Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

The backlash against violent crime in Halifax comes now from an unusual source – statisticians and the media itself. Lurid counter-headlines like “Actually, Violent Crime is down” and a Globe story announcing that crime is down 7.7 per cent over last year contrast the shrill “Summer of Fear” headline bombast from The Chronicle Herald (we are concerned, but now cowering).

Qualifications however, were also supplied as to the nature of the recent attacks — the depravity, the randomness and the gratuitousness of them. Many of the reported incidents were not “crimes of need”, they were spiteful and arbitrary.

The nature of these incidents is what goes unqualified in raw statistics and, also, the impact of these events. Psychological impact is not just measured by the nature of the attacks themselves, but our reaction to them, and our expectations from the media to express concern.

The Herald referred to Halifax in its headline today as “rough and tumble” with the highest rate of violent crime in the country. Others dispute this stat (even though I read about these same stats last year) and say Halifax is 5th. It doesn’t matter.

There is a violent culture here that is troubling.

The reaction of the Father of the boy who was charged with attempted murder four times following his alleged attack on four security guards was that “they are trying to make an example out of him”. Yes. Correct. Who wouldn’t? My callers today went crazy on that.

Meantime, the mother of one of the 15-year-old girls who allegedly attacked a 65-year-old woman with a metal table leg for no reason has had trouble with the law, including drug charges.

Children are the problem and parents, most times, are the cause may be a blatant truism, but when the public is confronted with the insensitivity of some of these parents there is disbelief and actual shock.

Just wait till the dispossessed reproduce.

Teen girls – and boys — have been responsible for recent acts of violence in Halifax recently: at the Busker’s Festival where Police were swarmed by a youth mob when trying to make an initial arrest following a fight between girls; outside the Halifax forum, which began, apparently, when girls started fighting and ended with four security guards getting stabbed. A 16-year old male teen has been charged with attempted murder; and a bizarre attack in the Halifax Common on a 65-year-old woman by two 15-year-old girls who allegedly beat her with metal table legs for kicks – not even asking for money.

None of this is very new.

In addressing youth violence or crime in general, the right side of the political spectrum, typically, wants to see more police, tougher sentencing, corporal punishment, active deterrence; the left side of the political spectrum is the providence of the ever-present “ounce of prevention”: increased welfare, increased social services, more education, more counseling, etc

Social factors such as reduced welfare and parents that are busier and more preoccupied (but with less or the same money) also contribute to the societal malaise, a sickness cariactured and captured so well in 1962 in the novel by Anthony Burgess called A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick later made it into a 1971 film starring Malcolm McDowell.

The story deals with a sick socio path named Alex who belongs to a violent youth subculture with their own dress and language (a jingoistic idiom inspired by Soviet Russia), who, upon capture for raping 10-year-old girls and others (Alex is 15), is subjected to the “Ludovico technique” which involves inducing nausea at the idea of committing a violent act (think of a similar treatment for alcoholism where the patient vomits if consuming alcohol due to a chemical reaction).

In a way, violence is an insobriety and these punks in Halifax and in A Clockwork Orange are drunk on their own ephemeral physical power. But what author Anthony Burgess was getting at in his 1962 novel was more of a demographic fear of the coming wave of baby boomers that were washing over the system, as well as a fear of Soviet inspired mechanical violence — cruelty for its own sake.

The fact of high per capita violent crime in Halifax is of particular concern. But is pointing fingers the answer? Is compassion for the victimizers sensible? 15-year-olds know right from wrong. Why should we be making allowances by creating, assuming, a context for punk actions? Who cares? If someone is throwing a brick through my window I don’t care if he had a bad Mamma or not.

At the same time, if most these kids really did have love in their home or had been respected and returned it, they wouldn’t be getting their kicks by acts of gratuitous violence — power would come from other sources, other places. However, when a youth is lost, society must then be the parent and the prison-maker and should contend with both youth crime approaches: more policing and tougher youth crime laws, and more social services spending. 

No one can take the place of a parent (or medication if the kids need it), failing that, throwing money at it is the only other way. Please don’t tell me about “values” as they are not abundant anymore, nor did values ever serve as a  corrective. The act of gratuitous violence itself only exists in the awareness of its moral opposite.

If only we could capture them like in the novel and play Beethoven loud, and make them sick. And make them stop; hearts may be black, self-preservation may be blacker.

For many, democracy is an inconvenience. And the protesters at Montebello Quebec were peaceful and many were older, but that didn’t matter. There were women and timid children in the crowd, young people, book-clad students, and the usual rowdies who want to belong to something, who also scramble at the first sign of a threat.

