IT'S A VISTA THING
Please direct all future correspondence to kevingrace@shaw.ca
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.59 pm, 31 January 2007►
PENSÉE
The Parable Of The Conservative Voter
A man was observed in the village square beating his
head against a wall. When asked why, he replied,
"Because it will feel so good when I stop." Five
years later he remained in place, still beating his head
against the wall. When asked why he had yet to desist, he
replied, "What, and let them
win?"
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.58 pm, 28 January 2007►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
After Three
Colors, Kieślowski
retired...He said he simply wanted to read and smoke in
peace.
—Jonathan Kiefer, "Kieślowski's
Three Colors," Salon, 10
June 2002
Kieślowski: 'Tobacco, divine,
rare, superexcellent tobacco,
which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold,
and
philosophers’ stones, a sovereign remedy to all
diseases'
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.47 pm, 27 January 2007►
MASTERS OF PROSE
Settling into a clot-inducing
rear-of-plane seat with the front-of-cabin movie screen
obstructed by the big heads of tall men, reading was the
only option on a flight home from Nairobi this week.
[Whew!—Ed.]
So I flipped open the Economist
magazine in the seat pocket—and
was shocked to discover talk
of Canadian politics while still cruising
six time zones east of Ottawa...
What the Economist peddles
as perception counts more on the world stage than a
dozen photo-ops at world leader gabfests...
And watching [Stéphane] Dion
yesterday, the Conservatives can only be flummoxed
at how this shaky Liberal
leader remains in the honeymoon
suite while [Stephen] Harper languishes
on a tight leash in the electoral
doghouse...
[Dion] talked about Canada
remaining a "good partner" in the [Afghanistan]
mission, yet demanded "more hearings" before he
could decipher a clear position
on its validity.
It was a confusing
backpedal in both official languages, a
particularly hard swallow
given it's one of two issues Dion has decreed will become
his defining stances in the
next election campaign...
With the New Democrats
assisting in an overhaul of
the government's signature
environment bill and the Conservatives rolling
out big bucks for renewable energy technology, Mr
Dion could only sputter at
how his party's old policies were being shamelessly
reprinted by Mr Harper under the blue
banner...
What confronts the Liberals is
the spectre they might find
themselves without a distinct
vote-swaying platform to stand
on by the time the election rolls
around...
They apparently have a fallback
position. They would smear
the Conservatives on the broken
promise of taxing income trusts and abandoning the
Kelowna Accord on native housing and education—neither
being the sort of grievance that would galvanize
public sentiment behind a Liberal resurgence...
Mr Dion is a very smart man.
Watching those bespectacled eyes yesterday, you sensed
confusion and consternation at the way things are
unfolding. What's missing is the confidence his Liberals
can move higher in polling where
they've clearly peaked.
—Don Martin, "Liberals
Confounded By 'One-Candle' Harper: Bizarre Set-Up For An
Election Nobody Wants," National
Post, 25 January 2007
Martin:
A two-time master
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.47 pm, 27 January 2007►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
(SPECIAL IDIOCRACY EDITION III)
We are too soft on stupidity. I
am not talking about general knowledge or vocabulary
failure. Jade
[Goody] doesn't recognize wedlock—the
word, that is, not the state. This is not a sin in itself;
words can pass you by. I can never get a purchase on
ontological and have to look it up whenever I encounter
it. Nor do I mean not having heard of famous people or
places. The
footballer's fluff thinks Winston Churchill
was the first black President of America, having seen a
black statue of him near where she lies her empty head.
And Jade suspects Rio de Janeiro might be a person. So
what? For all I know to the contrary Rio Ferdinand is a
region of Ecuador.
They add up, though—the
words you can't pronounce, the events you haven't heard
of, the ideas with which you are not and do not wish to be
acquainted. At some point the accumulation of missing
information and curiosity amounts to your not being in the
world at all. And it is this condition—a
condition that can with far more justice be described as
alienation than the ennui of the intellectual—that
Big
Brother and its host of satellite
celebrity magazines have for years been encouraging us to
embrace.
