now essentially the exclusive target of U.S. Homeland Security terrorism-related Intelligence work. Most of this work is done at the ground level by U.S. Intelligence fusion centres, that integrate "all levels of law enforcement." The first was established in 2003. Clearly the central question this and similar scenarios raises is: Where exactly do terrorism investigations end, and terrorist acts begin?

Ultimately, Bartosiewicz notes, today’s FBI is at liberty to “spy on whomever it wishes, for however long it wishes, even if that individual has never committed a crime or, more important, is not even suspected of one.” Further, though it is officially barred from the racial profiling of suspects, it remains otherwise free to pursue essentially the same ends through religious and/or nation-of-origin profiling. As well, Bartosiewicz adds:

“Enhanced surveillance and wire-tapping powers initially passed under the PATRIOT Act can now be used against citizens who are merely ‘suspected of associating with radical activists’ … [including] left-leaning political protesters, whether anti-globalist, anti-capitalist, or anti-war.”

Presumably, this includes participants in the Occupy movement that has swept American and international cities this fall?

There is so much more that I could say about the solid contents of the August 2011 issue of Harper's. In particular, don't miss Nathaniel Rich’s street-level exposé, “The Luckiest Woman on Earth: Three ways to win the lottery," about the almost certainly compromised Texas Lottery system. In what remains of this post though I will restrict myself to highlighting some key points made by Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell in "The Tomist," his review of American neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama’s new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.

Kingwell's review is noteworthy less for what it says about Fukuyama - the book earns a negative review for failing to take a discernible position – and more for its courage in naming politics as the sham that it is. “Institutions of politics,” Kingwell remarks, justify “the advantages of the few in terms that will be swallowed by the many.” Further, he notes, if they believe they must they will use force without justification to maintain those advantages if and when the otherwise reliable force of ideology (brainwashing, conditioning, material security and comforts) fails to maintain the status quo. Elsewhere, Kingwell succinctly spells out just what this system of advantages look like:

“[E]very political system known to history has been dedicated to some form or other of legitimated extortion: polls, taxes, fines, bribes, and rents, together with their financial-arms-race counterparts of evasion, loopholes, lawyers, and regulatory capture.”

Sound bleak? Perhaps, although as 2011 draws to a close and the wealth gap in most countries widens, one must seriously wonder and ponder.

First published in 1850, Harper’s www.harpers.org remains America’s second longest continuously running magazine after Scientific American, which, in any case, is only its senior by five years. As readily available in drug stores and gas station magazine stands as in Canada’s big box and independent bookstores, Harper’s may well be the English-speaking world’s most rewarding and well-balanced monthly read. Throughout its venerable one-hundred and sixty-one year publishing history, its pages, as Wikipedia notes, have offered up the writings of everyone from Herman Melville and Mark Twain in the nineteenth century, to Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath in the twentieth. During the past forty years its longest serving editor and contributor was Lewis H. Lapham, who stepped aside in 2006 to found a new publication known as Lapham’s Quarterly.

Continuous publication of Harper’s Magazine, as Wikipedia also notes, has been threatened on at least two notable occasions. The first instance was provoked by a perceived reactionary change in the magazine’s primary ownership, John Cowles, Jr., being the dominant backer at the time. A wave of high profile editorial and other resignations ensued, among them the well-known Norman Mailer and Bill Moyers. A second threat to the magazine’s publication transpired in the early 1980s, when the then majority controller Star Tribune announced that Harper’s would fold. In response, John R. MacArthur intervened, and with the help of several organizations established the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, which continues to publish the magazine today. Today, in the words of Wikipedia writers, Harper’s remains a consistent and effective internal critic of American domestic and foreign policy.

Beyond all this, Harper’s is distinguished by a principled exercise of imaginative reason, a rare cosmopolitan ethos, and a uniquely tangible humanistic practice. Sober and insightful, its writers normally succeed in critiquing the increasingly mad world we inhabit without falling back on crude or rigid ideological positions. While this stance will disappoint committed Leftists, who will prefer the pages of Canadian Dimension or Z Magazine or Monthly Review, it has the undeniable virtue of enabling a forum in which a spectrum of readers can discourse and, yes, disagree, including social democrats, liberals, and even some conservatives. That being said, Harper’s has consistently published some of the most radical analyses and forward looking articles to appear on the mass market in North America in recent years.

Becoming Dr. Strange: Thoughts on episode one of season four of CBC's Being Erica

2011-09-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

Image: Screen shot of character Erica Strange (played by Erin Karpluk) from CBC's Being Erica; original shot posted at Britts On blog

I've long been a fan of the CBC's (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's) adult television drama Being Erica, now in its fourth season as of yesterday's new "Doctor Who?" episode (clever title).

"Doctor Who?" was challenging though. It left me, and probably most loyal viewers, with initially mixed feelings - as it surely was meant to. In today's post I attempt to understand my mixed fixings. The post presupposes long standing familiarity with the show though, so newbies may want to skip this entry.

To reiterate, the first episode of season four of Being Erica left me with mixed feelings. They were provoked by its surprising and arguably shocking plot and character twists, which may strike some as downright inauthentic. Not wishing to spoil the episode, all I ask is whether the show's writers are sacrificing the integrity of Erica's character in a now impatient attempt to drive the show's narrative logic home by season's end? I will try to answer this question by characterizing this logic as both spiritual and psychological, and by summing its operative belief system up as the necessity that each of us engage in a conscious struggle at becoming fully human. This humanizing process, the show emphasizes, is filled with both moments of joy and of pain. Yet growth ultimately leads the individual beyond the normal confines of the ego into a way of being that heals both the self and ultimately all else it encounters.

Heady stuff - for a prime time Canadian drama.

But again, the question is whether the integrity of Erica's character is being subordinated to the show's spiritual and psychological logic? If so, it wouldn't be the first time character was subordinated to plot or theme in television history, as television characters often serve as vehicles or foils for ideas or narrative twists. We may not approve, when this occurs. Yet, as experienced viewers, we are generally forgiving. After all, the medium of television is driven by fundamentally different forces than film or literature, for instance, are. We expect a good film or a literary novel to illuminate character and to subordinate narrative and conceptual concerns in the service of this imperative.

Now, despite my initial mixed feelings, it seems to me the often shocking plot and character twists in episode one of season four of Being Erica were justified. This is so because Erica is now a therapist training. Consequently, as her colourful therapist Dr. Tom puts it in the episode, her life now is driven by a new imperative: she must strive to become her patient. How is this to be accomplished? By surrendering the ego's self-regarding imperatives. This permits both patient and therapist to experience a fully human encounter on equal footing. Or, to put the matter differently: Erica's character is rapidly converging with the show's narrative logic. Being Erica is about to become: Becoming Erica.

Being Erica: http://www.cbc.ca/beingerica/

Becoming Bruce: The Early Life & Work of Bruce Cockburn, by John A. McCurdy

2010-09-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

Cover of Bruce Cockburn's May 1970 self-titled debut album.

For several years now I've formed the distinct impression that both fans as well as the general public have been living with Bruce Cockburn's music these past forty years without necessarily understanding his music in a conscious way. In this short book I try to remedy this perceived problem with respect to his early work.

