Happy New Year

Finally, Christmas is over. All the music, all the sales and all the anxiety are over—no more bells, fake snow and mechanized reign deer. New Year is simply a much nicer holiday. There is no pressure to buy things, sing songs or fake devotion. All there is for New Year are finding a good party with good drinks and someone nice to kiss. That is pretty good. New Year is about romance, about expectations and hope. It is as if to celebrate the release from the obligations of the previous week, New Year indulges the individual. Just look at the food. Christmas is turkey and yam—big and bland. New Year is oysters and caviar—sensual and extravagant. You pass out on Christmas from the turkey but you get laid on New Year with the aid of champagne. Maybe I am not for god and family value here, but we humans created holidays to have fun, to break from the everyday; I can eat turkey and drink cheap wine everyday, but champagne and caviar? Well, that is a holiday.

Belated Holiday Greetings

I like holidays. What is not to like—family, friends, food and drink and general cheerfulness? I like Chinese New Year; I like Thanksgiving, north or south of the Canadian/U.S. border; I even like Easter with its eternal peeps. I cannot however bring myself to enjoy this holiday fast approaching. It is not that I hate turkey; I have eaten one or two excellent ones. It is not that I do not like religious holidays, most of them are. It is not that I do not like the commercialization of it; that is one of the points of having a holiday to begin with. It is the all-consuming nature of this one. My favourite radio station is playing Christmas songs all day long. My television is showing ancient Christmas programmes all day long. When I step outside, it is all Christmas sights, sounds and smells. There is a limit to everything; no matter it is the length, the intensity, the density or even the luminosity, there is a threshold across which enjoyment becomes oppression. My displeasure with this holiday is not with the holiday itself but the late stage of its development—by December, I am have had enough of it. As this is a religious holiday, why can the religious leaders not ordain the holiday season be no more than on week instead of taking up a quarter of a year? Chanukah seems to work so much better.

Where are my bootstraps?

Nothing is more odious than hearing Americans blame the Iraqi for the civil war and suffering in that country. Every politician, Democrats (“it is time for them to fight and die for their country) and Republicans (“the Iraqi government must start to take over the security duties) alike, are singing a duet of blame the Iraqi bums who just take and take from us. This is blame shifting in the lowest order. Just because the U.S. military destroyed all the material and political infrastructures, put all existing political leaders in jail, disrupted all civil orders, disbanded the military, the police and the courts, played favours along religious and ethnic lines, taken over the control of Iraq’s one great resource, and not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people they kill, it is their fault that they found themselves in such a horrible mess. Some even start calling Iraqis ungrateful. Ungrateful for what? All the death and destruction? All the poverty and sufferings? The bloody civil war? Or, the non-functioning government? Even if I agreed with the saying “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and overlooked its obvious physical impossibility, the person would be able to do nothing if someone had burnt the bootstraps. It is bad enough to go into someone’s house, beat up everyone and trash the place, but then to turn around and blame them for the bloody mess? That is revolting.

Imposing Democracy

As I said before Fareed Zakaria is a very smart man but he does have blind spots. Everyone has blind spots but they are a lot more noticeable when they belong to a smart person. In the article “Losing the War, as Well as the Battle,” Zakaria makes an intelligent lament of the failure of democracy in the Middle East due to the U.S.’s failure in Iraq. His analysis is very convincing and refreshing, but he fails to acknowledge the fundamental fault of the Iraq War vis-à-vis democracy—democracy cannot be imposed. The idea was that the imperial power would come in with overwhelming firepower to overthrow the despot and install a model democracy that would spread throughout the Middle East and solve the myriads of conflict there all together. That is a fantasy worthy of the Baron Münchhausen himself. What the modern day Münchhausens failed to take into account is the most fundamental nature of democracy—democracy is what people want for themselves and not what is given to them. Not everybody wants democracy. Some rather have a monarch to take care of everything. Most just want democracy when it serves their interests, even in the most ‘democratic’ of societies. Even when they want democracy, they may want a brand of democracy different from whatever is offered. The Iranian democracy is very similar to what some fundamentalist Christian’s vision of an ‘American’ democracy. And to many communists, proletarian dictatorship is the most democratic system under the present condition. No one ever asked the Iraqis what kind of democracy they wanted, what kind of government they wanted, or even if they wanted any change at all. Similarly, no one asks what the different Middle Eastern populations what they want. The whole exercise itself is anti-democratic to the extreme—to impose a political system on a people through the use of extreme force. The failure of this Middle East democratizing project is not so much the failure of the war/post-war Iraq but the very idea itself.

The Senate

Stephen Harper has announced the first step in reforming the Senate with elections to fill seat. While this seems to make sense in a democratic parliament, it does fundamentally change the way it is made up and it more fundamental constitutive philosophy. The Senate was conceived as a clear-minded house, independent of the excess and fervor of democracy. It is an antidemocratic element in a democratic institution. We may no long think it is necessary to have this check on democracy but since this is such fundamental change, we should have more than a decree or simple majority in the Common. We should also engage the whole country in discussing the future of the Senate. But there is little discussion about it at all. Some think we should just eliminate it. Some think it should not be changed. Harper’s suggested that the next step, after making Senate nominations an election, is to make it proportional. Exactly what he meant by ‘proportional’ is not yet clear; but if it is simply by population, then what is the different between the two houses? Sure the length of membership differs and their power differs, but on the representative sense they are the same, by population. I think a two-house system may still have its value. I like the U.S. division—one representing equal proportion of the population and the other states. Many of the dissatisfaction, particularly in the West, have been about the uneven distribution of parliamentary seats. This cannot be changed as long as most of the population lives in Ontario and Quebec. But if we have something like the U.S. Senate, each province would have a forum where they can voice their desires equally. It would then balance the geographically uneven Common. And if the power of the Senate remains similar to the power it has now, then it would not an infringement on the government’s operation but would provide a different prospective on legislations and government oversight from the Common. I think this would make for a better and more balance government.

