A Writer's Gratitude

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As a confirmed evolutionist, I know my unfortunate tendency to see bad news like THIS while good news meanders across my brain pan in a lower case way, was hammered into human DNA through the ages. After all, recognizing danger must surely confer a stronger evolutionary advantage than non-stop partying (or so I rationalize. Always possible I’ve just caught a case of incipient Presbyterianism).

So you won’t be surprised if I admit to sometimes having to force myself to dwell on the positive, rather than succumb to my default attitude (accentuating the negative). But I do know, deep down, that I have much to be thankful, especially as 2010 draws to a close. So I hereby declare today my gratitude day, a day to look over the year’s accomplishments, to goose my sunny side to the forefront, as it were.

My year in publishing started with February’s “Now It Can Be Told: The Hardboiled Stress Of Being Santa,” appearing on Joyland.ca. David McGimpsey, Joyland’s Montreal/Atlantic Editor, is the man who tried to teach me humour at a Quebec Writers’ Federation Workshop. Making people laugh…now THERE’S the kind of work I’d love to have!

My story follows intrepid tabloid reporter Renta Yenta as she susses out the secret links between dirty letters written by Santa, cash payments to former Prime Minister Mulroney, a Guess Who reunion tour, randy goats, sustainable development and Gilbert Gottfried. Quite the high wire act, but when, while writing it, I caught myself laughing out loud, I knew I was on to something. David called it hilarious and said he loved it! So I’m grateful for all of that, and I think you’ll find it’s just what Canadians need to read as we contemplate the tortures of the upcoming Xmas season (e.g. sharp-elbowed crowds and the endlessly looped, pan pipe version of “The Little Drummer Boy,” coming soon to a department store near you…).

Not long after that, I finally received my “printed” version of the prizewinning and honourable mention stories of The Binnacle’s Sixth Annual Ultra-Short Competition. The word limit was 150. I was expecting a typical print journal issue, though someone I’d met during a writing residency in Banff last year had hinted it would be a bit out of the ordinary. What I received was a box with 56 business card sized versions of the winners and other honoured stories, my “After Katrina” being one of latter.

What does a 150 word story look like, you ask? In answer, may I present, for your delectation,

After Katrina

My sister Darlene, she ain’t never been what you call reliable. I was the one ended up seein' to Mama after Katrina hit. The whole thing give her a heart attack, but I found her safe in hospital.

She didn’t want me going to the house. “Try and stop me,” I said. It was the only home I’d ever known.

Everything was a total write off. Papers everywhere, like Scarlet O’Hara’s discarded handkerchiefs, like drowned doves. And the smell! Eau de outhouse.

Only managed to fish out Mama’s marriage license and our birth certificates. Discovered Darlene wasn’t really my big sister.

At the hospital, Mama said, “Find anything?” her gaze red-rimmed steel, her lips like dried worms. Skeleton fingers plucked the sheet. This old woman. Lied to me my whole life entire.

The heart monitor hiccupped, the IV dripped its silvery drops.

“No ma’am,” I said. “Didn’t find nothing.”

For those interested in such things, the story arose from a prompt of Nancy Zafris’ at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop of 2008—to date, three of my published stories germinated under her skilled attention. Does she think writers are hothouse flowers? Hardly! But her green thumb left faint traces as well on my multi-award-winning flash story “Pie”--which has just made the Commendations List in the UK's Aesthetica Magazine Creative Works Competiton--and on “What I’ve Prayed For,” the latter published in The New Quarterly this spring. All these stories came from this movie review prompt in the New York Times. So please let me hereby express my gratitude to Nancy and also to The Binnacle’s Gerard NeCastro, The New Quarterly’s Kim Jernigan and The Lists Issue Guest Editor Diane Schoemperlen (thank you, thank you, thank you squared…).

