A Yearning For The Hearth

General Motors has announced that the Pontiac brand will be phased out by next year.

I’ve had six cars over the years, and three have been Pontiacs. I’d buy another too, and maybe I will if they get cheap enough now that they’re going out of business! My first was – brace yourself – a 1987 Firebird. I was 19 and I loved it. I bought it from a disc jockey who had it painted bright red, but the paint was starting to peel. I’m guessing that’s why he sold it. It was the ultimate cheese-mobile, of course and it wasn’t even that fast, but it was a cool car in its day, and it was actually a pretty good car. It ran well and got good mileage (it was a V6).

After my Firebird got T-boned I tried to replace it…despite warnings from friends and family, I bought a 1985 silver Fiero. It was cheap. I think $1200. Seemed to run okay, but the first time I changed oil it started to smoke, so the guy must have added something to the crankcase to mask it. And it burned oil. And it was gutless. And it was rife with electrical problems. Still, it kept me mobile for a couple years. Eventually the tranny died, but by that point I’d bought a more practical car anyway, a Chevy Malibu.

When I got married we inherited my in-law’s 2000 Grand Am. This was a very good car that drove well and I liked it. When we moved to Europe the car had to go, but my brother has it and it’s still going strong. 

So that’s been my Pontiac experience. I’m a little sad to see the brand die off. I thought the new line of cars set themselves apart a bit and I’ve always liked the little extra effort that they put into Pontiac interiors. Actually, GMs decisions around this downsizing don’t completely add up to me. Why axe Pontiac, but keep GMC – which really is redundant? Why axe Saturn, when you know you’re going to need to expand your range of cheap, efficient cars? Since Saturn has started selling rebranded Opels the cost of putting that line together must have been comparatively low.

Whatever becomes of GM, it’s going to be a very different beast from what’s its been.

Since I’ve bad mouthed environmentalists, I’d better make my own case about how I think we should be using the planet.

Here’s the first bit. An interview with Wendell Berry, mostly about science, but in which he also speaks about how he thinks land should be farmed and how humans can use the land without destroying it.

This is a Yahoo app for Firefox and Explorer. It’s got a ton of features, but what I like is that it finds music embedded on websites and places a handy pop-out control center on the left hand of the screen that lets you pick though the audio files online and play through what you want easily.

An Ed Neufeld sermon.

Do you believe in global warming?

Note the phrasing. It’s not something you think is true or untrue. It’s something you believe or don’t believe. It’s a matter of faith and creed. It’s one pillar in the new orthodoxies that govern our civilization. To deny it is to be labeled at the least a fool, who stubbornly denies the obvious truth, or just as likely a malevolent tool of the corporate machine that is destroying life on earth.

“The greatest threat we have ever known.” This all-to-common refrain and other like it have become so common they barely register when spoken. Not an eyebrow is lifted. The rhetoric of modern environmentalism has morphed into something resembling that of an apocalyptic cult. The Jack Van Impes of the environmental movement now toe the standard line.

Hyperbole is impossible. There’s no way of speaking about the dangers of global warming which will be interpreted as an exaggeration. To the contrary, whoever speaks in the most most extreme terms will be seen as most reasonable and responsible.

Is this not a sign that things have veered off course? None of us, on our own is capable of registering the small, incremental increases that are being described, much less predicting the outcome as it plays out in a biosphere much more complex than we understand. Rather, our information is brought to us from scientists via an inflammatory media, whose existence depends on keeping us watching and interested.

What of global warming then? Is it real? Maybe. Probably. What does it mean? That’s a bigger question. It might mean cutting back on our decadence to some extent, if the recession doesn’t do that for us. It might be beyond our ability to change much. It may cause problems, or it may not. We don’t know. Caution and cautious language should be the name of the game. Let’s give it a try.

Canada has denied entry to a sitting British MP. That might be unprecedented.

Now if it was going to be anyone, it was going to be George Galloway (although there’s a few chaps in the House of Lords with pretty dodgy stuff in their backgrounds). Galloway’s BFFs with some of the more unsightly folks on this planet.

Nevertheless, is he really the worst clod we’ve let in? He’s not even moving in, he just wants to go and address some like minded people about his objections to the war in Afghanistan. Denying him entry sends all the wrong messages about Canada and where we stand. Why should we bar people from visiting because they express contrary opinion? Now I’m aware that he’s accused of funding terrorists…but when it comes in the form of ambulances delivered to Palestine…does this count? We give money to all sorts of regimes in Africa knowing full well that piles of it are being misused. Now there could be something more that is not public knowledge that the government can’t or won’t say about Galloway and why they’re not letting him in. I hope there is, because Galloway needs to challenged, mocked, belittled, embarrassed and argued with – but not shut out of the country.   

You’ll have to trust me that I have good excuses.

A great deal of water has passed under the bridge in the past few months. The US has a new President, we’re in the midst of a recession and Canada nearly went through and unprecedented Constitutional crisis.

Since the Obama administration has taken office there’s been a change in tone and substance in the White House, or at least press corps room. Obama is starting off with such a great deposit of goodwill at home and abroad that whatever his success and failures early on, it will be difficult to get to anything through the blurry-eyed, rosy coverage supplied by international media. It’s a stark contrast: imagine if Bush had gone on Leno and made a Special Olympics crack?

