Hip Like Me: Years in the life of a ''person of hair''

Hip Like Me

Hip Like Me Years in the Life of a “Person of Hair” Geoffrey D. Falk

Million Monkeys Press

Copyright © 2008 by Geoffrey D. Falk. Published by Million Monkeys Press P.O. Box 68586 360A Bloor St. W. Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 3C9 Web: www.hiplikeme.com ISBN 978-0-9810682-0-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-9810682-1-3 (eBook) Cover background by Lori Martin, licensed from 123rf.com

There have been several documentaries made about tie-dyed fans of the Grateful Dead, following the band around on tour. The End of the Road was one such film. At one point in that movie the Deadheads stopped in Las Vegas before a show, and in the process of innocently enjoying the local sights wound up being brutalized by the police. Speaking about that mistreatment, a bystander objected: Don’t treat these people like animals, [just] ‘cause their hair is long and they smell bad.... That’s [how they treated] black people years ago. They’re taking away the most important right. The freedom of expression. It was a black man who said that. And he’s absolutely right.

Prologue I am an odd hybrid: Half intellectual, and half bar-fly. Think Jeff Goldblum, but if instead of getting trapped in that teleportation device with a common housefly, he had gotten stuck in there with a pint of honey-brown ale and a copy of one of Steven Pinker’s 600-page tomes on how the mind works or the origins of human language. I’m a best-in-class dropout from three different faculties back in my university days—engineering, physics, and education—but somewhere along the way I managed to complete a computer programming diploma, and then worked as a software developer off-and-on for a decade. I finally wound up as the only person in the whole World Wide Web who’s allowed to touch the customer relationship management software for a global non-profit org headquartered in New York City, after they couldn’t find anyone in all of NYC who cared enough to do the work properly, even for fifty bucks an hour. Bill Gates is a major donor to their cause. My younger brother was the real hippie in the family, taking time off from his job to see the Grateful Dead play live a couple of times a year. I always had my nose stuck too far into a textbook or an Eastern scripture to find the idea of just 1

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hanging out and having fun to be as tempting as it should have been. So, to my eternal regret, I never got to see the Dead play back when Jerry Garcia was still with us. If you can believe it, Jerry was actually in the U.S. Army for nine months, way back when. But he kept going AWOL•, so they finally realized he wasn’t right for them, and gave him an honorable discharge. Then he lived for awhile in an old broken-down car in East Palo Alto, and Robert Hunter lived next to him in his own car, and they were both eating big tins of Army-issue pineapple with plastic spoons from Jerry’s glove compartment. That’s how Hunter got to be the Dead’s lyricist: It was his pineapple. If the pre-diabetic Garcia had stuck to that kind of monotonous but healthy diet in the years to follow, rather than stuffing his face with junk food, he’d probably still be alive today. When he passed away from a heart attack in 1995, they did the autopsy and his arteries were like pinholes. It wasn’t the drugs that killed him: it was the chili dogs. “Just say no.” So the closest I’ve been to actually hearing the Dead play live was when I was working summers at a tourist lodge, and one of the guys in a fishing party there one year was the audiologist for the Grateful Dead. The lodge owner was a stocky, Catholic Republican from Minnesota, who still retained the brush-cut from his own Army days—he looked like a damned hedgehog. You could easily imagine him watching reruns of All in the Family ... and cheering for Archie Bunker. So it made him very happy when I cut my (pre-hippie days) hair almost as short as his, and shaved off the beard I had kept since I was young enough to grow one, for working in their dining room. Probably gave him hope that they’d make a conservative out of me yet. Well, good luck with that! •

Bold text refers to entries in the References section, beginning on page 199, and online at www.hiplikeme.com/references.php

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In my first summer there, I shared a room with a Pakistani engineering student from Saskatchewan, named “Rowhoss”—or at least that’s what the near-retirement-age hayseed from Kansas working there called him. Row-hoss was an atheist who wouldn’t eat pork for religious reasons, i.e., “just in case” his parents’ beliefs turned out to not be complete nonsense. At some point in our first month together in that hillbilly heaven the subject of employee unions came up, and Rowhoss mentioned a group of miners who had gone on strike because workers at another company were getting salads with their lunches, and now the first group wanted the same perk. So he had started to re-evaluate his support for unionized labor after that. I wasn’t so sure. After all, fair is fair, and if one group is getting salads.... One of our regular casual guests was a former German POW, who had been interned in the Lake of the Woods region during WWII, and liked it so much he bought a cabin there after the war. The most unforgettable evening of all my years at the lodge was when he and his wife, and another German couple, were sitting around the table after dinner with the hedgehog, talking about how the world needed more people like Newt Gingrich to fix what was wrong with it. Yeah, with the help of the ex-Nazis, they’ll figure it out.... And then there was the real-life “Roseanne Barr.” Kyle’s mom (South Park) isn’t the biggest bitch in the whole wide world. I’ve worked with the biggest, fattest bitch in the whole wide world, and Kyle’s mom isn’t even close. The fat-ass redneck in question had taught her daughters so well to emulate her that the latter brood had to be tricked, by reverse psychology, into doing their share of the work in the dining room. They never actually figured out that the tuna salad/cottage cheese plate “contest” was just a way to get them to do their share of that unwanted task. When I walked away from all that at the end of my last summer in the fishing-sticks, I gave the owners a three-page

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list of grievances, each one concerning that lard-assed mother-hen and her hillbilly family. The last thing the hedgehog said to me before I left for good was, “It’s too bad we can’t just give you guns and you shoot each other.” I’m sure the ex-Nazi would have agreed. Probably Gingrich would, too. So it turns out that being told that you should engage in an O.K. Corral gunfight with an obese-ape co-worker just to settle the fact that she’s an unspeakably manipulative, dogfucking bitch is valid grounds for leaving a seasonal job early, i.e., you can still draw unemployment insurance over the winter. But with having no job to go back to the next summer, I was very happy to get on in October with a communityowned organic food store in Winnipeg—where I started out as a cashier, and ended up reprogramming the cash registers. Coming from a carrot-cake-and-granola upbringing, it was a match made in ... well, Winnipeg. The best part of that job was the slim, nineteen-year-old, tattooed punker chick with translucent skin who was cocoordinating the store. She would have graduated at the top of her high-school class if she hadn’t been kicked out of private school on some trumped-up charges which boiled down to her pushing the envelope on their rules—skirt too short, collar too spiked, etc. In spite of the fourteen-year age difference between us, she told me numerous times over the course of the year we worked together that she (i) loved me, (ii) wanted to marry me, (iii) hadn’t met a decent guy until she met me, my brother, and the soothingly relaxed, rapping black produce-guy at the store, (iv) would throw her current husband out of the house if I’d marry her, and (v) wanted to dress me up in leather and take me to the monthly blackand-blue fetish balls she frequented. The latter subject actually came up at staff meetings. Seriously. The rules of the workplace, you see, are different for boys and girls, just as they’re different for Christians and pagans.

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For example, in the office at that store, where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a witch, Easter was referred to as the “dead guy on a stick” holiday. Since I was knee-deep in following an Eastern guru who emphasized the supposed esoteric unity of yoga and Christianity at the time, I actually found the remark quite offensive. But, of course, I was much too polite to come out and say so. Then there was the time that the entire staff (except for Yours Truly) went out behind the store to smoke a joint—or “kick the cooler,” as the produce-guy put it, in the vernacular from his days working at 7-11. Later the same afternoon, I was helping the punker chick take some stuff into a nearby house, as she deftly balanced her two-year-old tyke against her waist while trying to get the house door open. “God must be a woman,” she said. “Only a woman would think of creating hips.” “Well,” I chuckled, “it’s a good thing there’s someone here who isn’t high, to provide some balance.” She laughed. “I’d say that even if I wasn’t high.” Because, you see, the rules are different for oppressed minorities than they are for oppressive majorities. And while God as a Man with a Penis would be sexist, God as a Woman with Hips is liberating and empowering. My Deadhead brother found that all out the hard way, quite independently, in sympathetically attending several feminist-environmentalist meetings on How To Save The Fragmented, Patriarchal World. He told me later that he’d been made to feel almost like he should apologize just for being a man, by the angry Feminista radicals there. To be fair, there are real disadvantages to being a young woman under a male manager who asks you, during the course of the daily work, whether you can experience multiple orgasms. Especially when the same manager’s response to being told by an abrasive-but-smart and very hard-working cashier-ess that he shouldn’t walk over the dormant flower-bed in front of the store, was to blow off steam with other employees (e.g., me) by saying, behind her back, “I’m the manager here, you stupid cow.”

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On the bright side, one of our regular customers was a gay male couple, who would come in together holding hands, and gaze longingly at the organic cotton tampons, wishing they could use them too. Like Steve Martin said in L.A. Story, “I could never be a woman—I’d just stay home and play with my breasts all day.” So, on balance, I was proud to be a liberal, unionsupporting, meditating, gay-positive, organic-food-eating vegetarian feminist. I donated what I could spare to Amnesty International and Greenpeace, and continued in the family tradition of voting for the social-democratic NDP. Most importantly, I wouldn’t even have considered referring to any female who had reached the age of majority as being a mere “girl.” They were women, and they deserved my respect for that. Anyway, after nearly a year working in a high-stress environment which didn’t bring out the best in any of us, the only job I could imagine having any meaning for me was to do volunteer work for the yoga organization I had gotten involved with a decade earlier. So I left the world of fetish balls (which I never actually attended) and mid-afternoon reefers (which I never actually smoked) for a males-only ashram in the mountains outside of San Diego, thinking seriously of remaining there permanently. It was, after all, what God and my (invisible) guru wanted me to do. To make a long story short, it turns out that all closed, hierarchical communities are cults waiting to happen. But at least I learned how to program in Visual Basic while down there, as part of their utterly futile, Three Stooges-like attempt at setting up a software shop at the tail end of the dot-com boom. It was also during those nine months of “Hidden Valley Hell” that I started to grow my hair out, after years of wanting to but never being able to get through the in-between stage where it’s always falling down into your eyes.

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Following that gestation, I spent four and a half months south of Winnipeg, waiting for promised work from Hidden Valley that never arrived. Then, in late November, I packed my guitar, computer, and the rest of my worldly belongings into the back seat of my ’78 Dodge—with its wonky driver’sside door lock, temperamental hood latch, no parking brake, balding tires, and a leaking gas tank. I said my goodbyes, and got started on my own Neil Young-like “drive of origination,” heading for the folk-music scene in Toronto. I had to get out to clean the headlights seven hours east of civilization at two in the morning, and wound up locked out of my car (grungy hide-a-key still under the hood, whew!). Then I ran out of gas on my way into Sudbury, still half a dozen hours from T.O. (extra gas container in the trunk ... and it’s not empty, whew!), but I made it. On my first full day here, the Toronto cops took away my car. Said it wasn’t road-worthy. Bastards! Ah, but the Bright Lights, and the Big City.... The Star newspaper once did a piece about designer martinis and the like in Toronto’s chic Little Italy district. They interviewed a transplanted prairie guy in one of the nightclubs, where he enthused: “Back in Winnipeg, the cool girls wear thong underwear. But here, the cool girls don’t wear any underwear at all!” My first job here, over Christmas of 1999, was at the Golden Griddle restaurant opposite Maple Leaf Gardens. The place was a cash cow back when the Leafs were playing there, but kept going belly-up and re-emerging under new management since the hockey team moved to the Air Canada Centre down by the lakeshore. So I stopped by with a resumé, and interviewed with a pleasant gentleman named Ali. After a ten-minute chat he indicated that I’d gotten the job, and said he’d call me in a few days. But when that call didn’t come, I went back in person. It turned out that in the interim he had hired someone else—a young, dark-skinned woman with no previous hospi-

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tality experience, who would panic if she was given a table of more than four patrons to serve. He liked inexperienced girls a lot more than he liked guys with long hair, you see. Can’t say that I blame him for that. But, he could still offer me a job without tips, as a dishwasher and omelette-maker, where I could tuck my hair up under a chef’s hat, to meet the “health regulations.” Of course, if long hair on a server really was a health issue, every Hooters from here to ... Hooterville, would have been shut down long ago. Between the joy of getting regularly splashed with dishwater off of other people’s plates, and dealing with a kitchen full of Middle-Eastern cooks who couldn’t speak English properly but who still kept hassling me for how I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I lasted all of two months there. While looking for a ship to jump to from the USS Pidgin, I applied to a seasonal lodge in Algonquin Park, and got called in for an interview. First, they sat me down on my own to watch a video of the lodge goings-on, from which it was clear that the professionalism of their servers was nothing to be impressed with. Then we did the interview, and the woman doing that explicitly mentioned her concern about my hair—it was a very conservative lodge, our former (Liberal) prime minister Pierre Trudeau had stayed there once, etc. I told her that by the time the season started my hair would be long enough for me to tie back, and that I’d basically be happy doing anything except washing dishes. She tossed out something about how hard it is to keep from getting bored out in the middle of nowhere. No problem, I said. I’ve done it many summers before; I’ll bring my computer, it’ll be fine. Then she leaned forward, confidentially, and mentioned something about staff doing drugs to keep themselves “entertained.” I should have realized that she was playing “good maitre’d/bad maitre’d.” Instead, I related to her how, in walking

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to the interview site past the Toronto Hemp Company store earlier that afternoon, I had actually gotten approached by a dealer. D’oh. Anyway, the point is that, even before that fatal faux pas, it was clear that my hair was an issue. So after an intermediate (night-shift) job at a pressclippings place, I went to work for a small, home-delivery retailer—like Grocery Gateway, but for organic food. Three months into that, they merged with their main competitor, and relocated their office and warehouse to the twostoplight rural town of Orangeville, an hour northwest of the city. Two occasions stand out in my mind during the additional three months I spent working out in the middle of buttfuck-there. (Motto: “Bend over, you miss it.”) First, I was walking along the main street one evening, having just arrived on the Greyhound bus and grabbed a Veggie Delite sandwich from the nearest (and only) Subway sandwich shop. Two rednecks drove by in the same direction, and the passenger-hick shouted out of his window at me: “Keep walking!” Yeah, because, you know, “Long-haired freaky people need not apply.” Second, I was walking down the same street from the other direction a month later, and stopped to contemplate a greystone building: The pavement slants significantly as the road passes beside, making it look like the walls at the end of the building aren’t vertical. So I was idly wondering where I could get a spirit level to verify whether that was just an optical illusion. While I’m standing there minding my own business, with my beautiful long hair blowing majestically in the summer evening breeze, the same two idiots cruise by in their car, and the moron redneck in the passenger seat yells out: “You are one sexy bitch!” I’m not gay. But if I was, that go-nowhere rural pig-fucker wouldn’t even have been in my league.

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But what do you expect, when you’re dealing with people who think a Maple Leafs hockey game is a “cultural event,” and who proudly display their utter ignorance of what beer should taste like by walking around wearing t-shirts advertising their favorite brand of cold-filtered piss? Anyway, I’d had my hair grown down past my shoulders for nearly a decade when I spent the summer of 2007 delightfully out of work, living on nachos and subs, and otherwise just hanging out on the streets of downtown Toronto with my acoustic guitar—looking for all the world like Jesus on his way to a folk festival. Practicing six to eight hours a day, spending the evenings playing open stages in bars, and hoping to meet a girl or two before the touch of grey on my right temple spreads too much further. Growing older, and wanting to hook up with a woman half my age, to make up for not catching that punker chick (and her “instant family”) when she threw herself at me? I wrote a song about it: GLASS HALF FULL Bar-hopping college girl, realpolitik Nineteen years Thin, photogenic Mysterious, classically pretty Mona Lisa far from Italy I’m unshaved, middle-aged, low on tact But don’t count me out, girl Opposites attract In my unnatural habitat A glass half empty A glimpse of satin Hey cutie, I’ll walk you home Down streets of gold Photographed in monochrome

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If you’ll excuse the state I’m in We could drink Manhattans And sip sloe gin With apologies, of course, to Leonard Cohen. “First we drink Manhattans, then we sip sloe gin.” We could sit on the beach and make out ‘Til the moon hits your eye Like Chinese take-out I’m feeling more than amiable With my glass half empty And yours half full A good pizza will keep you feeling satisfied for half a day; but with Chinese food, the joke has always been that two hours later you’re hungry again. So, if a “big pizza pie” is “amore” in the old Dean Martin song, then Chinese take-out would be ... well, a much more transient commitment. Never went for the rose-colored tint Peer at the world Through shot-glass fingerprints Not a social charge, wipe that smirk But I was happier last year Full-time out of work Some of my happiest memories are of my periods of extended unemployment, when I could work uninterrupted on whatever labor-of-love project I was absorbed with at the moment, from when I got up in the morning (or later) straight through until bedtime. Breaking just for nachos and beer in the early afternoon, with the July heat drifting in through a half-open screen window. Watching all the “poor bastards [who] gotta go to work” running their rat-race outside, while I’m at my desk, blissfully reading and writing, without a deadline in sight.

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Been saving up for a couch Place is a mess, I was Gonna clean last month Dog died, the cupboards are bare Bed’s not much But I’ll buy you breakfast somewhere I’ve never owned a couch, or any amount of furniture beyond a few chairs and a desk; so it’s been easier for me to rent places that are already furnished. And then to just move rather than clean properly, when the place got too dirty. Consequently, I’ve had a big chunk of my life packed in bankers boxes since I started working seasonally at age twenty: when you’re constantly wishing you were somewhere else, it pays to travel as lightly as possible. Closing time, half past middle age With a hungry stare And four ounces of courage Mesmerized how the brass light shines On the butterfly tattoos Writhing low on your spine Make you bend like that I’ll be your high-wire You my acrobat Seize the night, sex and the city I’m looking for romance But I’ll take pity Hey cutie, I’ll walk you home.... So that was more or less my state of mind at the start of my “Summer of Music”—the latest leg of a long, strange trip....

May 15 Moved into my dorm room on the seventh floor of Tartu College this morning. Over the winter it’s eighteen floors of sparse residence near Bloor and Spadina, for science and engineering students at the U of Toronto, with six rooms to a unit. In the summer, it’s a low-rent option with strong student vibes overlooking Bloor Street and the northern edge of the university campus—$600 for a rudimentary bed, desk and Internet connection, and plenty of free time left over after paying the rent to practice guitar. No toilet paper in the bathrooms, but I assume that’s just because the former residents timed it to run out exactly when they moved out after exams—scientists will do that, just as a point of pride. The kitchen garbage is overflowing too, but again, they probably just left in a hurry. No big deal. So I took out the garbage, and made a mental note to pick up some toilet paper for my new roomies when I go out shopping for bedsheets, a blanket, and a bath towel. The building was named after the city of Tartu—the intellectual and cultural hub of Estonia. Home to the University of Tartu—the “Heidelberg of the North”—founded by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632. About half of all peerreviewed publications by Estonian scientists are written by academics at Tartu University. Impressed? I keep thinking of an old Dilbert cartoon: There’s two “Fourth World” Elbonian men, one of them with an upsidedown cardboard box over his head and a large, square-ish hole cut in the front of the box for his face. The other guy is working on one of the flaps as if it was a QWERTY keyboard. And the man in the box says, “Tomorrow, you be the computer.” Tartu College has an equally tall, equally cementbrutalist “sister building” more or less across the street: the Senator David A. Croll apartments. It’s now mostly housing for seniors, but back in 1968, as Rochdale College, it was the 13

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largest co-op residence in North America, at the cutting edge of alternative education. “Alternative” meaning a free university at which there were no profs, and students evaluated themselves for their success in the informal discussion groups that were held instead of structured classes—on topics from magic to revolution to flying saucers and the history of Atlantis. The most visible of Rochdale’s fund-raising schemes was the infamous Rochdale Degree.... You could order a B.A. in “Life’s Tosses and Turns,” an M.A. in “Absenteeism,” and a Ph.D. in the venerable art and science of “Mind-Fucking.” The poet Dennis Lee was actually one of the “Resource persons” employed at Rochdale College. He later won a Governor General’s Award in 1972, composed the theme song for Fraggle Rock in the ’80s, and collaborated on many of the other songs for that Muppet-based television series. His most famous work is the book of children’s poetry, Alligator Pie. Eastward down Bloor Street toward Yonge, in the 1960s, the Yorkville area was the coffeehouse launching pad for the careers of folk-music icons from Neil Young to Joni Mitchell to Gordon Lightfoot to Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins. City Hall deliberately turned Yorkville from a drug-laden “Haight-Ashbury of the North” into a shopping mall, boutiques, and other high-priced real estate in the late ’60s. So most of the hippies, squatters and bikers from that neighborhood wound up in ... yes, nearby Rochdale. Along with a whole whack of American draft dodgers, and assorted Marxists. Not coincidentally, in the summer of 1970 the chartered “Festival Express” train carried Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, The Band, and a whole lot of drugs and alcohol across the Canadian prairies. The occasion? A traveling jam session interrupted only for historic concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary—the first and only Trans Continental Pop Festival.

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The booze ran out around northern Saskatchewan, prompting Janis to stop the train and lead a classic “liquor run,” with Jerry close behind, to the nearest government liquor store ... coincidentally, just outside the Saskatoon hometown of the archetypal California-blonde songstress. You know, the one who “plays guitar and cries and sings”—Joni Mitchell. (Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were very sweet, for a time, on Joni and her prominent cheekbones.) What the hell does that have to do with Rochdale College? Quite simply, it was the M4M radicals at Rochdale who organized a series of protests directed against the “capitalist exploiters” funding the Festival Express tour. (“May 4th Movement”—the date of the Kent State shootings.) Their demands? Free admission to the shows, along with “free dope and no cops.” As one of the promoters of that tour remarked after meeting with the leaders of the Rochdale-and-street-people coalition: “These people have a loose grip on reality.” So that’s our sister building. The other thing about Rochdale is that it was a “clothing optional” environment. Well, if any of that groovy ’60s philosophy has rubbed off on Tartu, and I happen to see a cute coed or two walking down the residence halls as god and nature intended, I’ll be sure to let ya know.... May 17 Went out walking south down Spadina today, getting to know my new neighborhood. Got about fifty yards down the street, and a twenty-ish guy on a bike rides up slowly behind me, and then steers alongside me: “Hey, you know where I can get some good weed?” “No, sorry.” He cycles on past.

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Well, that didn’t take long. Back when I was living at Dundas and Sherbourne, just off the red-light district in Toronto, I used to get approached to buy or sell around once a month. Could have made a very nice second income, had I been so inclined. The thing is, I know I look like a total stoner, but I’m really not. And just because I’ve got long hair doesn’t make me a drug dealer. Why, what are you looking to score? Kidding. May 27 I have a friend who worked for a couple of years as a teacher in Burkina Faso, so I realize that there are cultures in this world whose members do not use toilet paper for its intended purpose, instead fashioning a manual bidet from a designated water container. More power to ‘em—I have no doubt that the “anal waterfall” is nothing if not a “pause that refreshes.” The problem arises when such people, in dripping water down their asses, fail to account for the existence of the toilet seat below them. Meaning that the water serves its purpose in cleaning the asshole in question to a fresh and fragrant shine, then drips down onto the toilet seat in our shared bathroom in Tartu ... and is just left there to evaporate. Or, left there for the next person using the facilities to sit down in. So I’m getting good at hovering. Plenty of spilled juice on the kitchen table, too, which has likewise just been left to drip down onto the chairs, and from there onto the floor, to evaporate. The kitchen garbage is full to overflowing again, too, with mango peelings tumbling down onto the floor. And there’s only been one other person living here since I moved in—a skinny Kenyan-ish guy named ... well, let’s call him Mango.

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Alright, I’ll take out the garbage again. But this is a team effort, right? It’s somebody else’s turn next time? Because I hardly even use the kitchen. Or the toilet. May 29 I got phoned today by an I.T. recruiter for a short-term MDXrelated position. Multi-Dimensional eXpressions—the language you use for querying data cubes, which in turn are a way of pre-computing the results of queries on humongous databases so they run faster. I’ve worked a lot with SQL Server 2005, and solved some very difficult programming (T-SQL) problems in it. But I haven’t used the multi-dimensional (cube/OLAP) database features at all. And I was quite open about that: As soon as I asked and found out that it was on the 2005 platform, I told the guy that I probably wasn’t the right person for the job. He persisted a little, so I ended up explaining to him, at a high level, that significant changes have been made to the way in which data cubes are built in SQL Server 2005 (where it’s all drag-and-drop) vs. 2000 (where you had to actually write T-SQL code in stored procedures, which is the only “fun” part of building cubes, and which I had done a lot of). And then he suddenly says, “Can I call you back in ten minutes?” as if he’s just got a call on the other line or something ... and hangs up before I can even say goodbye! Of course, he never did call back, which is fine. But what I can’t believe is that this guy didn’t even have the decency to end the call with an actual “goodbye.” He wastes my cellphone time by leaving such a non-detailed initial message that I had to call him just to find out what the position entailed, and then he can’t spare another five seconds for me. It’s kinda like the time I was walking home from Second City with my long, faux-promiscuous hair bouncing in the ghostly moonlight half a dozen Halloweens ago, and got propositioned by a cheap whore (as opposed to an I.T. recruiter, heh).

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Her: How’re you doing? Me: I’m good. Her: I’ll do you for twenty. I silently weighed the financial, legal, moral, and viral consequences. Her: I’m not expensive. I won’t go below fifteen. Fifteen bucks, geez that’s ... that’s less than the cost of three beers. But then, you can imagine what a three-beer hooker would look like. Me: Thanks, but I’ll have to have to pass. ... and she’s off like a flash to the other side of the street, where the business is hopefully brisker. The last full-time job I had, I was hired to work in OLAP and VB.NET. For a Microsoft Certified Partner located close enough to Rexdale (“Rednecks-dale”) in northwestern Toronto that I received more advice than I could ever possibly use, shouted out of passing pick-up truck windows, about where I and my hair should or shouldn’t be walking. The company owner was an orthodox Jewish man, around my own age, who embodied nearly every positive and negative stereotype of his people. It was like working in Fiddler on the Roof, except his wife had dyed her hair blond, to boost her shiks-appeal. (Shiksa, from the Hebrew term sheketz, meaning “loathsome,” “abomination,” “unclean,” “dirty,” “rodent,” or “lizard.” Nothing in there about being a large-breasted blonde angling for a doctor or lawyer husband, but you get the picture). It’s the only place I’ve ever been employed where it was written into your contract that you couldn’t discuss your salary with your co-workers, on penalty of dismissal. So “Tevye” kinda knew, I think, that he was giving us the short end of the dreidel. Call it “tradition.” The only really good part about working there was that we got Yom Kippur off—the owner’s day of atoning for his

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sins ... most of which, ironically, were probably accrued by him underpaying us during the rest of the year. And by repeatedly promising potential customers features in the software which never quite materialized. If there isn’t an Eleventh Commandment about not promising someone the moon—and then delivering just a piece of stale green cheese—just to make a sale, there should be. Of course, there was the time when he sold him a horse and told him it was only six years old, when it was really twelve. But now, it’s all over, and we live in simple peace and harmony. —Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof In the entire history of that company, they’ve employed exactly two real programmers: myself, and a world-class, Coke-addicted cracker who, on the basis of a chutzpahfilled sales pitch, quit a night-shift .NET job at a major corp to work on a flagship application written in Access 97. I learned at least two things from that malicious hacker. One is that if you want to learn hacking, learn it from the Russians—they’re the best in the world at it. And the other was that the particular Russian who was running our I.T. Department in a manner not unlike a Bolshevik with its head cut off, was the type of person you should try to learn as little from as possible. I had once remarked to Cracker-guy that I was worried that, if I worked there for too long, I’d start picking up the bad coding habits of the other programmers. Near the end of my imprisonment in that gulag, I actually got that confirmed: the Muscovite in charge had decided that, when we finally ported the app to .NET sometime near the end of the twenty-first century, we wouldn’t use structured Try/Catch blocks for error handling, instead sticking with the obsolete, unstructured way of doing things. Why? Because Try/Catch blocks apparently couldn’t do all the “fancy” things we’d need to be doing.

