Update

If you're reading this, you are at the wrong place. You need to be going here: www.copyrightad.com Viva Durrant!

What are you doing here?

Really, what are you doing here? You should be over at www.copyrightad.com Seriously, I have my own website now. All the new rants and revelations will be found over there. So get going!

Poll Dancer

I want to avoid the Orwellian undertones of what happened to me this week because it has been my experience that most people invoke Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four without any real conception of book’s subject matter. Every slack jawed, gap toothed, spawn of a union between their father and his cousin can tell you that Big Brother is watching you. But, if you asked the aforementioned yochal to explain the doubleplus significant minitrue job of Winston Smith at “The Times”, a befuddled nod and smile would undoubtedly follow. To benefit those of you who have not read the book, Winston Smith was tasked with changing the past issues of “The Times” such that history reflected the government’s current position. For example, in April of 1984 Big Brother forecast no decrease in the chocolate ration. By November, there was a need to decrease the chocolate ration. Smith, and his ilk, would rewrite the past to indicate that the chocolate ration was in fact lower in April than what people remembered and the current decrease would be seen as an increase. Through proper use of doublethink, holding two opposing ideas to be true at the same time, all party members would be happy for the increase in the chocolate ration. Are you confused? Then you should go read the book because I am not explaining it any greater detail. Although I’m half certain that those of you who are confused will just go wikipedia the book rather than opening your mind up and actually reading something that wasn’t assigned to you by an authority figure. But, I digress. Last Friday as I was calmly reading through the Associated Press news on Yahoo, I found a story that revolved around a rather glib comment made by current US Vice-President Dick Cheney. Therein, he inferred that although the people of America – and I apologize for the paraphrase but the necessity will soon become obvious – want change, as voiced through early polls in the congressional and senate race, it does not matter and the administration is going to stay the course with respect to Iraq. I was floored by such a statement. I knew that I would have to push back my plan for this week’s post to be about environmental sustainability and talk about this flagrant offense against democracy. Temporarily stowing my outrage, I hit the bookmark button resolute that I would alert the internet come Thursday. Two days ago I went to pull up the article such that I could rekindle the Durrant rage and spend a good forty eight hours stewing about Dick Cheney. Much to my horror, the article had changed. Perhaps, just maybe, the mistake was mine. I re-read the entire article from top to bottom and nowhere was there any mention of Cheney positing himself as a modern oligarch. The AP through Yahoo had changed the story and removed what could have been a potentially ugly and embarrassing statement made by the second in command of America’s government. Emphasis on government not on the nation itself because for those of you not familiar with the notion of democracy – the thing that America claims to operate under – the people are in charge and elect representatives to public office. Ranting to anybody that was within earshot regarding what I viewed as the re-writing of history to suit the whims of the Patriot Act, I sought out any other evidence to substantiate what I knew to be true. Had I become like Winston Smith, the minority of one? Was I the only person that remembered things the way they had happened? Did the idea that I held as true get cast down the memory hole for all time? No. I knew what I had seen. There had to be some other media outlet that had the journalistic integrity to stand behind what they published. After an hour of serious introspection and searching, I came across a Financial Times article by James Luce published, ironically enough, on November 5th. Entitled “Cheney says vote will not deflect U.S. in Iraq”, I searched hoping to find the quote that so incensed my convictions. Success was to be my companion on this mission. Quoting from Luce, Mr. Cheney also said that a US withdrawal from Iraq would undermine the “war on terror” by sending the wrong signals to allies such as Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, and Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan. “You cannot make national security policy on the basis of that [election outcomes],” he said. “These are people who are running for Congress and they are entitled to their own views...It may not be popular with the public. It doesn’t matter, in the sense that we have to continue the mission [in Iraq]...and that is what we are doing.” Afghanistan and Pakistan are allies to America? Really? I had no idea that they had been admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But it’s good to know that my country’s largest ally and trading partner keeps company with such liberal minded nations such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. How is it that America, a country that has had such a legal schism regarding the legalization of marijuana can keep company the number one producer of opium (107,400 hectares worth in 2005) in the world? Furthermore, how does Cheney sleep at night calling Pakistan, a militarist regime that practices nuclear brinksmanship against its closest neighbor, India, a friend? For more information on Afghanistan and Pakistan you can visit the CIA’s world fact book. The CIA: Cultural Learnings For Make Benefit Glorious Website of Copyright Adam Durrant. https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html - scroll all the way to the bottom to see the opium statistics. https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/pk.html Quoth the Cheney: “It may not be popular with the public. It doesn’t matter, in the sense that we have to continue the mission.” WHAT? What kind of person elected to public office can actually say something so obtuse and take himself seriously? Of course it matters what the public has to say about things, they were the ones that elected you to office you dim witted ill spoken roustabout. I know I’m just a lowly graduate school educated Canadian, so call me naive if you will, but while the Bush administration was off spreading liberty and democracy to the three winds, it seems that Cheney, acting as mouth piece for the executive branch, has lost sight of freedom and democracy on the domestic scope. How, after a statement like that can people still delude themselves into thinking that America is anything other than an oligarchy run by old white men backed by wads of dirty money? It is the exclusive purview of dictators to claim that the desires of the people do not matter. Mr. Cheney you are not a king, nor a nobleman, you are a citizen supposedly elected to represent the people of your nation. So once again, here I am on a Thursday afternoon outraged by something that an elected official has done in the line of duty. Furthermore, I am shocked and disappointed in the Yahoo news for the “wiki” aspect of their journalism. They called it an update when they change a story. I call it an Orwellian approach to journalism where things that go against the established doctrines of the body politic are vanquished under anti-sedition laws. Yes, I know what you are thinking, that I am making an alarmist interpretation of Yahoo changing an article. But, if they change one story, then they could be doing this to other stories. That being the case, you have to question the validity of everything you read of the AP on Yahoo. Consider this one man taking a stand for the permanence of the printed word. Environmental sustainability will be the topic next week. Fear not because won’t be any less disheartening of the society in which we live than this week’s post.

