I got into a little back and forth with another blogger and promised in my comments there that I would expand a bit further on my comments here.
But first some background. The site is called The Theology of Andrew. And the particular post that got me commenting is here.
As I wrote over there, young Andrew brings a peculiarly protestant sensibility to Catholic questions. He is very keen to find epistemologically solid arguments for things and is troubled by the fact that nothing seems to provide solid proof of salvation. It isn't hard to imagine him doing as Luther did and looking at the ten commandments and concluding that no one could do this.
I have cut and paste my answer from over there here below the fold just to have it somewhere on my own blog but better to go read it there where you can read his own words which do him better justice than I am likely to do. He is obviously a very intelligent guy.
What concerns me here is the relationship between following rules and virtue and I think his arguments bring us to the point where we need to think about the difference. And I will do just that in my next post.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Meanwhile Elinor is ...
Marianne has been doing her Ophelia routine, sitting around moping, playing favourite songs over and over again, getting morally self-righteous.
This last is an interesting part of the Ophelia sensibility--an extreme intolerance for injustice in the world. Neither Austen nor Shakespeare connects the dots on this but it is no doubt a function of projecting one's own feelings of having been unjustly treated onto the whole world. The need for personal vindication after having been treated badly by someone who was supposed to love us makes us see everything in terms of the innocent trampled by the unjust.
This never occurred to me before now typing this, but I was like that once about twenty years ago now.
Anyway, what of Elinor? Oddly enough for those who believe that this is a book about too much sensibility versus too much sense, Elinor now begins a slow and steady evolution towards more sense. That is to say, she becomes even less like her sister and her mother.
We get our first hint of this when Willoughby's perfidy is generally known and Elinor has to deal with the well-meaning but unhelpful responses of her friends. After noting that the coolness and distance of Lady Middleton is easier to bear than the effusive support of others, Austen observes that Elinor "was sometimes worried down by officious condolence to rate good-breeding as more indispensable to comfort than good-nature."
It's the reluctant acceptance of good breeding that is telling here. If we have taken Elinor to be a binary opposite to Marianne, this should not be. What we are seeing in these chapters is not the two girls moving closer together but two girls who were once to one side of divide—one more extreme than the other—both finding their understanding of the world challenged. One, Marianne, is digging in her heels and refusing to give up her former vies, while Elinor is moving more easily into the sense camp.
When the uncomfortable meeting between Lucy, Edward and Elinor takes place, Elinor is firmly determined to hide her feelings and let only her good nature show:
Elinor's increased focus on sense does not come at the expense of her sensibilities but she is rather cool in her responses. I particularly love her response to the opinions of Mr. Robert Ferrars: "Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition."
This last is an interesting part of the Ophelia sensibility--an extreme intolerance for injustice in the world. Neither Austen nor Shakespeare connects the dots on this but it is no doubt a function of projecting one's own feelings of having been unjustly treated onto the whole world. The need for personal vindication after having been treated badly by someone who was supposed to love us makes us see everything in terms of the innocent trampled by the unjust.
This never occurred to me before now typing this, but I was like that once about twenty years ago now.
Anyway, what of Elinor? Oddly enough for those who believe that this is a book about too much sensibility versus too much sense, Elinor now begins a slow and steady evolution towards more sense. That is to say, she becomes even less like her sister and her mother.
We get our first hint of this when Willoughby's perfidy is generally known and Elinor has to deal with the well-meaning but unhelpful responses of her friends. After noting that the coolness and distance of Lady Middleton is easier to bear than the effusive support of others, Austen observes that Elinor "was sometimes worried down by officious condolence to rate good-breeding as more indispensable to comfort than good-nature."
It's the reluctant acceptance of good breeding that is telling here. If we have taken Elinor to be a binary opposite to Marianne, this should not be. What we are seeing in these chapters is not the two girls moving closer together but two girls who were once to one side of divide—one more extreme than the other—both finding their understanding of the world challenged. One, Marianne, is digging in her heels and refusing to give up her former vies, while Elinor is moving more easily into the sense camp.