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Granted, the program generated a lot of errors. But still.... To get that job in the first place, Trotsky had worked for several months at the company for free, in 2003. Native-born Canadians can’t compete with that: You’d have to be paying the company for the privilege of working there, to be making less money. But that’s what immigrants will do to get a job here. Even in the midst of our tech “labor shortage.” Not that my own situation was so much better: I had to survive for six months on a federal job-creation partnership, which paid me only $413 a week, to get to a $40K salary— and that was still far less than I had been making at Shitvantex Disloyalty Marketing until mid-2003, doing the data cubes and SalesLogix customizations for them. Of course, according to the economic philosophy of Richard Stallman, being paid so little should have made me enjoy the work more, shouldn’t it? As he put it: If we take away the possibility of great wealth, then after a while, when the people have readjusted their attitudes, they will once again be eager to work in the field for the joy of accomplishment. Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project and the free software movement; his leadership of those has been described as “democracy under a dictatorship.” He actually squatted on the MIT campus for years. So apparently, because he was “happy but poor,” we should all be. The final couple of months I worked under Ivan the Terrible Manager were by far the closest I’ve ever been to clinical depression—having to struggle so much to get the simplest thing done in a morass of undocumented, often-redundant code, and arcane, unexplained business rules which apply nowhere in the world except on a manufacturing-shop floor. With people like him in Mother Russia, you can easily see how the West won the Cold War.

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Finally, one Tuesday afternoon, after Khrushchev had copped an attitude on me in the midst of my quiet loathing of his utterly deficient I.T. knowledge, I just got up and left. Permanently. If you’ve never just walked away from an awful situation that was slowly killing you, know that with each step you take in the February slush, it gets easier to take the next one away from ... Anatevka. “A pot, a pan, a Pentium, a hat.” Or: Sometimes the only way to preserve your (literal) sanity is to do the “irresponsible hippie” thing. Well at least, being perpetually single, when I got home unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon I didn’t have to justify it to Golde. She probably wouldn’t have gone for getting nicely plastered while watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show, anyway. Oh, and regarding the “technical skills shortage” you hear about every now and then: It’s a lie, and there have been studies done to prove that. I graduated with a programming diploma in late 2001 from a private institute in Toronto, and had been working part-time for Shitvantex while in school, so I got back on with them full-time within a few months of graduation ... after being stuck with doing data-entry and filing for a month at UNICEF during their Christmas rush, to pay the bills. Another grad from that class was on contract with a bank for awhile, but was unable to find related work beyond that. A third worked for several months for free for an online gaming company, to get himself in line for paying employment there. A fourth ended up in the porn industry. Doing websites, I mean—not films. Although there was a hot Italian girl with a delicious butt who used to sit in the back row with me, who certainly could’ve.... Anyway, the rest of the class of around fifteen graduates just wrote off the tuition and time as a bad investment, and went on with the search for a different career. One of the guys I worked with at Shitvantex was a young East-European with an amazing knack for storytelling, who

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had both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA. He dumbed-down his resumé to “qualify” for a position which involved mostly just slicing up graphics for web pages and maintaining the ugly company website—it was the only work he could find. For $15 an hour, on a temporary contract. Any public posting of such an entry-level programming position today will receive 500 resumés; that’s been the case for at least half a decade by now. Even at the height of the dot-com boom, less than half of the Comp Sci graduates at the University of California at Davis were able to find programming jobs. Why then do you keep opening the newspaper and finding articles about a non-existent “shortage” of I.T. professionals? Well, according to big business and the blessed governments they’re in bed with like a bunch of fifteen-dollar whores, the industry needs more bodies with different skills than it already has. But of course, it doesn’t really need more bodies, or we wouldn’t already have immigrants (and newly graduated Canadians) working for free. And any junk-food eating geek worth his or her salt (and vinegar) wants to have to learn new, cutting-edge technologies; if they can’t get paid to do that on the job they’ll do it at home, in their spare time. Hell, that’s half the reason why we got into this work in the first place: For the joy of learning, and solving new problems that no one else has ever solved before. If we wanted a job that didn’t require us to think, we would have just taken an MBA. There is no “labor shortage” in the I.T. industry; not a “desperate” one, not even a mild one. There never has been. Not in Canada, and not in the States either. In fact, given the nature of the average red-blooded North American male geek as a porn freak, there will be a porn shortage before there’s a skills shortage in I.T. In the meantime, though, the glut of H-1B visas and their ilk serves very nicely to drive wages down to the point where programmers with a hospitality background (like myself)

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would be better off financially if we just went back to waiting tables ... as opposed to starting at $30-$35K and working sweatshop hours as a junior-level programmer. “And would you like anything to drink with that?” Ah, but then I’d have to cut my hair short, wouldn’t I? You know, to meet the “health regulations.” You can just as easily be a “starving programmer” these days as a “starving artist.” The only difference is that artists have cuter girlfriends, and get out more. Well, back to practicing guitar, then.... June 5 When I was in my early twenties, I remember reading John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me—a nonfiction account of how he passed himself off as a black man in the southern States to document the oppression, humiliation and hopelessness of “niggers” in late-1950s America. I must have been pretty moved by it, because one of the first songs I ever wrote was based on the picture Griffin gave of that despair-filled life: BORN IN POVERTY We were born in poverty We struggled to survive They stacked the decks But the welfare checks Kept us more or less alive In a tenement shoebox On the Lower East Side We were man and a woman Husband and wife Maybe someday we’d have a child And we dreamed of a better life

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‘Cause it was okay to dream And no one could deny That it was okay to dream We were born in poverty We struggled to stay alive The wind would blow And the time stood still ‘Cause his hands were too tired And not having enough to eat It was hard to do what was right When some have so little And some have so much When truth is all black and white And the night coming tenderly And the night coming tenderly Thicker than the smog And darker than the stars In a tenement shoebox On the Lower East Side Lived a welfare woman Her unemployed man And their soon-to-be-born child And they dreamed of a better life ‘Cause it was okay to dream And no one could deny It was still okay to dream And the night coming tenderly And the night coming tenderly Darker than the stars Darkest before the dawn

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Courage to open your eyes Courage to carry on And the night coming tenderly So anyway, I was at the intersection of Bloor and Spadina half an hour before sunset today, waiting for the lights to change. Looking for all the world like Jesus on his way home after a long day of carpentry, wanting nothing more than a hot shower and a soft bed. There were just a few other pedestrians around, including a nondescript, teenage black kid in a football jersey standing behind me on the curb. The “Walk” signal finally shows, and as I stride across Spadina from the 7-11 on the northwest corner, the kid comes right up behind me, and pushes me with his forearm across my upper back, saying “This is what I’m gonna do to you.” It didn’t even put me off balance, and it actually tickled more than it hurt, but still: What the hell is this idiot doing? So I turned around and took a step backward: “Get away from me!” He takes another step toward me, waving his hands around me, like he’s trying to provoke me into hitting him ... so that he’s got an excuse to hit back, I guess. He wants to start a fight? What the hell kind of street cred could there possibly be for some little black shit going around beating up middle-aged hippies? What was he gonna tell his posse? “Yo, this muthafuckin’ old hippie comes at me from outta fuckin’ nowhere, bro. Musta been high on dope or sumthin’....” Anyway, the budding criminal is only around fifteen, and scrawny as hell—I’ve only been in one playground fight my entire life, but I could’ve easily stood my own against him, even being more than twice his age. So I’m sure he’s used to being the one who gets picked on. And he’s got the crookedest front teeth I’ve ever seen. I step back again, away from him: “Get away from me!”

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The jerk finally turns away, showing the big #54 on the back of his jersey—his favorite football player, and probably also his IQ. He walks twenty yards down the street, intermittently looking back at me, suspiciously. The little bastard finally stops and turns around again, and I say to him: “What is wrong with you?” He cups his hand to his ear: “Huh?” “What is wrong with you?” “Fuck off.” And he turns and walks away, yapping on his cell phone. He has money enough for Nikes and a cell phone, but not for braces. And with that kind of inability to prioritize, he’s fit to do what with his life? Maybe manage a McDonald’s? No, not even that. ‘Cause you have to be able to prioritize there, too. So I wearily dragged my white hippie ass up into the dorm, had that hot shower, put on some Pink Floyd, and lay down on my bed under the last rays of a purple-red, kaleidoscopic sunset. Still shaken by that utterly unprovoked black tickle-attack, and pondering the life of a hippie in a shorthaired world. Back when I had a real job, I used to take in some major concerts at the Air Canada Center and in other venues around the city—Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello and the like. And there was always a dirty-blond girl who used to hang around the entrances, offering little sheets with what looked like colorful, circular Avery labels on them. Her face would light right up when she saw me and my long, obviously drugtaking hair coming—I must’ve looked to her like a sure sale. Tripping to Dark Side... On LSD... The light, psychedelically Hip like me.

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Of course, I never actually purchased any of those funny labels from Avery-Girl. In fact, although you wouldn’t know it to look at me, I’ve never even done illicit drugs. (“What, never?” “Well, hardly ever!”—Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore.) Anyway, this whole experience tonight, in being pushed around from behind by Kid Gangsta just because of my long hair and sandals, got me thinking: Maybe it wasn’t the Jews or the Romans that killed Jesus. Maybe it was the blacks. And maybe they didn’t crucify him, ‘cause even though that’s what they really wanted to do to get that no-good Savior off the streets, it would have been way too obvious. Maybe instead they just had some bucktoothed teenage cretin sneak up from behind when the Lord was minding his own business, and push him around, trying to make the Son of God lose his temper and take a swing at the little criminal. But then I thought: Would they really kill one of their own preachers? Because in Revelation, Jesus shows up with brass- or copper-colored feet, which some Afrocentrists take as proof that he was black. And Malcolm X himself said Jesus wasn’t white. So if Morgan Freeman could play God in Bruce Almighty ... and if the Bible is on-side ... well then, good golly, why couldn’t Christ have been black? Nigger Jesus would take some getting used to, though. Almost like if it turned out that Martin Luther King Jr. was really just ... well, Martin Luther. In blackface, at a minstrel show. Still, if the world could live for centuries with a blond, blue-eyed King of the Jews, without batting a Caucasian eye, there’s no reason why we couldn’t get used to a Christmas Story in which three Wise Gangstas followed the Bling of the East to the birthplace of baby Nigger Jesus ... bringing him gifts of a do-rag, a basketball, and a goldplated 9 mm Glock. I should maybe run that whole idea past my cousin Roger.

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Yes, he is black. Adopted by a “good Christian” family— my Aunt Betty and Uncle Henry. They were the nearest neighbors to my family’s homestead south of Winnipeg, so I grew up playing shinny with Rog’ and his older (white) brother, who was my best friend in elementary school—even if he did look a little too much like Ken Dryden of the hated Montreal Canadiens, against my hero, Gerry Cheevers. It would never have occurred to me to judge Roger, or anyone else, on the color of his skin ... or the length or the wooliness of his hair. Much less would I have ever even thought of hurling a racist epithet at such a fine and honest young man—or by now, a fine middle-aged man. That minimal human tolerance and decency, sadly, did not stop other children in that monotonously white and literally retarded community from pushing Roger around and into the brick walls of our local school simply for the color of his skin, as I found out years later. (Thirty percent of the students there today are “special” ones. It’s not a special school; that’s just a product of the inbred gene pool.) Nor did it stop the moron phys-ed instructor from witnessing that abuse, and just laughing it off as if it was some kind of “game.” That was a long time ago, in the ’70s. Yet I know for a fact, from speaking to big-band musicians in Toronto, that there are, to this day, country clubs here where, if you want the gig, you will have to find a white drummer to sit in for your regular one, if the latter happens to be black. With musicians being so consistently “color-blind” in favor of their shared language and culture of music, that exclusion in particular is inexcusable and tragic. Because, whatever you may think of the intelligence of the average drummer, it’s not as though those rich white club members just wanted to have somewhere they could go with their blond trophy wives, without having to worry about being attacked from behind by some 54-IQ criminal whenever they turned their backs.

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Although, if that had been their motivation, I could sort of understand where they were coming from. Because we all deserve to have a place like that. Roger deserved it, and I do too. June 7 The kitchen garbage can is overflowing. Again. The weekly cleaning staff, seeing that situation, tied up the top of the garbage bag so that no more crap could be forced into it. Easily remedied: My roommates tear a hole in the top of the bag, to be able to cram more stuff in. It’s like living with a pack of fucking raccoons. Since I haven’t been using the kitchen for anything except tap water and an occasional turn at the microwave, there ain’t no effin’ way I’m taking out the garbage again for people who are too lazy to do that themselves. Even if it sits there for weeks like that, rotting and stinking. More recently, the white plastic cup which Mango uses as a headwater for his anal waterfall keeps finding its way up onto the sink, by the hot water tap—right where you want it if you’re trying to wash your hands, eh? With his sense of sanitation, I just hope he never ends up working anywhere near a hospital. They’ll end up naming a bacterial epidemic after him: O. mangosis unsanitarius or something. June 8 I was walking back along Bloor after lunch a couple of days ago in my favorite tie-dye, past a friendly young panhandler east of the Dominion supermarket. And as I passed him, he called out to me: “Hey, that’s a great shirt, man. Smoke weed in that shirt!” I laughed. “Thanks.” I also laughed it off when I was out on the edge of the greenspace at Bloor and Spadina practicing guitar tonight,

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and a kind-of-cute blonde walked by with half a dozen of her friends. And as she struts past in high heels on the sidewalk she points me out to her friends, and drops an H-bomb: “Look! A hippie with a guitar!” You can’t say, “Look! A nigger with a basketball!” ‘Cause that would make you a racist. You can’t say, “Look! A dumb blonde with a vagina!” That would make you ... conservative. But drop an H-word, and no one even bats an eye. Even if it’s raging hairism. ‘Cause hippie is the nigger of the world. If I’m in a job interview against two other men, they’ve both got shorter hair than I do; and as soon as the people doing the hiring see that, I’m not even in the running anymore. Be honest: Would you employ an obvious “drug dealer”? So if I hear that H-word coming out of your mouth, you damned well better have hair down past your shoulders, and at least one tie-dye in your closet. We’ve never been kept as slaves, but that’s only because everyone knows you’ll never get an honest day’s work out of a hippie. Right? “Where are the slaves, Bentley?” “They’re still pretty wasted from the acid test last night, sir. Jerry’s tripping out about dissolving into a field of cotton. And that hippie chick you’ve had as a concubine since last winter? She’s pregnant and wants to keep the baby. She’s naming it ‘Moonbeam.’” The U.S. would be a Third World country. Because everyone knows you’ll never get an honest day’s work out of a hippie. That’s what makes it more than a stereotype: It’s just common sense. What have the hippies ever done for the world? You know, aside from Woodstock, environmentalism, recycling, organic foods, the sexual revolution, casual clothes in the workplace, and some of the first multimedia shows as part of the Acid Tests—which the Dead were the official in-house

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band for. Not to mention a good part of the computer revolution: The latest generation of supercomputers, utilizing massive parallel processing, was invented, developed and manufactured by Danny Hillis, a genial longhair who set out to build “a machine that could be proud of us.” Public-key encryption, which can ensure unbreakable privacy for anyone, is the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie, a lifelong peacenik and privacy advocate.... Before Steve Jobs founded Apple Computers he was a Beatle-haired hippie and college drop-out, who went to India looking for spiritual enlightenment and came back wearing traditional Indian clothes with his head shaved. He was also a hacker on the edge of the law, for the “blue boxes” he and Steve Wozniak sold to let people make free long-distance phone calls. Woz actually once used his box to dial Vatican City—identifying himself as Henry Kissinger, and asking to speak to the pope. Sadly, His Holiness was asleep at the time. Wozniak was also “one of us.” As he put it: Everything I was reading about hippies and hippie beliefs in the late 1960s—the free love movement, things like putting flowers in guns—I knew that was me and what I wanted to be. I agreed with every bit of it. I believed, like hippies did, that everybody should be able to get along and help each other out and live out whatever kind of existence they wanted.... I would wear this little Indian headband, and I wore my hair really long and grew a beard. From the neck up, I looked like Jesus Christ. Woz wouldn’t do drugs, though, so the real hippies finally made him stop hanging around with them. Seriously.

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There’s actually an old programmer’s joke about how both LSD and the BSD distribution of Unix came out of Berkeley ... and maybe that’s not just a coincidence. Counterculture icon Ram Dass explains why it really isn’t just a coincidence: My friends from Silicon Valley all used acid, and they took what they learned from psychedelics into technology. The creation of personal computers and the Internet was inspired in part by psychedelics. And that surprises you? Where did you think the “allknowing, talking paperclip” came from? And an interpenetrating network where everything’s connected to everything else, like in the Web of Indra, well that’s just ... groovy, man. Or consider the testimony of James Fadiman, a leading transpersonal psychologist who “studied acid” under a younger and less mystical Dass at Harvard, and later supervised the LSD experiments at Stanford University in the mid’60s: [T]here are a number of rather distinguished, very happy [!] scientists who were involved in our studies. One became a vice president of Hewlett-Packard, another has won every major scientific award that the computer world offers.... If you were to go to a conference that featured the “breakthrough” computer minds from the first wave of computer companies, nearly all of them were deeply affected by psychedelics. Steve Jobs, for one, experimented with LSD, calling his experiences with that drug “one of the two or three most important things” he had done in his life. And then there were the psychedelic experiences of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s Wilson volunteered to become a research subject for Sidney Cohen, a physician on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine, and one of the world’s leading medical psychedelic researchers. After several profound and transformative LSD experiences facilitated by Cohen and his research psychologist, Betty Eisner, Wilson proposed to the Board of Directors of Alcoholics Anonymous that the psychedelic treatment model be incorporated into the AA approach.... [H]e asserted that psychedelics offered a safe and efficacious pathway to recovery from alcohol addiction. Could anything be more outta sight? It’s like, Psychedelics Anonymous, man. Stoners and hippies in I.T. and AA are one thing. But, potheads and Deadheads in politics? Christ—is there any group you’d want less to have a say in running a country? Well, tell that to Tony Blair, who played in a Deadinspired band in his student days (as did musician Bruce Hornsby—different band, though). Tell it to Senator Patrick Leahy, Al and Tipper Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Al Franken, John Kerry, or fellatio expert Bill Clinton himself—Deadheads, every one of ‘em. And on the other side of the political spectrum, there’s Ann Coulter, the pundit Tucker Carlson, and Clinton’s Monica-gate nemesis, Kenneth Starr. “I did not ‘rock and roll’ with that woman.” Even if us hippies meddle occasionally in politics, though, we thankfully tend to steer clear of the business world. Well, except for maybe Jerry Greenfield—of Ben & Jerry’s fame; hence the world’s all-time best flavor of ice cream, Cherry Garcia. And Larry Page, co-founder of Google. Plus Mitch Kapor, of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet fame—and a former Transcendental Meditation® teacher to boot. Maybe he’s not even a full-blown Deadhead, but he still co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the other Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow. (Barlow was also on the Board of

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Directors of the WELL—the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, an early [1985] online discussion board co-founded by Wired magazine father and Acid Test-organizer Stewart Brand, and home to the original Craigslist. He was also—if you can believe this—a campaign manager in Dick Cheney’s run for Congress in 1978.) There’s also a guy Coulter mentions who made candles to sell at Grateful Dead shows, whose “daily routine consisted of waking up, smoking a bowl, and turning on the Rush Limbaugh radio show while he made his candles.” But hey, that could be exactly how Greenfield and Page got started! June 13 Fat Einsteins is the oldest open (music) stage in Canada. It’s been going since around the time the Leafs last won the Stanley Cup. That’s a long time. It used to be held in the basement of a church somewhere up on Bloor, but now it’s in the Stonecutters’ Union building, south of the U of T. There’s a lot of predictably prounion stuff on the walls which I can half-sympathize with, and the best coffee and cookies this side of Yonge Street, provided by the longtime host, Martha. I’ve played there on Wednesday nights for the past four or five weeks, doing the standard two songs. I’m always the youngest person there, but age notwithstanding there’s always at least a handful of phenomenally talented artists playing who should be getting paid for their skills. They just never had the luck or the breaks, and also never set themselves up with a “safety net” in case the one-in-a-million chance at being the next Dylan or James Taylor or Cat Stevens didn’t work out. So they wind up working as nightwatchmen at museums, even when they could have breezed through university if they had ever tried. The open stage is normally held in the basement of the building, but we got displaced tonight by some Important Union Meetings or the like, so it’s up on the third floor instead.

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I sat and listened to the other acts for the first forty-five minutes, and then felt the coffee coming through. So, just to lighten my load before getting up on stage myself, I went in search of the familiar washroom in the basement. I got down the stairs alright, but then, as I turned toward the facilities off the hallway, a black man in drab green clothes, who had been blending in with the darkness in the recesses of an unlit side room, rose from his chair and came out to confront me. “You thought you could just walk right by me?” I stopped walking. “Huh?” “Get out of the building.” If the value of a human being can be measured by the sheer quantity of keys he carries around with him, this man was a king. Yet with one glance at him, you could guess there’s no way in hell he ever even made it out of high school, not even as a shops-class graduate. More puzzled than anything, I responded politely: “May I ask what your name is, and who your employer is.” “No.” “What is your name, and who is your employer?” “Get out of the building.” Increasingly shaken, I figured explaining myself might help: “All I want is to use the washroom before I play at Fat Einsteins.” My throat was getting dry. “You can use the bathroom on the third floor,” he said coldly. “Fine. I didn’t know there was one up there.” I turned away, and as I walked back up the stairs, increasingly seething at this decrepit asshole’s refusal to treat me with even basic human decency, I talked back at him: “You’re a waste of space.” He started to chuckle. “I don’t know about that.” “You’re a waste of space! Little bigot!”

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So I found the washroom at the end of the hall three floors up, and tried to calm myself down. You can’t fingerpick guitar while your hands are shaking. Then, back in the room, I got up on stage, played my song—there were enough latecomers that they cut it back to one song each by the end—and left as they were stacking the chairs. “God’s Gift to Security” was back to lurking in his dark room by the exit. And getting paid for it. I hissed back at him as I went out the glass front doors: “Zero!” Because that, in my estimation, is all the chance which that dismal mass of protoplasm has of doing anything that will ever matter in the world. But then, advertising his name doesn’t seem to be a high priority for that unionized vegetable anyway. It was his job to protect that property from “probable drug dealers” such as myself? Maybe so. But then it was also his job to identify himself when I twice asked him politely to do so. Unless, you know, there’s some cowardly, hide-behind union rule that says he doesn’t have to. Like I’ve seen Toronto Transit ticket-takers at Spadina Station cop out on, and read about Air Canada security ninnies doing, too. Pack of overpaid, gutless pretenders, tripping over all the regal power of their laughable keys and uniforms. Anyway, I suppose tonight was no worse, objectively, than my bathroom experiences with a couple of uptight Chinese girls in the first place I rented in Toronto, nearly a decade ago—another basement, but one that I ended up being effectively confined to, rather than barred from. The landlord there had grown up in the house, and his father still lived on the main floor, assisted on a daily basis by several nurses. Being literally senile, the old man truly needed the help. I went up to the second-floor bathroom one afternoon to shower in around ten pounds of water pressure. Then, coming back down without my glasses, I had to step around a

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puddle of yellow liquid on the kitchen floor. With the old man grinning stupidly over it, by the sink. Yellow liquid ... hmm, that wasn’t there when I.... Omigod. Hence the smell of urine which hung in the air twentyfour hours a day. Hence also the dried feces I found one evening while moving furniture around in the corner of my room. There was actually a university-age guy with long hair living on the second floor, along with a pasta-for-brains Italian doofus, and the four petite Chinese breasts. Nevertheless, that proximity to long hair apparently didn’t desensitize the girls to it all that much: After I had used the bathroom one afternoon and said “Hi” to them for the first time, those same two Asian chicks went to the landlord, hysterically complaining about the “long-haired man” (i.e., me) who was using their bathroom. So, as soon as his plumber-friend could complete it, I ended up showering in an exposed bathtub in the middle of an unfinished (and barely heated) basement. In the middle of winter. Shivering my Occidental ass off. And then just to be sure there was no confusion, the little chopsticks put up a sign on the second-floor bathroom door: “This is the girls bathroom, boys should use the one downstairs,” etc. Except, of course, that the other guys in the house were still welcome to use “their” bathroom: It was only me that wasn’t allowed to “squat in their paddy field.” There is a lesson in all that: Importing the people means importing their prejudices as well. This is a problem that modern liberals find difficult to understand. They say “Let’s overcome our prejudices and let in all these people from China”.... Then the people from China turn out to have prejudices of their own. If you ever check out an online dating site like match .com that encourages its users to state their preferences,

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you’ll find that a noticeably disproportionate number of the Asian women posting there list long hair as a “turn-off.” Of course, they’re entitled to be turned on, off, or sideways by whatever their spit-polished vaginas prefer. Even if, you know, they’re just blindly reflecting the conformity and intolerance of “outsiders” which is sadly typical of Far-Eastern cultures. (It’s actually all very predictable, since neither totalistic communism nor the feudalism and infallible Divine Emperor [i.e., national cult-leader] which the loyal Japanese lived under until slightly more than half a century ago have any tolerance for individuality or the questioning of authority.) But, studies have been done showing that persons who are rated as attractive tend to make more money than those who are seen as unattractive. And some of the guys and dolls (Asian and otherwise) who are prejudiced against long hair on men—thus rating us as inherently unattractive, for being all-turned-off by that attribute—find their way into hiring and decision-making positions in the business world. What happens then? Obviously, that’s going to result in lower wages being paid to persons like myself, even aside from any other accepted biases against us hippies. That is, the “little yellow prejudices” (as Inspector Clouseau would have said) of these people are not only costing me any chance at living out an Asian fetish, and preventing me from using the bathroom in a house where I’m paying my full share of the rent, they’re costing me money and career opportunities, too. We have laws against that, right? No? Oh. When I think back on how, a couple of decades ago, the Chinese people in general were being mocked by North American comedians as being “a billion people, all of them with the same haircut,” it fills me with many different emotions. Sympathy is not one of them.