And maybe this would be an appropriate time to thank all the incredibly generous and talented creative writers whom I encountered as writing workshop leaders and mentors over the past six years of my journey to published-authorhood: (in temporal order) Colleen Curran, Greg Hollingshead, Isabel Huggan, Edna Alford, Robyn Sarah, Joel Yanofsky, Monique Polak, Lori Weber, Luis Urrea (also instrumental to “Pie”), Mikhail Iossel, Brad Kessler, Tess Fragoulis, Robin Marantz Henig, Guy Lawson, Neale McDevitt, and Ilona Martonfi.

Whew! They say it takes a village to raise a child; it appears to me that it may take a small town to raise a writer. And sorry if I’ve forgotten someone (I probably have; but I’m even grateful for fallibility—it reminds me to be humble).

Well, this feels like enough gratitude for today…Besides, I think I like the idea of stringing this out over several entries.

Wishing you all peace and love (oh, I am so not a hippie!),

Bev

Lest We Forget: the Cowardly Assassination of Pierre Laporte

October 17th, 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Quebec’s Vice Premier and Labour Minister, Pierre Laporte, by Paul and Jacques Rose, the cowards of the Front de Liberation du Quebec. Rest in peace, M. Laporte. We can never repay your sacrifice...or that of your wife and children, and the widow and children of your late brother Rolland, all of whom you were supporting at the moment you were abducted from your St. Lambert home by a bunch of pathetic pseudo-Marxists who had taken leave of their senses after watching too many screenings of The Battle of Algiers.

Paul and Jacques Rose, driving to Texas to buy guns for the cause, were surprised to hear of the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross by their FLQ Liberation Cell brothers on October 5^th, 1970. They raced back home and grabbed you as you played football with your nephew. You, M. Laporte, who had been a journalist with Le Devoir from 1945 to 1961, determined to best the tyrannical Premier Maurice Duplessis. You, M. Laporte, who had been part of Jean Lesage’s Equipe de tonerre, who had helped to roll back la grande noirceur and ended up falling victim to its newer iteration. Who were these angry nobodies who had never done a thing to advance the people of Quebec, who confused the blowing up of mail boxes with positive political action?

On October 12^th, Prime Minister Trudeau, at the request of Premier Robert Bourassa, invoked the War Measures Act. Your letter to M. Bourassa, dated October 11^th, read:

My dear Robert,

I feel like I am writing the most important letter I have ever written.

For the time being, I am in perfect health, and I am treated well, even courteously.

In short, the power to decide over my life is in your hands. If there was only that involved, and the sacrifice of my life would bring good results, one could accept it...

You know how my personal situation deserves to draw attention. I had two brothers, both are now dead. I remain alone as the head of a large family that comprises my mother, my sisters, my own wife and my children, and the children of Rolland of whom I am the guardian. My departure would create for them irreparable grief, and you know the ties that bind the members of my family...

You have the power of life and death over me, I depend on you and I thank you for it.

Best regards,

Pierre Laporte

What would you think of the Quebec of today, a Quebec which virtually ignores your murder, a Quebec where a goodly number have convinced themselves the entire FLQ episode was some kind of federal conspiracy to discredit the independence movement? As if the independentistes needed any help in that regard, the truth being that some of the most revered of the separatists—their sainted Rene Levesque and his bombastic sidekick Jacques Parizeau—took advantage of the uproar caused by the kidnappings to talk about planning the “provisional government” of Quebec.

But Messrs. Levesque and Parizeau weren’t alone in mistaking their duties: as media analyst Raphael Cohen-Almagor later concluded, the media coverage of the crisis was a textbook example of irresponsible journalism in Quebec.

Influential segments of the French media served the interests of the terrorists and ignored the interests of the victims, as well as the interests of Canada as a free, democratic society. Journalists broke almost every ethical norm that is accepted during hostage-taking episodes; they did not hesitate to sensationalize and to dramatize the event, stirring up emotions in a way that hindered governmental operations...They gladly offered their services as mediators and messengers of the terrorists, disregarding their obligation to accurate reporting, and broadcast the terrorists' communiqués without the consent of the authorities. Through their extensive sympathetic coverage, French journalists not only provided a grand platform for the terrorists, but also legitimized their demands and actions...