The book is structured in the following way.

The contents of Chapters 2, 3, and 4, are primarily biographical. Together they reconstruct the story of Bruce's life as he himself has told it to so many journalists over the years, from his birth in 1945 to his first appearance as a truly established music artist at Toronto's Massey Hall in the spring of 1970. Virtually all the biographical material contained in these chapters has been carefully gleaned from interviews Bruce has given over the past forty plus years. Consequently, they present Bruce's early life and work as he has thus far offered it to the reading public. Wherever and whenever appropriate, I let Bruce speak for himself. A small portion of his biography is also presented in Chapter 6, principally the story of his marriage and earliest known Christian experience.

Chapter 5 offers an original narrative interpretation of Bruce's first album. (Copies of Bruce's debut are hard to come by today. It's possible to listen to the songs at the True North Records website http://www.truenorthrecords.com/Albums.php?album_id=14, though I must recommend that the reader acquire a copy of his or her own.)

My interpretation of his debut record rests on a central assumption: that Bruce carefully arranged and crafted the contents of his debut record to communicate autobiographical initiation narrative. This story, I argue, is one of initiation into an Eco-Christian world view, but one significantly that ushers in a vision not so much of an orthodox as of a pagan Christ. This Eco-Christian vision culminates, as Paul Nonnekes intimated in an earlier 2000 study of Bruce's lyrics, in an integral vision of earthly and heavenly harmony.

As Bruce sings in “Spring Song”:

“Seasons turning yet again / The Mother’s breast is full again / As in heaven, so with men / Is now and ever shall be.”

The attainment of an Eco-Christian culture, “Spring Song” insists, lies in shifting the seat of human consciousness from brain to heart. This is achieved by birthing and cultivating what seers and mystics have called ‘the eye of the heart': the fourth energy centre of the human body known otherwise as the heart chakra. As Bruce sings:

“When we come / When we come again / To celebrate renewal / At the heart / At the heart of us / Our eyes will touch life.”

In forwarding this claim, I wish to challenge the prevailing notion that Bruce's orthodox Christian material, dominant from 1974 to 1991, stands as the apex of his life work. What I would call the orthodox view regards his eclectic and syncretic early and late works as lacking Christian orthodoxy's imaginative clarity. By contrast, this book aims to show that Bruce's eclecticism and syncretism were once and are essentially once again his normative position as a music artist. By this measure, his bold though arguably brief orthodox mid-career period ought to be viewed instead as a significant temporary detour rather than as a defining feature of his work.

In short, Bruce Cockburn’s understanding of the human condition, it seems to me, is predominantly eclectic or syncretic. In this sense, his adult life and work constitutes a passionate inter-cultural quest, initiated when he was only in his teens, one that deepened during his years at Berklee School of Music in Boston in the mid-1960s.

One last point. Historically, Bruce has tended to be an unusually private Canadian icon. As early as 1976 journalist Patricia Holtz would point out just how shy he actually was. He cared, she insisted, “an extreme amount about his privacy," while the "whole idea of interviews seems to him like an unnecessary intrusion.” Bruce's private way of life will soon be challenged though by Bruce himself. In spring 2010, Bruce announced that he was planning to write a memoir, to be published in April 2010 by HarperOne and HarperCollinsCanada. As Bruce put the matter at a press conference at the time:

“‘... the notion that there should be a book about me has popped up now and then, along with offers to write it … It always seemed too soon, and I’ve felt all along that such a book should be mine to author. When HarperOne expressed their interest, it finally did seem timely ...’”

Further, Bruce's long standing manager, Bernie Finkelstein, has also announced the imminent publication of his own memoirs, set for release in the spring of 2012. There is no avoiding the fact that the looming appearance of Bruce's and Bernie's memoirs are virtually certain to alter the way we - myself included - understand the genesis, meaning, and significance of Bruce's early life and work.

In the meantime, I offer my book as a creative and competent reading of Bruce Cockburn's early life and work. Only time will tell if my reading of both will cohere with what Bruce himself has to say about himself.

Virtuosos of Rock: A Review of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010, 107 Min.), directed by Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen

2010-06-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

Images: film poster (top); Rush, Toronto, mid-1970s (below)

For a Canadian like myself, there is some fascination in going to the local cinema to see a documentary film about a Canadian band whose three members hail from Willowdale, Ontario, a dull, non-descript Toronto suburb, and Hagersville, Ontario, otherwise famous for a tire fire. The band in question is Rush and has been based around the talents of the same three men since 1974: Geddy Lee on bass guitar, keyboards and lead vocals; Alex Lifeson on guitar; and Neil Peart on drums and percussion. Arguably Canada’s most commercially successful and best-known band of the past forty years, both at home and abroad, Rush also has the distinction of running afoul of critical opinion.

Enter Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, the new documentary by San Dunn and Scot McFadyen, which seems to be doing double duty: to please Rush’s legion of loyal long-time fans, on the one hand, while attempting to bring critics and new fans on side, on the other (http://www.rushbeyondthelightedstage.com/).

How successful is the film in achieving these aims? Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage is indeed a disarming film that makes for good viewing. This is partly because it utilizes a straightforward format, including a mix of chronological and thematic analysis. It also successfully humanises Lee, Lifeson and Peart. The portrait of Peart that emerges is especially personal. This is ironic, given his reputation for unsociable behaviour. This is also apt though, as Peart has been Rush’s principal lyricist – the band’s ideas man - for most of its existence. The twin tragedies Peart faced in the late 1990s, the deaths of his daughter and wife, are handled subtly and with dignity. And who can deny the film’s good-natured humour, invoked by the directors at just those moments when the program seems to be loosing steam?

Ultimately though, the film seems as much about artistic integrity as about Rush. The band is presented as the type of the defiant artist: unbending in the face of market dictates, faithful to its vision to the end. As Katherine Monk put the matter in the Vancouver Sun: "The boys are rendered as musical saints who were martyred on the industry cross for their beliefs." In this there is something of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a work referenced directly in Rush's early work, a 1943 novel about an architect who remains true to his highest principles in the face of persecution and against all odds. The idea that Rush swam against the commercial stream is dubious though, and amounts to a romanticization of the band. It would be more accurate to say it remained in dialogue with the larger culture, embracing the synthesizer in the 1980s, for instance, as both a choice and as an affirmative nod in the direction of New Wave. Moreover, like so many other artists who got their big break in the 1970s – Neil Young comes to mind - Rush sought a synthesis of its previous styles in the 1990s. Essentially, the band rode the same waves as the rest of the music business, they just continued to surf in their own eccentric direction.

In addition to romanticizing Rush, Dunn and McFayden’s film fails to illuminate the process by which Lee, Lifeson and Peart advanced their musical abilities so fully and so early without apparent tutelage or extended apprenticeship. Leaving these details out feeds a related myth: that of the three boys with extraordinary ‘natural talent.' No doubt all three were largely natural musicians. Yet the viewer senses something has been left out. Surely Rush had teachers and mentors?

The film also arguably fails to penetrate the dense web of morphing ideas that fill Rush’s records. True, a number of the band's key ideas and more provocative lyrics are highlighted, but mostly in a spirit of curiosity or mute credulity. Even when the film allows avid fans to speak directly to the music, the results are mediocre: Rush’s music may be about the alienation of the individual from society, but if so the band is merely retelling the perennial story of rock and roll to a syncopated beat.