When the uncomfortable meeting between Lucy, Edward and Elinor takes place, Elinor is firmly determined to hide her feelings and let only her good nature show:
But Elinor had more to do; and so anxious was she, for his sake and her own, to do it well, that she forced herself, after a moment's recollection, to welcome him, with a look and manner that were almost easy and almost open; and another struggle, another effort still improved them. She would not allow the presence of Lucy, nor the consciousness of some injustice towards herself, to deter her from saying that she was happy to see him, and that she had very much regretted being from home, when he called before in Berkeley Street. She would not be frightened from paying him those attentions which, as a friend and almost a relation, were his due, by the observant eyes of Lucy, though she soon perceived them to be narrowly watching her.And then Marianne walks into the room and is nothing but good-natured and is absolutely useless to everyone raising everyone's level of discomfort.
Elinor's increased focus on sense does not come at the expense of her sensibilities but she is rather cool in her responses. I particularly love her response to the opinions of Mr. Robert Ferrars: "Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition."
Friday, May 7, 2010
ad orientem
At mass this morning I had one of those moments where something becomes absolutely clear. The thing that became clear is that preist has to turn around and face liturgical east again.
Father Stanley, the priest saying the mass, is a friend of mine and good man and a good priest. Maybe it was because of that that everything was so clear to me. In the past, I've blamed individual priests for what I now see is a general problem. The priest's personality just intrudes too much on the mass when he faces the congregation.
Before the 8 AM service began there was a group saying the rosary. The leader of this group had a wireless microphone clipped to her collar so everyone could hear her. I'm not enthusiastic about these rosary sessions but sitting there it was impossible not to feel the special unity that came from everyone facing the altar and not facing some person on the altar. And I thought, mass should be like this.
And with wireless microphone packs there would be no challenge making this accessible to everyone. It's odd, I have no particular enthusiasm for the old order mass and I am quite comfortable with the Novus Ordo but the priest has to turn around. Has to! I'm quite sure the future of the church depends on this.
Father Stanley, the priest saying the mass, is a friend of mine and good man and a good priest. Maybe it was because of that that everything was so clear to me. In the past, I've blamed individual priests for what I now see is a general problem. The priest's personality just intrudes too much on the mass when he faces the congregation.
Before the 8 AM service began there was a group saying the rosary. The leader of this group had a wireless microphone clipped to her collar so everyone could hear her. I'm not enthusiastic about these rosary sessions but sitting there it was impossible not to feel the special unity that came from everyone facing the altar and not facing some person on the altar. And I thought, mass should be like this.
And with wireless microphone packs there would be no challenge making this accessible to everyone. It's odd, I have no particular enthusiasm for the old order mass and I am quite comfortable with the Novus Ordo but the priest has to turn around. Has to! I'm quite sure the future of the church depends on this.
The Birth of the Uncool part 1
In the beginning
Michael Oakeshott once wrote that history is a place where we trace our opinions like Whippets exercising in a park. What I am about to do here is no more than that. Imagine the history of "jazz" music as a huge park through which we could draw many different lines. I am going to draw a line connecting various bits of that big park into a particular history that I will call "The Birth of the Uncool"
As I do so, I will be drawing distinctions between the line I am drawing and some other lines already drawn. Most of these lines were drawn by people hoping to find the one and only true history of jazz music. Others were drawn by people who care little about the music but love to play racial politics with history (the just awful Jazz by Ken Burns being only the latest example). Finally, and most importantly, there is an alternative history within jazz known as the history of cool jazz.
The story I am bout to tell is none of those. I should only add that while there is some creativity in drawing the line all the territory it covers is real; this is not a fictional story.
The story begins with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band because it has to. If we want to do history in anything vaguely resembling a serious way we have to work with documents and artefacts and, for better or for worse, the history of jazz begins here:
Now we could have a stupid argument about who was or was not playing jazz before this but we won't. Somebody undoubtedly was. Who exactly and where or how is a something we do not know and never will. Yes, lots of people made claims but but none of them can be accepted at face value.
Besides which, the whole argument about who did or did not come up with jazz first will distract us from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's (hereafter ODJB) one unquestionable achievement: they made the question worth arguing about. They did this by proving that you could make money playing jazz. They took a kind of music that was just lying around and proved that the whole world was interested. For New Orleans musicians, this was a little like proving that those rocks everyone had in their backyard were really gold.
A big part of this was the way they marketed themselves. Lots of people have noted that there is something a little presumptuous in the "original" in the ODJB's name. What is not so often noted that it was not unusual for the time. Blackface troupes called themselves by names like "Original Ethiopian Serendaders" and had done so for a long time. The ODJB name may stand out as odd to us but it would not have to the audience of the time. What would have stood out was that the men in the band were not in blackface and they did not claim to be playing anybody else's music but their own.