And this media mischief and misinformation continues: a Radio-Canada documentary just days back repeats the lies that your murder was “accidental” and in fact the fault of the police, since you were supposedly still alive when they deposited you in the trunk of that car for the police to find (this despite the fact that the communiqué issued at the time spoke very plainly of your “execution”). And, the Felquist apologist continued, if a communiqué from Cross’s kidnappers, addressed to the numbskulls who held you, and urging you not be harmed, hadn’t been suppressed by the police, you would have been fine.

Oh, M. Laporte, to think, if only the police hadn’t been so devious, you might have lived…is it only in Quebec people lie to themselves this way?

Instead of bowing our heads in collective sorrow at the fact that you were strangled with your own religious medallion—surely a torturous and agonizingly slow method of execution!--the Quebec’s news media today celebrates instead the canonization of Brother Andre, the illiterate “man of the people” who “cured” the sick by anointing them with oil.

And the pathetic apologia for your kidnapping and murder—and the murders of 5 others, as well as the kidnapping of Mr. Cross—continues, as one of the authors of Quebec’s high school history text declares the FLQ never meant to hurt anyone. This despite their having perpetrated in excess of 200 violent crimes--including at least 100 bombings--that resulted in the deaths of six people!

But luckily for this next generation, according to history teacher and textbook author Raymond Bedard, the Quebec curriculum does not put a lot of emphasis on the October Crisis, perhaps 45 minutes of class time out of the entire school year.

They say those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Dear M. Laporte, I am glad that, for you at least, that cannot be so. I wish you godspeed. You didn't deserve the treatment meted out to you. You didn't deserve it then, and you still do not now.

---------------

References:

Raphael Cohen-Almagor. The scope of tolerance: studies on the costs of free expression and freedom. London: Routledge 2006. p.235

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/flq-didnt-mean-to-kill-people-quebec-author-105014434.html

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/terrorists/flq/index.html

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Extremist+makeover+edition/3588195/story.html

Funny/Not Funny: Tyler Clementi & Why Context Matters

It's probably a rare person who actually enjoys being “defriended” on Facebook, but I don’t feel any shame in explaining how it happened to me recently. Albert somebody-or-other, a self-proclaimed Laughologist and inventor of Laughercize, with the click of a button, excommunicated me from his exalted circle. Fair enough: it’s his party and if I’m not invited, I think I can still manage to live a happy life. But the reason I was banished from the warmth of his virtual embrace bothers me, so much that I feel obligated to share it.

A few days back, under the heading “It is possible to have too much fun,” Albert posted this video

“pole dance no casamento”; the last word means “wedding” in Portuguese; another version I found intimates it dates from November 2009 (I tried to discover if it was a fake or urban legend at Snopes; it isn’t there, so maybe it is real).

The 1 min 31 sec clip shows a wedding reception, held in a large tent, if the beribboned pole in the foreground is anything to go by. The camera pans out over the tables, and we see we are indeed at an outdoor wedding, under a large white tent. A long-haired woman in a red sequinned dress, lots of back showing, dances around somewhat hedonistically, a wineglass in one hand, the large pole in the other. The bride, in the background, doesn’t look too amused (leading me to wonder if the entire deal has been staged, for some reason—like, maybe to garner a million youtube hits). Within seconds, red dress is dancing with a man (likely the groom); bridey looks even less pleased, being upstaged by red dress’s dirty dancing AND having groomy snatched away from her. And then the scarlet woman goes back to the pole, swings around it a time or two more, and...MANAGES TO PULL IT DOWN!

