Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

Stand-up comedian-cum-pastor Jeremiah Wright’s high voltage sermonic thunderbolt of anti-white, anti-establishment, vitriol has shaken the political fortunes of that great black hope Barack Obama to his Trinity United Church of Christ pew-worn knees.

Over the past few days, Jeremiah Wright’s fire-breathing ministrations have sent a red-meat chorus all the way back to the graves of Malcolm-X, the Weathermen, the Panthers, Soul on Ice author/criminal Eldridge Cleaver, Crips, Bloods, and whomever has a hate-on for whitey.

Jeremiah Wright’s assertions, that blacks have different (not deficient) brains, therefore learn differently, clap differently, sing differently, and relate differently to the mathematics of music and meter predicated upon different (don’t say deficient!) brain processing, comes right out of the playbook of racialist theories; theories espoused by both Ku Klux Klan types and — more devastatingly – by serious sources such as Bell Curve authors Richard J. Herrnstein of Harvard, and Charles Murray, who posit that racial differences in intelligence exist and where differences are deficiencies.

This is the same pastor that Obama has known for over half his life, who married him, who baptized his kids, and whose church and congregation assisted in consolidating his Chicago political base. “I could no more disown Reverend Wright than I could a member of my own family” said Obama in response to Wright’s previous pulpit outbursts that appeared on You Tube where he declared on the very Sunday after 9/11 that “the chickens came home to roost” (America deserved it) and that AIDS was a conspiracy to attack black people by the CIA. Obama’s tepid post-facto proviso was that he didn’t always agree with him.

This is a huge mess and Obama has sent race relations back 40 years by the glibness of his associations and the cavalier way in which he responded to the absolute angry, unbalanced, hate-filled, invective from Wright where Obama originally couched Wright’s bellows in an apologist manner as part of “the black experience” of disenfranchisement. Lately, Obama has modified and said that Wright’s speeches before the NAACP and before the Press club the other day “give comfort to those who prey upon hate.”

Too late. It was always thus with old foamy-mouthed Jeremiah.

The fact is Barak Obama had the chance to really distance himself from mad-hatter Jeremiah Wright in March when he gave his race speech in Philadelphia. He didn’t do it. That is called judgment.

Obama went on today to say that he was “saddened by the spectacle” of Jeremiah Wright. Really? He wasn’t saddened by the “God damn America” bit on You Tube”? Pease tell me how “God damn America” can be taken out of context anyway? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t sit through the whole sermon to find out, or to “put it in context”, whatever the hell that means.

Also, I just want to say that  I wasn’t responsible for slavery, the uprooting of Indians, or anything else. Neither were my grandfather and his father before him who dug this place out of the bush and cleared the land in Canada as pioneers. No one gave my pioneer forefathers a dime either when they were cold and hungry. I am not responsible for other people’s sense of loss. Never mind the anglos like me, who helped the Jews?

Jeremiah’s act just doesn’t wash anymore. Besides, when it was really rough, in the sixties, Dr. King did it, and said it, with love.

America has other problems with the racial divide that the campaign of Barak Obama, either directly, or indirectly, is fanning: Why is it that when 90 per cent of black voters vote for Obama that is not considered a racist vote? Yet, when 70 percent of white and Catholics and blue collar workers or professional white women vote for Hillary Clinton that is considered racial, or racist?

It is okay for blacks to vote for their own color but not okay for whites?

It is a shame that with all of the preachers in America that Barak had to choose one that learned to prey instead of pray.

That is called judgment.

And Judgment day is Election Day.

Praise the Lord.

The corrosive socio-economic effects of more expensive gasoline and heating oil, jumping to $2.25 per litre in a few short years, has many in the Province of Nova Scotia clutching their chests with one hand and their wallets in the other. Nova Scotia has it worse off than any other region in the country, worse off than even maritime New Brunswick, which lowered its Provincial taxes at the pump and raised other taxes. Still, it is a nightmare for this region, especially the Maritime region, and specifically bluenosers.

Nova Scotia Premier Rodney Macdonald was on air with me on Monday and declared that there would be no lowering of the gas tax as it would take away from road maintenance; Liberal leader Stephen McNeill meantime, wants to lower the gas tax by a few cents; NDP leader Daryl Dexter says let us apply the HST to the commodity price instead of taxing tax – a “tax cascade” the government terms it. Tax on tax certainly is an insult to an over-governed injury. But, like any bureaucracy, they grab what they can. They tax the tax.