But these people were still, apparently, too inconvenient; too messy for those in charge.

The recent North American leader’s summit at Montebello Quebec brought out the usual concerned crowd of conscientious objectors regarding the usual suspects: big business, jobs, globalization, “deep integration” with the U.S., the attenuation of the middle class, etc.

What was different was the approach of the political elite. They not only “infiltrated” the protestors with undercover Quebec cops, but they then sent undercover cops to pose as protestors.

On video, the undercover cops were seen trying to incite a riot by holding rocks, threatening to throw rocks, actually throwing rocks, and assaulting the protest organizer David Coles, President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union when he implored the three cops/thugs in question to put the rocks down. Finally, Coles called them out for what they were – phonies and worse: insidious, violent, and victimizing.

And who, exactly, were the phony protesters (undercover thugs) throwing rocks at? Why other cops of course! But those cops were in full riot gear just waiting to crack heads. A police riot would, of course, discredit the whole protest, which is exactly what the political masters wanted.

I say this as a result of the very reaction of the authorities when caught red-handed. First, there was the utter denial by the authorities regarding the existence of the undercover cops — lying, in other words; then the leading Police apologist, Inspector Marcel Savard, walked out in front of the cameras after other cameras on You Tube showed the fake protestors wore Police boots, and claimed, yes they were undercover cops after all, but all is well. “Everything is fine”, he said. Almost as if to say to the media, “Go home folks, there’s nothing here to look at, move along.”

According to him, the undercover cops were there to keep order and were just role playing –“keeping their cover”, he said. Rock throwing was just a part of it.

This farce of absurdist proportions reached its apogee when these same fake protesters/undercover cops actually got “arrested” during theMontebello demonstrations. Of course they were released when carted away from pubic view.

The whitewash did not end with the dismissive Quebec Inspector however, as the ironically titled Minister of Public Safety, Stockwell Day, resumed the apologist chorus saying “You can’t start getting politicians to make the calls, saying ‘it’s ok for you to use undercover agents in this drug operation over here, but you can’t use them in that over there”. Whatever the hell that means. Stockwell Day never was a very bright guy. I guess that works for him.

But Day’s deflection wasn’t the point. The undercover Quebec police actually broke the law: they assaulted Coles, and threw rocks; had they incited a riot successfully and women and children had been trampled, they would be responsible for causing deaths and injury.

What is far worse, morally, is that they were part of anti-democratic activities.

Any tin-pot dictatorship can sweep such Police tactics under the rug as the Tories have done.

The freedom of assembly and protest is absolutely fundamental.

Western Liberal Democratic standards in Canada are supposed to be higher – but they are not; neither is Police action in Montebello a small, nor an isolated incident I’m afraid. Don’t hold your breath for an inquiry either.

Your political overlords have spoken, now go away. Go away and finish the mission of bringing democracy to Afghanistan.

How involved should citizens be in law enforcement? Old school Europe doesn’t believe that all problems should be mediated by society. Sometimes, it is just too personal.

Citizen Bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman joined me today to chat about his new book You Can Run. But You Can’t Hide today on Maritime Morning. He’s also in Halifax on a speaking engagement.

Manure makes great fertilizer and, in the early life of Dog Chapman, there was a lot of it. Call it character fuel, maybe a bit too much: an abusive father, and a hard scrabble upbringing turned Dog from crime and time to transformation and peace of mind – no mean feat. Most who have gone through that kind of upbringing don’t make it out of their past, even if they can see it and smell it, mainly because they feel that they don’t deserve success.

As a character, and as a media figure folk hero, there is a strong cord that is being touched upon here with the public. But what it speaks to is less comic book hero/wrestler theatrics meets Good Samaritan, than it does a promotion of the fantasy of citizens taking the law into their own hands against the muddied moral clarity of bureaucracies and legal systems.

As someone who was involved in taking he law into their own hands when a close friend was raped in 1985, I understand this mentality, and I am torn regarding aspects of condemning it.

If everyone took the law into their own hands there would be anarchy. But is it realistic to say that Old Testament notions of vengeance are irrelevant? While Dog Chapman is only a facilitator of the legal system rather than its’ substitute, he still plays in the broader notion of the action-man in the name of justice.

If your son or daughter were raped would you really be happy with how the system would look after it? Some people cannot bite their lip that long.

My guess is, if someone messed with Dog’s family he would hunt him down, like all the criminals on his TV show, and look after business.