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June 20 Played the open stage at new-ton’s for the first time tonight, on College just south of the U of T. It’s the pub for the student crowd, but predictably empty over the summer. There was an amazing father-and-son duo onstage just before me—Richard and Paul. A couple of fantastic guitarists and songwriters, in the style of early Bruce Cockburn. So we hit it off quite nicely, complimenting each other’s music and having a few beers together. This must be what networking feels like. June 22 Kitchen garbage overflowing again. Again. The cleaners underlined the relevant rules in the sheet on the wall. No effect. The next week, they left a separate note on the wall. Nothing. The week after, they underlined each word in the note they had written. And circled the points on the rules sheet. Again. And again. (By now, those two sheets have black, red and green marker ink on them from three different weeks.) Nada. I happened to come out of my room when the cleaning staff was around, and they gently asked me whether I knew that it wasn’t their job to take the kitchen garbage out! The raccoons know how to deal with all that, though, without actually stooping to the level of cleaning up their own filth in our shared area: The lazy fools start chucking their orange peels into the bathroom garbage can. The cleaning staff instructs us, writing in large letters on that bathroom garbage can, that we are not to put kitchen garbage into it. What do the raccoons do then? They start their own personal trash heap in the kitchen, right next to the garbage can there, for all of their bulky stuff—juice cartons, cereal/

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pizza boxes, etc. At one time, that garbage heap was nearly as high as the garbage can itself. And I know that the pizza boxes are from Mango the Unsanitary Wonder Raccoon—I’ve seen him bringing them in from the elevator. The garbage chute is at most fifteen steps down the hall. But O. mangosis ain’t usin’ it, no way, no how. ‘Cause no one, not even the cleaning staff whose job it is to keep the place sanitary, is gonna tell that (psychologically) prerational, inconsiderate, door-slamming (starting at 6:30 a.m. nearly every morning) boor how to behave. His mommy obviously never taught him properly in the first place; and she’s not around here to wipe his ass (and toilet seat) for him anyway. And I always thought I was a slob. I have to move out by August 25th anyway, so I might as well start looking. June 27 I was happily practicing guitar today near midnight on my favorite streetcorner. A young black guy sat down on a bench ten yards away, and started laughing out loud, continuously, while looking at me. So I figured he was either high on crack or had mental problems; therefore, I just kept on playing, at a safe distance. That goes on for five or more minutes, until he stops laughing and instead starts talking continuously—loud enough so I can tell he’s saying something, but not so loud that I could what it was. All while looking straight at me. His message being what, exactly? Well, whatever it was, I had done nothing to provoke it: A few innocent glances at a nut who’s behaving oddly are not provocation. Oddly, he stopped that bizarre harassment only when a group of four guys (one black, one Rasta, and two others)

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came up to me, addressed me as “Music Guy,” shook my hand ... and asked me if I knew where they could get some ganja. Because, as everyone knows, anyone with hair this long.... Like they say: What Would Jesus Smoke? July 2 Walking back along Bloor after a sub-sandwich lunch today, I passed a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk. With some felt-pen writing on it. Ever the curious little observer, I stopped, circled back, and bent over to read what it said. “Will fuck for a ride.” In what was obviously a girl’s handwriting. Well, I hope she got a good “ride” out of that. “Paradise by the dashboard light,” and all. Makes me wish I still had a car. Public transit just doesn’t have the same effect on women. I’ve never hitchhiked. Ever. The closest I’ve come is rereading Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy every few years. So it’s not surprising that I’ve never been picked up by, say, even one redneck who had a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the hippie, or had a stereotyped image of the hippie as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied. Specifically, no hick or Bay Street MBA has ever ended up wanting me to expose myself to him, saying he had never seen a hippie naked. For that, I am extremely grateful. Still, it does bring up the whole issue of male genital size and its purposes. Ejaculated sperm can live for from two to seven days in the vaginal tract—they are not ones to “go gentle into that dark night.” Unless, of course, they were released as a prod-

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uct of tender lovemaking. In the dark night. In which case they might well have gone there gently enough. So, if there’s jizz in a given Happy Place from more than one lucky “donor” at any given time, the more spunk that came from Guy #1, the more likely he’ll be the father, passing his genes onto the offspring. Hence the development of larger male genitalia among groups of animals where there are higher degrees of “parental uncertainty.” Chimpanzees, for example, are extreme sluts—far worse than hippie chicks in the ’60s. While human females average 1.1 male sex partners per birth, chimp females average thirteen. Conversely, the male chimps’ ratio of testicle size to body weight is more than three times that of human males. That’s what happens when you’re a society of chimppimps and monkey-whores. It works the same way for us “naked apes,” though. So basically, the only way you could ever get notably largerthan-average male genitalia in any relatively isolated group of human mammals is if both the men and the women there had been sexually promiscuous (and too dumb to invent or use contraception) for many generations. Which is why it really surprised me to read, in Dan Savage’s syndicated “Savage Love” column a few years after I moved to Toronto, of a young black woman who was lamenting how she was “used to ‘brothas’ who have larger, longer-lasting ‘equipment’” than her current, small-dicked white boyfriend. (Dan’s response: “Break up with this boy and go find yourself a long-lasting, big-dicked, freaked-out brotha.”) Racist stereotypes never die easily, do they? Least of all when it comes to black people. Especially, well-hung blacks like Jesse Jackson (affair with a staffer, resulting in a child, Ashley) and Al Sharpton. In their attitudes toward white people, I mean. Sharpton, for example, was quoted as saying to an audience at Kean College in 1994 that “White folks was [sic] in caves while we was [sic] building empires ... We taught phi-

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losophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them [sic] Greek homos ever got around to it.” The irony there is that one of the major “black history” claims of contemporary Afrocentrists is that Socrates himself was black. Which would presumably mean that blacks not only invented philosophy, mathematics, and bad grammar, but homosexuality too. Reverend Jackson, for his own part, apparently channeling his inner “eighth dwarf,” led students around Stanford University in 1988 chanting, “Hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ [as a required liberal-arts course] has got to go”—an event “considered by some critics to mark the coming-of-age of academic political correctness.” Jackson is also a “friend and ally” of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. That Nation teaches that black people were the original humans, and that whites are only “potential humans.” Plus some even more out-of-this-world ideas, from a Meet the Press interview with Farrakhan in 1997: [Tim Russert:] Henry Louis Gates ... asked you whether you still subscribe to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad on Yakub, a black scientist who 6,600 years ago created the white man, and that by the end of the twentieth century, a spaceship will come and rain down upon white people and people who don’t embrace Islam. Do you subscribe to the teachings of Yakub, that Yakub, the black scientist, created the white man? [Farrakhan:] I subscribe to every word that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us. Until Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in 1964, knowing his life was in danger for doing that—he was assassinated in 1965—he promoted the same science-fiction teachings. And more:

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White people are born devils by nature.... Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people.... Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want strong coffee, you ask for black coffee. And when you’re eating fish, you ask for white wine. So? This is genetic science? Like, Gregor Mendel meets Juan Valdez? Elsewhere, Farrakhan labeled the Jews, Palestinian Arabs, Koreans and Vietnamese as “bloodsuckers,” for allegedly taking from the black community but giving nothing back in return. Farrakhan later confirmed that he is neither a racist nor anti-Semitic. Enlarging on that same theme in a speech in 1994, the Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam claimed: “Murder and lying comes easy for white people.” Enlarging even further on that theme, in 1992 filmmaker Spike Lee stated: A lot of people will have to do a lot of explaining on AIDS one day. All of a sudden, a disease appears out of nowhere that nobody has a cure for, and it’s specifically targeted at gays and minorities (i.e., Hispanics and blacks). The mystery disease, yeah, about as mysterious as genocide. I’m convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn’t just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out. A year earlier, comedian Bill Cosby had reportedly claimed that the same illness was “started by human beings to get after certain people they don’t like”—you know, like formerly cutting-edge comics starring in lame, 1980s, father-

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knows-best sitcoms. And, in the July 1999 issue of Vanity Fair, Will Smith floated the idea that “possibly AIDS was created as a result of biological-warfare testing.” All of which makes Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s probable plagiarizing of his own doctoral thesis, and his “notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than his wife,” look pretty mild by comparison, doesn’t it? On the other hand, Farrakhan’s former chief spokesperson, Khallid Muhammad, may have had a point when he allegedly said: “The old no-good Pope—you know that cracker [i.e., honky, not a malicious hacker], somebody needs to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there.” Not to be outdone, in January of 1984 Jesse Jackson reportedly referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” We all remember Hymie the robot from the classic Get Smart TV series, along with agents 86 and 99. Yes, Hymie was based on now-obsolete analog technology, with that ¼-inch reel-to-reel tape in his chest. But somehow, that made him all the more loveable than anything Asus or Intel have put out since then. But if, as Reverend Jackson has indicated, Hymie-like robots already control the political process and the media in Gotham City, what’s next? Hollywood? What will our culture look like in ten or twenty years, if the “Hymies” of the world are allowed to surreptitiously foist their special-interest robot politics on us, via movie screens across North America? A chilling thought. Yet it’s already happening. Star Wars’ R2-D2 and C-3PO. RoboCop. Terminator. Bicentennial Man. Star Trek’s Mr. Data. Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. All of them, clear evidence of the “Hymie” bias in Hollywood. All of them, clear attempts at generating sympathy for the “Hymie” agenda. So, in that context, Jackson doesn’t seem half so paranoid as you might otherwise have thought, does he? No moreso, at least, than the average B-movie “town-crazy,” who

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tried his best to warn the people around him about the latest alien danger. Um, but regarding “them Greek homos” ... the phrase “Emergency Cancellation Archimedes” comes to mind. July 11 Spent the hot ‘n’ sticky, heat-wave afternoon practicing guitar in the greenspace at Bloor and Spadina, sneaking peeks at a gorgeous blonde sitting on the grass in a wonderfully short skirt. A girl in the midst of an hour-long, highly distraught cellphone call, no doubt trying to control the latest emotional roller-coaster in her very active, sugar-baby love-life. After awhile a bearded, congenial, fifty-something panhandling white guy stopped by and asked me to play some Gordon Lightfoot. So he sang along with “Christian Island,” and then mentioned that he didn’t get much sleep last night. It turns out that the other guys in the boarding house kept waking him by sneaking into his room and sitting in his chair, to enjoy the cool temperatures. He has air conditioning, you see. I’m sweating through the sheets in student housing seven nights a week, and a guy who spends his days begging for loose change—he’s a fixture outside the local Dominion supermarket—is sleeping in air-conditioned comfort. Obviously, life on the streets isn’t quite as tough as I might have imagined. It’s like a snippet of conversation I overheard back in the summer of 2001, walking up Yonge just north of Dundas in that sweltering heat. A bum dressed better than I was on the sidewalk says, to any pedestrians in earshot: “Can anyone spare two bucks for an ice-cold beer?” Well, a passing guy in a business suit had the right answer: “Fuck off.”

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I’ve only asked for money from a stranger once in my life—when I was down in L.A. the first time for that yoga-cult’s annual convocation. Just from my own country-mouse naïvete I got taken in by a garden-variety confidence trickster I met at the airport, and wound up without even money for bus fare. So after asking a businessman for help and getting brushed off, I spent a night sleeping on the padded barbenches inside the Bonaventure Hotel, after enjoying a dinner of pretzels somebody had left behind on an adjacent table. The begging part was humiliating enough that I wouldn’t do it again. My second time in L.A. was the only time I’ve ever gotten mugged. In broad daylight. Again from my own naïvete and excessively trusting nature. And yes, the mugger was black, and a liar to boot: he actually tried to tell the local security men that I had tried to steal his money (and the traveler’s checks he had in his hands ... with, you know, my name on them). Anyway, the present “homeless” guy with the A/C kept bugging me to borrow my guitar, and actually told me he was “pissed off” with me when I politely refused. According to him, he could play better than me, but his own guitar was in a pawn shop so he could buy a present for his daughter’s birthday. Well, I can tell you what I’d do if I ever found myself in his situation: Get ahold of a cheap, used guitar, and then busk my ass off. There’s a guy named Memphis who regularly plays at Bloor and Bathurst with an axe and amp. I bumped into him at the Fox and Ferret and Fiddle and Firkin bar on Spadina over the summer, he saw my guitar, and we got to talking a little about open stages and the like. He pays his rent just by playing blues licks on a streetcorner, four nights a week. (He used to only have to do two, but “times got tough.”) No way is he living in luxury, but still, he’s getting by.

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I asked him how it works over the brass-monkey winter months. You know what he told me? That there was only one night in the previous winter when he couldn’t do his gig—it was so cold that his guitar kept going out of tune. Aside from that, he buys cheap woolen gloves for his hands, and just does what it takes to get by—giving something valuable back to the distinct culture of the city in the process, rather than just being a burden on others. That’s why I personally don’t give money to panhandlers. Ever. Well, except that I once gave $20 to a disabled guy outside the Dominion by Ryerson University around Christmastime. And a couple of years ago I was out in Scarborough, and a frazzled guy approached me on the street, saying he was in town from Oshawa, his transmission had broken down, and he had no money. So, since I didn’t have any change on me, I gave him a subway token. From the grit on his hands when he shook mine, there was no doubt he wasn’t just making the story up. There was no mistaking his genuine gratitude, either: He said he had previously asked “three hundred people” for help, and they had all just told him to fuck off. But those were the exceptions in a decade of “hardheartedness.” Because there’s always a better way to find food and shelter than outright begging, if you just keep looking and can muster even just a thimbleful of pride and ambition. July 18 Played at new-ton’s again, with Paul and Richard. Not only are they two of the most talented musicians I’ve met, they’re fantastically generous people—to the point of offering to record a demo of my songs with me in their home studio. Cool.

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July 20 Various grubby people keep trying to borrow my guitar over in the greenspace at Bloor-Spadina, and I don’t even want them to touch it ‘cause I don’t know when they last washed their hands. So I’ve had to find a new practice space. Turns out there’s a courtyard hidden behind the Woodsworth student residence—just past “Rochdale” on Bloor, at the east-west center of the university campus. The high-rise catches all the breeze from the north and funnels it down to behind the building, so it’s like practicing in a wind tunnel. But it’s also sheltered from traffic noise, which is a welcome change. It also turns out to be a very good place to meet girls: A cute blond Russian and a sweet Asian (named Miho) who plays the clarinet have already come over to my bench to ask if they could listen, and of course I would never be so impolite as to refuse that pleasure to them. (Like a lot of the people in the U of T residences over the summer, they’re here on a sort of “cultural exchange/learning English” trip.) There’s also an amazingly friendly Japanese guy with shoulderlength hair, who flatteringly doesn’t miss a chance to come down, say hi, and smoke a cigarette or two while I play. All I can say is he must really love music. And nicotine. A few nights ago I was playing at 2:30 a.m. on the street outside that building. And a very fetching, brunette Irish lass, with whiskey on her breath, stopped by with her friends to ask me whether I was high. My songs, you see, were so mellow, and my hair so very long, that she had difficulty believing I had both my feet on the ground. So, stumbling back to Innis College most nights of the week since then—delightfully befitting their Irish heritage— they’ve been stopping by my practicing-spot, for us to all sing “Patio Lanterns” together. It was actually their specific song request, which I hadn’t played before.

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The chords are easy enough, but I was surprised that they had even heard of Kim Mitchell: He had a couple of hits back when I was in university half a lifetime ago, but now he’s mostly just working as a local FM deejay. “They play ‘Patio Lanterns’ in Ireland?” I asked. “No, we’ve just heard it on the radio since we got here.” Ah yes, Canadian content. The path to provincial/national stardom for many a north-of-the-49th act. Affirmative action for music. Back in the ’60s, there were real prejudices against playing homegrown acts on Canadian radio—you had to make it in the States before they’d spin your stuff here. So, our groundbreaking artists did what they had to do: They toured their beaver asses off, across America the Beautiful. That’s how Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, The Guess Who, Neil Young (with Buffalo Springfield) and many other pre-Cancon stars built an international following just on the basis of the quality of their work, without any government handouts or meddling regulations. In the early ’70s, however, thanks to lobbying and testimony from, among others, Lighthouse bandleader Skip Prokop, the federal government got involved—via the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Ultimately, they mandated a minimum percentage of “Canadian content” on our airwaves and TV—around 30%, plusor-minus, depending on the context. What happens when you create a setup like that? The same thing as happens with any quota system: It drives the overall quality down, forcing DJs to play wanna-be, borderline Canadian acts instead of worthy international ones. Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night.” You’ve never heard of it? That’s because you didn’t grow up in Canada in the 1980s. Just a typical, one-hit “Cancon rock star,” whose “success” is (rightly) cheapened by the fact that he needed quotas to do it. What else happens? Artists like Bryan Adams, Avril, Shania, Alanis “Analingis” Morissette and Furry Neltado (sic), who have already made it big internationally, are still treated as if

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they were “persecuted minorities” in the music business. So, they still get the extra exposure, even though they’re long past the point of needing it. After all, as a twenty-first century Wolfman Jack, why would you spin a platter from a risky, developing act when, on the flip side, you could have a “safe” one in your rotation instead? The answer, of course, is that you wouldn’t. That’s why, just a few years ago, Arcade Fire couldn’t get airplay on Canadian radio stations until after they were touted as rising stars by the American music media. It’s why Daniel Powter was a cheesy persona non gratin (sic) in Great White Radioland, until after he topped-of-the-pop charts in Europe. And it’s all part of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy: Among the cheering crowd that day [in May of 1971, for a Crowbar show in Perth, Ontario] was Pierre Trudeau and his wife, Margaret. After the show, Crowbar presented the prime minister with a plaque that read, “Thank you for making it possible through the CRTC for Canadians to be heard in their own country.” According to [Crowbar vocalist Kelly] Jay, two of the band members also handed the buckskin-jacketed Trudeau—an admitted Crowbar fan—something extra. “Roly and Rheal slipped him an envelope with five primo joints of home-grown,” chuckles Jay, “telling him, ‘there’s a little Canadian treat for you and Margaret to enjoy.’ Thank God the Mounties didn’t intercept it.” It was even funnier—depending on what you’ve been smoking—when the born-in-Ontario Bryan “Summer of ’69” Adams collaborated with the white British-Zimbabwean producer Robert “Mutt” Lange (now Shania’s ex) on Waking Up the Neighbors in 1984 ... and the finished album wasn’t “Canadian enough” to qualify as Cancon. So the government had to change the rules: You now only have to be “halfCanadian” to qualify for preferential treatment.

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At that rate, some day just having “one drop” of Canadian talent will be enough. Even Sirius Canada has to offer additional Canadianproduced channels, with near-exclusive Cancon on each of those, to broadcast the rest of their channel lineup in Canuckistan. If you want Howard Stern, you’ve gotta put up with Howard Hampton (provincial NDP leader), and the nearlydead (well, he’s in his mid-eighties), squeaky-voiced former hockey-analyst Howie Meeker, too. Kidding. Plus, TV shows which are shot in Canada even while being intended for the American market (e.g., Stargate SG-1, and the old X-Files) qualify as Cancon for Canadian stations. Not that we’re alone in setting government quotas for artistic content: the Philippines, Ireland, South Africa, Jamaica, the United Kingdom and New Zealand all do it. So does Australia. And what do you want to bet they have exactly the same problems with their quotas as we do? How could they not? On the bright side, at least we don’t have “musical affirmative action” for jazz or reggae. Not yet, anyway.... July 23 Played a couple of songs at the Free-Love Café open stage on College Street tonight. Been there before, many times. Put my guitar back in its case in the corner after the deserved applause, and found an empty chair near the back of the room. Ho-hum. And then the Sugar Magnolia in the seat in front of me— who must have just come in during my set, ‘cause I hadn’t seen her before, and I definitely would have noticed—turned around, leaned into my ear, and asked me where I got my guitar. Well, this is a nice surprise.

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Turns out she used to sell ‘em, and had stopped in at the café on her way home from working in an office somewhere. “In what capacity?” I asked. “Uh ... to pay the rent?” That’s okay; I don’t need to use “capacity” ever again in casual conversation. Mental note. We were both thirsty, so I followed her brown eyes, white stretch pants, Puma sneakers and minimal chest out to the bar in the front room. It’s okay: What she lacks in “lovely lady lumps” she makes up for in luxurious, cascading dark-brown hair, and curves everywhere else they should be. I can deal with that. Plus, if it wasn’t for the worry-lines in her forehead, she could easily have passed for being in her late twenties. So from the angle of my forty-one years there’s enough of a “robbing the cradle” angle there to already make me smile. She sampled the Amsterdam Nut Brown at the bar, and quickly turned up her nose: “Ugh, no. Something lighter.” “Hey, don’t dis my favorite beer in the whole world!” “I wasn’t dissing it,” she smiled. “I just want a different one.” So then I with my Nut Brown, and she with her Natural Blonde, sat back down together against the wall in the corner of the back room. “This is cute.” She touched the left breast of my eggplant-colored Loreena McKennitt shirt—from the “Mummer’s Dance” single, with the name of my favorite harpist stenciled on the front. “Actually, Loreena grew up in southern Manitoba, which is also where I grew up, and when she was in high school and my uncle was teaching band class, he claims to have taught her to play the flute.” “Hmm,” she said. “That’s sure something to claim.” Okay, I can’t read that at all. You’re not calling Uncle Pete a liar, are you? He’s a hog farmer and a conservative politician, for god’s sake—and a damned fine Christian in both jobs. He wouldn’t have lied about that.

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Well, like any guy over thirty-five, I’m fighting the “battle of the bulge,” and not entirely winning. But I’ve still got a low enough body mass index that I’m only good for two pints before I start saying and doing things I wouldn’t do when I’m sober. And this was my third. And this girl kept leaning over into my ear to talk, and there’s just something about a woman’s hot breath, even beer-breath—hell, especially beer-breath—in a guy’s ear.... So I casually slid over against her, my thigh against hers, and put my left arm around her waist. She didn’t resist. “Mmm. That’s better, isn’t it?” I murmured. And she started playing with my hair. Running her fingers in circles around the back of my head, down my neck, and onto my spine. Maybe it’s just part of being a vertebrate—I’m sure jellyfish wouldn’t react the same way. But there’s nothing that drives me crazy—in a James Brown, “I feel good!” kind of crazy, Troggs wild-thing way—like a woman’s agile fingers dancing up and down my spine. “Your name’s Geoff?” “Yeah. What’s yours?” “Jennifer.” She took her hand out of my hair and shifted uncomfortably away from me on the seat. “If you don’t know my name, you shouldn’t have your arm around me.” Ah, yes. Shit. “I know it now,” I said, putting on my best Muppet face. I have a theory—admittedly a flawed one—that you can always do worse things when hoping to fix a mistake and score with a cute girl than put on an innocent, hopeful Muppet face. I’m not the only one, either: Apparently they have really wild Christmas parties on the set of Sesame Street. The puppeteers spend the rest of the year at work pretending to be asexual, and after a few drinks it just all boils over. Not surprising: Tickle Me Elmo was always foreplay waiting to happen; and then you’ve got Cookie Monster singing “C is for condom/That’s good enough for me,” and Snuffleupagus givin’ the long, phallic trunk to Big Bird....

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Anyway, Jennifer got up and put her jacket on, while I finished my beer, with all the nonchalance I could muster, wondering how to pull this thing back out of the frying pan and into the fire. “You live up on Bloor?” she asked. “Yeah.” “That’s on my way home. I’ll walk with you.” Yes! So I grabbed my guitar, and we headed outside together. And as we turned north along Spadina she asked me what kind of music I liked. “Well, I grew up listening to Genesis and Jethro Tull in high school. Boston’s still my all-time favorite band: Tom Scholz is a freakin’ genius. Enya. Gordon Lightfoot, Paul Simon.” “You know what Lightfoot song I like?” she said. “‘The Circle is Small.’ I think it’s neat how he tells the story of a woman who’s cheating on him, without coming right out and accusing her.” She took my hand and intertwined her fingers with mine, and we walked along silently, enjoying the heavy night air and the hormonal companionship. And as we crossed Harbord a few minutes later, halfway up to Bloor, she said: “Let go.” I was trying to, but it was such a hot and humid night that our fingers stuck together, and the knuckles held them in place, so she seemed kind of frantic about that until we got untangled. “I just wanted to see how it felt,” she explained. We turned east on Bloor, and walked further along. A lot further. “Haven’t we already passed your place?” she asked. “That’s okay, I’m not ready to go to sleep anyway.” So we somehow got onto the topic of my cult experience, i.e., the decade of my life, including the time at Hidden Valley, that I wasted believing in fairy tales purveyed by

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a yogi who also managed to fool George Harrison, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, Jon Anderson (of Yes) and Madonna. “How did you fall for all that?” she wondered. “You seem like a pretty smart guy.” Yeah. I am. So at the end of a half-hour walk we got to her building. She showed me the view from the roof, and we ended up back in the lobby, sitting and talking. And then one thing led to another, and before long we were kissing, caressing, and writing JavaScript code. Variable declarations, simple functions ... all the things you never get to talk about with a girl, but which Jennifer was actually interested in. Most of all, she wanted to know how to get the width of a browser window in client-side script. Geez, I haven’t done that in ages. “It’s something like a width property off the window object, or the screen object. If you have Internet access in your apartment, I could look it up.” Hint, hint. “I’ve got a dog.” I shrugged. “I’m good with animals.” “The last guest I had up there got bitten.” “Couldn’t you just lock it in the closet?” “He barks at strangers. All the neighbors would complain.” Damn that dog! “You must be getting tired anyway,” she said. “No, I’m trying to get my body used to a musician’s schedule—getting up after noon, and staying up ‘til four or five in the morning.” “It seems to be working.” So we talked, and kissed—she’s a very good kisser—and cuddled, and she called me her “Code Man,” and I wrote some more JavaScript until she had to go to bed for work the next morning. So I got her email address, and leaned in to kiss her goodnight—hardly an excessively forward move, considering how we had spent the last couple of hours. But

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she turned away at the last moment, so we just hugged instead. And I did the long, slow walk home at 3 a.m. in the mandolin rain, falling into bed alone. The ancient Greek philosopher-beggar Diogenes once masturbated in the Athenian agora—their “place of assembly.” When other people there rebuked him for jerking off in public, he replied: “If only it was as easy to soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” Great, now I’m hungry, too.... July 24 Emailed Jennifer the window-width code snippets. Grabbed a sub sandwich for lunch. And then kicked pensively around the cobblestones, trying to figure out the “cold feet” I’m already feeling. “The morning-after blues,” as Gord sang in “Carefree Highway.” Except, of course, that it’s not really a “morning after.” It just feels like one. I was reading a bunch of biographies of Albert Einstein last month, and this came up in one of them: In one unguarded moment, [Einstein] confessed to me that each personal tie was a form of torture for him, that each bond was often intolerable. As he put it, “every handcuff bothers me.” When he said this, I asked him, “Suppose that you had an intelligent wife who would stay in the background and have an understanding for everything that you feel and who would leave you alone and would not restrict you or put limitations on you in any way. Would you then have been happy?” Einstein smiled broadly at my utopian suggestion and said, “Of course I would!” Aside from that angel meekly staying in the background, which is the precise opposite of what I’d want, that’s exactly it: The handcuffs, the personal ties. Having to give up even

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the smallest part of your independence, and your precious physical and mental space. When Einstein was just a teenager but already thinking about the ideas which later produced his theory of relativity, he fell head-over-heels in puppy love with a very sweet girl named Marie. One of the last letters she wrote to him, after he had already met and fallen for a much smarter and more extraordinary woman who went on to become his first wife, detailed how much she was looking forward to cleaning up his messy desk when she came to visit him. She might as well have informed him that she was going to rearrange his thoughts to suit her liking. Even if the romance between them hadn’t already died from his end by that point, that “threat” alone from her would have sent him running. Like the saying goes: “I love you, you’re perfect. Now change.” Handcuffs. Hour-long phone calls talking about nothing, or evenings spent watching television together, when you’ve got reading you really need to do. Remember: I am “half intellectual.” You can’t be implicitly telling the most important person in your life, every day of the year, that she’s less important and interesting to you than a pile of dusty reference books and papers. But how else are you going to get any work done? Handcuffs. Having to drop the argument just to keep the peace, even when you know you’re right. Compromising not just on trivial things like where to go on vacation together, but even on your most basic principles ... without even realizing you’ve done it. When I was working at that shithole fishing lodge, the Catholic-schooled wife of the hedgehog-in-chief once openly lamented the commercialization of their local “Christmas in July” festivities. And the Mass-on-Saturdays hedgehog responded that it was a perfectly good way for the merchants in town to make some extra money.

