EclecticLip

On a Boston-bound business… trip.  (What’s a word that begins with “b” and is synonymous with trip?)

Cultural anthropology and other travel notes below:

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…until at least the weekend.  Workday priorities and such.

Meanwhile, the following phrase from Christopher Tyerman’s Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades struck me as postworthy:

Ironically, for all its political success, the Albigensian Crusade failed to eradicate the Cathars, a task effected by the more pacific and reasoned methods [?!?!] of the Inquisition.  (p68, hardcover edition)

The more pacific and reasoned methods of the Inquisition?

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There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

Show me the original face you had before you were born.

The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature.  Or so I think. 

In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.

To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex.  Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness?    ) would allow it to return to its full potential.

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Part II of John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country is titled Peace, Fairness, and Good Government.

It’s a play on the phrase Peace, Order and Good Government which appears in the Confederation-enshrining Constitution Act of 1867.  The phrase — an eminently pragmatic aspirational ideal — appears in many Commonwealth Independence documents.

A major point of Part II is Saul’s argument that the phrase was originally and consistently Peace, Welfare and Good Government. That’s the welfare-of-the-people, as in the English wellbeing, the French bien-etre, the classical Greek eudaimonia.  Saul notes this spirit is reflected in First Nations expression of the common bowl — an earthier analogue to the English term of the ‘commonwealth’.

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Infovore that I am, I love reading over the holidays.  More so than being acquainted with unfamiliar facts, I treasure being shown their context, and how they came to be.  To paraphrase from my Facebook, I like knowing what; I love knowing why.

I finished John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: telling truths about Canada a few days ago — a thickly-enriching read, as he always is.  Happily, it was an easier read than Reflections of a Siamese Twin, his previous tome on the Canadian identity.  This may be because he spent less time on the decades leading up to Confederation this time around (a grey area in my schooling), or he drew that historical arc more tautly, or it may even be that I’m more familiar with that period now.  :)

Saul’s goal (as evidenced by early references to the work as “three new myths about Canada”) is to re-envision Canada as:

1. a fundamentally Metis civlization, not a European one.
2. a nation built on peace, welfare, and good government   (instead of the more familiar “peace, order and good government”)
3. a country set to flourish once its elites internalize the first two points, and reject the learned helplessness that has characterized their behaviour, first with the British and now with the Americans.

He richly succeeds with the first two points; hopefully, he will be shown prescient on the third.

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Continuing Casino Royale, I burst out laughing to read the following:

“…On the straight stretches the Amherst Villiers supercharger dug spurs into the Bentley’s twenty-five horses and the engine sent a high-pitched scream of pain into the night.”

James Bond’s first car was a twenty-five horsepower Bentley!  Suddenly, the 110 horses of my first (and thus far, only) car, doesn’t seem so shabby. 

While in school, I either wasn’t taught (or wasn’t paying attention) when the topic of black Nova Scotians was raised.  I only (re-)discovered their cause when reading John Ralston Saul’s latest, A Fair Country.

I’d known black loyalists fled north after the American Revolution, but didn’t realize that they mainly settled in Nova Scotia.  (All the more reason to visit there!)  And it was a shock to learn that in 1792, a thousand Black Nova Scotians sailed to Sierra Leone, in search of a better future. A year later, the parliament of Upper Canada became the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to pass legislation against slavery.
The anti-slavery legislation beats the US Thirteenth Amendment by seventy-two years.

And the Black Nova Scotians’ trip to Sierra Leone preceded by thirty years, the emigration to neighboring Liberia, of freed American slaves.

More expensive than World War II.

Wow.
That really, really puts it in perspective.  After adjusting for inflation (which often seems underreported doesn’t it?) the US gov’t has spent more money bailing out financial institutions in the past four months than it spent in four years of fighting World War II!!

More below the fold…

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Recently I’ve been reading Casino Royale — the first James Bond novel, published way back in 1953.

Imagine my surprise that 007’s literary debut is:

           “James Bond suddenly knew he was tired.”   (!)

I was reading a book of Viking wisdom yesterday.  It included the memorable line ‘no lamb for the lazy wolf‘ (a corollary for ‘the early bird gets the worm’) but peculiarly, no tips on plundering villages.  Personally, I prefer ‘the second worm doesn’t get eaten’, but that’s just me.

Banking and fairies below the fold! 

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