He would then turn himself in and do his time. But is that justice?

What was that Old Testament for anyway?

Released just 11 days ago, Michael Derrick Robicheau was held and charged with sexual assault, robbery, and slitting the throat of a 44-year-old late night gas station attendant at an Ultramar station at 571 Portland Street in Dartmouth.

This raises the issue of toothless parole boards whose wise counsel falls upon jurisprudential deaf ears — as well as the nature of the late night retail environment for workers of large corporations.

Apparently, parole boards are hand-cuffed; they have to release a convict who has served two-thirds of the sentence, even if they suspect that the person is still a danger to the community. Why? Why cannot the “dangerous offender” categorization have a broader application?

Thirty-two-year-old Robicheau was convicted of a violent attack, again, on a late night female store clerk eight years ago and surrounding that is 28 convictions for break and enters in the 90s.

The man was deemed to have “low reintegration potential.” But, nonetheless, he was allowed a “community approach.” How nice.

Yet, the vicissitudes of the legal system or policing or the amount of crazies in the world is not really the point: A woman, alone, late at night, in a big city, is at risk. You are never going to have a perfect society. What is more disturbing is that gas stations and fast food organizations continue to put people, and younger people in the case of fast food, at risk.

There is not the traffic volume to necessitate two people often times, so only one worker does it. It is the old profit imperative again.

How about this: Government insists that a minimum of two people work late night and that there are state of the art accouterments: bullet proof glass, more cameras, better training, and maybe even security guards to protect employees – how revolutionary and profligate!

Why not? If there is real money at the late night window and the food is, by and large, unhealthy, why should the work environment be unhealthy too?

The accused, Robicheau, is a dime a dozen and hardly the point. Censure of the state is an easy reflex.

Where are the corporations?

“Young women have virtually abandoned the idea of dating and replaced it with a group of get-togethers and sexual behaviors that are detached from love or commitment – and sometimes even from liking. Relationships have been replaced by the casual sex encounters known as ‘hookups.’ Love, while desired by some, is being put on hold, or seen as impossible; sex is becoming the primary currency of social interaction. Some girls can handle this; others, like Morgan, are exhausted physically, emotionally, and spiritually.” So writes Laura Sessions Stepp in her book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.

Stepp got up close and personal with the lives of several high school and college age women and followed them around, “partied” with them (at observational distances) and interviewed them.

“The freedom to ‘unhook’ from someone – ostensibly without repercussions – gives them maximum flexibility. Although I use both phrases, this is not a hook-up culture so much as it is an unhooked culture. It is a way of thinking about relationships, period.

Stepp continues, “One can see the same impermanence in some of their other commitments – to their jobs and their life plans, for example.”

Stepp told me on the air today that “unfortunately, the ‘hookup’ culture even affects those women who want no part of it. Peer pressure dominates where girls tell each other to “go for it, go ahead and sleep with him anyway.”

Where does this put men? In the driver’s seat, of course: “To the delight of guys who no longer have to work very hard for girl’s attentions or their bodies. Young women’s goal, at one time, was to save their bodies and their reputations for someone they loved, while young men were expected to play the field. Young men are still expected to play the field, but now young women have jumped into the arena with them.”

Stepp focuses not on empty moralizing, but on this: how do women feel about their new freedom? Great or used? Loved or lonely? Free or trapped in unexpected ways?

What studies are showing, according to Stepp, is that “having sex with lots of men might limit their ability to sustain a long term commitment as well as their ability to actually conceive children.”

The issue, ultimately, is feeling love and feeling capable of love.

For some the whole notion of flirtation is just “playing games” and that love itself is a pipe dream. However, I have noticed in my broadcasting career, that cynicism itself is never a substitute for insight.

Laura Sessions Stepp has discovered that the post-feminist women’s movement has spawned an almost gay male sexual predatory aesthetic. And it doesn’t work. It is not working for women who grow up and realize that they should have slept with fewer people

The need to be connected intimately to others is as central to our well-being as food and shelter. In Stepp’s view, “If we don’t get that right were probably not going to get anything else in life right.”

“I hope,” Stepp says, “to encourage girls to think hard about whether they are ‘getting it right,’ whether their sexual and romantic experiences are contributing to – or destroying – their sense of self-worth and strength. Their studied effort to remain uncommitted convinces me only of how strongly they want to be attached.”

The post-feminist movement appears to have come full circle. Off air with me, Laura Sessions Stepp mused about my notion of how the pendulum has swung too far, and that women have fallen into a male trap.