The fact that Premier Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald isn’t making any adjustments at all to the gas pump taxes is not a wise political move. Just like gas price regulation itself (which many dislike, but opposition leader Dexter also told me he supports), regulation provides a physical demonstration that government cares and is taking action on the essentially un-actionable: commodity prices. To that end, Macdonald stated to me that “gas prices are beyond our control”. I think we all know that.

Whether or not Stephen McNeil would be wise in lowering the gas tax or not, clearly fiddling with the status quo, with way the taxes are applied currently where the higher the gas price goes, the more money the Province makes, is politically unsustainable. Sooner or later, there will be protests and demonstrations and vandalism. Just wait till the price goes to $1.50 per litre this summer and beyond. A new definition will be given to “road rage”. This is a crisis situation that is only going to get worse. Our lives will soon be transformed in very real ways by the looming gas attack on our living standards; a corollary to inflated oil and gas prices is food costs. Economists predict an across-the-board 3.5 per cent increase in our grocery bills – and that is just next year.

What is driving up fuel and food costs has to do with external forces beyond our control. Right now, we cannot make changes fast enough in terms of cutting back on our fuel usage or applying new technologies to make a difference. The coming erosion of our living standards is something we will have to face.

China and India and other developing counties are having their extreme impact; the relative decline of America and the resource competition for oil and water and arable land as a result of these new players and new geographic, demographic, political, and environmental pressures makes this a “Brave New World” of untold and unexpected proportions and consequences — and if you think this is bad, just wait until war breaks out with Iran – we will be the ones on the bicycles, not the Chinese.

If you keep an eye on the international headlines, and speak to the experts, it is fairly easy to conclude that we will not be able to avoid a conflict with Iran over their desire to go nuclear. Oil will go crazy. You can throw away your car keys.

In his novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s dystopia had one saving grace – Soma. It was the opiate of the masses. It narcotized the pain of it all. The folks in the book had a drug better than whiskey or nicotine.

In Nova Scotia, at the pumps, contending with the highest gas prices in the land, we are already operating without anesthetic.

Peter Mackay has not made a mistake in his role as Defense Minister. He was flawless, if fawning (Condoleeza) in his role as Foreign Affairs Minister (perhaps he took his title too literally). Simply compare Mackay to Foreign Affairs gaff-meister “Mad” Max Bernier, who put his foot so far up his mouth it came out his pants when he declared Afghanistan should change Governors (they should, but now they can’t, because it looks too influenced by “foreign affairs”).

Enter Peter Mackay.

Fresh off the Rick, “Curtis LeMay” Hillier grill laid the prostrate political corpse of Defense Minister O’Conner before him. Gordon O’Conner, perhaps the worst Defense Minister in Canadian History next to the bizarre Liberal Paul Hellyer, was taken to the media woodshed repeatedly by Chief of Defense Staff Rick Hillier who simply is a smarter man, harder working, and less ponderous.

Mackay has done two things which are significant: he managed up and he managed down. He has kept out of Harper’s way while staying relevant, needed, in the spotlight, and he has managed the unmanageable – Hillier, without showing conflict.  

By the way, the obstreperous, ego-ridden Rick Hillier would have had his head on a stick and would’ve lasted all of five minutes under Trudeau. He might’ve even made Hillier homeless; Diefenbaker would have stared him down and Chrétien would have grabbed him by the throat like a protestor; Mulroney would’ve have sworn a blue streak right to Hillier’s face. But, alas, we had Paul Martin, and, now, a Harper minority with the unfortunate conundrum of having the role of instilling loyalty toward a military that has been co-opted as part of the Conservative brand. Disciplining Hillier would’ve seemed “counter-brand”, self-alienating, disengenous (picking on a “straight shooter”) and, remember, Harper needs all the help he can get – you always do in a minority government.

Mackay has been nothing short of crisp. The poor guy had to contend with that massive shit sandwich that was the Atlantic Accord (thanks Steve and Jim), and maneuver through the minefield here in Atlantic Canada. The result: A seemingly decent facsimile of the Atlantic Accord (who the hell really knows?) and the cryptic, out-of-purgatory “Crown Share,” which sees $75-million land our way — money that may not be there at all if it wasn’t for Peter Mackay and the whole Atlantic Discord debacle he inherited from Finance Minister Flaherty.