You made me do this

I know I will probably get some nice hate mail for this one, but I don't care. This is for anybody that is more than sixteen years old and is paying money to go see Justin Timberlake. If this applies to you, then you need to do the following. 1 - Get a wrench 2 - Fit it around your neck 3 - Firmly but gently pull your head out of your ass 4 - Brace against a wall for balance 5 - Kick your own ass Repeat step five until you can come up with something better to do with your money. In the event that step five fails, please send the cost of the tickets to my paypal account and I will send you a stylish Copyright Adam Durrant t-shirt. My gods people. He doesn't write his own music, he sings through a vocoder and somehow still he needs backup singers. Slay the beast.

Fawkesy

There have been a lot of things on my mind in the past seven days. Some of which I would never have known about if I wrapped myself in the veil of ignorance that most people wear like a badge of honour. “Uh oh, the news is on and that’s just a little too real for me right now. Well that’s okay because it’s a new episode of Grey’s Anatomy tonight. Then, tomorrow night when it seems like there’s nowhere to hide from the freshly brewed events of the world, I can take comfort in the fact that the new season of the O.C. starts.” There are days when a life of sleeping awake seems oh so appealing, when faced with the consequences of those that have come and gone. As a counterbalance, there are days like today when I am confronted with a billboard of a balding old man holding a camera. Coming from the septuagenarian is a speech bubble stating, “I won’t raise taxes”. Well I’ll certainly vote for you in the upcoming mayoral elections based on a campaign promise given through billboard form. I mean if we can’t believe a billboard with a speech bubble, then truly we have descended to the level of animals. For it is only through the sacred covenant of the billboard speech bubble accompanying creepy picture of old man that local politicians are bound, much in the eternal fashion of a Mormon wedding, to their constituents. After passing this billboard my brain decided that it needed a break from all the serious contemplative behavior of this week. Acting on its own volition, my brain took things to a different level. Cue 1960’s announcer: It’s the Mayor, brought to you by Ajax dish soap. Ajax dish soap, the best friend of housewives across America, if you want a happy house and a happy husband use Ajax dish soap. Also brought to you by Viceroy cigarettes, if Steve McQueen smokes them, maybe you should too. The Mayor is brought to you in the splendor of Technicolor Cue generic off-beat knock off of the Magnificent Seven theme song In 1850’s printing press font, the words “The Mayor” appear and then two bullet shots sound, causing the words to spin. As the music rises in the background the camera fades from black to a morning sunrise in the old west and a lone figure riding out of the light. It’s the Mayor, starring Adam Durrant as the Mayor. One town caught in the midst of midterm city council elections. One man dispensing justice with a pair of six shooters in a made up, Manefest Desteny spawned, town in the American west. Square jawed, fast witted, faster on the draw, wearing a hat and always smoking because it’s the sixties, The Mayor. Unfortunately the show came along in the late sixties and the overt killing of “red injuns” and Mexicans was not received well by viewing populace of America. Killing of that quantity, with as many memorable one liners would not be seen again until a brave man named Paul Verhoeven made a seminal film called Robocop. By the time I pulled my car into the parking lot at Brock, The Mayor had been cancelled