Thirty years ago tonight

Thirty years ago tonight, I was a student at Carleton, and Lee G. Hill and I were sharing a room at Russell House in the university’s residence complex.  The phone rang.  It was my girlfriend, Paula.

“Turn on the radio,” she said, breathless.  “I think someone has shot John Lennon.”

I don’t remember much else, to tell you the truth, but I recall getting calls from friends and family back home, long into that awful night.  I was a punk, but – like many punks – I admired John Lennon.  He believed music could be a force for political change, like we did; he was unafraid to challenge the establishment (however much he was part of it), like we wanted to; he wrote about reality, and he was fiercely honest.  That was pretty punk, too.

In my circle, it was known that I was the guy with the biggest Lennon fixation: I not only had all of his albums, I had all of Yoko’s albums, too.  In the Nasties, I convinced the rest of the guys to play Gimme Some Truth – but I didn’t have to try hard.  I had his books, I collected clippings about him.  I knew a lot about him. As I got deeper into the punk scene, I listened to his records less, but I never let go of him.

He’d be seventy years old, now, but I still listen to his Plastic Ono Band, which is one of the two greatest rock’n’roll albums ever committed to vinyl.  (Ramones by the Ramones is the other.)

His assassination, on December 8, 1980, was a terrible tragedy – and so, in a small way, was the fact that his last album (before the inevitable avalanche of ham-fisted compilations and retrospectives) was a piece of unremarkable, glossy pop like Double Fantasy. Generally, he always needed Paul as an editor, and vice-versa. But Plastic Ono Band was the exception: it was stark, and raw, and different, and deeply, deeply personal. Some say the LP was the product of John’s dalliance with Dr. Walter Janov’s primal scream therapy, or his response to the (necessary, and overdue) collapse of the Beatles. To me, it was instead an actual piece of art and great rock’n’roll, improbably found under the same piece of shrink wrap. It was like listening to someone’s soul, without having received an invite to do so.

Thirty years later, I still listen to that record, and most of his other records, too.  The rest of us have grown older, but John Lennon remains forever frozen in time, hovering over that final autograph.  I miss him.


Kid Kodak, klown

“And then, speaking of laughable, there was the performance by the Ombudsman himself.

Marin’s report contains some useful information. Not a ton, really, when it comes to the government’s role, because most of it had already been reported. But it’s a helpful documentation of everything that went wrong, with a little new information on police conduct thrown in, and it passes judgment on some things that need to be judged.

But it would be a much better report, and easier to take seriously, if Marin wasn’t busy establishing himself as the Pat Martin of ombudsmen. His thirst for attention appears to be insatiable, and like the federal NDP MP he delivers a sort of dialed-up outrage via an endless string of sound bytes – his every sentence a Hail-Mary aimed at getting quoted.

This was most pronounced at the end of his press conference, when Marin spontaneously pronounced that the G20 weekend will “live in infamy” as “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.” But pretty much the whole thing was like that, and so (to a lesser extent) is his report.

I can’t really do either justice, but you’ll get a sense if you read the thing. Enjoy the subheads. And if you like the line about the government waking a “sleeping giant,” you’ll be pleased to know that at his presser he also accused it of poking a “hibernating bear.”

If you’re not familiar with Marin, you might think he just got really worked up over flagrant civil liberties violations. But this is how he responds to pretty much everything, so it becomes impossible to tell when he’s actually outraged, and when he’s just putting on a show – and the whole thing turns into a circus, in which any hint of nuance goes out the window.”


Abacus? Who? Isn’t that a kid’s toy you count with, or something?

That was my initial reaction when I heard about the firm that came up with this doozy:

I was skeptical for a few reasons.  One, I hadn’t heard of Abacus before.  Two, it was a bit out of whack with what others have been reporting in recent months.  Three – if true – it means we are heading into a Spring election, but nobody’s body language (currently) suggests that is in any way possible.  Four, if the NDP is that close to the federal Liberals – and, frankly, after Bob Rae’s disastrous Afghanistan decision, I wouldn’t be surprised to see our left-flank vote collapse – we could be seeing the beginning of some truly historic changes at the federal level.  Five, the Liberal Party of Canada slipping below 25 per cent – the lowest of the low – is a full-on, five-alarm disaster.

However, as my Sun Media colleague David Akin has reported, Abacus is no bucket shop (despite the fact that they are seemingly fronted by Doogie Howser, Pollster).  Abacus is affiliated with Summa, which is one of the most reputable G.R. shops in the country (and, full disclosure, with which my own firm has happily worked in the past).  Messrs. Powers, Armour et al. are top-notch, and serious players, to boot.  So Abacus, by extension, needs to be taken seriously.

The numbers themselves are, as I say, a bit inconsistent with recent voter intention surveys.  But, as the brainy Calgary Grit points out in his regular poll round-up (in which he includes Abacus as the “new kid on the block,” and which I only noticed just now) they’re not so inconsistent as you might think.  Add a little to the blue side, trim a little off the red side, and: presto! Unmitigated disaster (from my perspective, anyway).

The fact that Nanos was postulating something similar on Monday does little to improve my now-gloomy holiday mood.  In his expert view (but for different reasons), a majority is indeed within Harper’s reach.

Yikes.

The solution?  Well, it’s not getting rid of the leader, for starters.  The moment such a move is made in earnest, the Reformatories will concoct a pretext for an immediate election.  Ignatieff has earned the right to lead the party in the next election, notwithstanding what I (and many others) think about his senior staff’s acumen, or the total absence of a ballot question.  Or policy.  Or, or.

So what to do? What dost thou thinkest, gentle readers?  Is there a ballot question – or a strategy – left that the federal Liberals can grasp onto?  Something that will forestall Armageddon, or even (somehow) carve out a minority government?

Comments are open.


In today’s Sun: move East, young voter

“Thinkers at the University of Toronto’s Mowatt Centre think-tank have determined Canada has the greatest amount of electoral inequality of pretty much any federation on the planet. That’s right: In the whole world, we’re the absolute worst at ensuring that every vote is equal. America does best; we’re at the bottom.

Says Matthew Mendelsohn, director of the Mowat Centre: “Our research finds that compared to similar federations, Canada is now way (out) of step internationally in violating the principle of voter equality.”

The three guys who had or have seats in the three fastest-growing provinces are Messrs. Harper, Ignatieff and Layton. You’d think they’d be working overtime to fix this problem, because they potentially have the most to gain. Most of those new seats would go to them.

But, um, no.”


Power and Politics, Dec. 6: The all-WikiLeaks edition

What documents should be disclosed, when, and by whom?  What’s a free press, and what’s a reckless media?

The question I struggle with – and not in the abstract, either – is this: if a political opponent, or a media person started digging around around in your personal medical records, or your family’s past, or some divorce files, or whatever, would you be mollified by their pious claims that people have a “right to know”?  Or would you be outraged enough to want to sue them until their teeth bleed, or worse, to protect those you love?

Interesting questions.  I suspect we’ll be coming back to them, in the WikiWeeks ahead.

Monte falls asleep as I attempt to demonstrate how to tackle Mr. Assange. Linkage at 1:45 or something.


Twenty-one years ago today

Fourteen reasons we need gun control in this country:

  • Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
  • Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
  • Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
  • Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
  • Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
  • Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
  • Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
  • Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student