Good Lord, could the economy please go away. Could the news stop, please. Could politicians on both side of the border cease being so blatantly inadequate, with their special, scripted statements and pasted-on grins.

It's ridiculous, at the worst time. We can’t afford ridiculous right now. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are all: "shit, we’re trying to make this funny, we are, but we've lost our detachment."

It's hard to be funny when you’re highly alarmed. You can't help it, you just slide toward shrill.

Here's what else politicians need to stop doing, so long as they’re acting like they're five: stop being so churlish with one another and refusing to play nice.
I quote from the CBC on September 29th:

"Ms. May was not sanctioning strategic voting and she is campaigning to win. Ms. May has said she supports forming a coalition with the NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc to work against the Conservatives. But she may have trouble with that strategy since NDP Leader Jack Layton has said he wouldn't meet with Ms. May. During the campaign, Mr. Layton said he would consider a coalition with Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, who quickly shot down the idea."

You know what? We need to talk. A huge majority of Canadians want to vote against Stephen Harper's Conservatives, but they can't affect the outcome of this election because every party on the Left is too involved in its own ego and mission to "put country first," as John McCain piously promised on his own turf down south.

Stephen Harper is a singularly unpleasant man. He has no trouble at all with characterizing me, a writer, as a "cultural elite," and then contrasting my ilk with "ordinary, hard-working Canadians." As if I earn more than the annual salary equivalent of two Smarties and a piece of string. As if I don't work hard. As if I'm a nefarious intellectual... Hmmm. In Guatemala and Cambodia, at a time when it felt right to wipe them out, being an "elite" and a nefarious intellectual or professional was fatal. Is that where we're headed with this rhetoric?

Or is it just that, for the conveniently political time being, elites are the Other who are smelly and obnoxious on trains?

How do you gauge the seriousness of these times? How do you say, well we're a pink-cheeked democracy and we ain't gonna turn fascist under pressure, we aren't really gonna target our "elites"? Not really! Just jokin'!

How do you guage that?

I ask, because I had a long conversation about it with a friend of mine from the former Yugoslavia who would never in a million years have anticipated that his country was going to fall apart and become violent and repressive. He escaped to Canada to write about his total astonishment, in "The Book of Revenge: A Blues for Yugoslavia."

To the extent that there is incredibly disturbing precedent for this kind of casual demonization of professionals and "elites," I strongly advocate a push-back.

Join the viral campaigns against Harper at departmentofculture.ca and anythingbutharper.ca.

Or come to our rally on October 8th at 11:30 at Front and John Street in Toronto in front of the CBC Broadcast Centre. We will be there -- we writers and musicians and actors -- to say: we're ordinary, hard-working Canadians, Mr. Harper, and how DARE you try to separate us from our friends and neighbours with this lip-curled sneer?

Labels: CBC, department of culture, election, government, harper

Okay, it's hard to maintain a blog when you're grieving the deaths of your father and sister, so I apologize, but any reader will understand why I went AWOL.
My sister died on May 24th, amid the bloom of lilacs and lily-of-the-valley, and shuddery daily thunder storms, in Montreal's late spring. We would bring her bouquets of these flowers to smell, as she lay in her hospice bed, having been vanquished to palliative care when her inflammatory breast cancer spread like a wild fire.
The hospice -- the West Island Palliative Care Centre -- was a truly lovely setting. Nine rooms only, each with french doors leading out to private patios under the maple trees. A gazebo, a burbling fountain, a little forest. Delicious, home-made food prepared and served in a roomy and comfy dining room presided over by a Budgie named Blueberry, the menu dreamed up and cooked by volunteers, so that I and the many people who loved Katharine could eat three times a day without having to think about it.
They provided us with wine glasses that we could take back to the room, so that we could toast Katharine while we were with her, and otherwise keep ourselves upbeat in this time of real terror. It's hard to find words to describe the experience of being with a person you love in palliative care, and as a writer, I will try my best in coming months and years. But it is extraordinary, let's just say that for now.
Katharine was my 'anxiety buddy,' we shared jokes all the time about our hypochondria and other fears. So I have re-dedicated my book to her in the paperback edition, and am eternally grateful that I did my research on causes of anxiety before I dealt with these huge and painful losses. I have a little insight to anchor me. Otherwise, God knows what I'd be: a gnat in a hurricane, to quote the much beloved Dave Barry.

As anyone who has experienced anxiety will know, it is dispiriting but entirely predictable that people without anxiety will attack you as frail. They will describe you as self-indulgent, and self-pitying. They will whine that you are being whiney. Or, as someone who posted to Amazon.com felt moved to post this week, my memoir of anxiety is the self-pitying rant of "an old lady."
Interesting, on so many levels. One being that my mother is seventy-seven, does that qualify as "old lady"? and yet she is one of the most charismatic and intellectually incisive and emotionally solid people on the planet. So I, trailing her by more than thirty years, am what....? Prematurely aged in a feminine direction?
Do tell!