Mayhem ensues, people crawling over the grass, young guests comforting each other. The last image is of bridey, on the ground, being offered a folded handkerchief to staunch the bleeding from her nose.
Albert posted the video and “liked” it himself. I added, “didn't i see this in that sandra bullock movie '28 days'? actually, this is worse: in the movie, there wasn't a bloodied bride...moral: beware a woman in a red dress (i guess).”

But then I get to thinking about the episode, taken as a whole. And I start to realize it really ISN'T funny…

The rest of our exchange plays out like this:

---

Albert Note the Bride seems to be glaring at dancing woman as if to say "that woman is going to ruin my wedding." She was right!
Me yes, i did notice that...wasn't it because red dress started dancing with the groom?
Me but Albert, i fear anyone laughing at this has an unfortunate lack of empathy. and just such a spectacular lack led last week to the tragic death--by suicide--of Tyler Clementi.
Albert Beverly. You're way off. This is darkly funny.
Tyler is a completely different story. Don't know why you would connect the two.
Me it's funny only if it isn't a real wedding. if it's a real wedding, it isn't funny. why can't you see that?
Albert Still no connection. People laugh naturally at a lot of things. Some of them rough. This is still funny. Bride was not seriously injured…

---

And this is where Albert and I part ways: I feel the sight of a woman bleeding anywhere—much less at her own wedding, for God’s sake!—is not funny!

Not funny, no how, no way.

Days earlier, Tyler Clementi, the unfortunate 18 year old Rutgers student caught on streaming video having sex with another man (twice!) by his roommate and the roommate’s friend, had committed suicide by jumping off NYC’s George Washington Bridge as a result of this cyberbullying. The Facebook memorial page “In Honor of Tyler Clementi” is available here.

So, good people, I put it to you: is this wedding crashing video funny or not funny?

Funny only if it is a set-up, a fake? To me, conceivably. Funny if it’s the real thing—that is, a wedding at which a drunk or otherwise-overly-enthusiastic person pulls the house down and the bride ends up bloodied?

For the life of me, I just can’t see it.

And let me know if you perceive a connection between the pronouncing of this video funny and the astonishing lack of empathy—not to mention boundaries—demonstrated by Rutger students Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, also both 18 years olds. To me, it's all the same empathy continuum.

If you want to see the modern faces of heartlessness, here they are:



And, while I'm asking the questions and you're furnishing the answers, please tell me: is this the legacy of a decade of the idiocy of shows and movies like “Jackass” and its ilk--Beavis and Butthead, Fubar, Futurama, The Simpsons, Harold and Kumar, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Borat, Uncle Buck, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, and on and on--a generation that can't tell the difference between a joke and destroying someone's soul?

Worth More Alive than Dead: Why the PM may have engineered Bill C-391 to fail

(The Meaning Of Children now available on Kindle!)

Everyone knows Bill C-391, the second so-called Conservative private member’s bill (PMB) to propose destroying the registry is really a government bill—after all, if it walks like a duck hunter and squawks like a duck hunter, chances are it’s a duck hunter. Never in Parliamentary history has the governing party hired billboards, set up websites, sent out flyers etc., in support of a private member’s bill. So why the subterfuge? Because clothing a government bill in PMB clothing means Mr. Harper could exhibit pretend outrage at the opposition’s whipping the vote, all while imposing party discipline in his own ranks (why else would all 10 Quebec Conservative MPs have voted with the government?).

But division among the opposition is not the reason Mr. Harper may be satisfied with the 153-151 outcome on Bill C-391: money is. 

While researching links between the Canadian gun lobby and the U.S. National Rifle Association (NRA), a vociferous and financial supporter of its Canadian branch, the imperative made famous by informant “Deep Throat” during the Watergate scandal popped into my head: “follow the money.” The NRA, America’s most influential lobby group, wields a shockingly large annual budget--$307 million USD. To give you a taste of what that buys in Washington, in addition to lobbying against virtually any and all gun restrictions, the NRA recently lobbied: against an appointment to the supreme court; to be exempted from a proposal requiring lobby groups to disclose donor lists, and; to graft a ban on insurance companies charging higher premiums for people with guns in their homes onto a health care bill. Also, for the NRA, gun control anywhere threatens gun owners everywhere; they’ve meddled in Brazil and at the UN, so why not Canada? This is the bull the Conservative Party welcomed into our Parliamentary china shop.