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A few weeks later, I overheard someone else lamenting the same commercialization of the same tourist festival by the same merchants, to Mrs. Hedgehog. You know what she said? “It’s a perfectly good way for them to make some extra money.” Without even realizing she had sold her Savior out for a few extra dollars. Judas would have been proud. From the other side of the fence, Charles Darwin may have delayed publishing his Origin of Species simply because he didn’t want to risk offending his very religious wife, Emma, with the ideas in it. (At the very least, she worried that his lapses of faith might endanger their meeting in the afterlife. Charles finally ended up as an agnostic, going for walks on Sunday mornings while the rest of the family was in church.) And so do we all trade truth for love, sex, and the tender mercy of having even one other person in this cold world who cares about what we’re feeling, and whether we’re happy and comfortable. Back in the early spring of last year, at the end of an otherwise perfectly awful Saturday, I bumped into a woman I had worked with for a few months half a decade earlier. She was recovering from a bad date earlier in the evening, and we wound up spending the night at my apartment, and then the morning-after at hers. I saw some books by the Tibetan guru-fraud Chögyam Trungpa on her shelves, and one way or another I must have mentioned that the president of the publishing company that put out my first book, back when I still believed in everything New Agey, thought that leprechauns were real. And do you know what she said in response to that? She said, and I quote: “Leprechauns aren’t real?” I took a deep breath. “Ah ... well, I suppose we don’t have to talk about that right now.” Because there ain’t no way a bunch of non-existent little green Irishmen were going to get in the way of me having “morning-after sex” on a Sunday morning.

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Darwin’s own list of the advantages to being married included having a “constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow.” The disadvantages included “less money for books” and “terrible loss of time.” And a terrible loss of solitude, in having a constant companion. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Or before breakfast. And since I don’t normally eat a recognizable meal until after noon, that can wind up being the better part of the day. And then there’s the inevitable “cantaloupe argument”: “Why did you buy two cantaloupes?” she asks, testily. “We only needed one.” “I bought two cantaloupes because, like testicles and breasts, they work best in pairs. Any other questions, dear?” I really don’t take orders or petty corrections well. And my feeling from spending the evening with Jennifer is that she seems to give them quite well. And if you’re already having to laugh off minor annoyances after just a few hours together, how long will it be until you just want to get out, at any cost? Plus, there’s that thing about me seeming like just a “pretty smart guy” to her. I’m sure it was meant as a (lukewarm) compliment, but still: only “pretty smart”? Talk about damning with faint praise. I was walking home after dark from an open stage along Parliament Street a week ago, and two kids came up from the opposite direction. First, one of them mumbles something unintelligible, where I can only pick out one word: “Blah, blah ... hippie ... blah, blah.” But as they pass me, Kid #2 says: “No, he’s a genius. You can see it in his eyes.” Well, it’s a fair cop. And if a kid walking down the street can pick up on that, why can’t a girl who’s already looked into my eyes up close? Maybe I should email her a scan of my transcript.... So overall, I don’t even know how much I want to follow through on this. I mean, my body definitely knows what it wants, it’s just that my mind can’t decide.

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Think. Too. Much. August 10 Went into the kitchen at Tartu this afternoon to fill a container with tap water. The garbage was stinking to such high heaven that I couldn’t even inhale through my nose for the two minutes which that took. If I needed a reminder that human beings, aside from being literal animals (i.e., mammals), share more than 90% of their non-junk DNA with chimpanzees.... Except that chimps and even poodles would surely learn faster than these prerational ass-dribblers—inconsiderate jerks who will not be told, even by the cleaning staff, how to behave like rational, thinking human beings. As Einstein once lamented, “Is it any wonder little by little one becomes a misanthrope?” I was telling a bartender at the Regal Beagle pub—over at the east end of “Rochdale”—about some of this back in late June, and she disclosed her own shared-living travails: The construction workers she was stuck with in a nearby house had messed the kitchen up to the point where they needed to have ant traps set up all over the place, and were also leaving their smelly boots in the halls. (‘Cause they obviously didn’t want to have to inhale their own redneck foot odors, preferring to let others suffer that.) So, she made up some posters, with a scanned copy of the official management logo, instructing them to not leave their boots in the hall anymore. It worked like a charm: She even overheard them discussing how “management” had left the instruction! You really have to admire that kind of initiative. August 11 I was out practicing guitar this afternoon, midway down St. George Street on the U of Toronto campus.

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Dressed, as always, in “Garcia-wear,” i.e., a t-shirt, jeans and sandals, with my long hair flowing in the breeze. Looking, that is, like a fine hippie. Two teenage boys, out of high school for the summer, came riding up the sidewalk on their bikes, screwing around about ten yards in front of me. (The street has explicit bike paths adjacent to the curb in both directions, but they still needed to use the sidewalk. Illegally.) And as the “alpha biker” rides past me, just for fun he says: “Get a job.” Because, obviously, a long-haired guy out playing guitar on a beautiful Saturday afternoon must be some sort of drain on society, eh? Of course, being just a high-school kid, his idea of a “real job” is probably just stocking shelves at The Gap, or some other McWay of earning money for a new iPod. I wasn’t even busking—which itself is uncontracted entertainment, i.e., a legitimate “job,” not to be confused with begging. (That difference is well understood in Europe, even if often missed in North America.) Rather, I was simply practicing for an upcoming gig ... for which I will indeed be paid. Besides, since when is “rising folk/rock star” not a job? For that matter, so is “drug dealer.” As a Comp Sci Ph.D. candidate who’s doing his research in robotics at the U of T said to me afterwards, when such “insights” come from high-schoolers, they’re likely either based in a blind rebellion against authority, or on something deeper (and more sinister). My guess is the latter—‘cause, since when am I an authority figure?—and also that the overgrown rugrat in question (i) learned that bigoted (i.e., “hairist”) attitude from his parents (esp. his father), and that (ii) he’ll carry the same prejudices into adulthood and his career in middle-management or the like. And there, his bigotry will actually be “good for the company,” in easily weeding out undesirable/unreliable employees who cannot in any case ever be presented to the public as appropriate representatives of the corpora-

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tion. (Ask me why I have no wish to ever again “have a job” in that kind of intolerant, prejudiced short-hair environment.) In between now and embarking on that “valuable contribution to society” career, though, he’ll surely make a fine misogynistic, conformist-mentality frat boy. Because hippiephobia, homophobia, misogyny and racism are not at all so far apart as you might like to imagine. With the absence of “hippie rights” groups, you can still be a hairist in today’s polite society and (wrongly) consider yourself to be better than the explicit racists in the world. But at its basis it’s all just in-groups and negatively stereotyped out-groups, i.e., there’s no meaningful psychological difference between racism and hairism. Yes, I realize that I choose to look this way, whereas blacks (etc.) have no choice in the color of their skin. But, when you try to marginalize or otherwise crush the spirit of someone simply because he’s creatively expressing his individuality, that’s actually worse than mere racism. Like the black man in Vegas said, “They’re taking away the most important right. The freedom of expression.” What separates us from the animals isn’t the color of our skin—there are plenty of black, white, and even black-andwhite animals, after all. There have also been plenty of whiteskinned slaves in the history of the world, e.g., in ancient Rome, where Greeks were kept as forced labor. Rather, what makes us uniquely human is our individuality—the ability to go consciously against the “herd”—and our intelligence and degree of creativity (even just in tool usage, never mind in art and science). If you’re just using your faculty of reason to rationalize going along with the in-group crowd rather than living as a creative individual ... you might as well be a dumb animal, useful at least for your meat, if not for your brains. That creativity and independent reasoning and freedom of expression is exactly what is being embodied by nonconformist individuals such as myself ... and that’s also what is then being discriminated against by others who can only see

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a one-dimensional, negative stereotype where a real person exists. A person, too, who has already contributed more to the betterment of the world than some snot-nosed, bigoted, might-as-well-be-racist teenage rugrat on a bicycle ever will, if I do say so myself. Thankfully, the hippie community knows better than to judge people for how they look. Unless, of course, you’re a punk sporting a mohawk, as one such mohawk-punker guy observed on tour with the Dead: It seems to me like most of what I’ve heard about [the friendliness of the Deadhead community] is not true because we’ve gotten a lot of nasty comments, nasty looks, because of the way we look. It’s like people will be open-minded towards you if you look like you belong at a Grateful Dead show, but if you don’t look like you belong, then you get treated just like people treat you anywhere else where you don’t belong. Apparently it’s, you know, how you look, you know, if your dreadlocks are the right length, if your skirt’s baggy enough. This is the last place I expected to be shunned because of the way I look. ‘Cause even with “peace, love and grooviness” hippies, you’ve still gotta “dress to fit in.” In-groups and out-groups, my friend. In-groups and outgroups. That will never change. August 14 I played a “best of the open stage” feature at the Free-Love tonight, as one of four acts.

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The room seats around fifty people, and was absolutely packed. A trio of girls from Woodsworth who came there specifically to (platonically) hear me were lucky to get the last table. Those monthly “best of” nights don’t typically draw such an impressive crowd, but half of the audience was there just to hear their relative sing, in Spanish. Since we wanted to keep them all around for as long as possible (for upping the venue’s food and drink sales), the host and I decided it would be best to put the Hispanic guy on last. What that meant was that his numerous, obviously fertile relatives, of all shapes, sizes, and ages—including one baby, and a couple of teenage hotties—had around an hour and a half in which to eat, drink, and be merry, before their “native son” came on. There are, in hindsight, predictable differences between the respectful folk-music audiences one typically encounters in whitebread North America, versus a roomful of cheerful, boisterous Hispanics (and their remarkably vocal baby) who are really only there to sing along with one of their compadres. In Spanish. I went on as the third act, and basically, I could hardly hear myself play. The host tried to compensate, but if he turned the house volume up too loud, it started screeching feedback. So then he cut the high frequencies down, which prevented our ears from exploding, but also kept the muddy sound from being audible above the roar of a room half-full of fertile immigrants/tourists Spanishing (and crying) at the top of their lungs. As Basil Fawlty once said, “God only knows how they ever got an Armada together.” So I just did seven songs, and then went to have a couple of beers and dinner—in that specific order—in the front room. But hey, that’s Hispanic culture; and in a multicultural society, what can you do but admire and respect it?

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Even if they don’t return the favor. At least they bought lots of food and drinks to support the venue, tipped well, and put a lot of money into the Pay What You Can jar, though. Kidding! The recommended donation was $5; each of the four acts went home with around $10 in change. My guess is that if the crew of the Santa Maria paid out at all, they just did it privately afterwards. But hey, that’s “their culture.” And we’re multicultural. Multiculturalism has actually been an official policy of the Canadian government since the early 1970s. Have you ever wondered why? The bill which brought that policy into law was really just a ploy by our fox-in-the-henhouse prime minister, Pierre Trudeau (when his flower-girl wife wasn’t busy partying with the Rolling Stones), to diminish the “distinct society” claims of the French-speakers in Quebec, by enshrining the distinctiveness of all cultures. Trudeau actually thought so little of the “accomplishment” that he didn’t even mention it in his memoirs. If you want to know why multiculturalism, even in principle, creates conflict rather than tolerance and acceptance among its culturally distinct groups, just read up on Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment. Robbers Cave? Wuzzat? In 1954, Muzafer Sherif performed a classic social-psych study called the Robbers Cave Experiment, in a Boy Scout camp in Oklahoma. With Sherif and his associates posing as the camp counselors, they brought two buses up, with eleven boys on each, and placed the youths in cabins far enough apart that each group didn’t even know the other existed until the evening of the sixth day at the camp. The two groups of randomly assigned, middle-class white Protestant boys spontaneously and independently decided to name themselves, choosing the names “Rattlers” and “Eagles” for their groups. Even prior to having met their “enemies” face-to-face, the tribes each developed their own status-hierarchies, and their own cultures and traditions, with conformist pressures

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being exerted on their members to uphold those. The Rattler group further “speculat[ed] with resentment that ‘outsiders’ had been” using their hideout, i.e., were encroaching on “their” territory. In the second week, Sherif deliberately brought those two tribes together in a “friction phase,” of team sports and other competitive activities. Additional intergroup conflicts quickly emerged in that competitive environment—ranging from simple name-calling to vandalism and fisticuffs ... and up to the request for “separate but equal fireworks for the Fourth of July.” As Sherif and his colleagues observed: When the groups competed for goals which could be attained by only one group, to the dismay and disappointment of the other, hostile deeds and unflattering labels developed in relation to one another. In time, derogatory stereotypes and negative attitudes toward the out-group were crystallized. As David Berreby further notes, in Us and Them: Even though they had never heard of Rattlers and Eagles until they invented the names, the boys attached a full array of moral feelings to the human kinds they’d made. At the height of their war, campers in each group saw their enemies as cheaters and cowards—not as kids from another team but as kids from a different morality.... Robbers Cave was a microcosmic version of twentieth-century political life, its two cabins arranged like the two races of America’s color line or the two sides of the Cold War. All you have to do is replace the “Rattlers” and “Eagles” groups with “Red and Yellow, Black and White” ones, to see how little sense it makes to encourage the members of those classes to retain their group-identities (i.e., their differences)

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as points of pride. For, that will only create conflict, even without any explicit competition, and even when the groups have plenty of opportunity for “communication” and goodwill contact. That has nothing to do with race or ethnicity or culture as such; it’s just inherent in-group/out-group dynamics. (Any racial, ethnic or cultural tensions will certainly make the situation worse, but it was already more than bad enough in Sherif’s experiment even with just a couple of groups of monochromatic white youths.) All of that has been known since the mid-1950s! How did they get the two groups of boys back on good terms with each other? In the same way that the British Labour party was formed, in 1906: By having them work together in cooperation to achieve a common goal that they couldn’t accomplish on their own. The Scouts had to work together to unblock the water supply, pull a broken-down truck back to camp, and pool their money for a movie they all wanted to watch. Comparably, in the case of British Labour, “representatives of its warring factions spent an hour moving their conference table into a larger room.” And thus, the Labour Party was born. If it hadn’t been for that table.... Yet, those British politicians a century ago still had it easy: they were just a bunch of white males cooperating, so they didn’t have to face any additional big hurdles in racial or sexual (or religious) diversity, in the momentous task of moving a table from one room to another. It’s not so easy to avoid letting stereotypes and prejudices get in the way when you throw blacks, Asians, women, Jews and gays—with each group being fiercely proud of its origin and orientation—into the mix. So how do you do it? More successful than telling children not to be prejudiced against, say, the Christian kids, is persuading them not to see Christian kids [or “Eagles,” or “Rattlers”], because another set of human kinds [i.e., a different set of criteria for establishing in-group/outgroup membership] is more relevant. In the 1970s, the

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American social psychologist Elliot Aronson devised the “Jigsaw classroom.” His approach places students in small groups and forces them to work together on tasks, for example, learning about twentieth-century history. Racial, ethnic, gender, and school-clique boundaries don’t count for the task: The kids must work together to master their subject. The idea is that these preclass human kinds fade in importance and the kids’ shared work comes to the fore. One of the few places in this world where you naturally get an approximately Jigsaw-classroom approach is on the sports field. There, no one on any given team can win unless everyone on that team does well, and people are seen foremost not for their race or ethnic background but rather as the human-kind of “football players,” etc. That sort of thing is the only way to reliably build cooperation rather than mere in-group/out-group competition, regardless of the criteria being used to separate the groups. If you want to find the landmarks for racial integral in North America, look for when the color bar was broken in each of the major sports, starting with baseball in 1946. That may even have begun as just a rich white, constipated team-owner figuring out that he could win more games with the best (e.g.) second-baseman from the Negro Leagues this season than with the old, marginally skilled white guy at the same position. As the Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher put it, speaking against resistance to the inclusion of Jackie Robinson on his team: I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra. I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you can’t use the money, I’ll see that you are all traded.

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Those free-market pressures of competition made it too costly for baseball’s owners and managers to keep discriminating against skilled ballplayers on the basis of their race. More importantly, though, the same racial integration brought the sports fans—and what male in North America isn’t a fan of some major sport?—into a position where, if their team was to win, the “black guy at second base” had to do his job well. So, to cheer against him, or spitefully hope for him to fail, would have meant “cutting off their noses to spite their face.” Even if the black guy wasn’t a “hero” for them to identify with—and generally speaking, he wouldn’t have been, especially for white adults half a century ago—they had to hope that he did well, if their team was going to win. The nation-wide effects of that cooperation, and of “our team” in-grouping on the sports field, cannot be overestimated. In contrast to the Jigsaw classroom and the sports field, and far from teaching us not to see Christians, Jews, blacks, Chinese and Muslim people (etc.) in the world around us, one of the essential points of multiculturalism is that we should see each of those groups ... and then simply respect and tolerate them all equally. Well, good luck with that dream! Obviously, it’s not going to work! Equally obviously, one could draw the in-group/outgroup boundary based on any shared/excluded characteristic. But the very first impressions we get about others typically come through our sense of vision—we see them on the street or across the room before we hear, smell, touch or (after a few dates, if all goes well) taste them. (Hmm, I wonder how Jennifer’s doing....) Those initially noted characteristics therefore include their skin color, ethnic group, sex, and body type. When your country has an official policy which actually encourages you to see others in terms of any of those shallow attributes, it is basically a policy of “first impressions.” And that immediately gets in the way of looking beyond those external characteristics to see an individual rather than a stereotypical member of a group:

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Depending on stereotype, ensuring that ethnic groups will preserve their distinctiveness in a gentle and insidious form of cultural apartheid, multiculturalism has done little more than lead an already divided country down the path to further social divisiveness.... [It has] heightened our differences rather than diminished them ... and it is leading us into a divisiveness so entrenched that we face a future of multiple solitudes with no central notion [e.g., of a common nationality] to bind us. Because, you see, you’re not “Canadian,” you’re rather “Chinese-Canadian” or “Caribbean-Canadian” or “IrishCanadian.” That is, whether you like it or not, you’re pigeonholed into a group based merely on your race or ethnicity— which you can’t do anything about, even if you wanted to— rather than your shared national identity, or your value as an individual. And, as if that wasn’t enough, we’re now being encouraged to divide ourselves by religion too. At least, that’s what the term “Muslim-Canadian” seems to indicate. By parity of argument, then, we must also have CatholicCanadians, Jewish-Canadians, Baha’i-Canadians, etc. Or, more accurately, Irish-Catholic-Canadians, Italian-CatholicCanadians, and the like. Each of them a “distinct culture,” worth preserving. I’m an Agnostic-Canadian myself, some days even tending toward Atheist-Canadian. I used to be a Yogi-Canadian, but that was back when I was following an East-Indian-West-American guru, who ironically believed in uniting Kipling’s East and West—albeit on the basis of a wholly fraudulent, woo-woo spirituality—rather than splitting them farther apart. And what follows, completely predictably, from such a divisive multicultural policy, coupled with excessive levels of immigration (and hence, cultural dis-integration)?

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Canada, long considered a model of integration, won’t be forever immune from the kind of social disruption that has plagued Europe, where marginalized immigrant communities have erupted in discontent, with riots [by black Muslim “youths”] in the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005. To which one can only wonder out loud: “What Would Ann Coulter Do?” Honestly, when new minority immigrants are being encouraged to retain their traditional “Rattler” cultural identities in the midst of a majority “Eagle” group at our national “summer camp,” rather than to identify as all being “Camp Wobegoners,” how much knowledge of half-century-old, freshman social psychology does it take to predict that they’ll end up feeling excluded and marginalized, and ultimately react violently? Out-group exclusion and marginalization are significant enough problems with human beings in any context. But when your country’s official policy can only act to support those same dynamics, you really are asking for trouble. Official multiculturalism, the automatic classification of citizens according to race and ancestry, was a bad idea in the beginning ... and in time will probably be seen as one of the gigantic mistakes of recent public policy in Canada. The American “melting pot” idea was always a better way of doing things, even if it only “really worked” for WASPs immigrating to the U.S., and even then for much lower annual percentages of immigration than the United States and Canada currently have. At least it forced people to assimilate and learn English rather than taking easy refuge in their transplanted “traditional” communities. But neither approach can work to produce an integrated society if the country’s level of immigration is too high, as Canada’s is.

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Vancouver right now has Chinese enclaves where the parents commute to work in other parts of the city, being very well integrated into the existing society. But their children still all go to the local school, where they talk to each other only in Chinese. So, we have second-generation Canadians growing up today who aren’t learning English in school. What kind of future do they have in this country ... unless they want to try and grow that Chinese-only enclave even larger? Our Liberal Party supports high levels of immigration because they think it ups their voter base. The Conservatives support high levels because it drives wages down. And the feel-good, social democratic, union-backing NDP likes it because they’re so economically incompetent they (i) don’t understand that it’s transferring income from poor workers to rich employers, and (ii) don’t even realize that companies will contract-out to cheap labor rather than deal with unions full of people who are too stupid and too lazy to work real jobs for a competitive wage. Picture a bunch of sleepy teddy bears getting together on a lazy Saturday morning for a tea party ... and deciding to start a political party instead. That, right there, is the level of intellectual rigor you should expect from the NDP. So it’s not just the I.T. industry in Canada that’s gotten fucked by our politicians; it’s happening right across the board. In fact, less than 25% of new immigrants to Canada today are skilled workers; the rest are unskilled relatives. It’s called “family reunification,” and it’s killing Canada just as surely as it’s killing America. (The U.S. has the same foolish policy.) The Liberals and the NDP believe we should be accepting new immigrants corresponding to 1% of the country’s population, annually—i.e., a whopping 23% over 25 years, or roughly one generation. Those sheer numbers, as with the influx of legal and illegal Mexicans into the southwestern states of the USA, are a guaranteed way to end up with a very conflicted and non-integrated society, even outside of official multiculturalism. That would be true even if the bulk of

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our (and the Americans’) new immigrants were the cream rather than the lowbrow dregs of other countries. Worse, most of those new Canadian immigrants move to only one of three major cities—Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto—with 43% of new immigrants moving to the Greater Toronto Area. Thus, three-quarters of T.O.’s population growth comes from (mostly unskilled) immigration. And, although it would surely surprise the loveable teddy bears running the NDP—their heads all full of stuffing—that has the rather predictable effect of simultaneously driving housing prices sharply up, and wages down, for both skilled and unskilled workers in the GTA. Of course, the influx of young immigrants keeps our aging population young. Except that younger immigrants make up only a small proportion of the total population, so they don’t actually have much of an effect on the average age. Still, immigrants create jobs, and just by being here they increase the demand for goods and services, and for people to make and deliver those goods and services. But, um, they also occupy many of the jobs they create. So the claim that “immigrants create jobs” is actually pretty meaningless. And if they’re working for minimum wage, they’re not gonna have a whole lotta discretionary moolah to blow on non-essential goods and services. Plus, the funding for their free health care has to come from somewhere, and it’s not coming from their welfare checks.... Nevertheless, the real value of unskilled immigrants is that they do the jobs which no one else will do. No, wait—they don’t do that either. They just work menial jobs for less than our native-born dropouts would do them for. And by doing that, they not only put our own low-IQ pigfuckers out of work from their slaughterhouse and construction jobs, they also hinder the introduction of machines which could automate the same category of work (e.g., picking oranges, taking tickets in parking garages, etc.). Which, of course, also retards the creation of the medium-skill jobs that would exist for manufacturing and maintaining those machines, and the high-skilled work of designing the tech toys in

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the first place. That is, cheap imported labor decreases the pressure on us to become more productive. Overall, if immigration created jobs and wealth, wouldn’t Toronto be the wealthiest city in the world, with the lowest unemployment rate anywhere on the face of the planet? Well, it isn’t. But at least we’re only screwing up our own country with hopelessly naïve ideologies and politically correct policies that can’t possibly work, right? Ah, unfortunately, ‘tis not so: Australia’s multiculturalism policy (instituted in 1973) was inspired by Canada’s (1971). You know you’re in bad shape, Oz, when you can’t even come up with your own foolish ideas, and you instead have to go around borrowing dismally wrong notions from others. We will also, as of 2009, have a “black-focused alternative school” in Toronto, teaching subjects from an Afrocentric perspective rather than the traditional “Eurocentric” one. (The plan is for it to not be technically segregated along racial lines ... except that who but a black kid who was flunking out of the regular school system would want to go to a school with an explicit Afrocentric bias?) No word yet on whether the curriculum will include the established “fact” that Jesus was black; but with an “Afrocentric” slant to their history, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if it did. Of course, if the “separate but equal” Afrocentric schools for black kids in Toronto work out, the next step really should be “separate but equal” Afrocentric seats for them in the back of the city buses. Where, you know, they’ll be free to cultivate their self-esteem, and feel pride in their heritage, without interference by hegemonic, successful whites, Asians or Jews, etc. You know, the ones who didn’t need to go to a “special school” to make it through grade twelve. The thing is, where I went to school in the ’70s it was only the coolest kids who got to sit in the back of the bus. In fact, if you could manage to sit in the rear couple of rows, behind the tire hump, that’s pretty much how you knew you were cool.

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So I personally don’t see what was so bad about making Negros sit in back in Mississippi, etc. On the contrary, if someone had forced even the cool whites to sit at the front with the rest of the dorks and geeks, I can see how that would be humiliating. But that’s just the white, Christian culture I grew up in. And thankfully, because we live in a multicultural society, its values are widely recognized today as being as good as those of any other culture. Aren’t they? Regardless, with any luck future segregated high-school sports meets in Toronto will prepare our city’s disadvantaged black youths, if not to function in a mixed-race society, then at least for baseball’s Negro Leagues, where they may look forward to long and fruitful careers, barnstorming through the South. Satchel Paige would be proud. Outside of the sports field, there’s actually at least one other situation where you can get an approximately Jigsaw environment: In the military, during times of war. There we’re all on the same team, and we need each other to do well and to discover and share information competently and freely, regardless of our respective races or ethnic ancestries. It’s the only way our team can win against a real foe. As usual, though, multiculturalism throws a wrinkle into the game. Because, should Canada ever find itself in a global war, many of our Chinese-Canadians would go home to China, our Russian-Canadians would go back to Russia, and our Iranian-Canadians would return to Iran. And with that predictable outcome of an irretrievably stupid federal policy which encourages our visible minorities to keep one foot in Canada and the other back in their native culture and homeland—or at least in their ancestors’ homeland—a significant chunk of our population would end up fighting against us. How’s that for gratitude? Not exactly what the people who founded this country and defended it in two world wars had in mind, is it?