The ODJB did a Minstrel show performance without blackface and that was a considerable innovation. It opened a door for hundreds of others. Through that door would come jazz both hot and cool.
And it left an odd challenge. For all it's racial connotations, blackface was primarily a role for performers. It was a mask they put on and the performance they gave while wearing that mask was narrowly proscribed by the expectations that went with the shows. The performer disappeared into the role.
For many African-American performers this must have been very inviting. It opened the door to performing as themselves. It wasn't a completely clear road: the first performances of Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, for example, are little more than a glorified minstrel show.
For others, there was a challenge in that the role playing that went with jazz now became something they couldn't take off at the end of the day. Once you were a jazz musician, that was what you were; no matter what you "really" were. It was still role playing but the stakes had changed.
Michael Oakeshott once wrote that history is a place where we trace our opinions like Whippets exercising in a park. What I am about to do here is no more than that. Imagine the history of "jazz" music as a huge park through which we could draw many different lines. I am going to draw a line connecting various bits of that big park into a particular history that I will call "The Birth of the Uncool"
As I do so, I will be drawing distinctions between the line I am drawing and some other lines already drawn. Most of these lines were drawn by people hoping to find the one and only true history of jazz music. Others were drawn by people who care little about the music but love to play racial politics with history (the just awful Jazz by Ken Burns being only the latest example). Finally, and most importantly, there is an alternative history within jazz known as the history of cool jazz.
The story I am bout to tell is none of those. I should only add that while there is some creativity in drawing the line all the territory it covers is real; this is not a fictional story.
The story begins with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band because it has to. If we want to do history in anything vaguely resembling a serious way we have to work with documents and artefacts and, for better or for worse, the history of jazz begins here:
Now we could have a stupid argument about who was or was not playing jazz before this but we won't. Somebody undoubtedly was. Who exactly and where or how is a something we do not know and never will. Yes, lots of people made claims but but none of them can be accepted at face value.
Besides which, the whole argument about who did or did not come up with jazz first will distract us from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's (hereafter ODJB) one unquestionable achievement: they made the question worth arguing about. They did this by proving that you could make money playing jazz. They took a kind of music that was just lying around and proved that the whole world was interested. For New Orleans musicians, this was a little like proving that those rocks everyone had in their backyard were really gold.
A big part of this was the way they marketed themselves. Lots of people have noted that there is something a little presumptuous in the "original" in the ODJB's name. What is not so often noted that it was not unusual for the time. Blackface troupes called themselves by names like "Original Ethiopian Serendaders" and had done so for a long time. The ODJB name may stand out as odd to us but it would not have to the audience of the time. What would have stood out was that the men in the band were not in blackface and they did not claim to be playing anybody else's music but their own.
The ODJB did a Minstrel show performance without blackface and that was a considerable innovation. It opened a door for hundreds of others. Through that door would come jazz both hot and cool.
And it left an odd challenge. For all it's racial connotations, blackface was primarily a role for performers. It was a mask they put on and the performance they gave while wearing that mask was narrowly proscribed by the expectations that went with the shows. The performer disappeared into the role.
For many African-American performers this must have been very inviting. It opened the door to performing as themselves. It wasn't a completely clear road: the first performances of Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, for example, are little more than a glorified minstrel show.
For others, there was a challenge in that the role playing that went with jazz now became something they couldn't take off at the end of the day. Once you were a jazz musician, that was what you were; no matter what you "really" were. It was still role playing but the stakes had changed.
Jane Austen Saturday
I'm moving the Jane Austen stuff to the weekend permanently. I have a regular meeting commitment on Friday morning that takes up too much of my energy to allow me to also write coherently about Sense and Sensibility too.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
In praise of Roger Sterling
Long Weekend
This is a good episode to base my defence of the guy on because we rarely see Roger behaving worse than he does here. That, I suspect, is because the scriptwriters were against him. John Slattery was only a "special guest" in Season One and not a full cast member. This episode with his heart attack is a fairly obvious bid to begin writing him out of the show.