The long gun registry may be the best cash cow the Conservative Party’s ever had: why would they kill it? What if the failure of C-391 is what the government set its sights on all along, a milestone in their strategy to achieve a majority? With Bill C-391 defeated, Mr. Harper can shrug and tell supporters he gave it the old college try, but that the effort to squash the registry failed because of the “socialist coalition’s dastardly tactics,” like whipping a so-called PMB. This leaves the Conservatives free to exploit, once again, the registry as a key weapon in its fundraising arsenal, a war chest ostensibly necessary to gain a majority and so destroy the registry another day. 

The government denies the relationship between the NRA and their drive to destroy the long gun registry, despite the fact that the Public Security Minister’s Firearm Advisory Committee (FAC) includes Tony Bernardo, executive director of the Canadian version of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (CILA) and CILA’s sister organization, the Canadian Shooting Sports Association. The CSSA/CILA Facebook page brags it has 4 senior organization members on the Public Security Minister’s 12-member FAC, and that most of the rest are CSSA members; that CSSA/CILA is “fully endorsed by the NRA and NSSF [U.S. National Shooting Sports Foundation],” that “CILA’s work has been personally endorsed by NRA Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre and former Presidents Charlton Heston, Kayne Robinson and Sandy Froman,” that “as a direct result of our lobby efforts, including CILA-coordinated conference calls between Ministers and major firearms manufacturers, we proved to the Canadian Government that they were being mislead by their bureaucrats,” that they “conducted an election poster campaign which was approved by the PMO - posters sent to all dealers, retailers, clubs and businesses; conducted a ‘train-the-trainer’ session for grass roots lobbying – facilitated by the NRA Director of the Grass Roots Division, Glen Caroline and we are now offering grass roots political action training to clubs and members…”

The NSSF, the other American organization CILA proudly associates with, has a board of governors representing a who’s who of major gun manufacturers: Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Winchester, Glock, Sturm, Ruger & Co., Colt’s Manufacturing, and Remington Arms. 

The $100,000 anti-registry video the NRA produced in 2000, “Gun Control in Canada,” features Tony Bernardo and John Perrochio, a “former gun shop owner” who laments that the Canada’s gun industry has dropped from 6,000 dealers to 875 and was “a $6 billion industry that has been annihilated by ignorant politicians and absolutely pathetic firearms legislation.” Follow the money indeed.

If C-391 had passed, Mr. Harper’s grateful gun lobby supporters may have decided that donating to the Conservative Party was no longer so important. So despite all the heat generated by Bill C-391, the Prime Minister had the strongest of motives not to destroy the long gun registry, because its continued existence will fill his party’s election coffers more assuredly than the converse: the gun registry is worth more to him alive than dead.

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17wwln_essay.html

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=3219083173&topic=5930

http://www.nssf.org/industry/boardNSSF.cfm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmrqT9SIkQw (3min43secs into the video for John Perrochio’s quote)

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/09/13/canada-nra-gun-registry.html

Support the gun registry or you don’t know jack

These are just a few recent stories in the country-soon-to-be-naked-of-the-long-gun-registry:

July 2009: Joan Hanson, daughter, and granddaughter shot dead by Ms. Hanson’s estranged hunter husband with his legally owned rifle, which he later turns on himself. January 2010: Stephanie Hoddinott shot dead by a former boyfriend, using a legally acquired handgun he then uses to kill himself. March 2010: three women shot near Belleville by a male acquaintance of one of them; two die. Within days, Const. Vu Pham is shot and killed by hunter Fred Preston, apparently despondent about the break up of his marriage. Weeks later, disgruntled Edmonton car dealership employee Dave Burns walks into work firing a sawed-off shotgun. Manager Garth Radons dies and Burns turns the gun on himself; he’d apparently been suspended for uttering racial slurs and posting sexually explicit photos mocking another employee. Radons’ wife, a police officer, is among the first on the scene.