My own sense is that Rush is, first and foremost, a virtuoso band, a fact that renders them an immediate oddity, as virtuosos normally steer clear of rock and roll. This fact distinguishes Rush from most rock bands active today, with the exception of a handful of long standing progressive rock cousins. Some will argue Rush is an ideas band, or that their music is emotionally satisfying. I, however, cannot agree on these points, as it seems to me their music lacks warmth, soul, feel, and internal coherence. As Owen Gleiberman has put the matter in Entertainment Weekly: "They're the sound of all rock and no roll." There is something oddly – even eerily – unmusical about the sophisticated music made by Rush. Evocation of feeling and mood are no less a musical skill than the ability to write and perform in multiple time signatures. Two distinct gifts you say? But, then, what is the purpose of music: mere technical proficiency? Only when Rush adopted the economy of Pop in the 1980s, as Sting once described that genre’s central feature, did its music come to life. Yet one could make the case that Rush ceased to be Rush at precisely this moment.

The question as to whether or not Rush’s music has merit may ultimately be a moot point though. After all, they have enjoyed a long career and a consistent cult following that has assured them industry success, if not critical acceptance. Their musical skill is unquestioned, millions upon millions of units have been sold, and thousands of lives reputedly illuminated by their vast catalogue of songs. Indeed, the cinema theatre where I saw the film on opening night was packed to the backseats, if not with eager fans, than with a festive audience more than willing to celebrate Rush’s unusual achievement. Given these factors even a curmudgeonly critic has to ask him or herself if taste really matters in the end? Rock and roll, after all, is a business like any other.

Check out these reviews of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage as well:

Linda Barnard, "Rush: Documentary Finds Nuance Amid Noise," Toronto Star: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/article/821254--rush-documentary-finds-nuance-amid-noise

Mike Devlin, “Canadian Filmmaking Duo Revels in Rush Job,” Times Colonist:
http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/Canadian+filmmaking+revels+Rush/3135273/story.html

Adam McDowell, “Rush: Sticking to the Formula,” National Post:
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/Rush+Sticking+formula/3132812/story.html
McDowell on Rush: “Peart’s lyric’s these days explore love, loss and learning. Moving closer to the heart has also taken rush further away from the head. They’re just not that strange anymore, and some fans may quietly feel the magic is fading every year.”

Katherine Monk, “Getting Closer to the Heart,” Vancouver Sun:
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Getting+closer+heart+Rush/3135389/story.html

Jim Slotek, “‘Rush’ Doc Doesn’t Care for Cool,” Toronto Sun:
http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/movies/2010/06/09/14322801.html
Jordan Zivitz, “Closer to Their Heart,” Montreal Gazette:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Closer+their+heart/3137651/story.html

Owen Gleiberman, film review, Entertainment Weekly: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20392434,00.html

California Dreaming on the Psychoanalytic Couch: A Review of When You’re Strange; A Film About The Doors, directed by Tom Dicillo (2009)

2010-06-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

Images: film poster; portrait of Jim Morrison from the website Simply Art Online, published by Michael Arnold

I can still see the long line of people in the mall. Each has a ticket to Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors in hand.

The year was 1991. The Doors and the counter-culture they represented were experiencing a popular cross-generational revival. Some attributed the trend to the optimism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Every student of consequence at my suburban high school, or so I thought at the time, was standing in line. Some, like myself, were devote fans of the American rock band, which released six albums between 1967 to 1971 and recorded many of the period’s best popular songs (“Light My Fire”). Others attended that night out of respect for the band. Still others were merely curios. All hoped to walk home with some deeper insight into the dilemma of growing up absurd - as Paul Goodman once put the matter - in a stale suburb.

My passion for The Doors was born one cold autumn night in the Canadian suburb of Burlington, Ontario. I was walking home, aged sixteen and well past curfew, with a friend. Along the way he had me listen to a tape of The Doors. With its dissonant notation and macabre narrative, the first song I listened to, “Not to Touch the Earth,” was a bit of a scare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_-HqcNum7M. Raised Baptist, I'd never heard anything like it before: “Some outlaws lived by the side of a lake, The minister’s daughter’s in love with the snake, who lives in a well by the side of a road, wake up, girl, we’re almost home!”

To my surprise I found myself hopelessly attracted to the music of The Doors. Within a week of hearing "Not to Touch the Earth," I’d watched Live at the Hollywood Bowl, a film of a 1968 Doors concert. I'd also purchased The Best of The Doors on tape from a head shop on Toronto’s Yonge Street.

Historical documentaries sometimes suffer from an obvious necessity: digging up enough original film or photographic material to fill an hour or more of program time. Many a mediocre documentary hangs its prospects on a narrow collection of photos and film sequences. Not so in the case of Tom Dicillo's When You’re Strange: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333667/. Textured and personal, The Doors visual archive includes even film sequences shot by Jim Morrison, the band's lead singer. Dicillo's preference for moving pictures invests the film with a welcome lyricism. As a result, the film communicates in depth without feeling overworked or cluttered.

Though lyrical, the film unfailingly reconstructs the key turning points in the history of The Doors. It achieves this in one sense by adding a narrator, voiced by Johnny Depp, whose running commentary situates the viewer in the context of late 1960s America. Depp's narrator also offers authoritative insights into Morrison’s psyche and personality.

One thing a friend of mine told me after we'd seen the show was how much she appreciated being exposed by the film to the history and politics of the counter-culture era. Though in her late twenties, she could not recall seeing the footage of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, which the film cites toward its conclusion, before. Her high school history courses stopped abruptly at the end of the Second World War. Her experience reinforced for me the necessity of continuing to tell the stories of the 1960s for future generations.

Dicillo's film has another great strength: it effectively documents Morrison's troubled personality and often sinister stage presence. It quickly becomes clear when Morrison's wild and at times obscene stage antics result from inspiration as opposed to substance abuse. Moments when his antics register as shamanic invocations or acts of great theatre shock the viewer or audience into considering at an emotional or visceral level the extent to which contemporary society forces healthy human impulses down into the soul's underground. Morrison's posthumously published poem “An American Prayer" expresses this point poignantly:

Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist?
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
Have you been born yet
and are you alive?

Still, like many documentaries, When You're Strange picks up too many ideas only to put them down again without adequate comment; the film tracks the development of key themes and ideas in The Door's music, but only superficially. As well, Morrison's celebrity ends up the central focus of a film that otherwise purports to document the story of a band.

It's been twenty years since I stood in line waiting to see Stone's The Doors. I wouldn't call myself a passionate fan of the band any more, but I still respect its accomplishments as an avante guard band and believe the band remains culturally and historically significant. Few bands captured the zeitgeist of their era as well as The Doors. Morrison's narcissism, chauvinism, and self-destructiveness now seem tragic, if not farcical at times. Yet the band approached the world and the human condition in the venerable spirit of the Romantic tradition. At worst, Morrison stands, as one recent writer has put it, as the last Holy Fool, and Holy Fools, as history attests, deserve a hearing.