Sorry, I meant to direct you to the experimental site in my previous blog post. It's www.hallofphobias.com
That's right: www.hallofphobias.com

A new experiment of mine. Kindly involve yourselves. You'll see what's required, and how easy it is to contribute to this community, when you get there...

If you feel like engaging in some existential gnawing on the furniture, please know that I will be discussing the wonderful fun of anxiety on April 16th in Toronto, at Hart House in the 2nd floor library, University of Toronto, at 7:30 pm.
Next night, you could join me on April 17th in Ottawa, at the National Archives on Wellington Street at 7:00 pm, as part of the Ottawa Writer's Festival.
Do come and toss questions at me. I'll just make shit up. And then we can all go out for cocktails.

The day that the New York Times ran a glowing review of my new book, "A Brief History of Anxiety -- Yours and Mine," my beloved father unexpectedly died. It was impossible to comprehend the highs and lows, the excitements and sorrows. It felt as if the Fates had assigned the third week in March, 2008, as one of extreme significance to Patricia Pearson of Toronto. One half of the emails I received that day were congratulations about the review, and the other half were condolences about Dad. I am so blown off course that I am getting basic perceptions of reality wrong, and feel confusingly as if I'm inhaling liquid when I drink, and gulping air when I breathe.
Carrying on with a book tour in the aftermath has been such an exercise in 'sucking it up' that I've dislocated one of my ribs.
Dad would have been so proud of that NYT review. Particularly the bit where I was assigned "major points for wit and flair." He was so enamoured all his life of the great New York humourists, from Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker to the witty minds behind The Onion. At Christmas, we used to sit around reading aloud from Woody Allen's early books. Having been to Oxford, Dad loved the British comics as well. Nothing in the universe was as funny to us, as a family, as Monty Python's Flying Circus. That was our 'quality time' in the early 1970s. Chuckling in extremis over philosophers playing soccer.
My father passed on to me a passion for humour that bordered on the religious. THIS is what matters, he seemed to insist, as he gave me his books by Wilde and Leacock and Thurbur. Why does it matter? Why did it matter to him, and why to me? Because our lives our tragic, and melancholy is the soul of wit. We laugh because we must. Laughter is our affirmative answer to the shocks of existence.
Bless you Dad. You lovely and elegant and funny, funny man. I look forward to walking with you again soon on "Heaven's bright shore."

Green is the new black.

Feel free to think of that in terms of the sudden, all-over-town popularity of environmental causes – seemingly as faddish as a fashion trend. Or consider the notion to be more deeply metaphoric: The dark despair of the past 40 years, starting with visions of a nuclear winter and then shaded further by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, among other dire pictures of humanity's amoral rape of the planet, have yielded to a spring-like greening of hope.

There is, quite tangibly, a growing sense among entrepreneurs and social innovators from Toronto to southern India to Amsterdam that maybe we can do this. Maybe, through ingenuity and inspired vision, we can avert the planetary apocalypse after all.

This coltish, still tentative hopefulness was encapsulated last year in the Canadian book, Getting to Maybe: How the World has Changed, which became a grassroots bestseller in spite of receiving scant media attention. Its three business school authors laid out examples of individuals and groups who were setting out uncertainly with visions of change, of betterment, without guarantee of success, and who were finding that they could, in fact, make the needed difference where they lived. The book clearly tapped into a hunger for inspirational examples – as opposed to disempowering threats of catastrophe.

As the Calgary journalist Chris Turner points out in his ambitious new book, The Geography of Hope, Martin Luther King Jr. didn't stand up in Washington all those years ago and intone: "I have a nightmare." He had a dream. Leaders lead through their dreams, and we have had very few such leaders in the last two decades. Instead, we have had fear-mongers – in both politics and activism. Environmentalists have not been rousing the rabble. They have been scaring it to death.

The result has been to coax people to hunker down to proven pleasures until the end is nigh. Ignore the bad, bad, baaad news –more cancer! terrorists a-terroring! polar bears going extinct! – in favour of watching cooking shows, and calling in votes to Canadian Idol.

But, wait. Something has changed. In the last few years, arguably after Hurricane Katrina, the citizenry itself ditched the dithering politicians and gloomy activists and quietly begun taking the lead. This is the gist of Turner's densely reported book.

"Like the dot-com revolutionaries in their garages and converted warehouses," he writes, "the pacesetters in the sustainability movement are far ahead of policy."

Inventors, investors, visionaries and pioneers, capitalists in Florida and socialists in Cuba, Dutch architects, German roof gardeners and ordinary citizens from Denmark to south India have all begun to set the template for what Turner calls "the nascent sustainable age."

