#40 Attack of the attack ads
August 24th, 2015
Hi darlin,’
I am already sick of this looming election. If I had enough money… or any money at all … I might try to hire a good lawyer and sue on the grounds it is cruel and unusual punishment, tantamount to crimes against humanity, to flood the TV with these attack ads. And we still have a couple of months before the day we troop to the Rec Centre to put our X in the appropriate spot.
People don’t seem to realize only a few of us get to vote for the dweeb who will eventually become PM. Only those in the prospective PM’s actual constituency will vote for him. I’m not going to vote for Steve, or Tom, or Justin, or even Lizzie. I can’t. I only get to vote for whichever back bencher comes out on top in my constituency. Just as well, I suppose, because I am so underwhelmed by the choice for PM that words fail me.
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One of my all-time favourite reads is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. A friend of mine scored a hard cover copy in a thrift store. I asked him to leave it to me in his will as I only have a paperback copy which is getting a bit tattered. Roy gave me the hardback copy for my recent birthday and I’m re-re-re-reading it. When I’ve finished I’ll put it on the shelf next to my hard-back copy of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. And I’m on the look-out for a hardback copy of The Diviners.
McMurty is an odd writer. Lonesome Dove is just so good but some of his other stuff just flat-out isn’t. Now I know a writer can’t spin gold every time she sits down at the keyboard or picks up a pencil or whatever her process might be. But some of McMurty’s stuff is so gluppy I can only suspect the publisher invested in the book because they were confident the name McMurtry would sell any damned thing at all.
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An article in the New York Times says it has been revealed the FBI kept a file on George Carlin, the comic. As if we needed to be told that. Of course they kept a file on him! They don’t need to tell us that. What I’d like them to tell me is why they refer to themselves as “the intelligence community” when there is so little evidence of any intelligence at work.
Alan, darlin’, you know and I know CSIS has a file on you. They probably have a file on the guy who keeps track of the files.
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And now the guy who lost a whack-a-weight eating Submarine sandwiches is going to jail for child porn and for having forcible sex with underage kids. That’s a polite journalistic euphemism for raping children. Every time I read about someone amusing himself with a kid I think of my grandchildren, and I go ballistic.
They aren’t going to stop as long as we play sillybuggers with vocabulary. Call it what it is. Child rape. Let’s drop the euphemisms.
Years ‘n’ years ‘n’ years ago there was a huge political scandal in Britain called The Profumo Affair and the media kept referring to Christine Keeler as “a party girl”. I was still in high school at the time and, puzzled, asked what was wrong with going to parties. My dad nearly choked on his mouthful of tea, and when he finished braying, told me, in Salmonbelly Anglo Saxon what was really meant. She’s a hooer, he said [ie. whore or hooker] That’s when my mom nearly choked on her tea. Matthew, she gasped, think of the children!
Well, Annie was quite right. Maybe we should think of the children. Not just the poor little jiggers who have been diddled by the guy who went on a diet of subs, or those who were unfortunate enough to be exposed to that Duggar guy. Let’s think of all of them. Let’s, just for a start, ask ourselves what in hell is meant by the term “child prostitute”. How can a child, a person who isn’t even allowed by law to buy or drive a car, open a charge account, or get a six-four-nine ticket, enter into a business arrangement and rent out his or her immature body? That might be a prostituted child, but it isn’t a child prostitute.
It’s a victim. A slave. With all the recent fuss and go-round about will Bon Jovi perform or won’t Bon Jovi perform in Stanley Park… Could we have that same level of coverage about prostituted children?
Instead of a feel-good two-minute TV “news” item about a bulldog who is bouncing on a trampoline, can we get coverage on the Highway of Tears and what progress the cops are making in their investigations?
We only get one go at life. Maybe we could stop wasting our brief time on earth.
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We’re fast approaching the Salmon Enhancement fishing derby. If you find the idea of the Salmon Enhancement holding a fishing derby to be a bit of an oxymoron, you’re right. Every salmon hauled out of the water in pursuit of the prize is a fish which isn’t going to go up the river to spawn.
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Not many bees this year. I haven’t seen a big-bummed furry bumblybee for weeks. Maybe longer. My honeysuckle is bravely trying for a second bloom and yesterday afternoon there were two… just two… small black-and-gold bumbly bees busily stuffing their pollen pockets.
I was so glad to see them I almost cheered.
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Anne Cameron grows pussywillows on the western edge of Vancouver Island. She received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia in 2010. Her 23 books include Daughters of Copper Woman, the bestselling work of fiction ever written about B.C. and published from within B.C. She has banished herself to Tahsis, a small town not far from Friendly Cove where the shenanigans called British Columbia all began.
Love your letters, Anne. I laughed about your Christine Keeler question. I asked my mother, at the time, “What’s a party girl?” She took me aside and explained this was a woman who “lived with” a man without being married to him–which was very bad if they had children–she was equating a high class prostitute with a common law wife! (I was the latter for many happy years, but my mother had dementia by then and didn’t have to know what was going on).