In the Key of Me: The Spiritual is Personal

2009-11-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday November 17th, between 4:30-6:00pm, I will be speaking and leading discussion at the Interfaith Chapel at the University of Victoria, as part of the University of Victoria's Interfaith Chaplaincy "Sessions in Spirituality Series": http://web.uvic.ca/interfaith/SpiritualReligious/McCurdy.html . The series seeks to explore the question: What, if anything, does it mean to describe oneself as spiritual, but not religious? Is one orientation preferable to or distinct from the other?

I have decided to title my talk, "In the Key of Me: The Spiritual is Personal." Here's a brief outline of some of the themes and points I hope to touch on before the session breaks off for discussion:

Born and raised in the bosom of the North American Baptist Church, I made a sudden and desperate exit from that institution at the age of sixteen. To commemorate the moment I taped a paper sign to my bedroom wall that read "The Quest," self-consciously setting out on a personal search for truth that ultimately led me well beyond the bounds of my church of origin.

At a certain point in this process I began receiving spiritual messages from the universe from a range of dream and every day sources, and began to have distinctively spiritual experiences. In my talk I will describe both my religious and my spiritual experiences to date, identifying key turning points in my personal journey. I hope, in the process, to make a case for understanding religious experiences as those that are common to many, and spiritual experiences as those experiences of the world that are unique to each individual.

I believe our task, as spiritual beings, lies in weaving together our shared religious and personal spiritual experiences through processes of creative reflection. Experience has shown me that spiritual and religious experiences can be one and the same, though we ought not to expect that they always will or should be.

Often my experience of participating in the Eucharist (communion) has contained both a religious and a spiritual dimension, and this will be the focus of my talk. Where relevant, I will discuss how a range of spiritual traditions, especially Anglicanism and Anthroposophy, have helped shape my understanding of both the religious and the spiritual.

Review of "Dylan & Cohen: Poets of Rock Roll," by David Boucher

2009-03-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

Review of Dylan & Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll, by David Boucher (New York: Continuum, 2004)

By: John A. McCurdy

22 March 2009

Critics today occasionally still ask whether the songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen should rightly be regarded as poetry or not. Poetry shouldn’t depend on melody and instrumentation, they charge.

It’s an old-fashioned argument, but one that can be made.

Then there are those who take it for granted that Dylan and Cohen are poets in the traditional page-bound sense. Pressed to support the claim they often point to the fact that Dylan’s work continues to elicit a steady stream of interpretative tomes and tributes. Or they refer to the fact that Cohen’s songs are commonly anthologized in undergraduate literature textbooks or studied in university and high school classrooms.

But can we respond to the question as to whether or Dylan and Cohen’s songs are poetic with any confidence? In Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll, author David Boucher’s answer is yes. Grounding his arguments in the artistic theories of R.C. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott and Federico Garcia Lorce, Boucher posits the existence of three types of modern poetry: poetry of magic, which recreates the phenomenal (external) world; poetry of imagination, which stirs and educates the inner (subjective) world of emotion; and inspirational poetry, which operates solely according to the logic of imagery.

Boucher is generally successful in showing how Dylan and Cohen’s songs can be read as specimens of one or another of these types of poetry. Dylan’s work is described as having evolved from being a poetry of magic (here his early politically committed songs are exemplary) to poetry of inspiration (as in the imagistic masterwork “Desolation Row,” from 1965’s seminal Highway 61 Revisited). Meanwhile, Cohen served a much longer poetic apprenticeship (his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies appeared in 1956), so that he attains a level of imaginative poetry at roughly the same time as Dylan, on his 1966 debut Songs of Leonard Cohen.

Boucher’s book seems troubled though by what feel like internally incompatible elements. Though he performs many insightful close readings of key Dylan and Cohen songs, he also populates the text with a large volume of biographical, performance-based, and historical information. He does this in an effort to establish biographical and historical context. Yet it’s not always clear how this broader material directly supports his reading of both singers’ imaginative and inspirational songs.

In this respect, though Boucher touches on the question, it remains unclear precisely how Dylan and Cohen’s songs achieve imaginative or inspirational status. At what point does a song, as opposed to a poem, register meaning and achieve its distinguishing effects? At what point and to what extent is any work of art constructed by the reader? Viewer? Listener? Audience? The poetry question, as it relates to popular music and popular culture, remains on the table.

Whether or not Boucher achieves a breakthrough in terms of better understanding the relationship between poetry and popular culture, he is clearly passionate and deeply informed about his topic. Possessing a superior grasp of the vast literature written on Dylan and Cohen, he effectively presents what must be its leading insights. Though some of the biographical and historical content seems extraneous to the book’s theme and purpose, this material remains fascinating in its own right and is presented in an invariably sober manner. Consequently, one finds politically and psychologically grounded histories of the postwar American folk music movement and counterculture in Boucher’s book, alongside a set of unsentimental biographies.

Hank Williams emerges as Dylan and Cohen’s formative musical and cultural influence. Later Dylan turns to Johnny Cash, to Harry Smith's now famous Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), and ultimately to Woody Guthrie. Elements of Dylan’s early politically committed career receive due attention after years of critical fixation on his ‘going electric phase.’ How many younger Dylan fans know, for instance, that Dylan “sang to a crowd of over 200,000 people at the March on Washington rally” in 1963 “on the same stage that the Reverend Martin King Jr., deliver his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech?” Fewer perhaps than one might suspect. Boucher’s book is particularly valuable for the thorough manner in which the historical importance of the pre-“Like A Rolling Stone” Dylan is affirmed. He also makes connections across Dylan’s full catalogue. That 1979’s Slow Train Coming “was so intensely religious should not have come as a surprise,” he writes, for “Dylan’s early albums, beginning with the first, Bob Dylan, were obsessed with death and God” (p. 216).

Then there is Boucher’s reconstruction of Cohen’s biography, which turns out to be as conflicted and tormented as Dylan’s – if not more so. Some will know that Cohen experienced intense manic depression until as recently as the late 1990s. Fewer will know however that his interest in Zen Buddhism dates to the early 1970s; that his greatest early popular influence, Hank Williams aside, was Ray Charles; or that one of the most fruitful ways to interpret his work is as an running commentary on the undeniable battle between the gendered sexes. On this latter point Boucher expands, taking his cue from “There Is a War,” an early 1970s Cohen song:

“This war between men and women to which he refers is one that is a battle of the wills, a ruthless and vicious struggle to the psychic death, and in which women have the upper hand. Everyone knows, Cohen says, that women are the mind and force that hold everything in place. His album I’m Your Man [1988] represents for him a truce in this war, perhaps even a peace” (p. 197).

Happily such choice insights are to be gleaned in abundance from David Boucher’s Dylan & Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll.

*Original review of Dylan & Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll, by David Boucher published in Say3 Magazine, November 2005, pp. 34-35.