Dam Green House

As the new study from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) project that the Arctic Ocean may become ice-free by 2040, the top films in box office are Apocalyto and Happy Feet. Tell me that is simply a coincident. Our government apparently think so. Environment Minister Rona Ambrose continues to insist that the Kyoto targets are unrealistic while provide no real alternatives in Parliament. While it may be wise to start build arks like Norah once did, the financially wise may want to go into more profitable endeavours that the melt ice will create. Dam building, for example, seems to be one new opportunity. As the sea rises, large cities will be under water. New York, Vancouver, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mumbai, just to name a few will all become lowlands, like the Netherlands. And the Netherlands, well, it will be a good diving site, I suppose. A lot of dams will have to be built. I had better call my structural engineer friends to explore opportunities. And Dutch, got to learn Dutch.

Face-Victory

Donald Rumsfeld on his farewell tour said, “the enemy must be defeated.” On the surface it seems clear and reasonable; indeed, if you do not want to win, why go to war to begin with. Upon closer inspection though, we not sure who the enemy is much less how they can be defeated. The war, under the leadership of Rumsfeld, has morphed into a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites. That is a point even George Bush is not disputing. The problem with participating in someone else’s civil war is that you have to choose side. One may think that the U.S. has already chose side in a de facto sort of way. By supporting the predominately Shi’ite government, the U.S. has picked the Shi’ite over the Sunnis. But the government does not even represent all the Shi’ites, there are many a Shi’ite militias fighting independent of the government and at times against the government. So the situation is that the U.S. is supporting a powerless government while civil war rages right outside of their compounds. So, who is the U.S. fighting over there? The Sunnis? Sure. The Shi’ites? Sometimes. The government forces? Since both Sunni and Shi’ite insurgents infiltrate them, occasionally. Syria and Iranian agents? Yes. Al Qaeda? Absolutely. Anyone they are not fighting? I do not see any. So, how do you defeat anyone everyone around you? Traditionally, the power in the situation the U.S. is in right now would side completely with the Shi’ites and seek to use them to destroy the Sunnis. This way, they at least have a hope of having someone more or less on their side. The downside, of course, is the cultivation of a force the U.S. cannot trust. Past powers had found this out rather unpleasantly—once the puppet is strong enough, they would try to squeeze the occupying power out. And can you blame them? So, the U.S. has maneuvered itself into a winless situation. And they know it. They have not talked about victory but ways in which victory can be declared for more than a year now. It is all about face-saving, nothing military about it. The sad thing is when the U.S. military finally leaves, the Iraqi will be far worse off than before and far more people are suffering far more severely as the result of this war than they would under Saddam Hussein.

Police Massaging

The local police in four municipalities in the Lower Mainland here made a high profile crack down on message parlors on Thursday. All the spokesmen were giddy in front of the camera and everyone is padding their own back in congratulation. Well, nothing happens in years and happiness reigns when it finally happens once. And then, of course, the parlors are open again today. It is easy to talk about how the police are powerless against the criminals but this is the case of the police not really dealing with the criminals. The whole thing is a publicity stunt, produced to make the police departments look good. We cannot really call it a crime-fighting event. If they are truly concerned about the well-beings of the women and the enforcement of the law as they claimed, the police would act more often and provide better year round support to the women working in those places. What is more effective is to not only try to control the supply side but also the demand side, i.e. prosecute the clients and publicize the prosecutions. It is easy to say that the pimps are the exploiters in the equation but so too are the johns. Without customers there would be no business. In this transaction, the buyer and the seller should have equal culpability. In ethical sense, the johns are far more culpable because the women were making a living or being forced into the business and the pimps were filling a market need, it is the johns who are the market need. They wanted the service and they will pay for it. The question for an honest society is not to ask why there are so many prostitutes but why there are so many buyers of sexual services. The crucial point here that for both ethical and law-enforcement purposes, controlling the client side is far more important.

Law and Order

Now that the vote to revisit the issue of same-sex marriage in Parliament has passed and rejected, there is talk about allowing civic administrator who perform the ceremony to not do it because of personal objection to same-sex marriage. This is a very interesting idea, particularly when it comes from the usually ‘law-and-order’ crowd. There is the Charter of Rights, there is the law of the land as passed by parliament, and then there is whatever you want to do. This logic is truly liberating, freeing individuals, particularly those working for the government as the executor of the law, to complete disregard it the law. A policeman can just let speeding cars pass because he likes to drive fast himself. A doctor may let someone die because she believes the patient brought it upon himself. And a magistrate can refuse to perform a mix race marriage because he is a racist. And if they can not do things that they are supposed to, they should be able to do things that they are not supposed to. Then, police can shoot whoever committed any violation. A surgeon may perform an operation simply because he needs the practice. And a magistrate can nullify all marriages she performed because she had fight with her fiancé. Most important of all, judges can let murders go free because he is feeling charitable. This is certainly a different kind of ‘law-and-order’—my laws, my orders and screws them all. But then, this is really what ‘law-and-order’ has always really mean, isn’t it? The law never stops the ‘law-and-order’ crowd from doing whatever they want. Their law and order are but fragments of their own imagination.