The sheer vulgarity of Roger's pursuit of two models should be off-putting except that it isn't. I think the writers blew it by having the two women be so acquiescent. They behave more like 1970s rock groupies than 1950s models. And Roger behaves more like Bill Wyman or Jon Bonham keen to see how far the groupies were willing to degrade themselves to get some action with the band than with any Roger Sterling we have seen so far. I kept waiting for Roger to announce he had a shark ready for some action.
A general comment about the series is that the sex is too frequent and too easy. That some Madison Avenue ad men were less than 100 percent faithful to their wives is easy to accept, that sex was this easy to get and this depraved is a bit more of a stretch. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, these things certainly may have happened but not to such a small group of people in such a narrow time frame.
It is more of a criticism of our era than the one portrayed really, They would have been contented with a show that left the details to the imagination.
The fight club interpretation
I was reading someone yesterday on the fight club interpretation of Ferris Bueller's Day Off in which Ferris turns out to be a projection of Cameron's imagination. You could almost read Roger Sterling as a projection of Don Draper's imagination this episode. As the guy who goes too far only to create an opportunity for self-revelation for Don.
We start off drenched in cynicism. A client is lost and Don Draper says to Pete, "The day you sign a client is the day you start losing one." Then Don goes up to Roger's office and tells him about the loss and Roger says the same thing and Don incredulously replies, "You don't really believe that."
And we get enough cynical use and abuse of power to lat all season leading up to Roger scooping up two models from the casting department for a "party" up in Don's (not Roger's) office.
Father's and daughters
Roger finding himself in the middle of sex with a woman only a little older than his daughter, decides to speak about his daughter and how unhappy she is. He is in full confessional mode when the young woman ruins it all by brushing it all off by trying to minimize the problem.
The thing to notice, however, is that for all his coolness, John Slattery as Roger manages to achieve an emotional directness here that we have not seen from any of the other characters. In just a few lines he gives us an entire picture of a marriage, a family and a life. Even a line as simple as his saying he wanted to name his daughter "Margaux after the wine," fills in a huge amount of backstory that writers wil be able to build on in future episodes.
This is a vulnerable, caring man for all his excess. He is lovable and admirable even a convincing role model.
Yes, he says things such as, "Remember Don, when God closes a door, he opens a dress." But that's pretty good don't you think. It's just the sort of thing I imagine a lot of the 20-somethings who watch the show wish they had the freedom to say.
Do you believe in energy?
He means does Don believe in a human soul. Slattery's acting is the best in the series and nowhere does that shine out quite as strongly as in the hospital scene after Roger's heart attack. The look of fear and resentment in his eyes are searing. The way he delivers his lines—the same sort of lines he would have delivered if it had been someone else's heart attack only with a completely different sense—is very moving.
And we get one of the tiny number of religious moments in the show. "I wished I was going somewhere."
Watch it, that's all I can say.
All through this, Don comes off as empty and hollow. Even in a crisis, he is cool and collected and remembers to keep up the secrecy. But confronted by a little religious questioning by Roger and he is lost.
Don calls Betty and she is so wrapped up in her childish concerns about her father's new "friend" that she moves on from what Don has been telling her in a flash. There is an interesting contrast between Roger who begins professing his love to Mona and Don and Betty. Roger's marriage is unhappy because it is sexless. Don's is unhappy because he married a child. Betty is in her thirties but she is still Lolita.
At the end of the conversation, Betty says, "Do you want me to come up there?" Don says, "No, there is nothing you can do." Exactly. Bloody useless she is.
An existential crisis
They do give her one very good one line though, "Everyone tells you life goes on, no one tells you that is not a good thing."
That's nonsense, of course, but it is the sort of nonsense someone in a crisis would believe. Don appears to be in one and he goes rushing to Rachel to tell her all about it.
The biblical name here is no accident. Rachel is figuratively one of Don's people just as the biblical Rachel was one of Jacob's. Don goes to Rachel because of something she said in the very first episode:
Of course, he won't get it.
The day you sign a client, is the day you begin losing them. Don is already losing Rachel. Unlike the biblical Jacob, he already has a new name and a new life. He tells Rachel about his old life though. He tells her the secrets he has not told anyone else. We don't know how much because we ourselves haven't been told the whole story yet.
If you are joining me here, this series starts here.
The next post in the series is here.
This is a good episode to base my defence of the guy on because we rarely see Roger behaving worse than he does here. That, I suspect, is because the scriptwriters were against him. John Slattery was only a "special guest" in Season One and not a full cast member. This episode with his heart attack is a fairly obvious bid to begin writing him out of the show.