Professor David Boucher's Website: http://www.caerdydd.ac.uk/euros/contactsandpeople/profiles/boucherde.html

David Boucher's Dylan & Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll, at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Dylan-Cohen-Poets-Rock-Roll/dp/0826459811

Reading China's Rise: The Promise of the 'Unknown Rebel' and the Coming Pacific Century

2009-03-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

By: John A. McCurdy

November 2005

Tiananmen Square 1989 – one of those truncated media-inspired phrases that set loose journalistic images lodged in the minds of Westerners; image-memories of Chinese soldiers, held back by pro-democracy demonstrators, numbering one million strong for a time, crowded into the precincts of Beijing’s historically-charged central public square. Out from the photos and film footage emerges a single, simple, unforgettable image – Associated Press journalist Jeff Widener’s early June 1989 ‘Unknown Rebel’ photo.

Significant not just for seeming to evoke the mood and meaning of ‘Tiananmen Square 1989,’ the ‘Unknown Rebel’ records as well the final moment of the weeks-long Chinese citizens’ occupation of the square. Soon after the photo is taken Chinese government crackdowns commencing, fanning out across the Beijing night. Thousands of dissidents are rounded up. Many are charged with political crimes and imprisoned. Some are tortured and executed.

Sixteen years old at the time and increasingly interested in the burgeoning global human rights movement, I found myself deeply moved by this ‘Unknown Rebel.’ I cut his picture out of a popular news weekly and taped it in a prominent position on my bedroom wall. Whether it marked a beginning or an end was unclear at the time, but five months later the Berlin Wall fell. Viewed by many as a document of hope the ‘Unknown Rebel’ came to encapsulate the post-Soviet promise of democracy and human rights for all.

The “Unknown Rebel” remained on my bedroom wall for several years, his back to the camera, a constant reminder of the rights and freedoms I often took for granted in the consumer-comfort West. I slung my backpack full of textbooks and subversive novels over my shoulder behind him each morning, as I got ready for school. I completed my homework and hung with my girlfriend most evenings behind his back. In either instance he didn’t seem to notice – he just continued standing down that line of jerking, halting tanks.

I moved my bedroom to my parent’s basement in early 1995. Along the way the ‘Unknown Rebel’ was either lost or damaged and discarded. Whatever the cause of his absence my new bedroom walls didn’t seem to register any loss. I venture a hypothesis: his absence as the apotheosis of the peculiar sense of loss experienced by so many in the mid-1990s. Images culled from Rwandan and Balkan genocides cut down simple illusions about a global liberalism bringing about an end to history, as Francis Fukayama would have had it. World leaders spoke increasingly of economics and less of politics when mentioning China. If not global democracy, they asked, why not global free trade? After all, they assured us, trade and commerce go before democratic reform. U.S. President Bill Clinton called this policy ‘constructive engagement.’

It is now 2005, ten years since the ‘Unknown Rebel’ came down from my bedroom wall and I am waiting still for democracy in China. Perhaps, as Bruce Cockburn once put it, I’ve been “waiting for a miracle.” Well, actually, according to pundits, the miracle arrived in economic garb some time between 1989 and 2005 – first in the form of the mid-1990s ‘Asian Tiger’ economies, followed closely by the phenomenon of ‘China Rising,’ with its red-hot economic growth and trade statistics. In the year 2004, for instance, China alone accounted for one third of the total increase in the volume of world trade (Arrighi 78).

There is even a sizeable elite consensus today that China, or East Asia, is set to dominate the future global economy, along the United States. We are promised not a ‘New American Century,’ but rather a ‘Pacific Century.’ In one recent version of the ‘Pacific Century’ Business Week imagines a ‘global triumvirate’ consisting of China, India and the United States. “China and India will be both allies and counterweights to America, at the expense of Japan and Europe,” managing editor Robert J. Dowling writes (16).

Meanwhile voices in the U.S. Congress, while continuing to harp on the so-called ‘War on Terror’ mutter privately about China’s seeming threat to global U.S. hegemony. In the past this scenario might have been expected to provoke a new ‘Cold War.’ Yet, as world historian Robert B. Marks has written, “[c]ommon economic interests … vastly complicate relations between the United States and China” (160). Indeed, it often seems that many of these Congressional voices belong to conservatives who fear China less for its military potential than because they are cognizant that the U.S. is in a position neither to bully nor to disengage from China.

Some elite American media commentators have tried instead to strike a balanced view, calling on U.S. political leaders to drop ‘constructive engagement’ in favour of ‘constructive management’ (Schwarz 27-28). As Wang Jisi writes in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, the West’s future with China need not be viewed in ‘zero-sum terms.’ In fact, he notes, “such a simplistic view may threaten both country’s national interests. Black-and-white analyses inevitably fail to capture the nuances of the situation” (Jisi 47).

Thus the question of China-U.S. relations and of the future of global leadership (should such leadership prove necessary) will not one of lightness versus darkness – of St. George slaying the Dragon – but of grey ambiguities and deepening interdependence. Think Gandalf the Grey rather than Gandalf the White.

Will economic liberalization lead to political liberalization in China? As Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs write in Foreign Affairs, any answer comes down to the deeply uncertain equation between ‘development and ‘democracy.’ Pointing to the fact that the growing distribution of wealth in China and Russia has not produced clear signs of democratic reform, they note that:

“the link between economic development and what is generally called liberal democracy is actually quite weak and may even be getting weaker … authoritarian regimes around the world are showing that they can reap the benefits of economic development while evading any pressure to relax their political control” (77-78). The Chinese Community Party (CPP), for example, regularly co-opts China’s rising entrepreneurial class, thirty per cent of whom are card-carrying party members (Kennedy 80).

Still, there are at least two important quasi-democratic movements active in China today. Significantly their existence is not directly related to China’s expansive economic growth over the past twenty-five years. The first and earliest of the two is the Anti-Dam Movement, which gained impetus in 1992 when the CCP flooded millions of acres of agricultural and other land in rural China to construct the infamous Three Gorges Dam. The project led to the often-forced relocation of 1.3 million people, most of whom are traditional peasantry (Forney 34-36).

Today grassroots resistance to other dame ‘mega-projects’ continues in hundreds of locations throughout China’s many provinces, though, thanks to active government media censorship, few of these groups are aware of each other’s activities. Slowly, though, connections are being made between different activist groups through circulation of indigenous underground documentaries (36). For many in the so-called Third World development claims raise both environment and human rights concerns. At the time of ‘Tiananmen Square 1989,’ who thought the leading form of dissent in China would one day grapple with issues of both human rights and environmental protection in the same breath?

China’s growth since the early 1980s has lifted twenty five per cent of the population out of ‘extreme poverty’ (Keller D3). Yet this growth has come at great expense to workers who often are exploited in sweatshop conditions, and to Chinese citizens more generally, many of who have developed serious illnesses from industrial air pollution (Beecher 26). Land, air and water have been poisoned and many backs broken to achieve international development acclaim. Chinese activist and pro-democracy groups will undoubtedly engage human rights and ecological issues together for the long-term.

The other major dissident movement in post-Tiananmen Square China is the Falun Dafa (Falun Gong), an ostensible health and spirituality movement overtly opposed to the new materialism of Chinese society. In its struggle to operate free of government interference the movement directly confronts CPP authorities concerning rights to free expression, free assembly, and freedom of belief. By the late 1990s Falun Dafa had attracted more card-carrying members than the CPP itself, marking it as the most significant potential rival to old party rule in China since the days of the ‘Unknown Rebel.’ Accordingly the old guard has long since initiated a political crackdown on Falun Dafa that continues today.