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August 17 I moved out of Tartu and into a house-hotel in Chinatown, west of Dundas and Spadina, a couple of days ago. I took the liberty of relocating Mango’s butt-watering cup from the bathroom sink onto the kitchen table just before I walked out of there for the last time. Just in case he needs it for drinking water. I had never properly appreciated how great it is to come from a culture that knows what toilet paper is for, and which applies that basic knowledge to civilized life. So, as befits the Chinese—“they only come up to your knees,” as Monty Python used to sing in much less “correct” times—the new and very temporary place is the tiniest room I’ve ever been stuck in. Only eight feet by ten, which by itself wouldn’t be so bad, except that there’s a double bed, a fullsize shower, a sink, and a toilet packed into the same space. Plus the TV tray for my computer monitor, and another for my toiletries. (High-speed Internet is included in the rent. I’m surprised they found room for the LAN socket.) I’m being very careful when I shower and towel-off, to not splash any water onto my computer, two feet away. I actually dropped two of my external hard drives onto the sidewalk while moving in, but fortunately the first one cushioned the fall for the second one, and I was just using the first one for backup. So I only lost money, not data. Whew! Oh, and I saw a rat in the kitchen here. When I tried to tell the very pregnant Chinese manager about it, though, we hit a bit of a language barrier. I guess they don’t have rats in China? She understood “mouse” and “really big,” though, so I think the message eventually got through. For a couple of days I thought I had lost my birth certificate and passport. Finally found them right where I had left them, but in the last place I thought to look—tossed in with all of my installation CDs. I was so relieved I almost cried. But you know, if I really had permanently lost all my ID, there’s an easy way out. All you have to do is apply for refu-

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gee status, which you obviously don’t need any papers for— all you need is a good story to tell the interviewing officers, which you can make up and memorize beforehand. And Canada’s the only place in the world where you can even claim to be fleeing from persecution in the United States! With an Immigration and Refugee Board approval rate of 60 to 90% (versus the global average of 15%), next thing you know they’ve set you up with a new passport, and you’re living on welfare. Not only are the vast majority of the “refugees” who wind up in Canada not running for their lives from oppression, many are actually just using Canada as an easy way to enter the United States. If you wonder why Canada is indeed a “safe haven for terrorists,” that’s the reason. Hell, if Osama bin Laden himself ever needed a place to crash (metaphorically), he couldn’t do better than Canada. We probably couldn’t even extradite him to the States ... because, you know, those Nasty Americans have capital punishment. And our national conscience just wouldn’t let us send someone to his death in another country. It would be so ... un-Canadian. So sit down, Osama. Be our guest. Take a load off. Anything we can get you to make you more comfortable? Donuts and coffee, perhaps? A copy of the Infidel Times? August 19 I was walking through Kensington Market early this evening, and a sort-of Gothic kid with his girlfriend came up to me: Him: Hey dude, you look like you’re pretty old school. What do you know about datura? Me: Sorry? Him: Datura. Me: Nothing at all, whatever it may be. So I went right home and Wikipedia’d it. Ah, datura—jimson weed, thorn-apple, devil’s-trumpet. Hallucinogen.

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Did I mention I was wearing my Green Sunflower tie-dye shirt at the time? I’ve really gotta move to Amsterdam, where at least some of the stuff I’m constantly suspected of doing/selling is legal. ‘Cause really, the most exciting thing I “did” today was the laundry. August 20 I was sitting in the Free-Love tonight, waiting for my spot on the open stage to come up. And I happened to turn my head to see a cute brunette standing against the wall at the back of the room. Well, staring over your shoulder is a good way to get caught looking—which I think they can arrest you for by now—so I just allowed myself a quick glance in the dim light, and then went back to watching the stage. Half a song later Jennifer sat down beside me out of the blue, and immediately started playing in my hair again. “Hey, I didn’t even know you were here,” I said, smiling at her. “Of course not. I was in back.” Ah. I stand corrected. Regardless, she looked as good as always. And I would have happily sat there all evening slowly turning into jelly while waiting for my two-song slot to come up, but the house PA kept screeching feedback in our ears. So after the fourth or fifth time I suggested to Jennifer that we go outside instead. I grabbed my guitar, and took her dainty hand as I led her out into the front room. She quickly un-clasped us. Hmm, hard-to-get, eh? Alright, I can play that game. So we walked a short way up Spadina, found a patch of grass, and sat down across from each other in the streetlight and the moonlight. And, as promised, I played her some of my stuff, starting with “Alas, Poor Yorick”—a lovesong from

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Hamlet to the already-doomed Ophelia—and “Josephine,” which has lyrics taken from Napoleon’s love-letters. “So you’re a romantic,” she said, and smiled. I grinned—“Yeah”—and played her the first “keeper” song I ever wrote, back in my early twenties: RED-HAIRED GIRL In my eyes, red-haired girl You are surrounded by adjectives Words like cute, breathtaking, beautiful Radiant, unapproachable Words that you find in a big dictionary When you’re checking the spelling Of “contemporary” Words that reflect what I see in your eyes That can damn with faint praise But can never describe And your life, red-haired girl Is a page, of thirty-one lines Filled with poetry, big words that rhyme And are spoke to the wind With a penny and wish And my life, red-haired girl Is a noun, and it stands all alone Near the margin of doubt Lacking the power of action I stopped playing. “Damn,” I said. “I forgot to pay my bill.” “They probably won’t even notice it.” “No, it’ll come out of the receipts for the waitress—she’d have to pay for it. I’ll go back later and take care of it.” Which means I can’t segue into walking her home again. Damn.

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I resumed playing: Oh, red-haired girl Emerald eyes to die for Flowing like a river To the place it wants to be My heart goes out to you Like a cookie to the sea “A cookie? Like, crumbling?” she asked, curious. I laughed. “No. It’s from an old Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown and Snoopy are hanging out together on their wall, and Charlie Brown says, ‘How do you tell a girl that you think she’s really pretty, and you’d like to spend time with her and get to know her better?’ And Snoopy, in his wisdom, says ‘Give her a cookie.’” And your life, red-haired girl Is a page, empty page in a notebook That I, that I would delight just to write on In pencil, I think ‘Cause then it would work to erase All the stumbling words, the mistakes Reminders that you are the grace that you are And I am just what I am Oh, red-haired girl Emerald eyes to die for Running ‘cross the flowered fields To the Emerald City Is where you hold my heart And there you hold the key Is where you hold my heart She clapped softly and rapidly. “That’s a thousand pairs of hands in a concert hall.” “Thanks.”

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“Can I see your guitar?” “Sure.” I handed it over to her, and she began noodling around on the fretboard. “What kind of strings do you have?” “Martin Silk & Steel. Paul and Richard recommended them. So I can play for hours now without my fingers bleeding.” “It feels almost like an electric,” she said, bending the strings. “I like to use a lot of suspended ... jazz chords.” And she ran her nimble fingers down the fretboard, over those six strings, just like she had run them through my long hair less than half an hour before, leaving a beautifully dissonant trail of sus2’s and sus4’s I could barely keep track of. “What is that song called?” I asked, my jaw hanging down on the grass. “I just made it up.” Alright, she’s going to annoy the hell out of me in the long run, with the “Let go’s” and the “Of course’s” and the cantaloupes, but ... there’s nothing sexier than girlz with guitarz. Gord Almighty. She handed the instrument back to me, and then dropped a bomb Phil Lesh would have been proud of: “I had a big fight with the guy I’ve been seeing since June....” June. Seeing since June. Wait, it was less than a month ago that we were making out in her lobby, and if she’s been seeing someone else since June ... what’s August minus June ... two months? Two months, that means.... “He’s taking his boat back down to California for the winter. I don’t want him to go. We had a huge fight about it a couple of days ago, and I haven’t been able to sleep since.” Argh!!! So that’s why she’s such a big fan of “The Circle is Small”: It’s about her! Freud would have picked up on that. Damn it! Well, that all sort of spoiled the mood, so she got up to walk home, we hugged a lukewarm goodbye, and I crawled

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back to the café to pay my forgotten bill and try to figure out how something that looked like clear sailing all the way to Christian Island turned into the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. At least I’ll get a song out of this though, right? Like when Gordon Lightfoot was worried that Cathy Evelyn Smith was sneaking around on him behind his back (stairs)—while he was already married to someone else—and he wrote his biggest hit, “Sundown.” Of course, that was years before she injected John Belushi with those fatal speedballs.... August 27 The Free-Love has this big bowl of fortune cookies out on the bar. Which is kind of odd, seeing as the owner is Jewish. So I’ve been dipping into the Baileys and coffee tonight after an afternoon of rum-and-Cokes, and improvising an Asian dessert. First cookie: “You are demonstrative with those you love.” Well yes. No doubt. Eight days a week. But, as Queen once sang, “Find me somebody to love.” Second cookie: “You have yearning for perfection.” Truer words were never spoken. Damn, these cookies really know what they’re talking about. Third: “Your luck has been completely changed tobay [sic].” Well, I certainly hope so. If I had as much luck in real life as I’ve had on eBay—sold my Scholz Rockman rackmount there last autumn for more than I had paid for it, and put the full amount into ... well, rent—“tobay” would be enough, I wouldn’t even need to worry about “toborrow.” Fortune cookie: “You lead a useful life no matter what riches are coming to you.” Ain’t it the truth. “Rags to riches,” that’s my story. Well, except for the “riches” part.

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Cookie: “Watch your relations with other people carefully, be reserved.” What, even more reserved than I already am? That ain’t gonna be easy. “Find release from your cares, have a good time.” Now that’s the kind of Confucian wisdom I could stand to hear a lot more ounces of. “An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes.” Alright, I suppose. Your point being...? Eighth cookie: “You will enjoy good health.” Well yeah. Hey, you may have lost everything else, had everything you’ve ever hoped for fall to pieces, but as long as you’ve still got your health.... Stupid, patronizing cookies. Anyway, the café owner eventually came by out of her basement office and sat down next to me, and we wound up chatting. Turns out that her brother was the first Jewish programmer ever hired by HAL Canada, in the 1960s. Prior to that, it was obviously a very WASPy environment. And yet, I’ve been told by a reliable, world-class cracker source (same one as before), who worked for HAL several years ago, that their I.T. department today is majority Chinese. How did this happen? How did the red, white and bluechip American tech company end up being “yellow on the inside” in its Canadian headquarters? It’s not for the Asian technical or communication skills, I can assure you. I’ve worked with two Chinese database administrators, neither of whom could speak English well enough to relay technical information competently in a realworld I.T. environment. (One of them had already been in Canada for seven years at that point. If you can’t learn a language in seven years of immersion....) Truly good people, both of them; but that didn’t stop the nose-picking, grunting one from trying to install Oracle 7 on top of version 8 of the same database, fully expecting that to work rather than to irretrievably hose the server.

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How do you fix a mistake like that? Can you say “Format C:”? And no, he hadn’t first made backups of any of the stored procedures he had spent the previous three days creating. Why would he have? So, if you had been under the impression that work visas exist to let in the “best and the brightest” from overseas, you were sadly mistaken. Anyway, how I.T. at HAL Canada ended up being in the control of our Asian friends is basically this: A person of Chinese ancestry works his (or her) way up into a management position with the company, or is even hired externally as a project manager or programming team lead, say. They can’t communicate properly with the Englishspeaking developers there. But, they can communicate with other Chinglish-speakers. So they hire more of the latter. Plus, if a programming job is advertised for $20/hr., you’ll always be able to find a recent immigrant who will do it for $15. So you’re saving money for the company by hiring the Chinese/ ESL software engineer over the Canadian one, and probably even being lauded and given extra bonus dollars at salaryreview time for that fiscal restraint ... even though, in I.T. as everywhere else, you get the quality of work that you pay for—a principle which managers typically lack the gene to understand. If you play that dynamic out over several decades, you will find yourself with a very diverse workplace indeed. Or “diverse” at least until it becomes monolithically Chinese. Mao would have wanted it that way. Probably the NDP would, too. August 28 Went walking up Spadina today to the Kinko’s on Bloor, to print off some guitar tablature.

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As I passed the greenspace where I used to practice guitar, a disheveled First Nations (i.e., Indian) guy on the park bench by the U of T Sociology building called out a hello, in my general direction. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Native Americans. Even the Iroquois, who “took captives home to torture them before death” after their battles. Because, like the East Indians, they have a rich history of respect for sages and warriors with long hair. Conversely, I’ve never been hassled by anyone from either culture just for looking like Jesus during his hypothesized lost years in India. (By contrast, Chinese/Zen sages are typically bald as a cucumber. So it’s just as well if Jesus never wandered that far East: you can only imagine the prejudice he would have faced, there ... not to mention the difficulty he would surely have had in finding a washroom or a paddy field which longhairs were allowed to use.) So I half-waved back—a lot of go-nowhere Indians hang out around that corner, and I figured this might be one of the ones I had bumped into over the summer. He yells back: “Not you! Faggot!” So I mimed a “Diogenes handshake” back at him, and kept on walking. After all, his people were here first. That’s why they’re called the First Nations. Of course, since the first white man (and woman) got here, we’ve been “a nation of immigrants.” But then, so is every other country in the world, with the exception of that stretch of land somewhere in northeastern Africa where our species first came down from the trees—at a time when the entire human race was black. The idea that being the first, aboriginal group of Homo sapiens to reach a piece of land gives you some special claim on it is so ... well, species-ist. Because you know who was here, in North America, before the Indians? The woolly mammoths, horses, and camels (yes, camels!), that’s who. And you know what happened to them? In brief, the early Native Americans slaughtered them. All of them. And it’s not as though they were eating or using every part of their prey, either. On the contrary, “Clovis mam-

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moth kills prove to have been only partly butchered, suggesting very wasteful and selective utilization of meat by people living amidst an abundance of game. Some hunting probably wasn’t for meat at all but for ivory, hides, or just machismo.” The advantage of having exterminated every member of a species or race, of course, is that there are no descendents left to point out how you shouldn’t have done that. So, a tip of the hat to those thorough, homo-aboriginal hunters: even the later white settlers with rifles didn’t manage to completely kill off the buffalo, though it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. Still, should we ever manage to clone any of those lost animals, and if they could talk, it would be interesting to see what sort of apologies they might demand for being on the receiving end of the reckless extermination—almost a genocide, really—wrought by Homo aboriginalis on all continents where the large game hadn’t seen human beings before. Anyway, when I was working at the fishing lodge, one of my mini-jobs was to drive the Native guides back to their homes on the reservation five miles away, when the fishing day was done. I’ve seen beautiful, two-year-old houses with the windows busted out and then covered with plastic film, never to be fixed, where the man of the house was working as a carpenter at the lodge, and doing very good work there. I’ve also seen enough of their tribal chiefs to know that they’re every bit as honest and competent as our own political leaders are, if you follow what I’m saying. All of which has left me agreeing with John Ibbitson and Roger Sandall, that for any young adult on a reservation, leaving that environment now, getting a job in the city, and going back to school is indeed “the only chance you have to rescue what is about to become your wasted life.” August 29 Played new-ton’s again, with Paul and Richard doing the open stage before me.

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Only Richard was actually listening to my stuff, but he applauded sincerely, and told me afterward that it was fun for him to see me improve from one time to the next. I thought I had sucked, but I guess you know you’re getting better when even a bad day impresses people who are far better musicians than you can even imagine being. So we all hung around for a few beers. Paul mentioned that his next album is going to be produced by one of the top folk-music producer names in the country, and he gave me some advice about choosing songs for the demo. Four songs, with him and Richard doing the fancy-ornamentation guitar parts on top of my main part. Very cool. And just before Richard poked me playfully in the stomach and told me to call them to set up studio time, he said: “People are assholes. When you meet someone decent, you want to try and help him out.” Ah, a misanthrope after my own fractured heart. September 5 Did a half-hour feature at Fat Einsteins tonight to open their new season, after the summer hiatus. Back when Jackson Browne was hot musical shit, he saw a barely-legal Daryl Hannah in the audience at one of his shows, had his roadies bring her backstage, and they ended up in a fourteen-year relationship together. Tonight didn’t go quite that well for me, but still, no complaints—other than that the bigoted security guard from back in May was hanging around before the show started. (Yes, he was checking on the bathroom again when I wanted to use it. So I decided to just “hold it” ‘til after the show.) The best part was that I got a bunch of compliments on my songwriting from a woman who used to write songs for the Canadian version of Sesame Street. She was especially impressed by the last song I played—“Pockets”—which she said “had a lot of great lines.” Well, judge for yourself:

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POCKETS Saw you in Central Park Feeding ducks and drakes, and I was lost In the dying rays of Indian Summer The forecast of a killing frost I wandered evenings through the woods To your door and prayers unlocked it And while I had my hand upon your breast You stuffed my heart into your pocket Deep in the pocket of your tight blue jeans I was tumbling With your lotto picks and car keys I starved an August fever Swallowed medicine and hailstones Felt the brace of your cold shoulder The hoarfrost on your collarbone Felt the blood drain from my cheeks Saw my face turn ashen grey And from the way you shook your head It’s obvious it was my fault anyway Deep in the pocket of a clean white coat I’m a stethoscope I can hear what you don’t say I see you’re bored again High heels and craving spontaneity And I’m so predictable Seems I’ll always love you so predictably

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And bend whichever way you please Just toss me on the coffee table With your ticket stubs and car keys There was something in my chest The way it used to beat reminded me of you And there was something in my head Craziness all tangled up in blue Felt you stir in the morning light Pulled my tired eyes from their sockets Grabbed my overcoat and keys Stuffed some memories in my pocket Words are treacherous and deep And I have promises I will not keep The silent flight of ducks and drakes And I have miles to go before you wake Oh, before you wake Sadly, no good deed goes unpunished. Après the show I was walking down College Street, just enjoying the warm late-summer air. Stopping (literally) to smell the roses (metaphorically) on the near-deserted sidewalk. And some little piss-proud eighteen-year-old jerk walks up briskly from behind me and says, right out of nowhere, clearly annoyed with me: “What is your problem? Don’t you know where you’re going?” With just a trace of a Middle-Eastern accent—meaning that he probably wasn’t even born here. To which the appropriate response is, I believe, to paraphrase South Park: “Fuck Mohammed. Fuck Mohammed and his seventy-two virgins right up the ass.” Great, now I’m going to wind up on the wrong end of a fatwa, too. If anyone needs me, I’ll be hiding out with Salman Rushdie.

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The worst part is, “fatwa” just sounds so offensive and unnecessarily hurtful. It’s like something you’d put out on Rosie O’Donnell, if you wanted to see her lose weight. And really, who wouldn’t like to see that? Because, painful as it may be to admit, we live in a culture that values thinwa over fatwa. And you can’t blame Ayatollah Khomeini or even Cat Stevens for that. You can’t blame them for our immigration policies, either—it’s not their fault that we can’t give away our freedoms and Western standard of living fast enough, to immigrant cab drivers and their bullying, shithead kids. A couple of years ago every native-born Canadian in Toronto—I assume I’m not the only one left—was forced to endure the “hire an immigrant” campaign. There were annoying-as-hell posters plastered all over the subway and in bus shelters, pointing out how “unfair” it was that recent immigrants with Ph.D.’s were working McJobs. Their slogan was simply “Hire an Immigrant,” but it really should have been: “Hire an Immigrant—Put a Canadian out of Work.” If immigrants with doctoral degrees end up driving taxicabs in the most famously multicultural city in the world, the problem is not that they’re not being given a fair chance by the “white hegemonic power structure” in this supposed “land of opportunity.” On the contrary, assuming they can speak English fluently—which is no small or safe assumption, as the USS Pidgin proved—the simple fact that they can’t find work in their fields of expertise shows that those fields are already saturated with workers. Which means that the new immigrants in question, however much they may have been the “Persian cat’s ass” back in the seventh-century Land of Allah, should never have been allowed into this country to work in the first place: Ph.D. or no Ph.D., the jobs for their professional skillsets simply don’t exist here. Is that too obvious? No corporation would be so generous as to give a desk and a paycheck to any old schmoe who wants a job ... even if he happens to be the secretary’s mother’s brother-in-law.

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Rather, unless you really want to run a business into the ground—and I’ve worked for a few where that did indeed seem to be the managerial philosophy—you only hire people if they can be reasonably expected to add value to the company, while also fitting into the existing corporate culture. Suppose, for example, that you were confronted with an interviewee, of a random race, color and creed, who spoke openly about taking over your company, and who intended to substitute the moral code of his religion for your existing employee handbook: to ban alcohol at office parties, take away your secretaries’ high-heeled shoes, and cover them all in shapeless fabric from head-to-foot lest they provoke the uncontrollable lust of the nearest virgin-coveting, lustful male virgin. Would you hire that man? Or would you politely thank him for his time, and then have security escort him out of the building? Permanently. If you care enough to do the right thing for the good of a corporation which has done nothing more to deserve your loyalty than provide you with a paycheck in return for whoring your life away for The Man, man ... well, your civilized country deserves at least as much respect and consideration for its future. It’s not even about patriotism, or membership in a nationwide in-group; it’s rather just about maintaining a relatively safe island of freedom, with secure borders, in a world of violent insanity. Culture aside, what’s a good, quick way of gauging whether any given person is likely to be an asset to the bottom line of Canada, Ltd., or America, Inc.? [A 1997 report by the U.S. National Research Council] found that the average immigrant high-school dropout would cost American taxpayers a total of $89,000 over his lifetime, and that an immigrant with only a high-school degree would still cost taxpayers $31,000. An immigrant with education beyond high school, though, was estimated to create a fiscal benefit of $105,000 over his lifetime....

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“It takes the entire net tax payments (taxes paid minus benefits received) of one college-educated family to pay for the net benefits received by one low skill immigrant family.” What that suggests is that low-wage rednecks—even those who were born here—are for the most part an economic drain on society: they consistently take more, in social services and the like, than they’re capable of giving back in taxes. Happily for them, though, they’re too pig-fucking stupid to realize that simple fact, instead imagining themselves to be doing the “real work” in the world, when in reality they’re being subsidized by people with brains. But ain’t that always how it goes with the proles.... Of course, there are plenty of people walking around with easy, meaningless university degrees that don’t even require an average white IQ to complete. So, a real degree is actually worth way more than a mere six figures to a country where the relevant skills are genuinely needed, i.e., when hiring the new immigrant doesn’t just mean putting a native Canuck or Yankee or Limey or Frog out of work and into retraining. Actually, if it was up to me, anyone who is 80th percentile or higher in global standing in his/her profession would have free movement throughout the world, to work wherever they wanted to. Given the well-established fact that the top twenty percent of the people in any field do from fifty to eighty percent of the work, these are workers that any country would be lucky to have—as long as they’re not bloodthirsty terrorists or piss-proud eighteen-year-old sons of cab drivers, I mean. If that means putting incompetent Canadians out of work, fine: If you’re in the bottom 20% of your field, you’re basically by definition working outside of your region of competence to begin with. (Fortunately, the Pig-Fucking Plant in Orangeville is hiring. Pace yourself: You don’t want to wear yourself out on the first day.) But how many of the foreignborn Ph.D.’s who end up driving taxicabs in the Western

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world do you think are in the top twenty percent, globally, of their doctoral professions? Or even in the top half? The best part is that the whole cab-driving Muslim notion of “seventy-two virgins” in Paradise is actually just a mistranslation: What they’ve really been promised is six dozen sweet white raisins. So there’s a whole lot of cabbies in Toronto who are in for one hell of a disappointment when they pull up at the pearly gates, in their “white wedding” suits, to pick up that Great Fare in the Sky. September 9 I was out in Scarborough for a medical appointment early this morning, so I decided to grab a tea and muffin on the way back, at the Tim Hortons at College and Yonge. Tim Hortons is like Starbucks, except with the emphasis on donuts and donut holes (“Timbits”) instead of exotic coffees. We have Starbucks in Canada too, of course. But no designer-coffee place could ever satisfy the raw, early-morning hunger of Timbit Nation. The chain was actually founded by a former Maple Leafs All-Star defenseman in the mid-’60s; it’s now bigger than McDonald’s in Canada ... and in Afghanistan, where they’ve got a franchise located conveniently near the airstrip for the Canadian Forces Base in Kandahar. You can’t fight terrorism and rebuild a country on an empty stomach. The plus-sized Canadian singer Rita MacNeil once told a story on her TV variety show, about asking her uncle what Christmas meant to him. The grizzled old gent thought for awhile, rubbed his chin, and then gave his sagely answer: “Tim Hortons is closed.” Well, it wasn’t closed today. Rather, it was packed with at least one person too many: a greasy, unshaved white

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teenager who had obviously just rolled out of bed without a hairbrush, and who was panhandling in the store itself. It’s not as though it was cold outside—on the contrary, this was just a young, able-bodied man with no sense of shame at all. I avoided him, and took my tea and muffin down to the food court in the basement of the building, being coincidentally followed there by a well-dressed European man carrying a newspaper, laptop, and his own Horton-esque breakfast. And as I’m unwrapping my muffin, the same shiftless teenage greaseball starts drifting toward the array of tables, still annoying anyone who would listen. I saw him coming, and groaned: “Not again!” He mumbled past, asking for spare change, as I looked over at the businessman, dumbfounded: “He was just up there!” The gentleman smiled and nodded, we got to talking a little, and he mentioned about how immigrants tended to work harder than native Canadians—apparently he was a recent immigrant himself. In that context, I couldn’t really argue with him. Panhandling is one thing. Aggressive panhandling is another, where you’re fully justified, in my opinion—as I’ve concluded only after being hassled by more than one such mouthy bum— telling the person to get a job. But whoring a donut-shop line.... And there were actually people giving money to him! September 12 I headed out from the 8-by-10 around noon with my guitar, to practice in front of the Fields Institute on the south edge of the U of Toronto campus. Just a hint of autumn in the air, the leaves changing color, and beautiful coeds walking to and fro as far as the eye can see—perfect for writing a lovesong. The Fields Medal is the mathematicians’ version of the Nobel Prize; the Institute a few yards away from where I’m

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sitting is one of the world’s more noteworthy places where cutting-edge mathematics is created ... or discovered, if you prefer. I’ve been strenuously resisting the urge to add the word “Strawberry” to their plastic sign, in red lipstick or something else that would wash off easily and not do any permanent damage. My mama didn’t raise me to be no vandal. After hearing me practice there on Wednesday evenings for more than a month over the summer, always in preparation for the open stage at new-ton’s across the street, the building’s elderly cleaning lady approached me. Turns out that her late grandfather used to play some sort of stringed instrument—she didn’t even remember what kind, but hearing me play always reminded her of him. How sweet of her to say so—to feel moved by the music, even though her feelings had nothing to do with what I was playing. The building is also home to many cute secretaries who give one, as they walk past over the noon hour, a new appreciation for the beauty of “symmetry groups.” As a measure of the poverty which borders that worldclass institute of learning, however, the homeless and their kin regularly paw through the trashcan by the front doors of the Institute, hoping to find discarded books. Not to read them, of course: to sell them, for whatever few cents or dollars a discarded math text might fetch. Less-literate bums find the adjacent columnar ashtray, and the sidewalk below it, to be a good source of cigarette butts. A well-kempt man and woman on their lunch hour walked over and sat down next to me on the low stone wall, smiling in the balmy sunshine. “Looks like we’ve got live music.” I grinned back—“I guess so”—and started picking away at my song-to-be, starting with something about “If we can put a man on the moon/How hard could it be” to figure out what a woman is thinking.

