Posts by dyan campbell
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Albert Otter is my new hero, David H. Otters have a special resonance with me as I am from Vancouver and they are a common sight off Vancouver's sea wall, as I believe their conservatory of music is nearby.
A young musician having a snack, urban Vancouver style.
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dyan - there was a film proposed on Rewi Alley after the biography came out, but it didnt attract necessary funding from the proposed script.
It's a shame the film never got off the ground, because it's a fascinating story about a NZer who should not be forgotten - but I can see how it would be incredibly expensive to film,
He's still remembered. But one glaring omission from the Chinese version of his-story:
He did not distinguish between casualties, treating wounded Japanese prisoners as well as Chinese.
I only just heard it - Adrienne Clarkson mentions that in the interview I posted, as well as other facts I hadn't known. I knew Bethune was a driving force behind Canada's public health system, but I was surprised - and impressed that such a pragmatic man was responsible for setting up an art school for the very poorest children in Canada during the depression. As Adrienne Clarkson said, many of these children would have not even enough to eat, but Bethune felt it was important that "beauty be in their purview". It is a shame none of the people running health or education in this country are neither public health geniuses nor motivated by a genuine wish to provide help to those who need it most.
And, an interesting sidelight on Edmund Hillary: he undoubtedly did an enormous amount of good among Sherpa communities, but he could be brusque & unhelpful with other ANZ volunteers - almost as though he thought it was *his* patch, and resented ANZers who didnt kowtow.
But it isn't really out of character for people who do extraordinary humanitarian work... Albert Schweitzer whose humanitarian commitment is well known, was prone to rages and even punched volunteers who particularly enraged him. And it's interesting what Adrienne Clarkson says about Bethune - that the traits that made him most disliked in Canada - impatience, bossiness, unswerving resolute vision - these were all the traits the Chinese most admired. They interpreted his bossy nature as a sign Bethune knew exactly what he was doing, they interpreted his famous impatience as commitment and his resolute vision - which Canadians found arrogant and dictatorial - was very much appreciated in China. Bethune was also known to fly into rages and hurl medical instruments at colleagues if things didn't go well in theatre, and that did not endear him to anyone on the receiving end of a flying instrument.
Sean Penn is a famously provokable and bad tempered actor, and I am sure in the decades to follow there will be accounts of his unpleasant behaviour. In the meantime I am hugely impressed with everything he has accomplished and how much more he intends to do.
By the way, if anyone reading this has access to medical supplies (if you are a rep for a drug company for instance)
Sean Penn's organisation desperately needs the following:The following medical supplies are needed to fight the outbreak of cholera in Haiti:
Ringer’s Lactate 1000cc IV bags
IV fluids
Ciprofloxacin 400mg IV bags AND 500mg tablets
Tetracycline tablets
Oral rehydration salts
Stool sample containers.
Tylenol suspension for children
Amoxicillin suspension for children
Pedialyteand the website is here J/P Hatian Relief
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dyan - I'd never heard of Norman Bethune before...must learn more.
You ever come across an ANZer called Rewi Alley? Also esteemed in China for his work there.Oh, yes! Rewi Alley - I've read everything I've found about his work - what an amazing guy. He and Ed Hillary are two of my favourite NZ heroes.
There is a very good movie about Norman Bethune played by Donald Sutherland... (whose own father-in-law Tommy Douglas, was voted the greatest Canadian of all time). The interview I posted above with Adrienne Clarkson (if you can be bothered watching the whole 20 minutes) gives some insight into how clearly the threat of fascism was taken in Canada during the 1930s.
There were rumours that a film was to be made about Rewi Alley, but I don't know if it ever came to much. i will be interested what a filmmaker would make of Hillary's life too - in Nepal his mountain climbing is irrelevant, but the whole country was plunged into mourning when he died.