Now there’s Peter Mackay’s announcement this week in Halifax of the $3.1-billion Frigate refit. Our Halifax class ships will be modernized and updated and our shipbuilders and East Coast dockyards will be busy. It was a good announcement. Peter even asked me to talk about the subs which he also cares about during an interview this week. The troubled subs aren’t being dusted under the carpet and he wanted everyone to know that. Again, good for him.

And when Stephen Harper leaves office guess who the lady in waiting is? You guessed it. Right now, no other Conservative could touch him in a leadership race.

Peter Mackay also lives here. He cares about his Province. And whether you vote for Stephen Harper or like his style you have to respect and care about the political fortunes of the main voice we have in the Prime Minister’s office.

We need Peter Mackay more than Peter Mackay needs us.

Deal with it.

“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them”?

The arrest and seizure this past weekend of environmental activist/anti-sealer Paul Watson’s ship the Farley Mowat, caused an international media seal stew.  

This morning I spoke with Liberal Labrador MP Todd Russell who was making seal stew and seal blood pudding in his Labrador kitchen. The wind was up today, and the ice flows too sketchy to seal this morning he told me. Later in the day looked better to hunt seals he said. The sun was coming out as he was on the phone. It glistened off of the ice as it bunched up on the shore line outside his house like so many pure, white, dinner plates.  

“Hunting seals is a way of life for many here” he went on. “It is not just the economics – which is significant. Money alone it will add maybe a quarter of a fisherman’s yearly income. It means a lot. Paul Watson is full of crap when he says it is some kind of welfare and that we would be all better off if we were paid not to hunt, like the farmers out west are paid not to grow grain”. He paused. “There is an intangible here too. It is the activity itself which is part of a lifestyle and an identity and self-reliance. It isn’t just about the money”.  

As far the conservation part of the anti-sealing argument goes, scientists agree that seal populations are healthy, relatively speaking (nothing is like it used to be), and that the culling of the herd is no big deal, despite the bloody optics of ripe, red seal guts upon snow white ice.  

Deer bleed too, but it is forested: the leaves and the earth soak it up.  

The problem with the seal controversy this week stems from the tactics of the Feds: they stormed Watson’s boat in international waters with a European crew claiming an incident had occurred on March 30^th where his ship, Farley Mowat, had simply come too close to the sealers without government authorization. Watson denies this and says he can prove his case and the government will never prove theirs. History, he says is on his side too. “The DFO have written me big, juicy cheques before when they were wrong, and they will do it again this time”.  

For his part, the apoplectic Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn has simply snapped his twig. In media interviews his face would turn red, white, and his forehead veins would bulge and pop like a cartoon character when he described nemesis Watson. It has become insanely personal.  

By contrast, professional shit-disturber Watson has been the model of calm, rational, professorial discourse – articulate with a cool, deliberate passion.  

The government has taken the bait more than the fish stocks have. It is now a vendetta. The government, with stand-up comic, drooling Hearn at the helm, looks like it would bend the rules like Paul Watson has (he was kicked out of Greenpeace for his aggressiveness), to get things done.  

The Conservatives, always willing to promote their sovereignty integrity brand and to score points on the East Coast where they took their Atlantic Accord belly-flop were going to look good playing the heavy with the tree-huggers. But do they? Have they not played into Watson’s hands? Moreover, has the government broken the law? Earlier the RCMP refused to charge sealers in 1995 when Watson was beaten to an inch of his life with no one to defend him except actor Martin Sheen.  

If the Feds cannot prove their case against Paul Watson this time, and he didn’t break the law, the government will just look like a bully who tried to play to the crowd under the guise of public safety (protecting the sealers from Paul Watson’s ship). And we will be the ones to pay for it, to write the cheque.  

If Loyola Hearn appeared less like an enraged lunatic I might’ve believed the Feds. I don’t.  

Yes, Paul Watson is an activist and a protestor. That is his right. If he broke the law he must account for it like everyone else.  

But what happens when the government breaks the law?  

I expect higher standards from the government than I do a citizen with a boat, a cause, and a lot of balls.  