We return, in the end, to Business Week and its future projection of a global economy led by a Chinese, Indian and American ‘triumvirate.’ We return, that is, to the probable projection of a ‘Pacific Century.’ Which values, political practices and economic policies are likely to guide or govern such an entity? For starters it’s doubtful that the material standard of living enjoyed by most Europeans and North Americans can be extended to the third of humanity living in China and India today. Additionally, if the Chinese ‘economic miracle’ is a product of globalization, as most claim it is, the world may ultimately be in deep trouble. James Howard Kunstler is the author of the recently published study The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. As Kunstler writes in the Guardian newspaper this past summer:

“Today’s transient global economic relations are a produce of very special transient circumstances, namely relative peace and absolutely reliable supplies of cheap energy. Subtract either of these elements from the equation and you will see globalization evaporate.”

Thus, talk of a Chinese ‘economic miracle’ – of more or less conventional modernization in East Asia – sounds both unsustainable and highly contingent. In a world ripe with potential sources of conflict, potential is certainly there for the promise of the ‘Unknown Rebel’ to be lost or discarded in favour of continued authoritarian rule in China. After all, as many commentators note Chinese leaders still value stability above all other values.

What of the potential influence of the United States, Europe, or Canada, on China? All three entities suffer from their own democratic deficits and internal political weaknesses. The United States specifically, once viewed by many as a ‘benevolent hegemon’ or indispensable power of last resort against tyranny, has not only spent its international legitimacy (Arrighi 50) in a false ‘War on Terror,’ but daily slouches closer to a uniquely American brand of political authoritarianism. In short, there is a distinct danger that a mix of authoritarian states will dominate a ‘Pacific Century.’ Some may be more dictatorial than others, yet most, if not all, will profess little more than the superficial outward trappings of democracy.

If the Twenty-First Century is to be a ‘Pacific Century’ than Canadians must begin to grapple with the significance of the China-U.S. dynamic in international relations. Canada will belong to any ‘Pacific Century’ if by virtue of nothing else that its geography, abundant resources, and heavy reliance on Central and East Asian immigration. What should its role be? Prime Minister Paul Martin hinted at an answer recently when he told Chinese President Hu Jintao, “We believe that both economic development and better governance requires not only openness and transparency but an understanding of the importance of human rights” (Laghi and Curry A4).

Beyond our role as Canadians, we are global citizens and many of us would seek to contemplate the China question (and that of global world order) from a post-national perspective – perhaps via a cosmopolitan or socialist framework. If so, is the vision of a ‘Pacific Century’ one we too can work with? If not: why not?

Endnotes

-Arrighi, Giovanni, “Hegemony Unravelling – I,” New Left Review 32, Mar/Apr 2005, pp. 23-80.
-Beech, Hannah, “They Export Pollution Too,” Time, 27 June 2005, p. 26.
-Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce and George W. Downs, “Development and Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5 (Sept/Oct 2005), pp. 77-86.
-Dowling, Robert J., “The Rise of Chindia,” Business Week, 22-29 August 2005, p. 16.
-Forney, Matthew, “Power to the People,” Time, 27 June 2005, pp. 34-36.
-Jisi, Wang, “China’s Search for Stability With America,” Foreign Affairs, 84, No. 5 (Sept/Oct 2005), pp. 39-48.
-Keller, Tony, “What to do about Africa – and the U.S.,” Globe and Mail, 14 May 2005, D3.
-Kennedy, Scott, “Diving China’s Future,” World Policy Journal, Winter 2004/2005, pp. 77-87.
-Kunstler, James Howard, “Globalisation is an anomaly and its time is running out,” Guardian, 4 August 2005.
-Laghi, Brian and Bill Curry, “Chinese leader talks talk with PM,” Globe and Mail, 10 September 2005, A4.
-Marks, Robert B., The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2002).
-Schwarz, Benjamin, “Managing China’s Rise,” Atlantic Monthly, June 2005, pp. 27-28.

“Reading China’s Rise: The Promise of the ‘Unknown Rebel’ and the Coming Pacific Century,” was originally published in Say3 Magazine, November 2005, pp. 15-18, 51.

Daydreaming in Red and White?

2009-03-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

By: John A. McCurdy

June 2005

If you’re like me – in fact, if you’re like most Canadians – you’ve experienced a recent and quite personal surge of interest in our nation’s history, as well as in our potential to chart a political and cultural course distinct from that of George W. Bush’s America. This recent surge of interest in things Canadian appears to date to Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s March 2003 announcement that Canada would not join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. One notable national commentator recently characterized the move as an “unprecedented act of diplomatic autonomy” [1], another as ‘a defining moment for Canadians” and as “the most popular decision taken by the Chretien government” [2]. Furthermore, to others Prime Minister Paul Martin’s decision to reject formal Canadian participation in Bush’s Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) program seems informed, at least in part, by the spirit of Chretien’s earlier move.

That these unquestionably momentous developments may signal the possibility of hope for Canada’s ostensible commitment to higher principles at home and abroad was brought home to me on a bus ride to the protest against the Iraq war held in downtown Toronto on March 19th*. As our contingent of Hamilton anti-war activists relaxed – some talking on cell phones, others quietly reflecting or snoozing – activist Ken Stone, of the local November 16th Coalition, confided to me that he had nearly lost hope for Canada as a sovereign nation in the aftermath of 9/11, but that more recent Iraq and BMD developments had changed his mind.

Stone’s sense of hope resonated with that same aforementioned enthusiasm for things Canadian I’d been feeling. I looked forward to my first trip to Ottawa since adolescence – planned for Easter weekend – with greater relish. Soon, I told myself, I would be standing proudly on Parliament Hill, would soon be walking the same streets as our nation’s leaders, might soon trace the footsteps of the man Richard Gwyn once named the Northern Magus – Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Still, just beneath the surface of my enthusiasm a chronic and perhaps distinctly Canadian fatalism languished, insisting – then as now – that hope for an independent, sovereign, prosperous and just Canada was little more than fantastical, perhaps even moralistic and delusional [3].

A week later – out from under the shadow of Toronto and up on the Canadian shield – I received an impromptu walking tour of a portion of downtown Ottawa that began in Chinatown and headed over to Bank Street where the fair trade Bridgehead coffee shop served as a makeshift destination (we opted, in the end, for an odd mix of beers, dessert and appetizers at the equally popular Manx Pub a few blocks east). Along the way my fellow travelers discussed the pros and cons of buying or renting in this or that neighbourhood while I kept my eyes open for signs of political and diplomatic life.

Gradually, foreign embassy sightings were more frequent. After attempting to decipher the stained glass windows of the city’s Museum of Nature we crossed a nearby street and stood in front of the gates of an embassy whose flag fell limp and tangled. One friend guessed we were standing in front of the Iraqi embassy. The other then implored us to move on, intimidating video cameras seeming to record our every word and gesture.

On Easter Monday we drove to the Quêbec side of the border to hike the trails around Meech Lake. Up in the hills I kept expecting clusters of first ministers - crouched over and conferring quietly about political strategy - to come walking around bends in the trail as though the fourteen years between the present and the 1987 deliberations over the Meech Lake Accords had been temporarily erased. On the journey back to the car I was as much delighted as disappointed when all that materialized were two fearless deer, who drank from the lake beside the trail.