So, what about the parents? “It is clear that adults are complicit, either by their neglect, cluelessness or even subtle encouragement.”

The only way to win at the hookup game is not to play; because love is not a dirty word. It never was.

An earlier posted article on my blog titled “Fear and Loathing in Truro” took issue with the Truro Mayor for not only not flying the gay rainbow flag after a community request, but his assailing of the gay community for flying in the face of scripture. For Mills, Christ and Liberace don’t mix.

But how wrong is Bill Mills over all?

We live in a consumer culture that is value-less. We are taught how to jam up our Visa cards but not how to be happy. All the important life lessons are never reinforced by our culture – in fact the opposite is true. Parents, on a daily basis, have to fight through the plethora of porn pervading the internet.

Moreover, advertising and movie culture promotes and promulgates the notion that sex is power and a plaything, perverting the role of sex, its nature and function, reducing it to an empty toy; alcohol is categorized as a Godly reward adorned by the objectification of women — an objectification that, ultimately, victimizes both those that can play it and “win”, and those who are less attractive and feel that they can’t compete.

So, what does all this obviousness about society not having values (except to buy and spend) and, also, actually discouraging “values” mean? And how is it related to poor old Truro Mayor Bill Mills?

It is correctly against our codes to not be inclusive; however, many of faith feel that they are under siege by a consumerist culture that has been pummeling them for years, forcing their permissiveness to the point where “anything goes” and, “if it feels good, do it” — without a consideration of a sexual moral compass or values of any kind.

It is wrong, of course, to exclude gays from societal acceptance. But where is the respect and understanding for those of conservative faith who have a harder time accepting what society sells? While we are secular, we are not without God, we have just replaced him: The notion that we are all equal before the law stems from the notion that we are all equal before God.

On Monday, my broadcast will feature the sociologist author Laura Sessions Stepp who’s book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, chronicles the plight of women and how a culture without values limps along, desensitizes, generating self-recrimination, isolation, and confusion.

Bill Mills is still wrong, but at least he has a compass.

Goodbye Condoleezza, hello Taliban!

The shuffled cabinet deck chairs yesterday were less titanic than expected. We knew foot-in-mouth Defense Minister O’Conner was going. He was about as effective as an electric car dealership in the Middle East; replete with misquotes, PMO contradictions, obfuscations, and overlaid with a gruff inarticulateness, O’Connor stumbled and mumbled his way through question period and bluffed and huffed around rapacious reporters. So, Peter Mackay now has the Defense portfolio and will leave Foreign Affairs. Is this a demotion? No. It is a lateral move. Harper is saved the embarrassment of O’Conner who bungled and botched everything that was difficult: the Afghan detainee scandal, the length of the Afghan mission, and general weirdness in the Commons. 

Can Mackay sell Afghanistan better? Sure. Will he make a good Defense Minister? No.

It’s not Peter’s fault. Stephen Harper micro-manages every portfolio except anything Jim Prentice (whom he trusts) does. There are no Ministers except Harper. The rest are players on a very tight script upon a very narrow stage. No Minister will talk to the media unless Stephen says so.

So, how good a Minister-of-everything is Stephen Harper? The Tory’s are stalled in the polls. Furthermore, polls show women and urbanites are bailing on the Conservatives. It is both about the message and the messenger. It is about the PM as casting director, director, script writer and producer. Fatal Attraction, where Stephen plays both lead roles and eats his own boiled bunny.

I’ll bet Peter Mackay is regretting not having his own movie.

General George C. Marshall understood. When you win a war, you must back it up with moral authority. Hence both the Marshall plan for post war Germany and Europe, and post war Japanese reconstruction. It is also very good for creating American markets. Germany and Japan are models of how to win, and win the peace. Unfortunately, there are not enough examples like them. We did do well in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia too, I might add.

A friend of mine at the New York Times wrote an article in Sunday’s paper establishing that the Bush administration bailed on Afghanistan after the conquest; resources were diverted to Iraq instead. Even in Iraq, where the State Department was shut out and the Pentagon ran the show post-conquest, there was precious little help for the people. No one cared.

They care now though. Too late. Abused children retaliate. That’s what we are seeing now in Iraq.

After the first Gulf war, Saddam had the water running again pretty quickly. It is still, to this day, down in Iraq (and you thought Nova Scotia Power was bad!). It is common knowledge that from infant mortality to disease, the people in Iraq were better off with Saddam. The tribal, fractured, American puppet government there now is incompetent and lacks the confidence of the people.