More to follow…

The following quote comes from a lecture delivered by the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1978, although it could have been delivered yesterday. Solzhenitsyn was an exile from communist Russia and became a leading critique of both it and the west.

Legalistic Life

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

Can democracy exist without Christianity? That question might seem glib or factitious, or the kind of thing you’d hear from a radio pastor on the AM dial at an hour when broadcasting comes cheap. But stick with me.

It seems to me that the modern liberal democratic state is turning into a frightful thing. While it has no designs of empire as such, as nation-states once did, they nevertheless conquer, coerce and enslave. The difference is that it is now we who are the object of their aggressions and our lives the territory into which they seek to expand. Not that their motives are necessarily purely malevolent. Look what’s happening in the name of ‘freedom’ in the United States. And in the name of ‘peace and order’ in the United Kingdom. At some point the cure is worse than the disease.

And yet for all the power the state has and exercises, this power is essentially coercive. In a quasi socialized society like most western nations the state also manipulates capital, but when it comes to power, it is basically coercive. Of course we need that, we need rules and structure and those need to be enforced. Untempered though, it is a ferocious and terrible thing.

The retreat of the church has contributed to the hegemony of the state; for hundreds of years the church and state existed in tension with one another, now the church has little or no voice and all authority rests with the state. (The theocracies of the Islamic world offer an interesting contrast, where the state is fused with the religious authority and creates another fearful coercive entity)

The evaporation of church authority means that the state is set doing things its not well suited to doing. When it comes to building and maintaining communities, or restoring broken ones the state can only (1) punish wrongdoers or (2) reallocate capital. Of course, these only compliment the real work of building and fixing communities. Look at the social problems in the US and Canada. Dumping everyone in jail doesn’t work. Neither does dumping money on them. The state is out of ideas. The church is the proper body to put to work here - and there are churches all over the place doing good things - but as a society we’ve decided that ‘religion’ is a personal matter and any presence in the public sphere is inappropriate and dangerous. What we will come to see is that the church’s absence from the public sphere is far more dangerous that its presence ever was.

In Europe there’s been a huge news story about Max Mosley, the head of Formula 1 racing. The man was photographed taking part in a nazi-themed sex orgy, and the pictures ended up in the newspapers, causing huge embarrassment for the whole F1 world. He’s recently been ‘exonerated’ (as though that’s possible) in British courts - winning a case against the gossip rag that broke the story. What stuck me is that there exists in our society no organ to say “this is shameful and wrong.” The paper that broke the story - a typical rubbish celebrity one - is the closest thing that exists to a moral conscience.  

In a documentary called Manufacturing Dissent (readers will note the reference to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent) Canadian filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine turn Michael Moore’s methods on himself and yield some interesting results. It turns out Michael reacts to these filmmakers in much the same way that the people he goes after react to him. What’s more interesting is some of the things that they discover about the claims that Michael Moore has made in his films, and the ways in which he’s manipulated situations to suit his ends.

Here are some of the more surprising finds:

• In Bowling for Columbine there’s an iconic scene where Michael Moore goes into a bank, opens an account and comes out with a rifle. A surprising sales incentive for a bank! It turns out that Mr. Moore manipulated that situation heavily - they didn’t have guns in the bank, they brought one in for him and at his insistence. The normal practice was for the guns to be distributed by dealers who could run the background checks and manage the waiting period. Apparently it took over a month to arrange his getting it directly at the bank.
• Also in Bowling for Columbine, there’s a troubling scene where Moore confronts an ageing and partially senile Charleton Heston. That speaks for itself. But in the film Moore insinuates that three weeks after a brutal murder of a little girl in Flint Heston came to the city and held a gun rally to try and offset any growing anti-gun sentiment which might arise due to the killing. Apparently this did not take place. Heston was in Flint, but only for a long preplanned Republican party event, three months after the little girl’s death - which makes it far less tasteless than what Moore had implied.
• Several of the more embarrassing Bushisms in Fahrenheit 9/11 were taken badly out of context and show Bush as even more tactless than he admittedly is. The famous scene where Bush addresses an audience as “the Have’s and the Have-more’s” and then refers to them as his “base,” actually took place at a dinner with Roman Catholic clerics and academics (not often the ‘have-more’ set) and was part of a larger self-deprecating speech intended to ironic and funny.

And then there’s the real shocker…

• In his breakout documentary Roger & Me, Moore chronicles his attempt, as a lowly Michigan-born filmmaker, to get the head of General Motors Roger Smith to talk to him and survey the damage that GM’s policies were inflicting upon once-prosperous central Michigan. In the end Michael is completely stonewalled and never gets to speak to Roger Smith. Or, at least that’s how it’s portrayed. This documentary appears to show that, in fact, Michael Moore did meet with Roger Smith. Twice, as a matter of fact. Evidently, it made for a more effective film for Michael to lose that battle.

Manufacturing Dissent is not a great documentary. It lacks the pizzazz of Moore’s own films, but is guilty of some of their same faults. It turns into a character assault on Moore which is not so different from the one Moore launched on Bush. Nevertheless, if the claims of this film are accurate, and they certainly seem credible, then Michael Moore’s own credibility is very much in doubt.