On the way to Meech Lake I had imagined another car on the road ahead of our own, driven by the Northern Magus himself – his three sons and four sets of cross country skiis in tow. For many years now I’ve been haunted by his ghost, with whom I seem to share the ether along the waterfront trail by the bay in Hamilton. Somehow I’ve come to associate his spirit with the buzz and rose perfume that hover in late summer over the parks and gardens of Ontario. Still, this vision of him driving down the road had been rather blurry. It may have dated from the late 1980s or perhaps the early 1990s. No matter – it was merely some time during the Mulroney interlude. For probably the first time in my life I found myself daydreaming in red and white.

The scene shifted though as I recalled another, detailed in Trudeau’s Memoirs. While conducting research for his book at the National Archives Trudeau received a phone call from then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Later that day the two meet in the Prime Minister’s Office. “‘Would you be willing from time to time to give me some advice on foreign affairs?’” Mulroney asks, to which Trudeau replies “‘Yes, and the first piece of advice I give you is this: be friends with the United States – the Canadian people like the Americans – but don’t be subservient to the American government, because Canadians are a very proud people’.” [4]

Later I wondered exactly what sort of pride Trudeau had had in mind that afternoon. Was it the silent pride that may have taken rare outward form in the wake of Iraq 2003? Or was it the ostensibly federalist pride that the English-speaking Canadian majority demonstrated in their rejection of the Charlottetown Accords of 1992 – a move that, according to Trudeau, “established the locus of the sovereignty of Canada [in] the people”? [5] Indeed, was it at all likely that these two species of Canadian pride were in fact one and indivisible?

The modern Canadian identity has been shaped and reshaped by innumerable factors but surely key among them are such vital developments as Quêbec’s ‘Quiet Revolution’ as well as the long-standing foreign policy back-and-forth of American ‘activism’ and ‘isolationism.’ The Canadian experiment seems to depend for its success and viability on keeping Quêbec within the federal union (a range of federalist practices have evolved throughout our nation’s brief history) while also keeping the Americans at arms’ length. The Canadian dynamic would seem three- rather than two-fold, for since the 1860s the nation has increasingly been the sum of its often neo-colonial relations with the United States, as opposed to the sum of its original colonial relation with Great Britain), as much as it has also been the sum of Quêbec relations with the Rest of Canada (ROC) – though some debate whether even this odd conglomerate still exists.

I would like to think that there might today be one integral Canadian pride, though the concept may depend on a federalist and thus partisan bias. I would also like to think that should this integral pride exist that it manages somehow to translate into distinctly Canadian activity at the levels of both internal and external affairs.

*The November 16th Coalition, founded in 2002, is a Hamilton-based activist organization whose focus lies in mobilizing citizens to take progressive action on issues of war and racism.

Endnotes

[1]. Richard Gwyn, “Surviving Survivalism,” Literary Review of Canada, December 2004, p. 4.
[2] Reg Whitaker, “Living with Bush’s America,” Literary Review of Canada, January-February 2005, p. 5.
[3] Rondi Adamson, “Rejecting Missile Defence: Will Canada’s Decision Help Our Standing in the World?” Toronto Star, 27 February 2005, A16.
[4] Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Memoirs (McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1993), p. 358.
[5] Trudeau, Memoirs, p. 364.

“Daydreaming in Red and White” was first published in Hamilton, Ontario’s Say3 Magazine, No. 5, June 2005, pp. 21-22.

A Memoir on Ayn Rand

2009-03-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

Spring 2004

By: John A. McCurdy

One thing the millennium’s passing surely spawned in excess was “Top 100” lists. This was especially true in the United States, where to gauge popular reading tastes, publishers and politicos sponsored dozens of online surveys. Most top positions on these lists were dominated by the works of the Soviet defector Ayn Rand, a woman of Russian birth who was recognized in the initial Cold War years as America’s most dramatic champion of pure capitalism and rugged individualism.

The immense popularity of her works today has its origin in the cult Rand deliberately built up among conservative New York intellectuals in the 1950s and early 1960s around her powerful and domineering personality. In concrete terms she founded a society based around a philosophy called Objectivism: a system of neo-Aristotelian logical axioms covering all the branches of philosophy and arguing that the universe is knowable and that rational self interest is the only moral base on which to found human relationships and the wealth of nations.

In its early years the Objectivist movement boasted a number of influential members, among them Alan Greenspan, director of the U.S. Federal Reserve, as well as the popular psychologist Nathaniel Branden, with whom Rand fell hopelessly in love and whose wife Barbara would publish the definitive study of Rand's life and work, The Passion of Ayn Rand, in the early 1990s. While Rand’s ideas were said to have had an influence on the formative thinking of countless think tank directors in the United States the high regard expressed for her work in the noted “Top 100” lists must also be attributed to aggressive marketing of her books in bookstore chains and on college campuses throughout the English-speaking world in 1970s and 1980s. Her enduring popularity with talk radio pundits and the entrepreneurial middling classes, for whom her work functions an elevated specimen of the self-help and positive thinking genre, are also key factors in her success.

Her bestselling novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and popular essay compilations The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and The Romantic Manifesto (1972) indubitably fit the Cold War glove of the postwar period. Rand and her college minions detested the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the counterculture and likely spurned Paris ‘68. Yet, if Rand’s Objectivism could be said to have apologized profusely for American anti-Communism with its ceaseless harping on the evils of “collectivism” her ideas ultimately represent an extremist variation on the Anarcho-Capitalism of Murray Rothbard. Consequently while her works sell in the millions and claim fans from almost every walk of life, they receive scant attention from academia and hardly so much as passing mention in the mainstream liberal press. Her works might thus be regarded as subcultural, spread as they are by word-of-mouth, much as the seminal New Age works of the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, were disseminated - A Course In Miracles (1987), The Celestine Prophecy (1993). Globe & Mail television critic John Doyle dropped Ayn Rand’s name last month more or less out of the blue, pronouncing her a proto-fascist and using the reference merely to denounce an insipid new movie whose protagonist was an architect - just as is Rand’s most famous protagonist Howard Roark, from 1943’s The Fountainhead.

I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead thirteen years ago at the insistence of a new friend I’d made at an evangelical Christian summer camp that the book was a must-read. I took the plunge against my better judgment and indeed was thoroughly infected by the passion and seemingly boundless integrity of Howard Roark, the novel's self-contained protagonist, a genius modeled on American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. About the only thing Roark lacked was a bed buddy - not a lover - and he soon procured one in the person of Dominique Francon. A dissolute teen bursting with insights, energy, potential and idealism, I related instantly and intimately with Roark, pictured naked and in repose like a Greek statue in both the opening and closing passages of the novel, his contempt for convention setting fire to the mind.