The sheer vulgarity of Roger's pursuit of two models should be off-putting except that it isn't. I think the writers blew it by having the two women be so acquiescent. They behave more like 1970s rock groupies than 1950s models. And Roger behaves more like Bill Wyman or Jon Bonham keen to see how far the groupies were willing to degrade themselves to get some action with the band than with any Roger Sterling we have seen so far. I kept waiting for Roger to announce he had a shark ready for some action.
A general comment about the series is that the sex is too frequent and too easy. That some Madison Avenue ad men were less than 100 percent faithful to their wives is easy to accept, that sex was this easy to get and this depraved is a bit more of a stretch. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, these things certainly may have happened but not to such a small group of people in such a narrow time frame.
It is more of a criticism of our era than the one portrayed really, They would have been contented with a show that left the details to the imagination.
The fight club interpretation
I was reading someone yesterday on the fight club interpretation of Ferris Bueller's Day Off in which Ferris turns out to be a projection of Cameron's imagination. You could almost read Roger Sterling as a projection of Don Draper's imagination this episode. As the guy who goes too far only to create an opportunity for self-revelation for Don.
We start off drenched in cynicism. A client is lost and Don Draper says to Pete, "The day you sign a client is the day you start losing one." Then Don goes up to Roger's office and tells him about the loss and Roger says the same thing and Don incredulously replies, "You don't really believe that."
And we get enough cynical use and abuse of power to lat all season leading up to Roger scooping up two models from the casting department for a "party" up in Don's (not Roger's) office.
Father's and daughters
Roger finding himself in the middle of sex with a woman only a little older than his daughter, decides to speak about his daughter and how unhappy she is. He is in full confessional mode when the young woman ruins it all by brushing it all off by trying to minimize the problem.
The thing to notice, however, is that for all his coolness, John Slattery as Roger manages to achieve an emotional directness here that we have not seen from any of the other characters. In just a few lines he gives us an entire picture of a marriage, a family and a life. Even a line as simple as his saying he wanted to name his daughter "Margaux after the wine," fills in a huge amount of backstory that writers wil be able to build on in future episodes.
This is a vulnerable, caring man for all his excess. He is lovable and admirable even a convincing role model.
Yes, he says things such as, "Remember Don, when God closes a door, he opens a dress." But that's pretty good don't you think. It's just the sort of thing I imagine a lot of the 20-somethings who watch the show wish they had the freedom to say.
Do you believe in energy?
He means does Don believe in a human soul. Slattery's acting is the best in the series and nowhere does that shine out quite as strongly as in the hospital scene after Roger's heart attack. The look of fear and resentment in his eyes are searing. The way he delivers his lines—the same sort of lines he would have delivered if it had been someone else's heart attack only with a completely different sense—is very moving.
And we get one of the tiny number of religious moments in the show. "I wished I was going somewhere."
Watch it, that's all I can say.
All through this, Don comes off as empty and hollow. Even in a crisis, he is cool and collected and remembers to keep up the secrecy. But confronted by a little religious questioning by Roger and he is lost.
Don calls Betty and she is so wrapped up in her childish concerns about her father's new "friend" that she moves on from what Don has been telling her in a flash. There is an interesting contrast between Roger who begins professing his love to Mona and Don and Betty. Roger's marriage is unhappy because it is sexless. Don's is unhappy because he married a child. Betty is in her thirties but she is still Lolita.
At the end of the conversation, Betty says, "Do you want me to come up there?" Don says, "No, there is nothing you can do." Exactly. Bloody useless she is.
An existential crisis
They do give her one very good one line though, "Everyone tells you life goes on, no one tells you that is not a good thing."
That's nonsense, of course, but it is the sort of nonsense someone in a crisis would believe. Don appears to be in one and he goes rushing to Rachel to tell her all about it.
The biblical name here is no accident. Rachel is figuratively one of Don's people just as the biblical Rachel was one of Jacob's. Don goes to Rachel because of something she said in the very first episode:
"Mr. Draper, I don't know what it is you really believe in, but I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it. There is something about you that tells me that you know it too."Don himself doesn't know what he believes in but here he has an opportunity to connect and that is what he needs.
Of course, he won't get it.