after only eleven episodes and was replaced by the less violent G.I. Joe versus the Commissar. Realizing that there was no real way I could make an entire post out of my half mad thoughts on the way to work, I thought I would take this moment to be a history teacher. Guy Fawkes Day is upon us once more and those of you of non-English descent, or who did not see V for Vendetta, probably have no idea that the fifth of November is something to be remembered. Has the rhyme jogged your mass media soaked mind yet? Remember, remember…the fifth of November? The year was 1604 and James I was dealing with a tumultuous reign as the King of England. Married to a Catholic and son of a Catholic, he was a natural Catholic sympathizer. However, James soon found out that governing a nation full of Protestants meant a great deal of pandering to the mob. By January of 1604 James was begging to arouse the ire of Catholics in his continuous attempts to please all of England’s religious sects. In a vain appeal to the Puritans and their wacky buckled hat ways, James went so far as to utter his outright detestation of Catholicism. The days that followed saw James exiling Jesuits and Catholic Priests as well as instituting of fines for practicing the Papist ways. Sufficed to say, this did not sit well with the Catholics. Especially to one Guy Fawkes. Seeking out allies to oppose the king, Fawkes traveled around England, Scotland and France. Somewhere along the road he got it in his head that he would blow up parliament, abscond with the king and his daughter and hold them hostage until the oppression against Catholics ended. With parliament dismissed until November 5, 1605, the timeline was set. Fawkes must have pulled the short straw because, his job was to ignite the powder in the catacombs of parliament. In theory he would spark the powder kegs and then go scampering into the night as to avoid bieng caught in the combustion. But the explosion was not meant to be. Loose lips sank the conspiracy and Fawkes and his co-conspirators were tried for treason before they could blow up the government. Some were hung, others were drawn and quartered. To celebrate the triumph of Protestantism over the dirty papists, effigies of Guy Fawkes were burned on successive fifths of November. Today, it is a major celebration in England where effigies are burned, fireworks are lit, and everybody has a wonderful time, despite having to go to work prior to the revelry. What began as nothing more than an attempt by Protestants to en masse rub salt in the wounds of dejected Catholics, is now an excuse to party. Fawkes will no doubt be spinning in his grave come Sunday when after my soccer game I go out to my buddy’s house in the country get drunk and burn an effigy. But what is the lesson we can learn from all this? That mixing fire and alcohol is probably not in my best interest? Probably correct. But beyond that piece of dollar store wisdom is a reminder that the franchise that some of us take so casually, should not be forsaken. 400 years ago people were barred from voting because of their religion - serves them right the dirty Idolaters but that's not the point. Each time that some person says, “it’s only a mayoral election, it is meaningless” they are taking one step closer to surrendering the only real power most of us will ever have in this world. A vote is force. That ballot is your will made manifest. One of the rare moments where society listens to you rather than telling you what you need. Go vote, even if to spoil your ballot because you hate all the candidates, go vote. Next week, we return to things that will depress you in my exploration of environmental sustainability. Eat your sushi now because in fifty years there won’t be any fish left.