So committed to his ideals and “intellectual property rights” was Howard Roark - the phallic ‘fountainhead’ of creativity and wealth - that when his “collectivist” foe Ellsworth Tooey threatens to alter the strict functionality of his greatest architectural work for less than pristine purposes, Roark sees fit to blow the building up with dynamite. With the conniving mediocrities and the socialist meddlers of the world, Rand insists, there can be no compromise. Think Conrad Black, withdrawing support in the late 1990s from a Canada supposedly opposed greatness only add Black taking dynamite to his former corporate headquarters and subtract his current legal battles - for Roark recognized the supposedly moral basis of propertied exchange and never in a lifetime would have thought to pull a fast one just to make a buck.

Roark gets his day in court, an opportunity to deliver an eloquent and matchless Hollywood speech so persuasive that even his enemies are deflated and his petty detractors converted. Such was the holding pattern in Rand’s later work, particularly in Atlas Shrugged, where Howard Roark morphs into the equally matchless steel baron Hank Rearden. Roark had refused to compromise, to play the game. Rearden, on the other hand, leads a powerful clique of inventors, investors, and industrialists, on a strike against state bureaucracies, thoughtless consumers, and resentful workers, in an attempt to show the world precisely who Atlas is and how in fact the world is kept from collapsing.

Thinking back the big ideas these novels touted - and perhaps only an outsider to American society and a Soviet defector at that could ever have embraced Yankie capitalism with such single minded naivete - not only utterly fail to impress me today: they also failed to hold my enthusiasm hostage more than month or two at the time. I distinctly recall renouncing Objectivism internally only a short while after announcing my conversion to Objectivism publicly. Any lingering doubt moreover was definitively despatched with a reading of Henry David Thoreau's Walden.

My hope in approaching Ayn Rand's work had been deeply personal: to make a clear break with my Baptist roots by taking one big step from the sanctuary of my childhood and youth into the pages of Ayn Rand’s books and the meticulously ordered corridors of her logical axioms. For a moment there was bliss and certainty, but a roving mind, drawn to philosophy, was bound to dig deeper than Rand’s tidy idealism, first to that moment of existential awakening Jean-Paul Sartre evoked so poignantly in Nausea (1938), followed by a period marked by psychological despair and the finite resignation of Wittgenstein, who accepted in his Tratatus Logical Philosophicus, that “the world is all that is the case.”

Ayn Rand’s hero - the author she most aspired to emulate - was nineteenth-century French poet and novelist Victor Hugo, and her favourite Hugo work, Les Miserables. While it seems crass to admit to it now, at nineteen years of age a close friend and I went to the musical when it came to Hamilton a little over a decade ago. There we encountered no axiomatic certainties or flawless heroes, but instead a criminal and the lives of the destitute, redeemed as they were through love, compassion and redemption. Deeply moved by the story I cried in public for the first time since childhood. Those tears - and others that would come afterword - meant more to me then and more to me now than any tidy programme purporting to correct the human condition and set the world aright overnight without first traveling the path of the heart.

"A Memoir on Ayn Rand" was first published in the Spring 2004 issue of McMaster University's humanities quarterly Between the Lines.

Revising Lightfoot! A Review of Gordon Lightfoot's First Album

2009-02-05T18:56:00.000-08:00

Spring 2004

By: John A. McCurdy

In March 1966, music industry legend Albert Grossman – then managing the careers of rising stars Ian & Sylvia, Peter Paul & Mary, and Bob Dylan – engineered United Artists’ release of Gordon Lightfoot’s first LP, Lightfoot! Recorded in New York in November 1964, the album’s fourteen tracks captured, with stark and brooding simplicity, Lightfoot’s signature sound – rich as oak, warm as spring sunshine, quietly illuminating, self-effacing.

The opening track, ‘Rich Man’s Spiritual’ – much like the other thirteen songs – presents a caricature of Lightfoot, consumed by the idea that he can buy his way into heaven if he puts himself in the way of a little blues – just enough, that is, to establish a modicum of credibility with the Lord. “Gonna buy me a poor man’s trouble / Yes and Lord to lead me home,” he sings, “And when I get my trouble and woe / Then homeward I will go / I’m gonna get a little trouble and woe to lead me home.” Never suspecting that the blues might be real, Lightfoot’s young man runs up against some truly unwanted suffering.

‘Long River,’ the album’s second track, shows how the first certainty lost is the constancy of young love when, after describing an idyllic country home he laments: “And I’d give it all to you / If her love were true / Where the long river flows / By my window.” In ‘The Way I Feel’ – the haunting track that follows – Lightfoot’s young man becomes a “tall oak tree / Alone and crying” – a green-bowed home for his lover, imagined as a young robin outgrowing her nest and flying away. The deep sense of loss in ‘The Way I Feel’ looks forward in time to Lightfoot’s 1976 masterwork, ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’

In ‘For Lovin’ Me,’ Lightfoot’s blistering sketch of disillusioned young man turned callous womanizer, his character boasts to a new lover already on the outs: “I’ve had a hundred more like you / So don’t be blue / I’ll have a thousand before I’m through” - lost, like Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, in hyper-masculine conquest fantasies. Lightfoot’s reverent interpretation of Ewan McColl’s ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ follows, however, as womanizer turns troubadour, singing a solemn ode the “the first time.”

From this point the feet of Lightfoot’s Rich Man begin to touch the earth, his troubadour self now humble enough to accept, and even celebrate, nature’s cycles of life and death through a sweet rendition of Phil Ochs’ ‘Changes.’ ‘Early Mornin’ Rain’ follows, arguably the album’s most terrestrial track and Lightfoot’s greatest composition. With an aching in his heart and his “pockets full of sand,” Lightfoot’s troubadour, lying drunk in a patch of long grasses, watches helplessly as commercial jets ascend “far above the clouds,” to a netherworld where the comforts of landscape give way to sun-bright weightlessness. “You can’t jump a jet plane,” goes the songs refrain, “Like you can a freight train / So I’d best be on my way / In the early mornin’ rain.”*

Later, when it seems a wayward soul will once again tell a heartbroken lover, “That’s what you get for lovin’ me,” along comes Lightfoot’s inspired interpretation of ‘Pride of Man,’ a protest ballad marked by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Singing “Can’t you see the flash of fire / Ten times brighter than the day,” Lightfoot warns Prometheus to “Turn around / Go back down / Back the way you came” - to forfeit stealing fire from the gods.

Concluding that “only God can lead the people back into the earth again,” Lightfoot moves into “Ribbon of Darkness,” where nuclear apocalypse gives way to self-revelation, his troubadour grieving lost love again, and going – as Neil Young would later put it – “Out of the blue / And into the black.” Too late for forgiveness, and stung by a dose of his own callous betrayal in ‘Oh, Linda,’ the album’s second last track, the final cut, ‘Peaceful Waters,’ offers up a blessing for “mankind” as Lightfoot trades the pain of love for the chalice of spiritual faith. His Rich Man comes full circle, the blues leaving a healthy sense of unease at the enormous difficulty of loving well.

* Many years later Lightfoot would reveal that the song had been written while caring for his first newborn. See the liner notes to the Lightfoot Songbook compilation (Rhino-Atlantic, 1999).

Originally published in the Spring 2004 issue of Between the Lines, McMaster University’s undergraduate humanities quarterly. Reprinted in 2007 at Wayne Francis' Lightfoot! website: http://wwww.lightfoot.ca/lightrev.htm