“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office”…

Last year’s bleeding heart anti-sealing festival on the east coast ice shelf with Sir Paul and former wife Heather Mills, whose marital time with Paul ended up costing the former Beatle $500 per hour (I lustfully suggest a group rate consultation with former Governor Elliot Spitzer), received a chorus of raspberries from many who wanted ol’Paul to simply compensate the sealers for not killing, the way Paul bought off his wife for not clubbing him after he said love me do.

Lennon’s I am the Walrus back-up singer Paul certainly looked like “The Egg man” after that one (”cuckoo catchoo”).  

But that was yesterday.

The long and winding road for the self-made Beatle billionaire looks like it might end up in Halifax this Canada Day. The concert-starved burghers here, still smarting after the counter-snub Celine gave to those who rolled their eyes at the notion of the schmaltz-meistress’ warbles, will be somewhat sated by having a major-league entertainer come to the Promised Land of cell-phone bans, no poopy harbor water, plastic-bag free stores, cigarette bans, and Sunday shoppers.

Hell, if we get any more virtuous, we might even cozy up to a seal pup!

Will we ever forgive Paul for going on Larry King and not knowing what Province he was in? Is divorcing harpy Heather Mills enough to atone? During his visit here, Paul looked like a guy who was being dragged to a chick flick starring Hugh Grant.  

Maybe being married to Heather was punishment enough.

And where was that selfish bastard anyway, that knight-in-shining-armor activist Paul Watson to rescue Sir Paul when he needed to be saved? After all, McCartney has big, watery eyes too.

Is playing Halifax part of Paul’s community service?

Can the Coast Guard still give Heather a tow?

Anti-sealer activist Paul Watson, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, spoke to me today from the Halifax airport as soon as he landed. He’s the man who drives the sealing industry mad — raving mad. Beat-you-over-the-head mad.

Watson, who frequently sails his protesters into the belly of the seal-culling beast, announced that the recent loss of four sealers who were drowned when their boat capsized following a deadly Key-stone Cops Canadian Coast Guard tow, paled in comparison to the loss of seals, which he said, “is a greater tragedy.” He went on to name-call the sealers saying that they were nothing more than vicious baby-killers and “cigarette smoking apes with clubs.”

Kind of nasty considering the recent deaths.

Watson demurred. Then went on. “I had 30 sealers beat me almost to death. I don’t exactly feel great about these people.”

One deer hunter called in to say that he can’t buy his deer meat at Sobey’s and while his hunting is recreational he still eats what he shoots. Watson had less of a problem with this guy. His concern, he told listeners, was our raping of the environment: depleted fish stocks, species elimination, etc. Paul Watson particularly singled out the Fisheries Ministry for its incompetence. How true. The proof is in the pudding with the Cod on that one.

But, surely, recreational hunting is more heinous than people who are culling animals for profit. Burt Watson went on to characterize the sealing industry as a sham, as a form of welfare. And that we should just pay the folks not to hunt.

More callers said they support Watson than didn’t. His star turn in the documentary “Sharkwater: from the son of my old friends Brain and Sandy Stewart of Tribute Magazine Fame, Rob Stewart, hasn’t hurt his profile. He loves the battle.

The fixation on seals though has me a bit concerned.

Seals are seen as sympathetic for two reasons: the big watery eyes, and the nature of the killing process which involves clubbing. Watson has the seals and whales and other species all in the same category of man’s inhumanity to nature. However, the seal populations are actually doing ok. Whales, not so much.

Seal activists are an endangered species too if you speak to the cigarette smoking apes with clubs.

Paul Watson part 2 Monday morning April 7^th/08. 9am AT.  Stay tuned. Also on Monday morning, investigative journalist Daphane Bramham who goes inside the cult Mormon world of child-bride polygamy. “The Secret Lives Of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in a polygamous Mormon Sect.”

The apogee of the Christian Church in North America occurred during the 1950s and ‘60s. The pews were full. Everyone went to Church on Sunday – I played hockey for the Riverside United tykes in Weston, Ontario. The cars had fins. The drive-in movies were busy. The roller skaters served at the car window, and there was a sense of moral clarity where the good guys were good guys and the bad guys hadn’t become good guys yet. Vietnam was happening but distant. Jack, Bobby, and King all had had the assassin’s bullet, but we still believed in democracy and God. In Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was our Bobby Kennedy, his sun rising against the setting sun of Pearson Liberalism and amidst the backdrop of Expo ‘67.

