February 12th, 2006
The Fives Game
My Obligation to the Meme calls, this time by Hugh who can now safely be called “of LibriVox fame“, so without further ado, five things about me that could be interpreted as “odd”, should you want to interpret them that way, but maybe interpreting them that way would say more about you than me, so stick that in your corncob pipe and allume-le.
- Living in a big city has tremendous benefits, like: money and booze and music everywhere, even if a lot of that music is Sheryl fucking Crow. But a lot of the obligations of urban living tire me out. Structuring all your time around the 9-to-5, having friends beholden to same, the general feeling of placelessness, the reliance on services instead of people, the having to wear the right shoes, and of course, lots of Other People, with their own sets of conventions and rules, their own schedules, and their own sordid histories. Often I dream about packing up everything I own, dropping most of it in storage, and moving somewhere both isolated and far, far away. A log cabin in the woods maybe. Or a small town somewhere with a reasonable climate. My Bella Coola, BC (thanks Dick) still awaits me. Knowing myself, I’d never go all the way to Walden Pond living, but a place an hour away from a city would suit me fine.
- I’m in an office fantasy hockey league, and I am beyond obsessed with it. The other players in the league share in the fanatical obsession, which adds to the fun of it all. There we are, tracking player movement like Bay Street day traders, Excel spreadsheets and elaborate market timing and the whole thing. We even have moratoriums on talking about strategy between rivals, for fear they might emulate it and thus nullify the gains of your clever tactical move. Then chat windows are open, trash is talked, and we all reload the boxscores every night until the whole thing is over. It’s fucking sad, is what it is, but I’m in second place and you can’t take that from me.
- It’s now entirely possible for me to surf the web without even realizing it. Surfing has become an idle pleasure like doodling or pen-spinning, taken up for its own sake while doing something else. All I need to see is that Firefox icon somewhere on my screen, and I’m liable to get sucked right in. I will sometimes open a few sites in tabs, one after the other with a rote movement, and my habit has gotten so bad that I’ll open the same site twice on occasion, without having even looked at it the first time. On bad days I’ll do it twice in a row. Metafilter in this tab, and Metafilter in this tab too! I’m like the smoker who lights up a butt when there’s already one fuming away in the ashtray. I never felt my hand move, but suddenly I’m checking box scores (see item #2), or what Layton said about Harper this week. It’s not hard for me to do this for several minutes without noticing. Be honest: have you ever found yourself absent-mindedly typing random letters into the Address bar, and visiting the sites that pop down in the menu? Try it, if you haven’t. Put the cursor up there and start typing letters, and see what you’ve looked at recently (try ‘x’, especially if it isn’t your computer). I’ve done the alphabet during times of extreme duress. A to Z. Surfed every one of them. The Web is a dirty succubus, and I am a lonely travelling salesman wandering the Red Light District with a pocket full one one-dollar bills.
- Politically, if you removed all the shades of gray and pinned everything onto a board labelled “conservative” and “liberal”, I would probably come out on the “conservative” side. The margin would be small and maybe uncountable. These labels are meaningless, as we all know, and it’s important to remember that both terms have been hopelessly perverted by the media, turned into daggers, rendered into lumpen categories with which to dismiss an opponent. People who hold political opinions of any kind are bound to have undetermined or inchoate areas of opinion, and even hypocrisies within their beliefs. Nobody has a self-consistent system. So at best I can categorize my views in vagaries. I like smaller government, except when I don’t. We should help the poor, except not by paying them in cash. Education should be perhaps the highest priority of government, both in providing it and exuding it. The government is best used when the private sector cannot provide the service, and by “cannot provide” I mean the service does exist for the purpose of financial gain. It is something bordering on a crime to me that I can’t find a doctor in Montreal who doesn’t have a two-year waiting list for new patients, or that I have to sit at the passport office for six hours before I can even hand in my forms, but politicians sit in their war rooms dreaming up the next expensive social program for getting themselves elected. My indignation is mostly towards the political class as a whole, and at the stunning lack of qualifications and moral authority these people have to rule the country.
So I hate waste and politicians. That’s not a political philosophy. Conservatism is, though, and I am going to state here that I am theoretically a conservative, and that includes, get ready…a vague allegiance to evil social conservatism. But a secular kind. I won’t go into everything here but I do believe that nationhood depends on a modicum of tradition to its affairs, respected by both the citizenry and its elected officials, and a clear delineation of the rules by an authority which is seen as legitimate (I might even go so far as to say the A-word…aristocracy). A society of no rules has no identity. If public institutions and laws are going to work they need to be treated as keepers of nationhood and pillars of civilization, not only in a legal and structural sense but what I will call a reverential sense. Resistance and fracturing creeps in when those institutions lose meaning to the citizenry, when they grow into nothing but means to economic ends. This is what I see as the true bedrock of Conservatism, not about making sure those dirty gays can never visit each other in the hospital, or handing tax breaks out to those who deserve them least, or divvying up the oil profits. Real Conservatism also has very little to do with any political party currently existing in North America, but then again, I’m talking theoretically here. Tommy Paine said it best: “That government is best which governs least.”
So I won’t vote for any contemporary conservative (read: business-class) party, which are the creation of politicians, but in theory, I wish a real one existed. (It won’t. I’m resigned to this.)
(FWIW, the sections of my political file which could be called “liberal-leaning” tend to fall into protection from the views of politically significant religious groups, tyranny of the majority, and of protecting society at large from the extremely wealthy and the massive bureaucratic structures they use to vacuum up the nation’s wealth. I believe this latter area to be the most underrepresented in all of political discourse today, probably because the media is beholden to this system and thus serves to harness uproar and direct it towards the insignificant. How big should corporations be allowed to get? What happens when corporations reach the size when they can easily put governments out of business, or clog up the system by dragging their feet on legal matters to the point where government agencies cannot function as they are intended? What happened historically when the private sector was allowed to assume control over a nation’s military for its own purposes?) - I really, really love the Wu-Tang Clan.
I am not one to tell other people what to write, but the Obligation to the Meme is strong, so I’ll have to pass this on to two people. If they feel like it: Moose Morel and Vila H, I summon thee.
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