My sister Shirl (who lives there) says the whole nation came to a halt because of the collective grief, and when she mentioned her sister lived in NZ, Nepalis would go into raptures about how kind, how honourable and how selfless NZers are because of all the schools, hospitals and airfields Sir Ed helped create. Even though I wasn't an actual Kiwi, they were sure I was wonderful because I lived where Sir Ed came from. My sister guarantees any NZer who goes and volunteers at her school will get treated like a visiting god.
I think Sean Penn will be remembered by our generation exactly the same way. His relief organisation is an impressive model of extraordinarly well run aid, (OXFAM - you would learn a thing or two) - Penn has been living in a tent along with his volunteers among the refugees ever since the earthquake in Haiti.
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The mood in post-WW2 NZ was very pro-military. The 1949 Labour Government's referendum on conscription resulted in 77.9% in favour. Compulsory military training was abolished by Labour in 1958, and reinstated by National in 1960.
It could not have been more different in Canada. The post war mood was buoyant, and the people who'd been through WW2 wanted to focus their lives on family and enjoying life, I think.
The mood that prevailed in Canada was about peace, progress and egalitarianism - or so it seems to me in hindsight. The people who shaped Canadian society were peacenicks
Lester B. Pearson; Tommy Douglas; (Keifer Sutherland's grandfather) Marshall McLuhan and John Kenneth Gailbraith seemed to be the big cultural influences.By the time I was learning history, a great Canadian communist, and huge cultural Chinese hero Norman Bethune had been welcomed back out of historical obscurity in Canada and was as celebrated (finally).
Bethune is seen in China the way Sir Ed Hillary is seen in Nepal - almost a god. In Canada we take more pride in that aspect of our cultural heroes, though I'm not sure why - most people here are only dimly aware of what huge esteem the Nepali people hold Ed Hillary, and all NZers because of his good work. Not like that in Canada... we were taught to take great pride in Norman Bethune... after we discovered the Chinese worshipped him.
Communist Chinese take on Norman Bethune:
CBC interview with Adrienne Clarkson, who has researched his life (lengthy, but fascinating) - Adrienne Clarkson was Canada's Governer General and is married to John Ralston Saul. She also looks a lot like my Mum. -
The babyboomers here lived in a very different culture to those in Canada or the USA. I was not aware so many NZers were drafted into the war in Vietnam (I had thought the soldiers from here were either career soldiers or volunteers) but there was certainly no draft in Canada, nor any generation gap to speak of, as the generation that fought in the WW2 - or Korea - in Canada tended to be as anti war as their boomer offspring.
The permissive society I meant by Benjamin Spock's "Baby and Child Care" was to a large extent a good thing - I was glad to grow up - as were my sisters born in the 1940s - without defined gender roles, with plenty of latitude, lots of input - play, conversation, attention - from our father and absolutely no smacking or spanking. This is largely Benjamin Spock, and I am horrified when I hear accounts of NZ childhoods, which - Russell you may be the exception - seemed to be completely oblivious to Benjamin Spock and his liberal ways. There seemed to be much smacking and very sharply defined gender roles. I talk to people my age and their experience sounds like something from a vastly different era.
The part about "Baby and Child Care" that even Dr. Spock admitted may have been a little off was the degree of importance the feelings and self esteem of children were given. Sure, children's self esteem is important, should be fostered, but so many boomers grew up with an inability to comprehend any experience where they are not the point of the events. In everything. Most North American Boomers are more likely to think of their experience in absolutes - their misery, their love, their fatigue, is expressed in absolutes, as if their perception of their own experience is the zenith of all perception and eclipses all other, less significant suffering or joy.
There is so much talk of depression - not exclusively a boomer malady - but I was struck by Leonard Cohen's refusal (in the CBC interview I posted a page or so ago) to describe his "darkest hour". He said "it's an unwholesome luxury to even think I had a darkest hour, when you think of how much suffering there is in the world".
Perhaps it wasn't Benjamin Spock to blame for the "Me Generation" phenomenon, but in his later years he himself questioned the child centred message, and agreed with critics (I believe later editions addressed this) that yes, children should perhaps be taught to consider other peoples' feelings as well as their own.