The day you sign a client, is the day you begin losing them. Don is already losing Rachel. Unlike the biblical Jacob, he already has a new name and a new life. He tells Rachel about his old life though. He tells her the secrets he has not told anyone else. We don't know how much because we ourselves haven't been told the whole story yet.
If you are joining me here, this series starts here.
The next post in the series is here.
I know exactly what he means
I blow hot and cold on Ta-Nehisi Coates but this post about getting old and no longer wanting to stay in the hood is really worth reading. Warning: It does features some language I would never put in print.
We lived in a downtown neighbourhood when we were first married. I'm pretty certain it wasn't as tough as the one Coates describes but ...
Our apartment fronted on a public park. It was quite beautiful to look at. But the city planners, in their wisdom, decided that it was a great idea to okay a beer store to open on the other side of the park. Then they decided to open a needle "exchange" too. Pretty soon the park filled up with people who wanted beer but had no where to drink it or wanted needles and had no place to use them.
Sometimes I would wake up because of some noise I'd heard and discover that it was a hooker using our backyard to service her customers. (The hookers magically showed up the same week the province dispensed welfare payments every month.)
One night I woke to find the police busting a guy. I didn't think much of it at the time but the next day I saw a police officer in the yard searching it. I went out and asked him if I could help. He was very evasive at first but eventually admitted that he had good reason to believe that guy they had arrested the night before had been carrying a weapon which he believed he had thrown away just before they got him. After he left, I took up the search myself on the theory that I probably had more motivation to make sure there wasn't a loaded handgun lying around my property than he did.
I did not find any gun but I found five used needles in a space of about 60 square feet.
I used to tell stories about all this at parties—the kind of stories that pass off as complaining but are really bragging—and watch the envious looks in the eyes of friends who lived in less edgy neighbourhoods.
One day my friend Rob came by walking his then-girlfriend's Golden Retriever. We walked down to a street corner and sat and talked for about an hour.
We noticed the guy across the street because he had a Pit Bull on a crude rope leash. We wanted to be sure to move if he came our way so as to avoid the Golden getting ripped if the two dogs ran into one another so we kept a half an eye on him. That was why we noticed that he was dealing. Every once in a while someone would approach the guy and talk awhile then they'd go down the side street and come back. I knew the people coming up to him because they were regular panhandlers in our neighbourhood.
It was one of those eye-opening moments. I was never so naive as to think that the money was really for food. A friend of mine was once yelled at and nearly assaulted when he went and bought a sandwich and brought it to panhandler who had claimed that was what he wanted the money for. Still, it was quite a jolt to see the steady path of them even including a woman who would stand on the street with her baby in her arms and say she needed money to take care of it.
I started seeing things in a different light after that. I didn't want to move. It felt disloyal to the wonderful neighbours who were trying so hard to make the neighbourhood work. The sort of people who would, as Coates puts it, call 311 when a street light burns out. But sometimes also the sort of people who would defend the needle exchange and defend the legal rights of panhandlers.
The people who ran the needle exchange, and the people who defended it, always insisted on the "exchange". They claimed that needles were only given to people who brought used needles in return. It wasn't so much the lie but the blatant falseness of it that bothered me. Eventually a particularly determined critic dug up the facts. Thousands of needles went missing every year.
And then someone buried a bunch in the sandbox in the play area at the park. The play area was fenced in and locked at night. This wasn't someone casually throwing away a needle, this was a deliberate act of hatred.
And then a drug user decided to retire. He didn't owe anyone any money, he just wanted to quit. He was sitting with his girlfriend and her son when there was a knock on the door. He opened the door and his former dealer stuck a gun in his face, backed him up against the wall, pushed the barrel up a nostril and pulled the trigger. The guy survived, minus a significant portion of his face.
The last straw was when three rubbies had an argument behind the local grocery store. It was two against one and the two pushed the one down and lit him on fire.
We moved further out.
Postscript: The other night, some kids had a party in the local park. Someone called the police and the kids were told to leave. As soon as the police were out of sight, they started going through the neighbourhood committing various acts of petty vandalism to punish the neighbourhood for ruining their party. I went out and confronted them. On one level it was pathetic. I caught two guys trying to let the air of someone's tires. They were trying to figure out how to do it!
On another level it's troubling. If people who put flowerpots out in front of their house keep waking up to find the pots smashed in the middle of the road, they stop putting out flowerpots. And when that happens, something gets lost.