In Montreal, our cultural capital at the time, Expo ‘67 was called “Man and His World.” Indeed, “Man and his World” meant something different back then. There was optimism in the air despite revolutionary, cataclysmic change and revolutionary social forces that rippled under the surface of it all. The calmness and youthful energy of things meant that these changes, initially, seemed manageable and positive, if uncomfortable. The soundtrack of the era was the Beatles, a band that actually wrote songs with melodies and meaning with cartoon colors. The revolutionary pop culture guard that the Beatles were created music that you could sing along to at pubs. Not too scary.

Throughout this period, and earlier, in the ‘50s, there was serious scholarship occurring in the cultural shadows of religious studies. There were quiet whispers as Christian scholars started asking hard questions about their faith and the historical accuracy of the Old and New Testament. Powerful religious figures such as the young Charles Templeton actually left the pulpit in a sweat, depressed as he told Billy Graham and others that it was over – he just couldn’t do it anymore. Templeton had lost his faith. God no longer spoke to him, if he ever did.

There were a lot of religious men and women who progressively stared out into space as they sat with their morning coffees, their blank expressions reflecting the black void within. Modernism and post-modernism had caught up to the canons. And the canons were empty.

Today occurred part two of my discussion with author and United Church Minister Greta Vosper. Her book, “With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe,” essentially postulates that the declining attendance in mainstream churches has occurred because the public has caught up to the ‘50s-‘60s religious scholarship – the “abracadabra” nature of the Bible with its stories of miracles and magic and virgin births and blood sacrifices no longer washes.

Moreover, religious skepticism, religious aversion and cynicism are creating a polarization effect: non-believers, or diffuse Christians on one side who vaguely believe “in something” but who no longer attend Church, and religious literalists, fundamentalists and evangelicals on the other who fervently, and frothily, believe it all.

Gretta Vosper promotes a third way: looking at the question of how to live one’s life in the shadow of the Bible but within the light of secular truth and knowledge.

Is there a place for Christianity without a historical Jesus? Or without a Jesus who could perform miracles? Is there a place for ethics and morality and meaning without a God who casts thunderbolts?

God, Jesus, and the Church, are, according to Gretta Vosper, human constructions. We are the Church. Nothing is going to bail us out except ourselves.

The “Godliness within us,” and the moral and ethical responsibilities that go with it, are a greater burden than the expectation that we will be swept away by an extrinsic rapture.

Vosper’s deracination of the central tenets of the Christian faith, for many, transforms to a point where Christianity is not recognizable, where it ceases to become “Christian.” But, for many others, a great many others, there is no religious leadership or experience anyway: God is not dead. God is irrelevant, as important to an adult as Santa Claus is on Christmas Day when you have the Visa bills.

Yet, 80 per cent of us say in surveys that we believe there is something. Yet, that something is not urgent enough to bring us into the fellowship of communal worship, into Church.

Today we have a glut of aging, cynical baby boomers, fewer young people, and an even greater divide between the generations. The average father spends 30 minutes a day – sometimes per week – with his kids and half of that in front of the TV. There is increased youth violence, and an internet that spreads pornography far and wide to even younger people as well as pedophiles, increased sexualization of women – an almost numb pornogrification, and an entire generation of young people raised by entertainment and fashion industries.

There is a void. There is a lack of meaning. There are two parents working hard as hell and a world that makes less and less sense. More often than not, we have a culture that works against parents, against family, against each other. Statistically speaking, we all have even fewer friends than we did 15 years ago.

We are lonely, all together.

Going beyond the notion of Tom Harpur’s “The Pagan Christ” that the symbols and transcendent metaphors of the Bible can still feed us even if the literal stories are untrue, Gretta Vosper says there is a another way. Between abdication and abrogation of Christianity, and the literal evangelical fundamentalist, lies a third option: a sense of fellowship and a church still; the promulgation of values and meaning and life for its own beauty, for its own resonance, its own truth.

Gretta Vosper’s crystallized vision and testament is a revolution no less meaningful and probably more important than that of Martin Luther, all those years ago.

It is time religion in North America got real. But that, in itself, does not refute the light of your own belief path, whether it is fundamentalist or the darkness of nothing.