Generation X is used to describe an age group - the youngest boomers - , but it was a specific book by a Canadian who was describing their "accelerated culture" and "no culture to replace their anomie", living as they did in "a world populated with dead TV shows, Elvis moments and semi-disposible Swedish furniture". (He meant Ikea).
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Excellent post Jackie.
At the end of the day, weakening the welfare state, regardless of its merits or not, is false economy. What anti-welfarists might save in taxes, they'd probably lose in increased spending on personal security
This is particularly true, and having seen the rise and rise of the gated community in my country (Canada) I can tell you this is depressingly true.
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You are just talking about the US right?
The US and Canada.
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I'm not sure I prefer him in the end to the lugubrious Cohen, as in this best-version-ever of The Partisan from French TV, 1969
He was never lugubrious - even when he was clinically depressed (he's Jewish - depression and humour run in the same vein if you're Jewish) he only seems lugubrious when he sings; he's really very funny. Canadian presenters often felt compelled to say "he's not a stand up comedian" before introducing him at poetry recitals.
Here he is, keeping the audience in stitches before a reading:
And here he is, in an excellent interview by former Moxy Fruvous singer Ghian Ghomeshi talking about the mysterious magic between audience and performer, clinical depression, how he felt he could have helped Kurt Cobain with his depression, and he admits (under pressure) how he wishes people would stop singing Halleujah -
Re: Boomers and our sense of entitlement - the babyboom in North America differed greatly from the generation that raised them because of the "permissive society" - a the result of paediatrician Benjamin Spock, and his child-centred philosophies.
Spock's book - not popular here, but literally on nearly every postwar family's shelf in Canada and the USA - coincided with a generaton of war weary parents that wanted nothing more than to lavish everything on their children, and with a level of prosperity for ordinary working folks that people from other parts of the world (here included) only associate with great wealth. So a generation of boomers grew up in a kind of golden age of endless childhood, the most indulged, least responsible generation in history. Most boomers still have trouble thinking of themselves as adults. Me included.
Our parents wished that we should have everything and should never struggle - and that's what most of us expected.The resulting generation and a half - the boomers - and their younger siblings - the Xers - were hilariously and accurately portrayed in Douglas Coupland's novel, Generation X. He has a perfect ear for the hip, ironic, self consciously cool, smart alec style of speech that typifies the North American patter; it's as if we are all in our own little personal sitcom. I'm as guilty of this as anyone.
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"I want some of what Leonard Cohen's on."
Watch him make this serious journalist simper in 1966.
http://fliiby.com/file/375673/9gsqhs5bdr.html
From This Hour has Seven Days (CBC TV Canada)
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and within my very large babyboomer family&friend cohort, there is NO-ONE who takes annual holidays overseas or who is wealthy except in family & friends. So, STFU those folk who make unwarranted generalisations
Islander, I am sorry to upset you (especially you, as you have created real characters who live and breathe in your writing) but the quote about the Poverty Jet Set
"A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people names Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties."
was by Douglas Coupland, and when he was talking about "The Poverty Jet Set" was describing a facet of the lives of the demographic he coined the term Generation X to describe.
But then I always think of the book - and I very much see the landscape of my own youth. Baby boomers and - even more so Xers, as described by Coupland, enjoyed a golden sense of entitlement - however mockable and repugnant - that is a peculiar characteristic of the most indulged generations in history. It was the land of rampant consumerism, great wealth and post war parents who wished for nothing more than to give their kids everything in the world. And the standard of living there was insanely high - In 1979 I had a job that (oh god in hindsight this kills me) that would have bought me a modest house in Vancouver in a year, or a nice house in two years. And I was a receptionist. a bloody receptionist at a publishing firm. So I - and all my friends who worked in similar 'McJobs" - took holiday after holiday and bought insanely expensive clothes. In hindsight, I wish I'd bought property. Because, boy, did it go up in price. And Jeremy - back then a lot of folks who'd been born in the first 30 years of the 20th C seemed to own everything.