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Hmm, I wonder how Jennifer’s doing.... A few minutes later a “downtown redneck” walks up and sits down on a short bench by the ashtray, talking loudly to no one in particular in between agitated puffs from his cigarette: “I used to have a job. A good job.” Yeah? Sorry to hear about that, buddy. You’ve still got your cigarettes, though—that’s more than some people have. “And then they move me along,” he carps. Uh-huh. You don’t live in this city for long without realizing that the streets are filled with crazy people, angry about one thing or another. Or sometimes they’re not even pissed off about anything, just plain crazy: Earlier in the summer, I had a guy come up to me in the same spot and inform me, out of the blue, that he was a patient at the nearby Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. That spooked me a little at first, but then he explained that he was just receiving treatment because he was bipolar. I’ve worked with manic depressives before—programming can (seriously) do that to people, as I discovered under Ivan the Terrible, where it gets to the point where you wish you had just been a lumberjack instead. As long as they take their medication, they’re not psychotic at all. So at his request, I sang Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” for him. And then he asked if he could sing one for me. “Sure.” So he belted out a pretty good a cappella version of “My Way.” And then, after cheerfully complimenting my country-full-moon-themed t-shirt, he walked off across the grass toward the university bookstore ... all the while doing an encore performance of Sinatra’s signature tune, for anyone who cared to listen. “Crazy” ones (on medication) like that are okay—it’s the crazy and angry ones without medication that you have to worry about.

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Like, for example, this guy with the cigarette, who’s been muttering unhappily in a continuous, barely audible stream, still to no obvious person in particular, for a good five or ten minutes by now. While I’m trying to work up metaphors for space travel and Neil Armstrong and Marilu Henner losing her virginity in the shower on the night of the first moon landing. “One small step for man.” When I finally stopped playing, he stopped talking. I played a little more, and then looked up to find him staring straight at me. Oh, now I get it. That’s the message. I picked up my guitar and case, and walked over toward the bookstore, to be allowed to practice in peace, without being hassled by the truly pathetic scum of society in ways which you would have thought had been left behind in junior high school. When I looked back, he too had moved on. His only purpose in sitting down there in the first place, after all, had been to intimidate me into moving. The thing is, I’m 98% sure that this was the same Neanderthal who was furious with me back in spring at Osgoode Station, simply for my re-trying a subway token after a turnstile had already rejected it once. After I got through there—yes, on the second try at the same gate with the same token—I heard some commotion, several yards behind me. “You don’t keep trying it!” the Smoking Homeless Man sputtered, as he clawed angrily at the rejected-token slot, hoping to get lucky. He wasn’t waiting impatiently behind me to get through the same turnstile or anything—the station was empty. It’s just that he’s an angry, unstable failure who gets told to move along when he loiters, and I’m a longhair who’s the real drain on society. And somebody needs to point that out to me, right? Somebody like him, or the bag lady on College just around the corner from the Scott Mission back in July—same week I met Jennifer.

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I was stealing a few minutes of practice on a streetcorner by a paint store, prior to taking in Paul’s solo show at the Free-Love. And while I’m happily fretting away, a disheveled, sixty-ish woman pushes a shopping cart past me on the sidewalk, scowling at me as she passes. Then she stops, barely still in sight around the corner, glaring straight back at me, and says: “They move me along.” Yeah, I can imagine. And therefore, because you’re treated like garbage by the world—not altogether without reason, mind—you can’t pass up the opportunity to treat someone else in the same way. To coin a phrase, “As ye are shat upon, so shall ye shit.” It got me thinking about my first weekend in Toronto, driving past a homeless man seated on the front steps of a church, eating a piece of white bread. Nothing so shocking there, except that he was meticulously picking up any small crumbs that had fallen onto the dirty concrete steps below, and eating them too, while pigeons fluttered around in between his feet, competing for the bounty. So a few weeks later, while living in the basement at Senile Excrement Hills, I wrote this song: SPARROWS Crouched at the top of dirty church steps Bowed, his aging head A homeless man Savors a crust of white bread Meal fit for a prince or pauper Then gath’ring every dropped crumb and smidgeon In greed he swallows those No charity No charity for the Sparrows and pigeons

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God sees every sparrow fall And lets them fall He sees every vulture rise And lets them fly Sleeping cold outside the Scott Mission Devoid of pride, hope and ambition Failure eats at her hungry heart Everything she’s begged Borrowed or stolen Stuffed in a shopping cart She stirs and bumps her head on the brick wall A Who without a home In a world World with a heart Two sizes too small God sees every sparrow fall And lets them fall He sees every vulture rise And lets them fly But if you can believe the love of Jesus Is more than fiction There’s a toast, hot coffee and eggs benediction Set out by the Sisters of Mercy For their downtrodden brothers Of endless misery You can join them for commiseration In the smell of urine and stale salvation The flotsam and jetsam lost in the storm The dregs of Christmas Day When Christ was stillborn

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Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? Are not two hot dogs hocked for three bucks? There but for the fading grace of God In whom we trust In whom we trust Anyway, fast-forward to eight years later, and if you’ve never had a homeless shopping-cart lady try to stare you down and put you in your place ... it’s actually kinda funny. Except that I’m betting she doesn’t do that to every busker she passes on the street. Maybe just the long-haired ones. And the really unfunny thing is that, when she had a roof over her head, she had exactly the same prejudices as she does now. And depending on how much power and money she had “back in the day” when she may have even been something to look at, it was far less of a joke when she tried to enforce them. Because if her current behavior had anything at all to do with my appearance, she might well have previously gotten away with that to the detriment of ... oh, I don’t know, maybe some hippie who lost out on a job because of her ... and wound up living on the street because of that. Everyone has a history. Who knows—maybe the cigarette-smoking jerk out in front of Fields is her son. If he isn’t, he certainly should be. As should the redneck moron I encountered a year ago in an otherwise-empty subway car, coming down Yonge early on a Sunday morning. I got on at Yorkville; he was already at the end of the car, messing around un-self-consciously with a backpack. And as the train starts moving, he gets up, takes off his outer shirt, and snaps it like a towel, presumably to get all the cooties off it. Understandably, I turned to look at the source of that sharp sound, raising my eyebrows. Unfortunately, among some of the higher primates, turning to look at a loud, sharp noise with raised eyebrows is regarded as a form of aggression. As his glare let me know.

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Needless to say, I spent the rest of that trip minding my own business—“knowing my place,” as it were. Except that I briefly made the mistake of again glancing in his general direction, doubtless in response to more of his continual mucking-about. That was evidently his cue to start carping at me, subaudibly—as such cowards are wont to do, safely immune from any reprisal—with his narrowed, impotent, pig-fucking yokel eyes rooted firmly on me. Among some of the lower primates, an unblinking stare coupled with quiet muttering is regarded as an expression of homoerotic arousal. Not that he was even in my league. And so, right down to when I got off at Eglinton, he kept his “hate stare” fixed on me, yapping primitive redneck jungle sounds all the way. Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. September 18 Got back from viewing an apartment-hotel room up near the intersection of Desolation Road and Rock Bottom Drive today. Being guided on that tour by the sour-perfume smell of an unattractive, barely competent woman who’s thirty pounds overweight even in her early twenties, and is sure to end up as somebody’s spinster aunt. The building is actually slated for demolition in a year or two, to put up condos instead. But in the meantime, there’s only one other person currently living on the eighth floor, so it should be blissfully quiet—my very own ghost town, looking down over a Catholic-school football field. The other room they showed me was on the ninth floor— opposite a suite whose occupant seems to have made himself at home in the building, with a wreath on the door and all—but with much less of a view, and no proper table. Half of the nearby major intersection has been revitalized, with a shiny-new supermarket, pizza place, drugstore,

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luxury rentals, more condos already under construction, and a couple of gated communities. The other half is decrepit: An old goodwill store, a soup kitchen, a Harvey’s that’s gone out of business, and more underclass black people than I’ve ever seen in one place before. The miscegenating border of spanking-newness, poverty, and functional illiteracy. Worse, there’s not a pub for miles around—even the Heineken signs hovering in the mist above the storefronts are just for licensed restaurants. (“Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot! She has been setting a light to our beacon, which, I just remembered, is Heineken-shaped.”) And the rent? A mere $1000 plus change per month, with no long-term commitment. Reasonable enough, for Toronto. And having a proper space of my own should at least get me back into practicing guitar again, which I’ve hardly done for the past month. With the Chinatown hole-in-the-wall being so cramped, and after a summer of being “moved along” by the city’s rabble, and with the weather turning colder, I’ve inadvertently slipped back into doing too much of the “easy” thing. By which I mean, staying inside and reading. Pinker, cognitive science, deep history. Fascinating stuff, all of it ... but none of which will get me one step closer to having my picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone. September 25 Moved into Desolation Towers yesterday. I only finished that cab-assisted relocation near midnight, and didn’t bother looking through my new closets before that. Turns out they hadn’t given me any linens, towels or soap at all. So I ended up sleeping on the couch. Good thing I had my bath towel—Douglas Adams would have been proud. It’s a decent-sized suite, especially when the bed is folded up into the couch—a 400% increase in square feet from the Chinatown shoebox, with a kitchen, bathroom, and a make-up room suitable for a young Farrah Fawcett.

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There’s a chest of drawers and a trio of half-size glass coffee tables to match the glass dinner table by the eighteen feet of sliding windows looking out over my new balcony. As always, the table will be reserved for my computer—I need a comfortable workspace more than I need to throw dinner parties for my imaginary friends. As long as I can see my flat-screen monitor while I eat, I’ll be fine. For ornamentation, they’ve given me a ten-inch high statue of a black stallion, and a six-inch tall fake-ivory elephant on the corner shelves. And opposite the plush green fold-out couch set against the wall, an old 24-inch Electrohome color TV with a Zenith cable box. All sitting on a retro Mack-Tacked wooden trolley with coasters on a light-brown, short-pile rug. It’s like living on the set of That ’70s Show. Right down to the hall carpet being patterned with orange and black rectangles—all of the lines are at 45 or 90 degrees to one another. With suite doors alternating between orange and dark pea-green as you walk toward the elevator past waterstained cream walls. Behind and above the TV, there’s a framed photo— “Cape Light”—by the world-renowned artist Joel Meyerowitz. The picture is taken from one room on the main floor of a house, through a hallway with a throw-rug on the floor, to an open screen door on the far wall of the house foyer. And there’s a bedroom just visible on the right-hand side of the photograph. I suppose it’s meant to make my room look bigger, having that screen door just “across the hall.” A few other technical difficulties: The toaster dial is stuck on “very light,” so bread comes out just about the same color and texture as it went in. For the stove, only the upperleft element actually works, and only settings 3, 4 and 5 out of 10 on that give any heat. So I can make banana pancakes with the thin skillet they’ve given me, but there’s a high carbon content in the finished product. And while the A/C unit in the wall blows plenty of air, none of it’s cold. “Be it ever so crumbled”....

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Oh, and there’s silverfish in the bathroom. But just a few. So after leaving a message with the office about the linen situation, I walked down to the supermarket to pick up some dishtowels and detergent. And standing in line with my basket at the checkout, I’ve gotta say: I’ve never seen so many brutally unattractive and obviously uneducated people in one place before. One after another, the cashiers and customers look like escapees from an ugly carnival—people who fell down off the highwire of life face-first once too often, without a net. No light in their eyes at all. If I needed proof of the correlation between attractiveness and income, and between intelligence and income, there’s a whole study-waiting-to-happen right here. All of which would have to be related to the “Jefferson effect.” Because when George and Weezy “moved on up” out of Queens to their deluxe apartment in Manhattan, they weren’t just taking their money and knowledge of drycleaning out of the working-class neighborhood. They were also taking the genes which gave rise to their success, out of that region. And then what was left in the ghetto gene pool in TVland? Jimmie “J.J.” Walker, Willis and Arnold from Diff’rent Strokes, the guys on What’s Happening!!—who were all either too smart, too shy, or too fat (Rerun) to be getting any action with the girls—and maybe some of the dumber Sweathogs who didn’t even have lines on Welcome Back, Kotter. When even the best of Gabe’s inner-city kids were consistently “so confuuused” by the simplest ideas, you knew that there was no hope for the likes of Rerun—the highlight of his life was always going to be getting caught trying to bootleg that Doobie Brothers show. To put it bluntly, when the smart and successful people leave a poor community, the genes which gave rise to their expressions of intelligence and success leave with them. So the average intelligence of the people in Manhattan goes up, while that in Queens goes down.

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Obviously, smart hard-working people deserve to make more money than dumb, lazy ones. But the reality is that their very success, and the hard-earned good fortune of many others like them, coupled with the unavoidable desirability of living in a better neighborhood, creates a genetically based difference in intelligence between the rich and the poor classes, and their corresponding neighborhoods. That “Jefferson effect” will happen anywhere members of the lower socioeconomic classes can claw their way up in the world by a combination of hard work and intelligence. (That’s even truer if you want to broaden “intelligence” to include “bodily-kinesthetic” talents, e.g., the ability to play basketball or hacky sack.) It happens for people migrating “Out of Queens.” It happens with every sustained “brain drain” across a provincial or national border. It even happened in the English aristocracy, where peerages were created for the most successful commoners, thus depleting the peasant gene pool. (Needless to say, no 85-IQ “Elizabethan redneck” peasant, for whom the Friday-afternoon pillorying was a much-anticipated “cultural event,” was ever in danger of occupying such a peerage, much less of having a say in how the Bard’s country was run. And that, of course, is why we should be thankful to live today in a democracy, where university-educated, cultured individuals are allowed no more say in how things are done than the average pigfucker and/or Leafs fan.) The same genetic drain of course also happens when the smartest country mice move to the city, taking the genetic basis for their success out of the country and into town, thus simultaneously raising the level of intelligence in the city, while lowering it in the country. And when those now-cosmopolitan mice reproduce with other smart ‘n’ sexy city mice— even the coolest ones with “no underwear at all!”—their genes for intelligence get passed onto the next generation of city rodents, perpetuating the average difference in intelligence between urban mice and their rustic counterparts. So if you’ve ever wondered why rural rednecks are so stupid, that’s part of the reason: on average, the smart, ambitious people from the country keep moving to the city to

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seek fame, fortune, challenges, and reproductive opportunities that just don’t exist out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. They relocate, that is, to escape “the idiocy of rural life.” The only way the “Jefferson effect” wouldn’t create a genetic difference in intelligence between economic classes (and geographic regions) is if intelligence was 100% cultural, with no genetic component at all. Which, as every cognitive scientist from Steven Pinker on down by now knows, isn’t the case: If there was no genetic component to intelligence, there’d also be no correlation between the IQs of identical twins raised apart. Don’t blame me: Blame George and Weezy. Of course, my own formerly country-mouse IQ, generalor-multiple intelligences, and ability to play hacky sack, are still stuck in a pretty damned low socioeconomic class here in the Big City. But hey, sometimes you have to take one step back, to take two steps forward. Sadly, that’s the closest I ever get to dancing. October 27 Played at the Free-Love open stage tonight for the first time since late August. Meaning that I put in just enough practice over the past week to not embarrass myself, not enough to get into a studio for doing a demo or anything. One of the songs I did was a new one I just wrote in the past month: A TALL SHIP I must go down to the seas again To the lonely sea and sky And hear the west wind’s song The wheel’s kick, white sails shaking Pale grey dawn is breaking On spirits high and strong

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All I ask is a tall ship And a star to steer her by All I ask is a tall ship For a Mariner in rhyme Spray and wind-blown spume A running tide to chase away The ladies of the harbor For a halo draped around the moon All I ask is a tall ship And a star to steer her by All I ask is a tall ship A sextant’s grip And a star to steer her by All I ask is a tall ship The gust in unfurled sails A vagrant gypsy life I must go down to the seas again For my lover calls my name And she cannot, she will not be denied All I ask is a tall ship And a star to steer her by All I ask is a tall ship And a star to steer her by All I ask is a tall ship.... I’m not nearly up enough on classic poetry to have known about John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever” poem from any original sources or compilations. I just initially cribbed the “All I ask is a tall ship” line from Star Trek and Captain Kirk. Anyway, it pretty much suits my present state of mind: After that whole “circle is small” debacle, I’ve decided to stop writing lovesongs about women altogether, and switch to

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writing them about inanimate objects and natural phenomena instead. “I’ve already got a woman to worry about; her name’s the Enterprise.” Relationships would be much easier if they were treated more like jobs—if it was understood from the beginning that you’re just “filling a slot” in someone else’s life, without expecting to be there until you either retire or the stress kills you. And as long as you gave two weeks’ notice that you had found someone better, you could leave on good terms— with a reference, even. Not that I got anywhere close to that with Jennifer. It was more like I showed up bright and early for the first day of work ... only to find that she had decided to “merge with the competition” instead. Well, there are things in life you can only be philosophical about. By which I mean: What Would Diogenes Do? October 28 We are the champions! We are the champions ... of the World! The World Series, that is. I’m a die-hard Red Sox fan. I’m not even remotely Irish, and I’ve never been to Massachusetts, but my favorite uncle when I was just a kid had a Boston Bruins sweater, so that got me into cheering for all the New England teams. Which in turn led me into decades of consistently shattered, “Wait ‘til next year” hopes. I started following baseball in 1978—the Bucky Dent year. I suffered through the Calvin Schiraldi vs. Keith Hernandez atbat in 1986, sitting on the edge of an old lime-green couch and indulging in every superstition I could think of, praying for just one more strike. In 2003, I saw manager Grady Little leave a wilting Pedro Martinez on the mound to blow a three-run lead in the seventh game of the ALCS against the Evil Empire, and I cried out to the baseball gods: “Why?!!”

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So when Steven Pinker talks about how the Greatest Comeback Ever in 2004—in the ALCS against the hated Yankees, after we were down three games to none—nearly made him believe in God, I know exactly how he feels. Even though I’ve never met him or that other famous philosopher and member of Red Sox Nation, Daniel Dennett, I think we understand each other in a way that only people who have been through years of heart-breaking tragedy together, and risen triumphant from the ashes to stand gloriously on top of the world, can ever do. Someday I’ll scrape together enough money to make a pilgrimage to Fenway Park, and bow down there on the pitching mound where Curt Schilling’s ankle bled—not unlike how Jesus bled on the cross, redeeming our sins and renewing our faith that miracles are possible. Then, I’ll kiss the infield grass where Jonathan Papelbon has danced, and the dirt behind the scoreboard where Manny Ramirez has peed. And then, when I’ve completed my “sacred duty” and perambulated seven times around the ballpark, counterclockwise, maybe I’ll take a walk around the Ivy-league Harvard campus, just to ogle the Celtic cuties. IVY There was a Cambridge girl Ivy college world Spunky Harvard coed Held her close and I Love the way Her curls fell down Brush them from her forehead Lively Harvard lass Sugar, spice and upper-class Ravishing and naughty

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Flashing Celtic eyes Storm-filled as crimson skies Or a harborfront Tea Party If I kissed her once The apple of my eye If I kissed her twice No word of it a lie If I kissed her long enough Ravished ‘til the sun is up There is a Harvard girl And all her Irish curls Fall on a cashmere sweater When she is good She is ... very good indeed And when she is bad She’s even better If I kissed her once The apple of my eye If I kissed her twice No word of it a lie If I kissed her long enough Ravished ‘til the sun is up There is a Harvard girl When she walks by a church Well, God cannot stop praising When she is good She is very, very good indeed And when she is bad She is amazing If I kissed her once The apple of my eye

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If I kissed her twice No word of it a lie If I kissed her long enough Ravished ‘til the sun is up And the sun is up.... Oddly enough, in the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants to America weren’t viewed as being white—they were supposed to be a different and lesser race altogether. Same thing for Italians. As if the ancestors of Sophia Loren (38C-24-38) or Loreena McKennitt (celtic harp, B-flat) could ever be viewed as inferior to anyone! The Red Sox were actually the last of the major-league teams to racially integrate—they didn’t field their first black player until they brought up Pumpsie Green from the minors in July of 1959. They had a chance to sign Jackie Robinson in ’45, but passed. They could’ve had Willie Mays as a teenager, but decided he wasn’t their “kind of player.” They had George “Boomer” Scott, Reggie Smith, future five-time AllStar first-baseman Cecil Cooper, and slugger Ben Oglivie in the late ’60s and the ’70s, but traded them all. If it hadn’t been for Jim Rice, their 1983 roster—which gave us their first losing season since 1967—wouldn’t have had a single black player on it. They actually fired their minor-league instructor, Tommy Harper, for protesting the invitations given by the Elks club, just to white members of the team, at the Sox’ spring-training location in Florida. In the mid-’80s. (Harper later sued, and won.) So maybe it wasn’t so much the “Curse of the Bambino” that caused the BoSox to go from 1918 to 2004 without a World Series win in between. Maybe it was more the curse of their own racism. Because Mays, Robinson and Ted Williams on the same team would’ve been tough to beat.

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November 19 The maid service here in Desolation Towers leaves much to be desired. Three weeks ago I saw the new cleaning woman taking my personal bath towel out of the apartment, as part of the rest of the laundry. I stopped her from doing that, and explained that that was my own property. The next week I was out again when she did her cleaning, and when I got back home the towel was gone. Along with a couple of dishrags I had bought the day after I moved in. Last week, I got back from running errands to find that the detachable cord on my top-of-the-line noise-canceling Bose headphones had been vacuumed right out of the earpiece at one end, and torn out of my computer sound card at the other end. According to the rental office, the girl responsible for that damage felt absolutely terrible about it. So I just got back from Bay-Bloor Audio—on maid-service day, again—buying a replacement for that cord. While I was out, the other set of studio-quality earphones I had been using since the first pair got busted also got mangled: the new-again maid (her first day) had knocked a glued-on piece off of the phones, put a small gash in the left earpad, and put a kink in the cord. Obviously, again by being too stupid to run a vacuum cleaner competently. At least the first one had the decency to tell the manager and leave a note about her destruction. This one just walked away from it. So I stomped down to the rental office, but there was no one there ... at 3 in the afternoon. I stomped back up to my suite. I stomped back down to the office with the receipt for the damage done to the first pair of headphones, and the second pair in my hands. There was still no one in the office, but I found the manager, Cheryl, gabbing airily in the hallway.

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I pushed the receipt and the headphones in her face. “The maid just vacuumed these. Again. They’re $160 headphones.” Well, at least they were when I bought them a dozen years ago. “Oh,” she said. “If there’s a thousand-dollar computer on the floor, anyone knows you don’t vacuum right up against it.” “They don’t know that,” she countered. “And you never told us to be careful around it.” “You’re going to reimburse me for this, correct?” “Well, yes,” she said reluctantly. “But this is getting to be expensive. I guess if we didn’t send her up ... but I’m obliged to offer you maid service.” Yes, she was actually thinking that the solution to the problem might be just to stop cleaning the suite. No mention of any reduction in rent, of course; just give me less than I’m paying for, so it doesn’t cut into her bottom line. Toronto is full of Rent Nazis—women who think they’re landowners and part of some privileged class just because they manage a building, yet who have no comprehension of what responsibility means. When I lived at Yonge and Eglinton it was a dour Russian bitch who would have fit in better behind the Iron Curtain than anywhere in the free world. At least this one doesn’t have a KGB accent. “If the maids you hire are too stupid to run a vacuum cleaner, they’re too stupid to be employed,” I ranted. “And if you hired them, and they break stuff, it becomes your problem.” “We’re happy to support your lifestyle, but you’ve got your equipment spread out all over the suite. You’re renting an apartment-hotel. It’s not your office. You’re supposed to go out to work, and your room is just where you go after work to eat, sleep and relax.” Well, my jaw dropped at that. In Communist Russia they probably told you what you could do in your own space, but here? With business travelers?

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I lived for five and a half months last winter in a similar apartment-hotel downtown in the Village by the Grange, by Osgoode Station, with exactly the same set of “equipment” distributed around a much smaller suite. Never had a single problem with the weekly (Filipino) maid service or the management there. “This is unbelievable,” I said. “No, what’s unbelievable is how you’re using your room!” All I had left was sarcasm: “Have a good afternoon, Cheryl.” From what I could tell as I turned and stomped out of there, she was a bit taken aback. “Yes, have a good afternoon.” “Fucking idiot” I growled, as I got out the door. So I stomped back up to my apartment ... and tried to figure out where I should run to next. CAN’T RUN FAST ENOUGH You don’t know me, but I’ve been here before Quaking primal fears, locked behind a sterile door Just huddled quiet, not emotionless as such But I’ll run, I’ll run.... No dishonest words or tangled web to weave No weaknesses and nothing up my sleeve But I’ll be on my marks when you call my bluff ‘Cause I can run, hey I’ll run But I can’t run fast enough I’ll run, hey I’ll run But I can’t run fast enough Nothing’s stuck in my throat if I swallow hard Pull the splinters out, extract the broken shard Tear these sutures out from where I bit my tongue ‘Cause I can run, I’ll run

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I’ll run, hey I’ll run But I can’t run fast enough I’ll run but I can’t hide I will see you on the other side I’ll face the Mariner, I won’t back down from him I’ll run, but I can’t swim I can’t see you though my eyes are wide I cannot touch you, for my hands and arms are tied I cannot feel you, for my heart is cold and rough But I can run, I’ll run I’ll run, hey I’ll run I’ll run, I’ll run But I can’t run fast enough By 4 p.m. I had left a message for a rental office on Bay Street. By 11 p.m. I was out of ice and the supermarket was closed. So I dragged my long hair and sandals across the intersection of Indecision and Despair to a convenience store I hadn’t been in before. An elderly Chinese man stood behind the counter, minding the cash register. I looked down into the first freezer I could find. Lots of ice cream, but no ice. If it’s possible for hopes to literally sag, that’s what I could feel mine doing. “There’s another freezer over here,” the old man said helpfully. “I’m just looking for ice,” I said, as I moved toward the other one, closer to the checkout. “And here it is!” I greedily snatched a bag out, and eagerly paid the gentlemen for it. “Thank you,” I said, with more sincerity than I’d ever felt before for such a small mercy. “You’re welcome,” he smiled.