Already we also have people who try and protect the "right" to panhandle-some even handing out business cards and offering to defend panhandlers pro bono and who worry more about the conduct of the police than the criminals. And you can see how it happens ...
We lived in a downtown neighbourhood when we were first married. I'm pretty certain it wasn't as tough as the one Coates describes but ...
Our apartment fronted on a public park. It was quite beautiful to look at. But the city planners, in their wisdom, decided that it was a great idea to okay a beer store to open on the other side of the park. Then they decided to open a needle "exchange" too. Pretty soon the park filled up with people who wanted beer but had no where to drink it or wanted needles and had no place to use them.
Sometimes I would wake up because of some noise I'd heard and discover that it was a hooker using our backyard to service her customers. (The hookers magically showed up the same week the province dispensed welfare payments every month.)
One night I woke to find the police busting a guy. I didn't think much of it at the time but the next day I saw a police officer in the yard searching it. I went out and asked him if I could help. He was very evasive at first but eventually admitted that he had good reason to believe that guy they had arrested the night before had been carrying a weapon which he believed he had thrown away just before they got him. After he left, I took up the search myself on the theory that I probably had more motivation to make sure there wasn't a loaded handgun lying around my property than he did.
I did not find any gun but I found five used needles in a space of about 60 square feet.
I used to tell stories about all this at parties—the kind of stories that pass off as complaining but are really bragging—and watch the envious looks in the eyes of friends who lived in less edgy neighbourhoods.
One day my friend Rob came by walking his then-girlfriend's Golden Retriever. We walked down to a street corner and sat and talked for about an hour.
We noticed the guy across the street because he had a Pit Bull on a crude rope leash. We wanted to be sure to move if he came our way so as to avoid the Golden getting ripped if the two dogs ran into one another so we kept a half an eye on him. That was why we noticed that he was dealing. Every once in a while someone would approach the guy and talk awhile then they'd go down the side street and come back. I knew the people coming up to him because they were regular panhandlers in our neighbourhood.
It was one of those eye-opening moments. I was never so naive as to think that the money was really for food. A friend of mine was once yelled at and nearly assaulted when he went and bought a sandwich and brought it to panhandler who had claimed that was what he wanted the money for. Still, it was quite a jolt to see the steady path of them even including a woman who would stand on the street with her baby in her arms and say she needed money to take care of it.
I started seeing things in a different light after that. I didn't want to move. It felt disloyal to the wonderful neighbours who were trying so hard to make the neighbourhood work. The sort of people who would, as Coates puts it, call 311 when a street light burns out. But sometimes also the sort of people who would defend the needle exchange and defend the legal rights of panhandlers.
The people who ran the needle exchange, and the people who defended it, always insisted on the "exchange". They claimed that needles were only given to people who brought used needles in return. It wasn't so much the lie but the blatant falseness of it that bothered me. Eventually a particularly determined critic dug up the facts. Thousands of needles went missing every year.
And then someone buried a bunch in the sandbox in the play area at the park. The play area was fenced in and locked at night. This wasn't someone casually throwing away a needle, this was a deliberate act of hatred.
And then a drug user decided to retire. He didn't owe anyone any money, he just wanted to quit. He was sitting with his girlfriend and her son when there was a knock on the door. He opened the door and his former dealer stuck a gun in his face, backed him up against the wall, pushed the barrel up a nostril and pulled the trigger. The guy survived, minus a significant portion of his face.
The last straw was when three rubbies had an argument behind the local grocery store. It was two against one and the two pushed the one down and lit him on fire.
We moved further out.
Postscript: The other night, some kids had a party in the local park. Someone called the police and the kids were told to leave. As soon as the police were out of sight, they started going through the neighbourhood committing various acts of petty vandalism to punish the neighbourhood for ruining their party. I went out and confronted them. On one level it was pathetic. I caught two guys trying to let the air of someone's tires. They were trying to figure out how to do it!
On another level it's troubling. If people who put flowerpots out in front of their house keep waking up to find the pots smashed in the middle of the road, they stop putting out flowerpots. And when that happens, something gets lost.
Already we also have people who try and protect the "right" to panhandle-some even handing out business cards and offering to defend panhandlers pro bono and who worry more about the conduct of the police than the criminals. And you can see how it happens ...
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