With surprising doggedness, Turner (previously best-known for Planet Simpson, his book about the cultural impact of The Simpsons) travelled all over the world to investigate this template. He went to Taos, for example, to explore houses built from discarded tires and soda cans and sunk into New Mexico's arid hillsides, so that they rather resemble hobbit holes. These so-called "earthships," the brainchild of an architect named Michael Reynolds, collect their own water, heat themselves naturally, treat their own sewage and contain greenhouses for food production. Twenty years ago, Reynolds was derided as a whacko; now he's being profiled on CNN.

Turner flew to Atlanta, where one of the world's largest producers of industrial carpet, helmed by the old-fashioned American capitalist Ray Anderson, has figured out how to recycle every scrap of its own product, including what it uses to make the carpets and tiles in the first instance. In India, Turner documents the soaring demand for fully sustainable office buildings, and the thriving organic farms tilled by Tibetans in exile. He visits the wind farms of Denmark, where entire communities have managed to get off the grid, and the remarkable ecovillage of Findhorn in Scotland, which has become a United Nations training base for sustainable development techniques.

"Humanity already possesses the know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems," Turner declares. "We have the tools." What we need now, in essence, is the hope.

Momentum is indisputably building. Websites such as Worldchanging, massivechange, grist, and treehugger are rebranding environmentalism as a skateboarding, hipster, techno-whizzy optimistic movement that stands to make its outriders "mega tons of money," in the inimitable words of Stéphane Dion, when he swept to the federal Liberal leadership last year at the helm of a green-powered campaign.

Maybe we can fashion a new world for ourselves. At the very least, and this is doubtless what drives Turner to explore the manifold possibilities in his book, as parents and citizens and stewards, we must try.

I was on iTunes tonight, noodling around, trying to find some stuff, when I noticed that the Number One paid download was “Gimme More” by Britney Spears.
And there you have it. North America’s most popular song is essentially the dub track for “Debbie Does Dallas.”

Aren’t we impressive nowadays, as a culture.

I am not going to say “end all further analogies to the Roman and American empires because the argument is won. Done. Over,” for I’m actually more interested in the lived-through details. Such as how I will find myself working out at a Curves gym in a year’s time, with fellow members, while we huff and puff and engage in our usual, discrete wariness about eyeing one another’s lumpy bodies and earnest efforts to fend off cardiovascular disease while we listen to a husky-voiced woman announce, “It’s Britney, bitch,” and then pantingly beg someone to give her more.

That will just be odd.

Even more jarring, and yet very likely: a happy extrovert in grade six performing America’s Number One tune at her school talent show this coming winter. (Multiply happy girl by several many thousand.) Observe, while parents grin or grit their teeth through their lovely daughter’s lip-synched routines of pre-orgasmic begging and gasping.

It would have to be lip-synched, of course, even though Spears, herself, has been unable to do that competently. But really, how else?

It’s tricky to get the precise pitch of someone else’s lust-dazed moan right. I always had trouble singing along to Van Morrison because of his vocal flights, but this is...wow. Amazingly difficult to weakly demand, on the verge of cumming, “gimme more” in some other woman’s voice! No two snow flakes, kind of thing.

Then there’s the pole dancing in Spears’ video. Eventually, that’s where this hit is really going to settle into rotation -- in the new pole dancing studios opening up all over the place, one of which I just passed by on the street near my house. There, you are going to see countless women paying to pole dance and mutter “gimme, gimme” without appearing to realise that actual strippers pole dance, moan on cue, and do it because they GET PAID.

God. We’re sodding dim wits, collectively. What’s the feminist version of 911?

August. A doldrum for pundits. The world turns, sluggishly, with half of it on vacation and the other half hunkering down in the flooding rain. Sweat, heat-stroke, hook worm, no energy left: a desultory hush descends and shuts up the barking. Yet, still, I bumped into my old friend Steve Jones on Facebook the other day, that miraculous site that persuades all of your friends to send you messages that they could just as easily send TO YOUR E-MAIL, directly, to a place that requires you to sign in with a password, and he wondered why I hadn't blogged in over a year. Just was wondering, and figuring it was the busyness of having kids and five pets and writing a book.

But, in truth Steve, it was that I ran into a technical difficulty with blogging. I couldn't get the program to embed links in my posts because I was using Safari, rather than Firefox. That simple programming challenge stopped me dead in my tracks. I threw up my hands the way I used to when faced with the prospect of recording a TV show on my VCR. Here's what I can do: type without looking at the keyboard. I learned how in Grade Nine. I can do that, and I can write and sort-of spell, and I can remember my password to blogger.com. C'est tout. Beyond that, I'm like the robotic dinosaur that my son got for Christmas last year that can roar and snap, but then just drives its head blindly into the confounding obstacle of the dining room wall.
Anyway, my friend Rob came over the other night, discovered my dilemma, and switched me over to Firefox.