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And as I walked the quarter-mile home with my plastic bag containing just another plastic bag filled with nothing more extraordinary than frozen tapwater, I was astonished at the depth of gratitude I felt for the simple kindness of that gentle man, in treating his newest loyal customer with basic human decency. Even if that customer is just a tired, fortysomething hippie dragging his ass down the street, looking for all the world like Jesus lugging a heavy cross up to Calvary, and wanting nothing more than one last round of rumand-Cokes before it’s all over, and he can finally rest his head, in peace. November 23 Went down to the rental office today, reluctantly, to pay my next month’s rent. Cheryl was there, and she apologized, saying that she was just stressed on Monday from a bunch of other stuff, including having to keep training new maids. Though of course she also couldn’t help mentioning that when she spoke to the agency that provided the girls, the people there brought up the point that “they had never been told that there was expensive equipment in the suite.” One of my many other mini-jobs back at the fishing lodge a decade ago involved helping out with housekeeping when the resort was busy—including performing the “rocket science” of running a vacuum cleaner over a rug. No one ever had to tell me not to break the guests’ stuff just in case it turned out to be expensive. Even the dumbfuck hillbillies I worked with knew that much. So I could have responded to Cheryl, but I know where that would have led: I would have just wound up “on the run” again, looking for somewhere else to live; and the firstchoice place I phoned on Monday never called me back anyway. The normal (Hispanic) rent-a-maid is coming back soon, after being off for a month for personal reasons. Thank god. She’s been in Canada for eleven years and still can barely

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speak English, and I’ve never seen anyone who takes less pride in a job well done than she does—dusting apparently isn’t part of her responsibilities, nor is cleaning the bathroom mirror or sink, or replacing the burned-out lightbulbs. But if it’s a choice between high-school-dropout black women who clean my suite so well that they cause hundreds of dollars in damage, and someone who doesn’t give a shit but at least doesn’t break stuff, I’ll take the latter. I never did get my bath towel back, either. But I can easily “even that up” when I finally move out.... November 29 It had been nearly a week since I and my long hair had gotten hassled just for walking down the street, minding my own business. So I was finally starting to relax and enjoy life again. All I wanted to do over noon hour on this particular day was to get downtown to pick up a package of books from my rented post office box, and spend the rest of a brisk and windy November day blissfully sipping tea, and reading. As I stepped out of the subway car at Bloor and Spadina, however, and turned to walk toward the Walmer exit ... I was surprised to see some student-age redneck in a powder-blue hoodie, thirty yards ahead of me, from a completely different car, giving me the finger as he turned to walk toward the same exit. It took me a while to piece together a plausible narrative as to what I might have done to provoke that antagonistic gesture. (There was only one other person walking behind me—an attractive brunette—so it had to be directed at me.) The Spadina line of the Toronto subway system runs all the way up north to Downsview station. And I worked long enough in that neighborhood (for Tevye) to know that the further you go northwest in this city, the more likely it is that a hippie such as myself will get barked at just for existing. So here’s what I think happened: As I stood on the platform, waiting patiently for the arriving train to come to a halt, Redneck Finger saw me there in

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my long hair and sandals. Looking, let’s face it, far too much like Jesus on his way to the post office. And if there’s one thing which our world’s rednecks can’t stand, it’s Jesus on his way to the post office. Disgusted, then, by the mere fact of my living and breathing in this city, and given the opportunity to do something about it, the pig-fucker decided to make it clear that the world would be a better place if I simply didn’t exist. It was a little thing, but piled on all the other little things it broke something in me. Suddenly I had had enough. Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation—not of myself but of all men who were hip like me. December 12 I remained in my apartment more and more each day. The situation in Toronto was so strange I decided to try passing back into short-haired society. I went out only at night for food. My heart sickened at the thought of any more hairism. In my past forays into the business world, in giving technical advice on near-six-figure software purchases I have had to listen to sociopathic, bumbling, yet silver-tongued senior VPs—people who otherwise failed to even schedule a simple meeting competently—ask their vendors whether they employed any long-haired guys. Not whether they employed any blacks or Jews or gays—obviously you can’t ask those sort of stupid questions and still have a job to come into the next morning. But you apparently can ask whether they employ any hippies. I have had middle-aged, Teletubby-body-type, deer-gut businessmen cut in front of me in line while boarding a flight in Winnipeg, and then dis me when they waddle-disembarked in Toronto, just to make it clear to me how little I am worth in their world—just to show me “who’s boss.” Heading down to the Arizona desert in the middle of summer for software training, I have had border officials refuse to believe that I have never been in police custody. After all, the criminal’s profile they called up with their clumsy

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fingers, from typing in a passport number at least distantly related to mine, matched so perfectly with what they expected mine to be, given my appearance—how could I not have been arrested in the recent past? I have had dumb blacks and dumber Chinese men in Chinatown yap at me in foreign gibberish, while I was doing nothing more provocative than walking down the sidewalk with my long hair flowing in the autumn breeze. Their goal undoubtedly being to make me feel that the most notably multicultural city in the world would be better off without my type. Standing on a street corner in Mississauga, waiting for transit which in no way deserves to be called “rapid,” I have been catcalled by school-busloads full of horny teenage boys—presumably the big-city cousins of the “sexy bitch” Orangeville idiots. I have been told to “get a job” by overgrown, unimaginative rugrats who will surely grow up to be just as prejudiced as their parents, after college days as misogynistic, dateraping frat animals who’ve bought their way to a degree via essays written by others for $19.95 per page. Merely wanting to use the washroom before getting up on stage, and looking for all the world like Jesus in desperate need of a urinal, I have been harassed by dropout-stupid Npeople—certain in their bigoted paranoia that I had been trying to sneak past them as they lurked in the recesses of an unlit side room, chocolate-vegetating and getting paid for it. I have had BMW-driving morons in the business district of Toronto gun their engines from a standstill when turning onto sidestreets I was crossing—with no oncoming traffic to even remotely justify that—forcing me to break into a sprint to avoid being run down. I have had enough. Some people grow their hair long with the explicit plan of cutting it short again, and donating it to make wigs for cancer patients. I donated mine to MagiCuts.

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The blatantly gay stylist there was a little too happy about that. Not surprising—just about every time I had previously come in to have the ends trimmed, he had “joked” about cutting it all off. It’s not often that you can literally see the last ten years of your life falling in pieces around you onto the floor. I closed my eyes. Snip, snip. Adam in the Bible was a longhair, you know. He had to be, unless God created scissors and hair salons and gay barbers at the same time as he created the Garden of Eden. Snip, snip. Samson too. That’s where he got his strength from, until they cut it short and poked his eyes out, after Delilah betrayed him. That girl, she sure knew how to hurt a man. I’ll bet she really could kiss, though.... Snip, snip. You know where the whole Western prejudice against long hair comes from? World War I. Cutting hair short in the military was just a way to control lice and the diseases they carry. So when all those short-haired soldiers came back from fighting overseas, of course the women all swooned, and next thing you know it was “masculine” and “patriotic” to have short hair. And World War II and the Korean War just reinforced those attitudes. It’s a pretty sad behavioral-psychology, stimulus-response way to live—Pavlov and Skinner would be proud. But that’s typical for our species. You think men grow their hair long as a product of low testosterone, or to express their feminine side? Tell that to every long-haired man who fought in the Civil War, in a time when soldiers had “more or less complete latitude to groom their hair any way they liked.” Tell it to every feared warrior in a pre-Scissors Age culture where the fighters wore their hair down past their shoulders. Tell it to the long-haired Ben Frank-

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lin, member of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Tell it to the litany of composers, judges, barristers and Founding Fathers who walked around wearing wigs. Tell it to the trigger-happy conservative rocker, Ted “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” Nugent. Tell it to every lion-maned lead singer, guitarist or rock-star drummer who wound up marrying a Playboy Playmate, after years of enviable debauchery and consensual statutory rape: Even Ozzy Osbourne, who was never more than a B-grade joke, spent nights on the road working his way through half a dozen groupies, each one “more beautiful than god.” Tell it, even, to Albert Einstein, whose own hair in his later years was long enough that a young boy passing him on the sidewalk in Princeton one afternoon turned to his mother and asked her: “Was that Mrs. Einstein?” Prior to WWI, no one would have even thought of associating long hair on men with any negative traits, much less would it have been taken as indicating a lack of masculinity or patriotism. Or as a sign of drug usage. But then the ’60s came, and guys started growing their hair long to dis “Leave It to Beaver” America, and to not go along with what their middle-class fathers thought they should be. And then Vietnam happened, and long hair became “a symbol of opposition to the war,” so short hair versus long hair was “us” (in the establishment) versus “them.” And then Telly “Kojak” Savalas broke the “no-hair bar” with his “Who loves ya, baby?” And before you knew it Patrick Stewart was bald but incredibly sexy, keeping the Federation safe from dangerous aliens on the bridge of the nextgeneration Enterprise; and then black rappers were shaving their heads.... Snip, snip, snip. “Okay, how does that look?” I forced myself to open my eyes. In the flood of incandescent light against barbicide and that little whisk they use to brush stray hairs off the back of your neck, the face and narrow shoulders of a stranger—a

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very short-haired, gainfully employable, non-drug-dealing stranger—moped at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me. All traces of the Geoffrey Falk I had been were wiped from this world. The reflections led me back to Bay Street, back to the financial district, back to the final admission of defeat against mindless business-world conformity and hairist prejudice. I got up, paid the bill, and put on my winter jacket, habitually reaching around behind my neck to pull out the luxurious mane that always got trapped inside my parka. Reaching around to pull out something that no longer existed, grasping at air. December 17 What a tremendous relief, to be able to walk the streets of Toronto again without being the target of hairist bigotry. To celebrate my newfound freedom, I went out to the Free-Love open stage in the evening. Not to perform—just to listen and relax. I ordered a veggie burger and was served, and it was a miracle. I went to the restroom and was not hassled by prejudiced Chinese chicks, dropout blacks, dumbfuck MBAs, or homophobic rednecks with brains the size of a walnut. No one paid me the slightest attention. No one said, “What’re you doing in here, hippie? Where’s your guitar? Do you know where I can get some really good weed?” What a tremendous relief. December 19 Woke up, got out of bed, showered, dragged a comb—no need for a brush anymore, sigh—across my short-haired head, and grabbed an armful of books to return to the local branch of the public library.

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We just had another major blizzard yesterday, so the drifts are again as high as a pedophilic clergyman’s eye, but they’re already starting to melt in the glorious morning sun. I turned the corner to the library, and strode ahead, ten yards from the front door. I was halfway down that path when an airhorn-like sound blasted several times, quickly approaching me from behind. I turned slightly to find out what was creating the 80decibal noise ... to see a black man on a bicycle, the melted snow on his brake pads acting like a buzzer against the rim. And then I just kept walking. The middle-class, fifty-something guy stopped beside the front door, leaned his bike against the snowbank, and started muttering unhappily to himself about ... something. About me? For what? I reached the door and stopped, listening to this fully grown, supposedly adult black man and his grumbling monologue, unable to believe that it was actually directed at me. He walked right up behind me, still griping: “And then he doesn’t even go through the door.” I took my hand off the door handle, slack-jawed, immobilized. The black man-child pulled it open, and walked in gruffly past me. What the...? What THE...? You lousy sonofa.... I may well have cursed at him, for being such a completely unprovoked asshole. I may have even taken the Lord Nigger Jesus’s name in vain—or part of it, anyway. (Hey, he started it.) I just hope Roger didn’t hear me, because it wasn’t directed at him. And it’s not his fault that some of the most insecure, worthless, hate-filled assholes in this world just happen to have the same color of skin as he does, and go around dumping on others in the same shitty way as they (or at least their dead-or-dying ancestors) used to be treated. In the Deep South. Fifty or more years ago. With me nowhere in sight.

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In pre-emancipation days, black slaves who tried to learn to read used to be punished by having their right hands mutilated. Even just before the civil rights movement in the ’60s, it was an unspoken rule that they weren’t allowed to enter libraries in the southern States. That’s where the old saying comes from, that “A black needs a library like a fish needs a bicycle.” Or maybe it was, “A black needs a bicycle like a fish needs a library.” Or maybe it was a school of fish. Or a school of blacks. You know, during segregation. Anyway, there was something about wheels—which is ironic, given that no tribal, kinship-based African culture ever managed to discover that basic piece of technology before their contact with White European Men. Which probably accounts for their recent fascination with shiny, spinning rims on their pimped-up sportscars. You know: overcompensation. Either way, the world has certainly come a long way since then, for blacks and bicycles alike—to the point where a middle-aged white man who’s just minding his own business and trying to return a few books on a Wednesday morning had best step aside, if there’s a nappy hose-head on a bike heading, hell-bent, for the same library doors. The thing about “persecuted minorities” is that they rarely even try to understand how much ill-will they bring upon themselves by their own utterly unprovoked, adversarial behaviors. You can actually take a person such as myself, who would never have believed any of the negative stereotypes about a race or a sex or any other group, and turn him into someone who expects the worst from you, simply by ... well, simply by repeatedly behaving exactly like one of those stereotypes. Way to go, “brothas.” December 31 New Year’s Eve. Blah. Good thing I’ve got a head start on the drinking.

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New Years comes but once a year And always comes in the same old way No midnight kiss, no reason to remember this No point to celebrate the day New Year’s, New Year’s blahs I’m young, I am single, by Darwin I should mingle Grab my coat, go out tonight But gravity’s winning until the room stops spinning Captain Morgan proved that that Newton guy was right I actually met a very decent direct descendent of the real Captain Morgan during my time at Hidden Valley. It’s been my favorite brand of rum since I started drinking heavily to recover from my experiences in that unholy “sanctuary.” New Year’s, New Year’s blahs New Year’s, New Year’s blahs Could bounce down the stairwell to Filmore’s fine hotel Where Tiffany dances the night away The sweetest, the slimmest, she used to be a gymnast She’ll pommel your horse if you let her have her way And oh, what heights she’ll reach A perfect ten, your Nadia Comaneci New Year’s, New Year’s blahs New Year’s, New Year’s blahs My first apartment in Toronto, after the basement room in urine-soaked Senile Hills, was a legendary hellhole near the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne. Just down the street from Filmore’s hotel ... and strip club. They did actually once advertise a former gymnast named Tiffany for a week or two on their marquee.

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When I moved into my own 225 square feet of cockroach-racing heaven, the superintendent warned me not to look any of the neighborhood hookers in the eye—they’d take it as a sign of interest, and follow you up to your room. No big sacrifice: It’s not their eyes that draw your attention anyway. I miss that neighborhood more than I can say. In two and a half years of living there the only time I got hassled about anything was from a shriveled Chinese prune of a man who’d stand outside his little grocery store—a corner store that couldn’t even afford a corner, and so ended up midway between two side-streets on Dundas—and glare Asian daggers at me as I walked past. I finally got driven out of “Cockroach Downs” by an African-student neighbor whose academic major seemed to involve waking me regularly in the middle of the night by screeching a monster chair across the floor on the other side of a paper-thin wall. Or maybe it was a throne he was wrestling with. Either way, it was closer to Eddie Murphy in Coming to America than I ever wanted to be. I moved on up from there, Jefferson-style, to a building at Yonge and Eglinton (“Young and Eligible”), meshing as well as I could with a neighborhood of young, attractive urban professionals, just a fifteen-minute walk away from work. I got laid off from Shitvantex six months later in favor of an immigrant from England—white as Her Majesty’s delicates, he was. The ownership figured he’d be able to “do everything I can do, and more.” By which they meant that he could interface with clients, for having shorter hair and nicer clothes. Never mind that he had never worked with SalesLogix or OLAP before—he could learn on the job, right? Also never mind that, in two and a half years there, not once had I been required to meet with potential clients; it simply wasn’t a client-facing position. The blonde who made that micro-managing decision, with no input from the very competent but utterly selfcentered I.T. Director, had started in sales, and worked her way up to president ... by marrying the CEO. “Bungler and

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the Ho,” our shareholders used to call them, while watching the company’s share price drop near-monotonically from a dot-com high of four dollars, down to around five cents. I would have thought that the fact that “Alice” clearly liked me—to the point of grabbing my love handles as she walked past at the company Christmas party, six months earlier—might have afforded me some job security. But alas, while there may be honor among thieves, there is none among executives. Or at least, not among dumb blondes with more bedroom skills than boardroom ones. As an unemployed programmer and then aspiring writer, I’d go for walks at weird hours of the night, wandering through the attached 24/7 mini-Dominion without a cart at 2 a.m., trying to decide what I was hungry for. Of course, that tended to attract the attention of the (black) security guards who’d then follow me around. But they were just doing their (vegetating) jobs with no hint of paranoia, and probably would have even had the basic human decency to identify themselves if I had asked. The only time I got anything close to being harassed outof-the-blue during four years in that beautiful and unspeakably convenient neighborhood was my first time in the local library, walking out with a handful of CDs and a headful of shoulder-length hair. One of the middle-aged “book cashiers”—they’re hardly trained librarians—came chugging after me: “Did you check those out?” “Yes.” “Do you have the receipt?” “Yes.” “Can I see it?” So I pulled the paper out of my jeans-pocket, and she looked it over. “Oh, they’re all ... checked out.” Yeah, they’re all checkout out. Just because I have long hair doesn’t make me a music thief. And I’m making more money than you ever will.

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Well, at the time, I was. Six months later, I wasn’t. Life is like that. I got along fine with them beyond that initial misunderstanding, though. (The bitchy, sallow, middle-aged rancid cunt at the Spadina branch is another story altogether. Don’t even get me started: I hate people when they’re not polite.) One of the other bookworms was actually a huge fan of the work of the New Age quasi-guru, Ken Wilber—she told me that his writings were the biggest spiritual influence in her life. I never had the heart to tell her that I’m the world’s #1 debunker of Wilber’s fatally flawed, utterly dishonest and/or incompetent work. She didn’t seem to have much in life beyond books and her cat—I bumped into them together on the subway once, on their way to the vet—and I didn’t want to take either one of those away from her. By contrast, I today have so much: my books, my computer, my guitar, my short hair ... and the furnished cupboards here on Desolation Row in an apartment which, to judge by the inadequate size of the drinking glasses, was formerly rented by hobbits. A toast to an end with my little eggnog friend A single bed with room to spare When it’s twelve o’clock And the Times Square ball drops It’s just as good as being there New Year’s, New Year’s blahs New Year’s, New Year’s blahs And all’s good and well at Filmore’s fine hotel Where Tiffany’s name is up in lights A Happy Nude Year one and all And to all, and to all a good night

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January 11, 2008 It was an early morning, yes, today; I was up before the dawn. Took the first subway train north, for a medical appointment. So there I was, standing in a door bay of the near-empty car, humming happily to myself, trying to work out a new song in my head. As we pulled into Wilson Station, a black, Zimbabweesque teenager, dressed-messy like he’s heading to a manual-labor job on a construction site, stepped from behind me, unseen, into the same bay. And while he’s standing in front of me waiting for the doors to open, he starts yapping away, in Afrikangibberish. The subway car was all but empty; had he wished to avoid me rather than deliberately provoke or dis me, he easily could have. So, I can only assume that he was perturbed by the (short) length of my hair ... and the color of my skin. His look said: “You short-haired white bastard, you ofay sonofabitch, what are you doing walking these streets?” just as the short-haired whites’ looks had said a month before: “You hippie bastard, you long-haired sonofabitch, what are you doing walking these streets?” Because if I was a shiftless, jobless drain on society before, what could I be now but a white, colonial, imperialist oppressor? Or perhaps humming in the morning is taboo in traditional Zimbabwean (or whatever) society, for the effect it has on the souls of the ancestors, or the misfortune it will surely bring to the tribe, perhaps in attracting killer bees or some other sympathetic-magical plague. Either way, when you’re a short-haired white male, why should you be allowed to ride the subway on a Friday morning, when there are illiterate hunter-gatherers in the Third World who have no subways at all?

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What would the corrupt, Muggerbe-supporting racist friends of South Africa’s President Mbongo do? Probably steal more land from competent whites to give to “real,” black Zimbabweans, “many of whom do not have much experience in commercial farming,” to put it mildly. Well, that’s one efficient way to cause a famine. Just don’t ask for my dime: This whitey is “all dimed out”.... February 3 We are not the champions. Giants 17, Patriots 14. Blech. Just when you thought our quarterback, Tom Brady, was a mythical creature made real, descended from Mount Olympus, who didn’t know how to lose.... Brady recently did a 60 Minutes interview where he wondered out loud, after three Super Bowl rings, about whether “there’s something greater out there for me.... There’s gotta be more than this.” Sorry to break it to you, Tommy-Boy, but when you’re making millions of dollars a year for being arguably the best to have ever played the game at your position, and you’re shacked up with a supermodel who’s making millions of dollars more than you are just for being gorgeous, and you’re coming off a 16-0 season, it’s not gonna get any better than that. Not unless the heavens open, revealing a choir of angels in thong bikinis, and Morgan Freeman personally anoints you Tom Almighty. In heaven, even the cool angels still have underwear—a gossamer gown against the light of God doesn’t leave much to the saintly imagination. But it sure could inspire some amazing lovesongs. If you’ve been practicing guitar. Which I haven’t been. I wouldn’t blame Paul and Richard at all if they’re not even interested in recording together anymore—it must look pathetically ungrateful of me to not have properly followed up on their offer of studio time, and to just have “disappeared” from the open stages over the winter. But Christ, just

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keeping my head above water for the past six months has been all I could do. March 19 I just read an excellent short essay by Julian Baggini (via a link from Ophelia Benson’s fantastic www.butterfliesand wheels.com site). From the New Humanist magazine, on “Spongers.” I can’t stand our former Conservative premier of Ontario from a few years back, Mike Harris. But full props to the man for bringing in workfare, i.e., for demanding that able-bodied welfare recipients participate in either training or job placements. Of course, Baggini’s stereotypical “sponger” has hair down to his shoulders. ‘Cause, you know, if it was anyone other than an unemployed longhair, the stereotyped group whose members were being singled out for “not pulling their weight” would be screaming bloody murder. Indeed, if the figure used in the illustration was anything but Caucasian, the magazine would be defending itself against cries of “racism” (or sexism, if they showed a woman). So you can see why it has to be a white male who’s the designated “drain on society.” But why not at least portray him with, say, just medium-length hair? Why not stop at “shaggy”? Why does it have to be down to his shoulders, implying (in context) that he hasn’t had a job and has been living off welfare for two or three years? Why, indeed. Well, I think I know why. Because for all of the stereotypes which you can’t publicly express without being either an Awful Racist or a Despicable Sexist, the regard for long hair on men as an indication of many other socially undesirable qualities is the one stereotype which anyone can still indulge in, even quite openly, and not be seen (or even privately feel, himself) as being a Very Bad Person. In my own experience, poor and uneducated people of all races and ethnic backgrounds are the worst for missing no opportunity to shit on anyone who, they think, is contributing

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even less to society than they themselves are. And per capita, for every redneck/white bigot there is one black bigot, one brown bigot, one yellow bigot, and one red bigot, etc. It’s just basic human psychology: “Persecuted minorities” have a fully comparable percentage of racists (and sexists) in their ranks as the “oppressive white male majority” does. But everyone already knows that, right? March 31 I discovered back in early January that the private school where I did my programming diploma in 2001—the nowclosed 2 Bloor St. West campus of the Institute for Computer Studies—has lost the database containing my grades. In the exact words of Mildred Galloway at Everest College: Further to your request for a Transcript of Marks relating to your studies at Institute for Computer Studies in 2001, I write to advise that Corinthian Colleges Inc. was not the owner of Institute for Computer Studies at the time that you attended. CDI Colleges are a division of Corinthian Colleges Inc. CDI Education Corporation was acquired by Corinthian Colleges Inc. on August 18, 2003. During the acquision [sic] transition period (2003 to present), we have discovered that not all records have been kept or that records were not properly maintained and stored by the various campus locations. We have conducted a search of all available student information, however, to date we have been unable to locate your student file. As a result, we are presently unable to assist you in obtaining a Transcript of Marks relating to your studies at Institute for

Computer studies in 2001.

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Isn’t that nice? And the tuition was only, what, $17.5K? In all seriousness, I will still be paying off that student loan until the autumn of 2011. And I’ll sleep so much better knowing that “in the event that information becomes available,” Mildred & Co. will be sure to “prepare and deliver a Transcript of Marks to [me] as soon as possible.” So I guess won’t be sending scans of that out to potential girlfriends anytime soon. And it’s now definite that I can’t work in the U.S. under NAFTA—it would have been iffy with the accelerated diploma anyway, which packed two years of courses into five and a half months, when the free-trade rules say that a two-year diploma plus three years of experience are the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. So it’s just as well that I didn’t get too excited about being repeatedly approached by an (ethnically East Indian) preferred recruiter for Microsoft back in November, about building the data warehousing and cubes for Microsoft Office Live. I finally got in touch with a couple of lawyers this week, but only one of them even bothered to respond, and he said that the case wasn’t “big enough” for his firm to bother with. To be “big enough,” hundreds or thousands of former students would have to be in the same boat, for a class-action suit. Of course, ICS won’t have had a separate database set aside just for little old moi. And since in their heyday they were pushing through four or five classes of around thirty students each per year at the Bloor campus alone, there’s every possibility that I’m not the only person in the whole wide world they’ve screwed over. But either way, my diploma has apparently vanished as if it had never existed at all. I’d been thinking of enrolling in the distance-education program at Athabasca University—Canada’s version of the University of Phoenix, which is fine if all you want is a piece of paper to satisfy the people at the border that you’ve completed a degree. I could have gotten two years worth of transfer credits for that previous work, saved myself two years

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of tuition in the four-year bachelor’s program, and gone to work in the States a mere two years from now instead of four. Yet, even though this brutal and inexcusable fuck-up is thus costing me around $125K and two years of my life, I’m still not getting screwed over badly enough for it to be worth anyone else’s time and effort to lend a hand. Fantastic. And from what I’ve read online, the Ministry of Education doesn’t even care about complaints against private schools like CDI—they’re far too Big Business to risk offending. Fucking whores. Ironically, when I had applied to the U of T back in 2001, they required a high-school transcript. And when I emailed my old school for that, I never even received a response. So on top of the missing ICS records, there’s every possibility that there’s no direct record left of me attending high school, either. Hell, if my grade twelve marks weren’t listed on my U of Manitoba transcript, I’d have no record of having graduated from anywhere. Sigh. If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all. But then, there’s plenty of that to go around, isn’t there? For instance, you may not have had good science teachers at your high school. I deeply sympathize. Personally, I didn’t have any physics teacher at all: The school I went to was so far out in the sticks that I had to take the course by correspondence. But I still scored 100% (literally) on the province-set exams in grade twelve, and walked straight from that into finishing third out of 325 first-year engineering students at the University of Manitoba, and then first out of eighty second-year electricals. You didn’t go to a good preschool? Hell, when I arrived in class for my first day of kindergarten, and we had to write our names down on slips of paper, I didn’t know how to print my own name—no one had ever showed me how, and it didn’t come up at family gatherings with the cousins. It didn’t stop me from acing nearly every course I’ve ever taken since then, though, including Milk and Cookies 101.

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Your parents don’t have walls lined with books to pique your interest in a wide spectrum of ideas? How sad. Where’s your nearest university library or public branch? Growing up, mine was fifteen miles away, and I didn’t have a car ‘til I was eighteen. Your school can’t afford field trips to the local museum because the PTA funnels all the money to the better schools in your division? Aww, poow widdle diddums.... The nearest museum where I grew up was even farther away than the library. And the few field trips we ever took there were just excuses to take a day off school running around a reconstruction of an old sailing ship and flirting with the girls, without having to learn anything. Well, except learning how to flirt, that is. If I had done as well in that as I did in Intro Milk and Cookies.... Your school doesn’t have the latest-and-greatest science equipment or computers? You realize you’re talking to someone who did his first programming at a school which had approximately three TRS-80s for a student body of between 100 and 150 people. Anyway, things don’t change that fast in science at a high-school level that you would ever need to have fully up-to-date equipment or textbooks— in grade twelve, the math text we used had actually been published before I was born. You didn’t get into the Ivy League university of your choice? Or the guidance counselors at your high school gave you bad advice about what schools or career to pursue? We didn’t have guidance counselors where I grew up. They were hardly needed for a graduating class of eight (8) people—four good Christian girls, and four very horny boys, only one of whom ever even dreamed of shaking the world. Consequently, I had no idea that full scholarships to places like MIT or CalTech even existed. Had I known that they did, I would have at least applied to those world-class institutions, rather than settling for the one university close to home that offered an engineering program.