October Revolution Redux

Buttons donned proudly by faculty, students and staff can only mean one thing, that the labour dispute within the walls of Brock University has officially reached critical mass. As I walked to the room where I teach, and then to my office in the history department, all I could think was, “That didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would”. Our department’s secretary explained to me that eighty-eight percent of the faculty who voted yesterday, October 25, 2006, cast a ballot in favor of striking. Although it will be another six weeks before they can walk off the job, the wheels have been set in motion. Something similar happened when I attended Brock as an Undergraduate. The union blustered, the administration retaliated with bravado and at the eleventh hour a resolution was reached. Life returned to normal. Two years later, the same thing happened again. This time, it was the teaching assistants that were touting Marxist slogans in the name of wage adjustments in line with other Ontario universities. Debates and protests among students and staff had only once prior reached such a high water mark during my tenure; the time that Stockwell Day was invited by the administration to give a campaign speech. I doubt that I shall ever see so many Libertarians protecting my rights to marry a chicken against so called ‘fascists’ ever again. But, I digress. The Brock administration took a page from Chamberlain’s lexicon and played appeasement. Teaching Assistants won the day. Presently, it seems that the administration is on war footing, unwilling to budge an inch in their rejection of the faculty’s demands. From what people on both sides of the dispute have explained to me, the crux of the problem is that part and full time instructors are working on year by year contracts without any sense of job security. They can be replaced on a whim by an assistant professor despite, in some cases, years of service to the university. While the administration seems to find nothing wrong with this policy, the union views this as an egregious injustice. Amidst the cat and mouse game of negotiations, there has been much talk about what is fair and unfair when it comes to hiring practices. Fair and unfair: An interesting choice of adjectives for this situation. One of the first lessons I learned within the walls of academia is that naïve notions of what is equitable and just must be modified if not abandoned. As some professors bluntly put it, university is not a fair place. No matter how apt and erudite a person perceives himself to be, there is always another that puts in half the effort and gets twice the grades. It is, in fact, a sense of scholarly Darwinism rules the campus. Those that are best fit to adapt to the nature of university are those that flourish within its often cold and lonely embrace. My particular field, the social sciences, finds success dependent upon the qualitative assessment of professors and teaching assistants. Appeals are slow and bear meager fruits such that only the most resolute of malcontents follow them through to conclusion. Pleas for tolerance and mercy often fall on deaf ears and acerbic comments such as, “If you don’t like it then find a job in the food service industry”. In an institution where fairness is marginalized, it is a high irony that unions invoke it in negotiations with administration. Before class began today, a student of mine brought up the impending strike and her thoughts on labour inequity. She mentioned how many of her instructors in the Classical Studies department are contract instructors, not assistant professors. This piqued my interest. I was further told that many of these instructors hold a Ph.D. As a person presently working on my Ph.D. applications, I am fully aware of the limited career opportunities that accompany those letters when they are newly awarded. Until an academic publishes, their career opportunities are often limited to lecturer positions. Sometimes, if the gods smile, an assistant professorship can be obtained but never with tenure. So if there really are Ph.D. holding instructors, who after ten years have not yet successfully obtained a professorship from Brock University I am left to wonder if there is not, in fact, something wrong with them? Have they not published, either in journals or their own books? Is the quality of their teaching so poor that the administration won’t reward them with a better academic position? And more importantly, why have they not courted other universities? It’s no secret that Brock’s reputation, not to mention coin purse, is nowhere near as deep as other schools in the province. Am I to believe that there is a legion of Ph.D. holding instructors that have published above and beyond the call of duty, received excellent reviews from their students, attended more than one university in their life (See, triple play of Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral work all at the same school. See also, shooting oneself in the foot) and committed no misconducts that would result in a blackball at Brock and the administration refuses to grant professorships to them? It seems an unlikely situation. If the unlikely turned out to be truth, my advice would be to polish up your Curriculum Vitae and start applying to other institutions, not a strike.

Perhaps though, I judge too harshly. Often times, the portrayal of labour activists in the media results in a dismissal, either on a conscious or subconscious level, of legitimate grievances by the masses. Those that strike within a teaching environment rarely find public opinion on their side because it is commonly accepted that teaching is a trust where you put the education of your charges before yourself. But the university is an unfair place. In that light, we often remind our students that being there is not enough, you have to produce something. If injustices are being done to honest and true academics then simper fides, but you should know the game well enough to find another school. For the rest, I think thou doth protest too much. Write a paper, write a book or reap the rewards of doing all your education at the same school.

A Call to Arms

Friends, Citizens and Country folk of the Copyright AD Fiefdom, As your benevolent Duke, I ask very little of you. I am satisfied in tasking you all to keep an open mind to the wonders that surround us, to think a thought for nothing more than the value of thinking itself and to never dismiss a critical mind as a mark of weakness. But today, I call you to war. With the assistance of one of Fiefdom's citizens, we have tracked down a distributor of the "Genuine White Boy" clothing. While I do not suggest returning hate for hate, I strongly advise all of you to email and snail mail this company demanding they cease their activities. Additionally, I call upon you to make your disgust known with your Member of Parliament such that a nation wide embargo can be placed against this company and their ghastly and sordid t-shirts. Here is their website: http://www.ssenterprises.com/covrpage.html Here is their mailing address: CINDY FIDDELKE PO BOX 5436 FRESNO, CA. 93755 LONG LIVE THE FIGHTERS