One of the reasons America let Saddam keep the Kurds down after the no-fly zones were established was to placate Turkey, a country that happens to have a whole bunch of Kurds straddling their border too;  the Kurds want their own state and want to re-draw national boundaries. In southern Iraq, Saddam was allowed to put down a Shiite rebellion under America’s watchful gaze, all in the name of state security, control, and the status quo.

Control and order.

Many China watchers have said to me that the only reason nationalism (China has a huge historical memory and harbours many grievances against the West) has not run amok in that country is due to the repressive regime of the Chinese Communist leaders — they kept the students at bay in 1989 and have been going strong ever since.

Democracy, and the Chinese nationalism it will unleash, is bad for business according to the Maoist/Marxist, Chinese oligarchial leadership who are milking their capitalist engine — despite the idelogical contradiction.

Let me repeat, China: a communist ideology, a dictatorship, a capitalist engine. If that country isn’t due for a colonic  I don’t know what is. But what makes it work is one thing — government control. The same thing is needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is common knowledge that America prefers an acquiescent dictatorship to a dissenting democracy. The U.S. has propped up more dictators than any country on earth, more than England in its’ hey day. Simply put, democracy is a Western notion that doesn’t take hold in many other places. It almost didn’t here in the West during the 1930’s.

Without the dictatorship in Pakistan, the whole world would be in flames. President Musharraf sits upon a fundamentalist powder keg with nuclear weapons. And his regime is shaky.

Our notions of Western universalism and triumphalsim is absolute bullshit.

You know why Clinton let the 1994 genocide happen in Rwanda but stopped the killing Bosnia? Because we are European, that’s why. We are not anti-African. If the genocide happened again in Cambodia or Indonesia (and it did) our response would be the same. What’s wrong with that? Was Asia or Africa here to help the settlers when we dug the place out? Did they intervene to prevent the Spanish destruction of the Incas, and Aztecs? Or our destruction and decimation of Indians? Was the colonization of North America conducted under the rubric of democracy? Get real. Democracy for us maybe, but not the Indians.

Democracy is a process, constitutional Liberalism a goal; the final act of black emancipation in America was dictated to the south by the executive branch of the U.S. government under Kennedy and Johnson, against the “democratic” wishes of the south.

Democracy is not always the answer, nor is it what we always mean when we use the word.

“Our way” has much blood on its hands too. At least dictatorships are honest.

They may not even want us.

The Venetian Nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s Dead Lagoon: ”There can be no true friends without true enemies; unless we hate what we are not, than we cannot love what we are.”

Truro Nova Scotia Mayor Bill Mills may not use the word “hate” — that would get him into trouble — but certainly exclusion is a term that he would embrace. In Truro, you see, you are not welcome if you are gay — goes against scripture according to Mills.

The gay community asked to have their rainbow flag raised on municipal property, and around town, as part of their summer festivities. No dice, according to the city fathers.

Mills was quoted as saying, “If I have a group of people that say that pedophiles have rights, do we raise their flag too?” Then he backs away from such hate-mongering invidiousness and says, disingenuously, “I don’t want to lump homosexuals in with pedophiles (even though he did), but that’s the point, the issues, that’s my feeling”.

That’s like me saying that I would never call Bill Mills a rural religious red neck.

Even on religious grounds, there are powerful counter-arguments in favor of New Testament forgiveness and understanding.

Here is the crux of the matter: gays are born that way. Studies regarding fetal hormonal exposure and genetic pre-determinants pretty much guarantee it is science over socializing. Who, may I ask, would choose to be gay?  Who would want the hassle, the lack of putative social support, and then have to deal with a clown like Bill Mills anyway?

If my brother had his choice, I know that he would have chosen to have had a straight lifestyle and would have wanted more of a family. My brother was married for ten years and is a gay man. He is more productive than millions of “straights.” He also employs lots of people. A real man in other words, unlike a prejudiced small town mayor.

Gays have been their own worst enemies, too, in terms of how they have branded themselves following the advent of protective civil rights laws. As I have mentioned before, hyper-sexual displays of homo-eroticism do not play well — in many places, not just rural Canada.

Statistical facts are, however, that mayor Mills probably has gay people in his family, or one of his ancestors was gay. Who cares?

Truro Mayor Mills exhibits the same kind of thinking, the same sensibility that has, historically, kept Jews and others down, out, and excluded.

When the wind blows off of the pastures in Truro it smells an awful lot like Bill Mills and Truro council.

No wonder so many people move from Truro to Halifax.