Done.

Now I get to report on the following:
I have finished my book, a tragi-comic work of first-person reportage called "A Brief History of Anxiety -- Yours and Mine." Due out next spring from Random House in Canada, and Bloomsbury in the United States. We are still settling on book cover designs, and on jacket copy. My editor needed to pitch the book to her sales reps later this week and wanted a short, encapsulatory movie or TV clip about anxiety. I suggested this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kDuU-6Du7w

Labels: anxiety, August, Blogger, blogging, Bloomsbury, Facebook, Random House

Smokers - the new deviants
Aug. 20, 2006. 07:45 AM
PATRICIA PEARSON
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

"Smokers need not apply," ran a classified ad for a job in Ireland this past May.

"Why not?" asked Catherine Stihler, a British Labour party MEP, who posed the question on behalf of one of her constituents. Should women not apply, either? Or homosexuals? Muslims? What about high-functioning alcoholics, or fat people?

The answer, from the European Commission that oversees anti-discrimination legislation in the EU, came back to Stihler this month: Smokers are fair game for discrimination.

"A job advertisement saying that `smokers need not apply' would not seem to fall under any of the prohibited grounds (under EU legislation)," Vladimir Spidla, the commissioner for employment and equal opportunities, wrote to Stihler, who showed the letter to the press.

This would have pleased the employer who placed the ad, call-centre director Philip Tobin, who reportedly told Irish radio in May, "If these people (meaning smokers) can ignore so many warnings and all that evidence then they haven't got the level of intelligence that I am looking for. Smokers are idiots."

In other words, if you're addicted to nicotine, a substance that studies have repeatedly shown to be more difficult to withdraw from than heroin, you're too dumb to answer the phone.

Joni Mitchell need not apply. Kurt Vonnegut doesn't have the brains to say, "How may I help you?" Peter Jennings, thick as a plank. C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill — inferior minds all around.

And we believe this. We've bought into it because health is now the basis of our prejudices. We judge one another's conduct according to how well we maintain ourselves physically.

It isn't confined to smoking. British surgeons have begun to refuse doing certain operations for obese patients. Women who drink more than a glass of wine a day are made to feel they're alcoholics. Mothers who choose not to breast-feed are castigated as if they were amoral.

The objective of life, in this health utopia of ours, is to live it as long as possible, in mechanically perfect condition. Compare that to previous utopian cultures, where the objective of life would have been, variously, to be honourable, or spiritually sublime, or warrior-like or, in the case of Communism, a humble devotee of collective economic well-being: an impeccable worker ant.
Consider, by contrast, how AIDS activists have turned around the stigma of their affliction. How someone contracted HIV doesn't matter.

Every culture with a utopian vision has its officially acknowledged deviants.
The Ontario government's anti-smoking website is addressed http://www.stupid.ca. It's for stupid people. Deviants addicted to nicotine.

The degree to which we have turned an addiction into a moral failing really came home to me last year when Peter Jennings died of lung cancer. On his last ABC news broadcast, when he announced his diagnosis, he explained to his viewers that he had quit smoking 20 years earlier but had fallen off the wagon after 9/11. He apologized. He actually apologized for dying of cancer.

Imagine if Jennings had said on the air: "I've got lung cancer, but I enjoyed every cigarette I ever smoked, and my life has been really full and interesting. Live fast and die at 67."

It would have been viewed as an apostasy.

Consider, by contrast, how AIDS activists have so successfully turned around the stigma of their affliction. How someone — gay or straight, male or female, young or old — contracted HIV doesn't matter. As The New York Times reported, in a lead-up to the Toronto AIDS conference, "In 1996 in Vancouver, the audience cheered after a grandmother told the conference: 'How did I get infected? The answer is very simple: It just doesn't matter.'"

How do smokers, young or old, get addicted to nicotine? A new study out this month by McGill University epidemiologist Jennifer O'Loughlin shows that some people are so susceptible to nicotine that they can begin to crave the substance after one cigarette. One cigarette. One shared needle. One night of unprotected sex. It just doesn't matter.

In the last several years, the U.S. has made available to smokers a huge arsenal of nicotine-replacement therapies, such as the lozenge, a nasal spray, and a new pill called Chantix that blocks nicotine reception in the brain, none of which is available in Canada. The Americans run in-patient rehab programs for nicotine addiction. We Canadians run public-service ads in movie theatres specifically produced to demonstrate that smokers are knuckleheads.

Are we seriously committed to helping people wrest free of nicotine? Or are we writing them off as deviants?

What the EU discrimination ruling about the Irish call centre reveals is that the door is wide open for health discrimination in the upcoming decade. Until we snap out of it and realize that there's more to life than its length, we are in for a whole new wave of prejudice.