How does the long gun registry help prevent this litany of death, including suicide, and crime, including murder? Knowing who has which guns allows police to remove them as a preventative measure, should it become necessary. In thePreston case, if his estranged wife had reported any threats he made to police, they could have removed Mr. Preston’s guns. ALL his guns, which isn’t possible if they aren’t all listed somewhere handy, like, say, a long gun registry.

Since its creation, some 22,000 firearms licences have been denied and over 8,000 guns surrendered and confiscated because of safety concerns like those posed by Mr. Preston. Of the revoked guns, 74 per cent were nonrestricted shotguns and rifles. The boundary between “law-abiding duck hunter” and “criminal” only takes a fraction of a second to breach: how long does it take to pull a trigger? In light of these statistics, how can opponents of the registry continue to deny it saves lives?

In fact, many lives have been lost at the hands of "legal" gun owners. Having a gun in the home, rather than making you safer, dramatically increases the chance of death. Those suspicious of statistics and their collection may prefer to believe in unreported crime and--coming soon to a parliament near you, perhaps--imaginary crime. (With the crime rate plummeting, we’ll need to fill all those new penitentiaries somehow.)

Dr. Ted Miller's 1995 look at gunshot wounds in Canada, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, estimated that 1991 gunshot wounds cost Canada $6.6 billion (1993 dollars), representing nearly $9 billion today. About $63 million was associated with medical and mental health and $10 million with public services; productivity losses exceeded $1.5 billion. The remaining dollars were attributed to "pain, suffering and lost quality of life." Miller didn’t take into account costs associated with the justice and incarceration systems, but it’s clear that the enormous costs of gun violence—including “legal gun” violence--dwarf the cost of the registry. Even preventing the loss of one or two lives—or one or two shootings--pays for the registry, if you’re callous enough to consider only dollars and cents. At $3-4 million a year, the long gun registry is an incredible bargain.

Jack Layton is supposedly a supporter of women’s rights and equality. He is also, supposedly, a supporter of the long gun registry. Well, the gun registry is a women’s issue, too: the vast majority of those long gun owning “duck hunters” are men. The vast majority of individuals threatened, shot and killed in domestic disputes are women.

The RCMP and the associations of chiefs of police, the women’s organizations, suicide prevention, emergency and other medical associations have unequivocally come out in favour of the gun registry, proven a critical tool in the prevention of suicide and domestic violence, especially in rural settings.

Gutting the registry when all these groups are in favour of it and the “duck hunters” are against it is really letting the tail wag the dog. If this same “duck hunter” brain trust decided that our murder laws don’t prevent murder, would you strike those laws down, too, Mr. Harper?

So there you have it, Messrs. Harper and Layton: either you ensure the registry survives, or you betray your sacred responsibility to Canadians, including women and rural people. Either you support the registry or you don’t know jack.

(Appeared in The Hill Times, Sept. 13, 2010; p.17)

The solution is simple: Canada needs MORE gun controls

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The late Anastasia De Sousa, who died at Dawson College, September 13, 2006

Today being the fourth anniversary of the tragic murder of another "beautiful young Canadian with everything to live for," Anastasia De Sousa, during the Dawson College Shooting , I've decided to post the opinion article I wrote following the Sept. 13, 2006 rampage by the deranged Kimveer Gill. Versions of this piece appeared at the time in The Montreal Gazette and The National Post. The memorial notice for Ms. De Sousa is here; you may leave a message of condolence here.

