Friendly Fire

The most recent installment in the sad folly that is Canada's involvement in the Afghanistan war played out in two parts this weekend. Four soldiers killed and 10 wounded when ambushed by the Taliban; another, a luckless RCR, was strafed and taken by an American A-10 Warthog, a victim of what is war's most bitter and black humoured euphemism, 'friendly fire'.

The Canadian media have used many expressions to avoid painting our place in Afghanistan for what it is. The common descriptor is mission, as if our soldiers were working with the cold and clinical precision of a surgeon in the inhospitable Afghan desert.

We are fighting a war, plain and simple, in this Godless and obscene place. the stated goal of our 2200 soldiers is to help plant the seed of a true democracy where one has never taken root, let alone cultivated. It is the poppy and the opium trade, not tolerance and democratic forces that are the abundant Afghanistan harvest.

On September 4 Christie Blatchford of the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote a long and passionate attack on the leader of our left wing party, Jack Layton of the NDP. She questioned the moral rectitude of Layton and anyone other Canadian who both opposed this war and who professed sorrow at the deaths of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Blatchford wrote - "You can't position yourself as a soldier lover when you loathe soldiering"

I respect passion and honest feeling where ever I see it, and as
Blatchford was stationed in Afghanistan for months as a Globe correspondent, where she observed this war from a front line position, she must surely feel a real kinship with our soldiers there.

Sadly, her honest sentiments have been twisted and tortured into stunning and peerless sophistry. Hers is the uncomplicated mantra of 'are you are with me or against me?' It has all of the subtlety of the kindergarten playground.

In the Blatchford world, it is only the true patriots who believe in our Afghanistan cause who are permitted to express their emotions for the dead and the wounded. The rest of us, it seems, are hypocrites and fakers. We are against the soldiers if we are opposed to war.

I am saddened on two fronts. The first is that Christine Blatchford and her passions could fall so readily into this man trap of false patriotism. I love my country too, so much that the waste of life and effort in such a bleak and featureless place as Afghanistan brings me near tears without my countrymen dying there. Our democratically elected government determined this course - I have the option of both emphatic peaceful protests and the ballot box. I honour our soldiers, who have no choice in this matter. I want my government to ensure their safety as best it can when they are deployed in this terrible place where the enemy is both seen and unseen. I demand that our men and women be properly cared for and protected by their commanders as best they can be during their tours of duty.

I find the concept of an Afghan war for democracy, or whatever other ideals are espoused thousands of kilometers from our own imperfectly constituted nation, as one that is repulsive in the extreme. I can love the soldier, one Canadian to another. I can despise the cause. I can mourn a tragedy, too. No one needs Christie Blatchford, or anyone else to dictate how they may make their withdrawals from their private bank of human feeling.

The second front in my personal conflict over Afghanistan? For the first time in his long and often quixotic political career, I found myself in agreement with a sentiment expressed by Jack Layton..Thank you, Christie Blatchford - there is a first time for everything..

Hockey's Hoar Frost

In meteorology, sublimation occurs when water vapor in the atmosphere converts instantly into a crystalline solid, by-passing the liquid state. Hoar frost is the result, icy particles that first cling to and then cloak trees and other living things in its opaque and brittle shell. The features of all frosted growth is obscured, with only a stark outline visible, until the crystals are dissolved by the sun's heat.

In the inevitable Indian summer of our glorious Canadian autumns, there are regular sequences of warm days and cold nights that produce hoar frost. In most instances, shaking a tree limb or brushing the stalks of low ice caked plants sends the shattered frost in thin jagged sheets harmlessly to the ground. In a rare case, when the hoar frost is thick and its adhesion acute, the living thing will fracture, torn from its trunk by the weight and the grip of the icy mantle.

There is a peculiar Canadian symmetry between these frosty evenings and the start of our hockey season. Youths are trundled out of the doors of their homes before dawn, heading to the rink for a practice, or arriving home late at night from an out of town mid week game, the crunch of the frost underfoot.

David Frost was arrested last week on a series of sexual exploitation charges in Napanee, Ontario. The former junior hockey coach, National Hockey League player agent, and target of a failed murder plot has been in the eye of a media hurricane powered by equal measures of outrage and titillation. The national sports press have predictably rehashed the bizarre and sexually tinged relationship between Frost and his former protege and latter day would be killer, Mike Danton.

Selena Roberts edged far closer to the real issue at the heart of the David Frost case in her excellent New York Times column of August 27 (Differentiating Between Coach and Predator, www.nytimes.com/sports). Roberts smoothly directed her analysis to a fundamental truth - Frost is not a one off, isolated Svengali of sport. His ilk are everywhere. Like hoar frost, when the atmosphere is conducive, the manipulative forces in sport will cling to living things, distorting their true appearance and rendering contact dangerous.