There is a vindictiveness in
dumbing down. It aims to dethrone not only intelligence
but the means by which we rate one thing above another.
Dumbing down is an assault upon the very concept of value.
Thus Jade, though she wouldn't know what I am talking
about, is the child of that nihilism which gave us
postmodernism and the Turner
prize. A celebrity for being nobody, a
belcher and a farter with her
own perfume, she is an ironic reference to
the unmeaningness of meaning.
Racism? We have far more to
worry about than that.
—Howard
Jacobson
Goody: 'Despite
those titles, power, and pelf/The wretch, concentred all
in self,/
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,/And, doubly dying,
shall go down/To the vile
dust, from whence he sprung,/Unwept, unhonour'd, and
unsung'
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.57 pm, 26 January 2007►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
(SPECIAL IDIOCRACY EDITION II)
Precisely what a young student
lacks is the ability to discern where his intellectual
skills are weakest and the wisdom to foresee the benefits
of mastering abstruse and difficult material—therefore,
asking others to direct his education on the basis of what
amuses him the most is sure to undermine his development
in ways that will have lasting consequences, for him and
for the society that has to put up with one more fan of
Kevin Smith movies.
—'Udolpho'
Smith (middle) with peers: 'And universal darkness
buries all'
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.07 pm, 25 January 2007►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
(SPECIAL IDIOCRACY EDITION)
Polybius
(c 150 BC), although strictly speaking not a
product of the classical era, left what was to become the
most famous depiction of the population
problem of ancient Greece.
In our own time the whole of
Greece has been subject to a low birthrate and a general
decrease of the population, owing to which cities have
become deserted, and the land has ceased to yield fruit,
although there have neither been continuous wars nor
epidemics. If then anyone had advised us to send and ask
the gods about this and then find out what we ought to say
or do, to increase in number and make our cities more
populous, would it not seem absurd, the cause of the evil
being evident and the remedy being in our own hands? For
as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness,
avarice and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or
if they married to rear children born to them, or at most
as a rule one or two of them, so as to leave these in
affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the
evil rapidly and insensibly grew.
Polybius's pro-natalist lament
has such a modern ring that it is difficult to avoid the
notion that the Greeks in their concerns for over- or
underpopulation were "just like us."
—Angus
McLaren, A History Of Contraception: From Antiquity To
The Present Day
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.05 pm, 23 January 2007►
PENSÉE
The films of David Lynch: TM: Transcendental
Masturbation.
'Look, up in the sky! It's a hack; it's a pseud; it's
Peter Suderman!'
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.12 pm, 22 January 2007►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
To condemn Jade
Goody for being a racist bigot is like
condemning Adolf Hitler for being a bad painter.
The accusation monumentally
misses the point, which is that the unanswerable and
deeply depressing case against Jade Goody is that she is
Jade Goody.
England made her. She is the
end product of the comp school she went to, the
neighbourhoods she grew up in, the trash magazines and
newspapers she reads (if she can read), the trash TV she
watches (and appears on), the trash DVDs she rents, the
trash talk radio shows she tunes in to, the trash clothes
and trinkets she buys, the rubbish food she eats, the
rubbish friends she cultivates, the rip-off clubs she
patronizes, the rip-off minicabs
she takes home after an evening spent sipping a disgusting
green drink with two glace cherries on a toothpick and a
paper umbrella...
Jade, in short, is a victim, a
sucker, a patsy, an ideal candidate for that brave new
Blair world of all-day pubs, ASBOs,
super-casinos, and the promise of sink
schools where illiterates
in baseball caps can simmer their lives
away up to the age of 18 when they can join their friends
on the human slagheap.
Sir Christopher Wren (famous
architect, Jade, an architect being a geezer what designs
buildings) has as his inscription in St Paul's Cathedral:
"If you would seek his monument, look around."
If you would seek a monument to Controlled New Labour,
look at Jade Goody.
—Keith
Waterhouse
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.03 pm, 22 January 2007►