-----------------

I am the mother of a Dawson College student, was friendly with a beloved husband and father killed at Concordia University 14 years ago, and worked in a non-traditional occupation - molecular genetics research - when the Ecole Polytechnique massacre took place. My husband is a provincial politician who spends much of the year at the National Assembly in Quebec City, where three were killed and 13 wounded by a deranged Canadian soldier in 1984. And so I feel myself uniquely placed to respond to the events of Sept. 13.

My response is not to launch a fruitless inquiry into the "root causes" of this catastrophic occurrence. I couldn't care a whit whether the perpetrator of last Wednesday's atrocities was refused academic admission to Dawson College, whether he was bullied as a child, either in school or at home. I think it's irrelevant if he grew up with a chip on his shoulder because of some imagined slight, or even if he or his family suffered in the past from some form of persecution, be it real or imagined, in Canada or elsewhere.

To me, there can be no mitigating factors for murder, whether the locus of attack is a college campus in downtown Montreal, a nightclub in Tel Aviv, a skyscraper in New York City, or some parched crossroads among the rubble of Afghanistan. Murder is murder is murder. Each one should fall under the rubric of "hate crime."

When 14 young Montrealers, full of hope, ambition and promise, had their lives snuffed out because they had earned the privilege of studying engineering while another could not, many people I knew, especially women, insisted the "root cause" of this crime was our society's oppression of women, an opinion at which I scoffed.

When gun control was trumpeted as the panacea to these horrible killings, I was skeptical. I bought the argument that gun control penalized the law-abiding, rather than the criminals. I was sensitive to the position that people living rural lifestyles needed firearms as part of their daily lives, a situation unimaginable to me, given my urban existence.

Well, I am skeptical and sensitive no more. Last Wednesday was the drop that made the glass overflow, as we say in Quebec. The balance has shifted. I realize more clearly now that my choice must be to care more for the potential victims than the potential perpetrators.

So that's my response to the Dawson killings: No more guns. It's as simple as that. Because no one can accurately predict who among us will become unhinged enough to explode in bloody slaughter, I believe that guns should be unavailable to the public.

I don't trust psychiatrists - much less gun-registry officials - to ferret out what lies deep in the hearts of men. After all, Concordia administrators, some of whom had equipped their own offices with locks and panic buttons because of Valery Fabrikant's continued harassment, consulted a psychiatrist about the demented professor before his murderous rampage. I saw the same psychiatrist on television last week, hovering in the background following the Dawson shootings.

According to journalist Morris Wolfe, the psychiatrist had deemed it "unlikely" that Fabrikant, a professor repeatedly denied tenure, would become violent.

So if a trained psychiatrist with an abiding interest in severe and chronic psychotic illness, confronted with a man he himself has diagnosed as having "a personality disorder" cannot foresee the coming explosion of rage, all the administrative screening in the world won't be able to keep legal guns out of the hands of loonies. The solution that's clearest to me is to make guns - both legal and illegal - impossible to get.

And so, as a mother, a woman, and a sentient human being, I'm telling Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the entire government of Canada to wake up and smell the coffee: If you persist in your intended dismantling of the gun registry instead of making it harder for people to own guns, there will be hundreds of thousands of us marching in the streets of Montreal. I guarantee it.

----------

I continue to believe that guns, especially long guns, are too readily available in our society. The government of Canada--under the guise of a private member's bill--is attempting to destroy the long gun registry, part of a web of regulations that seeks to make Canada's gun owners more accountable for their weapons and has been shown effective and even cost-effective.

The psychiatrist, Warren Steiner, contacted me after my piece(s) appeared to say Mr. Wolfe had it all wrong and that he--Dr. Steiner--regretted not having demanded retraction of the statements ascribed to him. Four years later, the comments are still available here. Dr. Steiner has since made the recovery--or lack thereof--of the Dawson community a particular research interest. And it looks to be a lucrative, longterm one.

The Maytag Repairman: Lonely No More!