Ms. Roberts commentary can be taken one step further. Hockey still rules the Canadian sporting consciousness, although changing demographics that have largely resulted from our immigration patterns of the past 30 years have reduced hockey's rule from that of sole despot to more of a chairman of the Party.

David Frost is a creation of the Canadian hockey environment. The hand wringing of hockey officialdom over Frost was both too late and irrelevant. So long as there are parents who are prepared to put their faith in the words of purported mentors who promise to take their boy to the promised land of the elite rep team roster spot, a Junior A club, the minor leagues, or the Holy Grail that is the NHL, there will be a frost forming in the atmosphere.

Making a Meal of Afghanistan

To my ear, David Feherty is the consummate golf commentator. His easy Irish wit underscores the fact that golf is, after all, a game, where success is so often the classic intersection of talent and opportunity. Feherty's American contemporaries tend to run to two types. The first is exemplified by Johnny Miller, a paragon of arrogance and hyper-criticism, who leaves me so profoundly irritated that a silent television screen and graphics are the only alternative. The second group, the golfing equivalent to the jock rider, includes Bobby Clampett, the type of analyst who would not say shit about one of his former Tour lodge brothers if he had a mouthful of it. Most of the other golf media remaindermen are as bland as butter.

A popular Feherty jibe, usually delivered with a nicely understated explanation, is that one of the millionaires is 'making a meal of it' when a relatively easy shot is tortured in some fashion. A beautiful expression - the error is highlighted, without questioning the player's general moral outlook or base intelligence (Miller), or bleating some fawning commiseration that suggests an act of God or a bad clubhouse burrito to be the cause of a poor swing(Clampett et al, ad nauseam).

I wonder if in some odd ball parallel universe, David Feherty could be whisked from the clipped and genteel beauty of his usual haunts, such as the links of Royal Lytham St. Annes or the gorgeous fairways of Medina, to be embedded as a journalist in Afghanistan to see the Canadian Forces play their daily 18 holes in the Taliban Open. I have an idea that watching our players attempting to hit out of God's own sand trap in Kaladar would prompt any number of regretful Feherty meal makings.

We have brave soldiers and well ordered units such as the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry and they are honourably led. It is they whose members have been returned in the flag draped caskets to CFB Trenton, the casualties of a real, honest to God war, not a reconstruction, a peace keeping, or any other such euphemistic claptrap. Can some one truly articulate why?

Canada is not a supposed world 'middle power', a flaccid phrase trumpeted by our political myth makers to define our international identity since the time of Lester Pearson and his Nobel prize; Pearson was honored for helping to avert Middle East crisis number 1,875 in 1956. We are an American ally, period. Our forces have been tasked to assist the United States in the execution of the Afghani impossible - to bring about a fanciful American spun democratic reconstruction of a place that for thousands of years has resisted any true political or social order, other than that achieved by arms and death.

As an aside, this is not one of the interminable anti-American rant spaces, either. I both like and admire much of what America is about. Many Canadians are said to possess an anti-American sentiment (as we increasingly people our country with immigrants from places with a historic antipathy towards the United States, this view may regrettable become more prevalent). My view of America is similar to that of a great friend who speaks the occasional uncomfortable truth about his pal after a few beers. Our family frequently visit the United States; our daughter attends an American university. True friends can always be truthful with one another.

My truth concerning the Afghanistan debacle is this - we are in a war, small scale when compared to others, but a war nonetheless - let us Canadians call it what it is. We are hopelessly ill-equipped to fight any war, let alone one against self styled freedom fighters on their own soil. Until our own house is truly in order (a drive through a native reserve or an inner city slum suggests this is not nearly so) , leave the Afghanis to their own devices. Erect the battlements against terrorism. Work ceaselessly to rid North America of such evils as we can. Let the Afghanis achieve what home made solutions as they may. The results may not be democratic - given that current American trading partners include human rights bastions China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, a new and equally regressive Afghanistan is my preference to Canadians dying for no purpose.

We have made enough meals out of sand, rock, explosives, a hostile civilian population, and heretical faux Muslim martyrs to last this lifetime. Let history repeat itself in Afghanistan without any further help from us.

The Blogging Luddite

I mocked bloggers and their kind two years ago. The frustrated artists with no paying audience, I thought then, as smug as those stuffy clowns who mocked Henry Ford's earliest assembly line or the first radio with pictures.

I mock no longer - the blog is pure untrammeled communication, a world with few edits and no rules...a near as dammit description of my own self, in a way. I want in.

Most of all, I want to be a part of the greatest and most genuine creative process that we can ever know - the wild carom of ideas, back and forth, twisted and adulterated, where the spent ashes of one debate are the life giving potash for the next. I want my small part of a organic and pulsing intellectual havoc, where ideas are king.

I shall post a morsel or two about each of my personal bedrock interests in the coming days - my own melange of sports, Oscar Wilde, and the current Afghanistan disaster. No idea is safe, but in an odd way, all ideas are as sacred as life itself. You will come to know me as well as you know yourself.