It’s been a terrible month for appliances chez moi. First, and disaster de tutti disasters, my laptop of nearly 4 years’ vintage crashed. Literally, taking a swan dive off our kitchen table and landing, screen first, on the floor. It seemed none the worse for wear at the time, but next morning, on rebootation, I received a message so traumatic, I seem to have blanked it out (either that, or the Alzheimer’s is proceeding faster than I thought). Worse than the blue screen of death, it said, “No recognized operating system.”

Cue stab scene music from Psycho.

And the best part—okay, the worst part--is that the crash happened in early August and my last external backup was—cue sad chamber music by string quartet on the deck of the Titanic—June 21^st. So let that be a lesson to you: back up your hard drives, people.

But I digress: today’s subject is Maytag repairmen, and the complete opposite of their loneliness, and my laptop wasn’t made by Maytag. My dishwasher, however, is another story.

Last summer, we finally decided to renovate our 1950s kitchen. It wasn’t quite the reno of our dreams--that would have cost at least another $5,000. Let’s call it the-reno-of-our-dimished-but-wholly-practical expectations. But there was the dishwasher dilemma: ours still worked, but it was 10 years old. Should we keep it till it died, or spring for a new one?

We opted for door number 2. Cue buzzer for wrong answer from Family Feud. Worse, instead of our usual bottom of the line, department store brand, we sprang for a Maytag.

Why?

I have no answer except the salesman’s recommendation, the middle of the road price and—let’s face it, they’d hardly spend the billions if it didn’t work—the advertising. Did we want the extended warranty?

No, we did not.

Foolish us.

But in nearly 30 years of marriage, we’d had 3 dishwashers and maybe 2 repair calls. Extended warranty? What for? It was a Maytag. Extended warranties were how they gouged you; everyone knew that!

Did I mention we were foolish?


Dishwasher purchased June 2009; expiration of manufacturer’s warranty: June 2010; dishwasher death: August 2010.

I called the toll-free repair service. Did you know that Whirlpool bought Maytag and now comprises some 8 or 9 brands? Together they represent the OPEC of household appliances.

A tech came and consulted the entrails of a chicken: we needed a replacement electrical panel. Replacement electrical panel: $100. Two service calls: $150. The feeling you get spending $250 to fix a year-old dishwasher bought for $750 (and still being paid for): priceless.


I was ticked. Seriously. Told the pudgy young service dude, “Tell your supervisor how seriously ticked I am that our dishwasher is broken a mere 14 months after purchase.”

His answer: “I never see a supervisor. They’re in Ontario.” To a true Quebecois, Ontario is like, oh, I don’t know, the frigging moon or something. And vice versa, I’m sure.

Four business days to get the part, he said.

Of course, I had to wait much longer than four days, and finally called to inquire where said part was, only to be told the repair wasn’t in their system.

This frightened me: they had a system? For manufacturing substandard appliances and failing to repair them in a timely manner?

Who, exactly, was in charge of this “system,” the ex-cons from Enron?

I told Katie, the customer service rep with the nice Southern drawl—and I’m not talkin’ south’n Ontario, neithah—how upset I was to be paying $250 to fix a dishwasher purchased for $750 not quite a year ago. She put me on hold. I waited.

They would cover the part, she finally told me; the service charges, however, were all mine.

I subsequently googled Maytag dishwasher repair: in June 2010, some 1.7 million dishwashers—same manufacturer, but branded Maytag, Jenn-Air, Amana, Admiral, Crosley, Magic Chef, and Performa—had been recalled. Produced between 2006 and 2010, the dishwashers risked “an electrical failure in the dishwasher's heating element” posing “a serious fire hazard.” As opposed to an unserious fire hazard.

Twelve reports of fires, one “of extensive kitchen damage” but luckily, “no injuries.” So far.
Of course, my dishwasher didn’t fall into that recall, but I have high hopes for the next one.

At least, with 1.7 million dishwashers recalled for servicing, you can be certain of one thing: that ol' Maytag repairman sure ain’t lonely no more!