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Still, that didn’t stop me from receiving a best-in-theprovince four-year scholarship to that local university, which covered my tuition each year. Of course, a few years later scholarships started to show up explicitly for women in engineering—of which there had been a mere half dozen in firstyear, only one of whom made the Dean’s Honor List. I, however, got my scholarships for what’s between my ears, not for what’s between my legs. (Not that I haven’t received compliments—if not province-wide awards—for the latter, too.) Just like Madame Curie got her world-class successes in life for her brains, not for her breasts. And because the awards I received were merit-based rather than genital-based, they meant more than any “booby prize” given on the basis of “vaginal affirmative action” or minority status ever could: It’s something I earned simply by being smarter and working harder than anyone else in the province in my graduating year. You can’t find a good job right out of high school, and you’re too proud to work for minimum wage at McDonald’s? Cry me a river: One of my other mini-jobs at the fishing lodge over the summers was driving the sewer truck. Not unlike the “untouchables” in India, I spent up to forty hours a week sucking raw human sewage out of holding tanks, a thousand gallons at a time. For that, I made just slightly above minimum wage, while regularly getting splashed, even in the face, with other people’s diluted excrement. Just for the privilege of working that job, I had to relocate to a different province—a three-hour drive from where I grew up and spent the winters. Yet I was happy to have that means of supporting myself. But you try and tell the young people of today that ... and they won’t believe you. The one thing to note, though, is that the small, utterly inbred community of farmers and housewives in which I grew up knew a thing or two about the Protestant work ethic ... even while the older generation there explicitly viewed “too much learning” (esp. in university) as an impediment to one’s Christian faith—which of course it is, heh.

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But the point is that people who indiscriminately take up not merely the good but also the detrimental aspects of whatever culture they grew up in, and are proud of that, pretty much deserve what they get. Because, since when is the world so kind and generous as to spoon-feed you only what’s in your own best interests? To put it bluntly, it’s all in what you make of it. And whatever shitty situation you may find yourself in—metaphorically or, in my case, literally—if you won’t bust your ass to claw yourself out of it and build a better life for yourself, who will? April 11 I finally got started with recording the demo. Not with Paul and Richard, unfortunately; just guitar-and-voice recordings of me in my apartment. When Eddie Van Halen was in high school, he used to sit on the edge of his bed with a six-pack of Schlitz, practicing from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Inspired by that, me and my six-pack of honey brown managed to put down most of the basic guitar and vocal tracks for four songs: “A Tall Ship,” “Josephine,” “Red-Haired Girl,” and “Just a Night or Two”: Rose petals are red, girl Violets are blue Wouldn’t take me long at all To fall in love with you Violets are blue, girl Tulips soft and pink I could grow so fond of you In a night or two, I think Just a night or two, girl Just a night or two Wouldn’t take me long at all Just a night or two

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Your lips are red as roses, girl Your eyes are like the moon The planets are aligned for you To fall in love real soon Fall in love real soon, girl Fall in love real soon The stars above all shine for you Fall in love real soon Life is just uncertainties A race against the moon Crescent shines and then it’s gone In just a night or two Yet roses still are red now, girl Lilies soft and white Could you fall head over heels In love for just one night Love for just one night, girl Love you just one night Before the moon all disappears Love you for one night I know, it breaks my vow to only write lovesongs about inanimate objects. But time heals all wounds. And I think I’m ready to lust again. April 18 Since I first moved into this apartment last September, there’s been a tenant who insists on occasionally blasting his music way too loud for my liking. With the most awful, thumping, repetitive taste in structured noise, too, seeping in through my windows.

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I figured out pretty early in the game that it was the guy on the floor above, in room #908—the one whose Christmas wreath was, in hindsight, obviously a “territory” marker. But it was only happening a couple of times a week for five or so minutes at a stretch—though sometimes as late as 11 p.m.— so I had been able to put up with it without screaming too many obscenities out the window in return. I know, I’m bad for needing peace and quiet when I work—especially to not have doors slamming, scaring me out of my skin. But I’ve actually met people who are even worse, including a Random House-published author who didn’t do her own writing until after midnight, when the city has quieted down. I was practicing guitar on the street below the Woodsworth residence around midnight one day back in July— finger-picked, with no amplification, so I wasn’t exactly “waking up the neighbors.” Out of nowhere, a bunch of water splashed down from above onto the sidewalk, ten feet away from me. I looked up, and a window slammed shut on the fifteenth floor. Some people just have no appreciation for music. Never mind that during those same weeks some other guy was busking with his saxophone ‘til 2 a.m. just down the street from Tartu, and still not being subjected to a “rez shower.” Anyway, a week ago the guy upstairs started disturbing my peace for hours on end—knowing (I can assure you) that it was driving me crazy, but simply not caring. Today, he had his windows open and the volume cranked to such extremes that you could clearly hear the music and words down on street level, fifty yards away from the building. So I programmed the superintendent’s number into the Contacts on my cellphone, but I haven’t used it yet. Basically because I have reason to believe, based on the past behaviors of the idiot upstairs, that if I do make that call, I can look forward to something like being woken up at a quarter to eight every weekday morning by him slamming his door in retaliation.

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It’s getting too late for me to move into the U of T residences for the summer, even if I were to abandon all standards of cleanliness and throw my ass to the wind. And it doesn’t matter anyway since, by Murphy’s Law, exactly on the day before the jerk stopped even trying to be considerate, I committed in writing to stay here until at least the end of June. It will be interesting to see how this ends. Sigh. Like the Hidden Valley monk used to say, “Life sucks, and then you die.” April 29 – May 4 Well, it’s certainly been a week to end all weeks. It was the best of weeks, it was the worst of weeks. It was, above all, the most Hispanic of weeks. First, I finally got those four songs finished and posted on my MySpace page (www.myspace.com/geoffreyfalk). It’s a start—call it a milestone, even. Second, it had been awfully quiet from #908 recently. Too quiet. So I took a walk down the hall on the floor above. The wreath is gone. I broke out an ice-cold honey-brown beer from the fridge to celebrate ... and got started with unpacking my bankers boxes. That was the “best” part. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there. I was out for a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday morning on College Street, hustling across an intersection to the north side of the street. And as I got to the curb and turned onto the sidewalk, some old fart with a cane caught my eye and then looked away, grumbling to himself in some foreignlanguage gibberish. I was moving too fast for him ... or not giving him the elderly respect he deserves ... or what? I dunno. I couldn’t even guess.

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Had a blood draw after that at the doctor’s office, during which the Hispanic technician barely managed to get a quarter of a test tube of blood out of my arm. Typical bumbling, barely grazed the vein with the needle, even though you can see the eighth-inch wide blue streak right through the skin. At least she didn’t hit a nerve. After that appointment, I grabbed a Veggie Delite sub sandwich, then extemporaneously stopped in for a haircut in a dingy salon I hadn’t noticed before, where the only stylist in the place kept a Spanish radio station playing all the time. She used her clippers instead of scissors around my ears. I’ve never seen that done before. For good reason: One side is now cut higher than the other. And she didn’t even touch the uneven bangs which are already down to my eyebrows. It’s by far the worst haircut I’ve ever received, all thanks to the imported “skills” of Señorita Taco. Then, on Wednesday morning, 7 a.m., I was getting in line with an assigned number, for an appointment. I was #16, waiting behind some Pakistani-Spanglish guy who was #15, to get seated in numerical order on a line of chairs. He sat down in the first (i.e., highest-numbered) one, then started getting clumsily back up, and I decided to just avoid the commotion, and walked around him to a different chair. That simple act seems to have greatly annoyed him. Him: I was getting up so you could get past. Didn’t you understand that? I just sat down, and shook my head ever-so-slightly, in despair. Him: I know you didn’t understand it. Me: Have you done this before? Him: Yeah, hundreds of times! (Later in the day, he was likewise claiming to have told a certain piece of information to one of the staff, “hundreds of

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times.” When you’ve accomplished absolutely nothing in your life, you have to exaggerate by several orders of magnitude in order to make it sound like something, right?) Me: Fifteen ... sixteen. Him: That’s why I was getting up, so you could get past me. You’re number sixteen. Don’t you understand that? Me: Fifteen ... sixteen. Him: I know, that’s why I was getting up! You still don’t understand that?! His implication being, of course, that I must be a Very Stupid White Person to fail to comprehend such a simple idea, and to be so unappreciative of all that he had done for me. Yet, what he took for lack of understanding on my part was, of course, merely my speechlessness and slackjawed amazement at how he could be such an abrasive, confrontational asshole. In a country where he’s functioning as little more than an oxygen sink. Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote that “[m]ediocrity knows nothing higher than itself,” and that was certainly true of this mediocre bugger. Me: Do not bother me. Now, contrary to popular belief, I don’t go out in daily life looking for people to insult. But this guacamole-for-brains moron not only aggressively started the conflict from out of nowhere, he crossed a line at least twice after that when he should have known enough to just shut his cock-sucking mouth, and let go of it. It’s as if the gene that makes rednecks simultaneously loudmouthed and completely unaware of how stupid they are, has crossed a racial or cultural barrier. Like the bird flu, but for visible minorities instead. But then, why should that be surprising? In any objective view of our dismal species, it has ever been thus.

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And if you just walk away and let such lowbrow bullieswho-think-they-own-the-world get away with crapping on other people for no good reason, when will they ever stop? So, having later overheard that this total jerk—let’s call him C. C. Goat-fucker—was originally from Mexico, and that his god was Allah, we had the following exchange: Me: Fuck Allah. Fuck Mohammed... Him: Shut up you bitch! Me: ...Sodomize Mohammed! All of which puts me in mind of the poem Perfumed Garden, by the great Islamic poet Abu Nuwas: O the joy of sodomy! So now be sodomites, you Arabs. Turn not away from it—therein is wondrous pleasure. Take some coy lad with kiss-curls twisting on his temples and ride him as he stands like some gazelle standing to her mate—A lad whom all can see girt with sword and belt not like your whore who has to go veiled. Make for smooth-faced boys and do your very best to mount them, for women are the mounts of the devils! “Sodomize Mohammed,” indeed! Ironically, a female “Savage Love” reader once wrote in to that column, to suggest that we’re probably all half-gay. Dan agreed with her, and remarked that it was odd that only women seemed to recognize that. Of course, that would go double for involuntarily aroused, bitchy goat-fuckers, and their Orangeville-redneck counterparts. Pack of 85-IQ fairies! Because, as much as homophobia can simply be the product of a “yuck factor,” when you’re looking at a non-gay man, involuntarily seeing a “bitch” there, and then shitting on him for what you can’t help feeling inside even though you really, really don’t want to feel it, that’s homophobia in the classic projecting, Freudian sense.

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Or, the “Redneck Muslim sense,” if you prefer. You know what rock group is really big in Iran in the twenty-first century? Queen. For using the word “Bismillah” (i.e., “In the name of Allah”) in their “Bohemian Rhapsody.” ‘Cause it’s also the first word in the first verse of every chapter in the hate-filled, flush-worthy, toilet-paper-thin Koran. Never mind that the Parsi guy belting out that song— Freddie Mercury—was openly, flamboyantly, irretrievably gay, to the point of dying of AIDS in 1991. As long as you’re quotin’ the Koran, it’s a cut above Western culture in general. Especially if you’re a homo-aroused terrorist stuck in the Dark Ages. No wonder they’re sexually confused: With the chadors and the hijabs and the sweet white raisins and the gays and the Parsis and the bohemians and the rhapsodies and the niqabs and the jilbabs and the burqas and the Bismillahs, it’s a wonder they don’t all go mental and turn to manic, homicidal violence. Plowing a long, hard, sleek 747 into a phallicshaped skyscraper could almost be therapeutic, from that point of view. In 2004, a fourteen-year-old would-be Palestinian suicide bomber told the Israeli troops who disarmed him: “Blowing myself up is the only chance I’ve got to have sex with seventy-two virgins in the Garden of Eden.” Yeah, no shit. A chance like that doesn’t come around every day. The “Garden of Eden” is a cheap hotel outside Mecca, right? Down the street from the Holy Meteorite strip club? Say no more. Admittedly, the above “Fuck Mohammed” exchange occurred after I had asked the butch little Mexican-Muslim bastard, “What are you even doing in this country, you fucking immigrant?” (I am still waiting for an answer to that reasonable question. And why not?) He started it. And you shouldn’t start a fight if you’re not prepared to finish it. Especially if you’re taking up space in a

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country you weren’t even born in. Because even if you’re an obnoxious, tortilla-munching, borderline-retarded falafelmonkey in your own shit-eating shanty, you should know enough to behave like a polite, civilized human being when you’re a guest in someone else’s house, right? As Newt and the hedgehog would say, it’s too bad they couldn’t just give us guns, and we shoot each other. Because, having grown up on a farm, I’m a pretty good shot. A Pakistani database administrator I once worked with had a great way of dealing with the frustration engendered by the ever-bumbling management there: He’d say, “Geoff, I need a gun. And if this keeps up, I’m going to need bullets, too!” Yes, he was a Muslim, from Karachi—observing Ramadan, eating halal foods, the whole nine yards. But he was also the sweetest and most gentle man you could ever hope to meet. Someday, a woman is going to fall deeply in love with him for his cauliflower ears alone. By contrast, I happened to catch a glimpse of the above “bitchy” immigrant moron’s girlfriend later. And all I can say is: What a dog. Not only did her lopsided, misshapen puss veritably cried out for a niqab—a “face made for Islamic radio”—but if those two ever choose to procreate, they won’t have children ... they’ll have puppies. Ugly Muslim puppies. We can tangentially thank the Islamic religion in particular for at least one good thing in this world, though: Blues for Allah—the 1975 Grateful Dead album. According to Robert Hunter, the title track is “a requiem for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a progressive and democratically inclined ruler ... whose assassination in 1975 shocked us personally.” Faisal was a fan of the Dead. A very anti-Semitic one, believing among other things that Jews “mix the blood of non-Jews into their bread and eat it,” but a fan nonetheless. We can likewise thank the Hispanics for at least one good thing in this world: Jerry Garcia. Spanish on his father’s side; Irish and Swedish on his mother’s.

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In the spring of 1966, while tripping (of course), Garcia was confronted by the ghost of a Tamal Indian medicine man, who blamed Jerry for the cruelties perpetrated by his paternal ancestors against the aboriginals. That’s what “white liberal guilt” will do to you. Even when you’re half-Hispanic! It’s that toxic and reality-bending, even just on “half a hit”! Aside from fifty percent of Captain Trips’ DNA, though, what has Latin America ever done for us? Beyond Alvarez’s asteroid-collision theory of dinosaur extinction, a handful of good writers, a few hot-but-not-too-bright actresses and singers, and Manny “Piss-Break” Ramirez, it’s historically been “the least creative outpost of the West.” Not surprising, when you consider that in Mexico, for example, less than one percent of the men have completed high school. Yet, like homophobic rednecks everywhere, they’re “macho” nonetheless; being too blissfully ignorant to realize how pathetically little they have to offer any woman —or man—who’s even worth having. If you ever need proof that even the lowest dregs of humanity still consider themselves to be above-average.... But it’s like they say: “To a manual-laboring dropout who only knows how to hammer, every girl looks like she wants to be nailed.” So anyway, after all that I was coming home on the subway Thursday evening, switching trains at St. George Station by the U of Toronto, and got up the stairs to the north-south line just as a train was speeding out of the station. A congenial, bearded, mid-twenties guy was on the platform reading a book, and asked me: “Did that train just go by without stopping?” I didn’t know, but after a couple of fairly reasonable suggestions which didn’t wash, I said jokingly: “Maybe it’s a new form of strike.” See, our blessed Toronto Transit Commission just got legislated back to work last weekend, after turning down a contract—a three percent raise each year, with a guarantee that they’d always be the highest-paid of city transit employ-

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ees, or whatever—which their union leadership had already recommended. So then the shaggy, Henson-esque guy says, gently enough: “Well, I’m sure that if you were fighting for what you believe in, you’d hope that people would support you too.” Well, good luck with that! So I did my best to “muster a smile for his nostalgic tale,” as the Doobie Brothers used to say, and then walked off quietly to be alone with my thoughts. I know I was just about as mixed-up as that wanna-be hippie when I was in my mid-twenties, always giving the benefit of the doubt to the “little guy” in any (wage, etc.) dispute. But Christ, there’s just no excuse for it. By contrast, a congenial black guy I happened to be talking to a few days earlier brought up the very good point that what Ontario needs as a premier is someone who will deal with the TTC the way Ronald Reagan handled the air traffic controllers back in the ’80s: You come back to work Right Fucking Now or you find a new job, and we’ll be happy to replace you with someone who will do your $25/hour job for $15. I couldn’t agree more. And you only have to do that kind of thing once, and they’ll never mess with you again. If we don’t stand up to the world’s unionized bullies, when will they ever stop? The TTC also has a “Request Stop” program, where women traveling alone on the bus between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. can get off the bus between regular stops. Not men. Just women. So if you’re a gay guy who happens to live, say, across from a park where someone you knew and loved has recently had his head smashed in for no better reason than that he’s Muslim ... I mean, gay ... you’re shit out of luck. Transvestites and transgenders? Fortunately, they’re in no danger of being beaten up and left to die in the middle of the night. Right? And “sexy bitches” like myself, who get the pig-fuckers and the goat-fuckers into such a homoerotic tizzy?

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Shit. Out. Of. Luck. I’ve never actually seen anyone use that Request Stop feature—as far as I can tell, it’s just there as a “moral victory” for a few hate-filled, hideously unattractive hags, for them to get a taste of how sweet it feels to be able to discriminate against the awful men who are to blame for all of their problems. Well, if you ask me, those totalitarian, brainwashing, overgrown Girl Scouts have sold their heterophobic victim cookies to society for too long. If we men and women of conscience don’t stand up to those sexist bullies.... Worse, when these supposedly oppressed people gain a comparable (or greater) amount of power as their former oppressors, what makes you think they’re suddenly going to drop the methods that got them there, when those means have clearly worked so well? And if those methods happen to involve minority racism or female sexism.... Minority rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a “victim” group, while those at the receiving end of their behavior are blamed simply because they belong to the “oppressive” majority. It’s funny: When I was eighteen, I was proud to consider myself a feminist, without really knowing what that meant—I really thought it was just about equality and justice. Dopey moi! And then, just a few months ago, having re-read a couple of Gloria Steinem’s books, I was to the point of being very proud to not be a feminist. But then I discovered Ophelia Benson’s writings. And I’ve never encountered anyone who thinks so clearly, chooses her words so carefully, and who I agree so consistently with. Yet like the fantastic Daphne Patai and the refreshingly non-Afrocentric Mary Lefkowitz, Benson and the phenomenally courageous “infidel” Ayaan Hirsi Ali are both explicitly feminists, as is Steven Pinker. So if they’re all (equity) feminists whose professional work positively brims with self-honesty,

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truthfulness and excellence, and since I agree with 99%+ of what they say, I guess I must still be one, too. Does that mean I’ll ever get fooled again by Steinem’s one-sided touting of the feminist sensitivity to “images of darkness or blackness as negative,” while she blithely ignores the comparably unfair images of white elephants, white flags, and whitewashing ... not to mention red flags to the Native Americans, and yellow-bellied cowardice to the Chinese? Or that I would be impressed by her “insightful” observation that men would not likely feel equal to women in academia if universities offered “spinster” and “mistress” degrees (rather than bachelors and masters) ... while she makes no mention of the fact that all of that learning occurs, of course, at one’s alma mater (Latin for “nourishing mother”), or of the fact that the “master” title derives from the Latin word for “teacher” (magister), not from any power differential? Or that I would agree with Ms Steinem that “We need to raise boys like we raise girls”? Or with her notion that “[p]atriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself.... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home”? Or that “Romance itself serves a larger political purpose by offering at least a temporary reward for gender roles and threatening rebels with loneliness and rejection.... [I]t privatizes our hopes and distracts us from making societal changes”? Or that I would I ever again be such a stupid twat as to swallow G-L-O-R-I-A’s despicably sexist quoting, with implicit approval, of the claim that there are only a “few good men” on the face of the Earth? Not fucking likely. I believe in truly equal rights and opportunities for all, not because of but rather in spite of the vacuous “work” done by daffy, sexist, paranoid, whining, dangerously warped airheads like the esteamed (sic) Ms Steinem. Seriously, these are woefully deluded human beings who (i) have spent the bulk of their adult lives bravely fighting their own psychological projections, (ii) would make fine cult leaders, for the way in which they will not tolerate even the gentlest questioning of their totalistic ideology, and (iii)

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couldn’t think their collective way out of a wet sanitary napkin wrapper if you gave them all bloody month to do it. In contrast, as a much more rational and reasonable woman said: By “feminism,” I mean the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equally with men, and the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can. In that case, count me in. Um, but there’s no “small print” beyond that, right? Nothing about extra-special rights for selfidentified “persecuted victims,” and nothing about all men being “potential rapists,” right? Nothing about “history” being bad and “hermeneutics” being good, no “seminars” being replaced by “ovulars,” and no attempt to exclude men from marching in solidarity with women on “Take Back the Night” night, right? No rewritings of John Steinbeck for an all-female cast, Of Mice and Women, right? Nothing about Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues empowering women and their rightly celebrated, jaw-droppingly fantastic genitalia, while to even joke about The Penis Dialogues would be sexist, right? (“If my penis got dressed, what would it wear? Probably just a sock. Or maybe a size 1 ¾ bowler hat.”) You realize also that “persecuted victims” is an in-group too, right? That is, a group to which a man or woman can proudly belong, if only he (or she) can meet the criteria for membership, and then adopt enough of the prevailing culture and belief-system of the group to “fit in” there ... settling comfortably into the inherent conflict with the “persecuting” out-group which that selective psychological boundarydrawing entails. Note especially that it is entirely typical for in-groups to rate themselves higher in morality and achievement than their denigrated out-group(s). In short, you realize that ingroups (incl. of “persecuted victims”) are inherently biased

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and unfair in their evaluations of, and behaviors toward, their excluded, Evil Other out-group(s), right? Experimental assessment of intergroup attitudes [at Robbers Cave] showed unmistakable attribution of derogatory stereotypes to the villainous out-group and of favorable qualities to the in-group. Laboratory-type judgments of performance showed the tendency to overestimate the performance attributed to fellow group members and to minimize the performance of members of the out-group. Whether it’s a bunch of pre-pubescent white boys at summer camp dissing another (randomly assigned) group of equally white, middle-class boys, or a group of “professional victims” in Manhattan or in Queens or at your local university or at “clit lit” readings dissing Dead and Living White European Men, you can’t have an in-group without an out-group to define yourself against, and to rail and rage against. No surprise, then, that the members of that “villainous out-group” are so regularly tarred as being inferior (in both morality and skills) to the “victimized in-group.” The blaming—with suitable name-calling—of the villainized out-group for all of the in-group’s problems, even for blatantly self-inflicted or entirely imagined ones, is equally common: In an early morning swim ... the Eagles had discovered their flag in the water, burned the previous evening by the Rattlers. Upon making this discovery, they denounced the Rattlers as “dirty bums,” and accused them of having put ice in the water (because it appeared to one of them as colder than usual), and of throwing rocks in their creek (because one of them stubbed his toes a number of times during the swim).

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Such simple dynamics as these, in a nutshell, are what all minority activism—whatever its other justifications and merits or demerits may be—is ultimately and unavoidably tangled up with. Not only can such activism not be separated from in-group/out-group dynamics, its general classes of behavior can actually be very easily and accurately predicted from the very same well-established dynamics. But you try and tell the feminists, gays and blacks of today that ... and they won’t believe you. I’ve also been thinking about the subject of immigrantswho-think-they-own-the-world a fair bit since I cut my hair short, and this is my tentative hypothesis: Canada lets in a lot of brutally unskilled immigrants. That is, uneducated visible minorities who have grown up in foreign cultures where the West (via the history of European colonization, etc.) is viewed as being the source of all their problems, and of the marginalizing of their own societies’ comparatively meager “accomplishments.” And yet, that same “source of all their problems” is also seen as being a Promised Land, where everyone has milk and honey to spare. They’re low-IQ, uneducated and unskilled, and they’re getting into the civilized part of the world for no better reason than that they’re related to somebody who had enough education or money to legitimately be welcomed here—all thanks to our feel-good “family reunification” immigration policy. (The U.S. again has exactly the same foolish way of doing things, and it’s dragging their economy down and killing their culture just as it does for ours.) So now they’ve made it to the Promised Land ... but all they’re fit to do here, just like back in the old country, is minimum-wage jobs that no one else wants. Yet, successful people, many of them maddeningly white, walk around the city with money to burn. So, all they see is a continuing unfairness where the whiteys who “ruined their country” have all the money and power here. And, having not gone through any higher education themselves—that’s what makes them unskilled, after all—they also have no idea at all about how much hard work

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and intelligence is involved even just in getting yourself to be minimally qualified to do the high-paying jobs in our society. This is the Promised Land, after all; it was all supposed to be fair (according to some rather dimwitted and uninformed notions of fairness) and easy. But the damned whites still have all the milk ... and most of the honeys. “Dimwitted” is no exaggeration: The IQ of the average new immigrant to the United States is a mere 95. That is, the typical immigrant has below-average intelligence, and speaks English only as a second language. Such individuals don’t even have the potential to work at white-collar jobs; and as such, they can be relied on to cost the treasury of their new country much more than they contribute, over the course of their lives here. The traditional cutoff for expectations of success at a university level? A 110 IQ—a full standard deviation above the immigrant mean. Mensa cutoff is 130, or 98th percentile, which might initially sound impressive. But hey, if even a “dumb hippie” like me can score 157 on the Mensa home-IQ test—which is like a home-pregnancy test, except you lose points for peeing on it—I’m not gonna try and tell you it’s any great accomplishment. Einstein’s estimated at 160+. People tend to immigrate to the countries that used to oppress them? Of course they do: It’s their Promised Land, the land of power and money! And they, quite understandably, want to get “their share” of that sweet deal. But if you imagine they’re coming here with a clean slate about that past, open your eyes and get real: They’re immigrating to the new land with a love-hate chip on their shoulders the size of Wyoming. How could they not? Obviously, there are plenty of smart, hard-working firstgeneration immigrants in this country—and plenty of lazy, stupid people who were born here, who do nothing with their lives but annoy others (including skilled immigrants!) by panhandling while others are trying to eat, and who have no idea at all of how lucky they are to live in a country with a donut shop on every corner. (As they say, “When you’re tired

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of Canada, you’re tired of donuts and hockey.”) But those native dregs clearly aren’t going to have the same bitchy attitude toward how our country isn’t living up to its billing as the homoerotically-aroused wetback goat-fuckers and the bullying Zimbabwean construction-farmers do, either. Unless, you know, those native dregs are Leftards or something. And then, when the bigoted chinks and the dropout blacks and the piss-proud terrorists happen upon a 98-pound white “imperialist oppressor” weakling like myself, it’s their rare chance to exact revenge and act like the alpha males they’ve always wished they could be, and get away with it. So the pathetic cowards yap out in some foreign gibberish, from Ukrainian to Swahili, safe in the knowledge that I don’t have a hope of deciphering what they’ve just said, but leaving no doubt that it’s meant to dis me, just for the fact that I exist in “their” country: Canada. Incidentally, my late grandmother on my father’s side was from the Ukraine. And even if she never learned more than a few words of English, and probably never even completed high school anywhere, Canada was better off for her kindness, and for her homemade pastries—the chokecherry perischke, especially. But then, the duties of a frontier housewife three-quarters of a century ago don’t have much in common with what you need to bring to the table to contribute to an information-based economy in the twenty-first century. Both the paternal and maternal lines of my family tree are actually Mennonite for many generations: all that my ancestors ever wanted from the world was to be left alone to practice their Amish-like religion, and quietly farm land which no one else wanted (e.g., in the Russian steppes, the Netherlands and Germany). That makes them—and me—simultaneously (i) as white as a human being can be, (ii) a member of a brutally persecuted (esp. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) ethnic/religious minority, and (iii) the descendent of penniless refugees (from the Russian Revolution), who left the old country literally running for their lives (as former landowners). Plus, the Mennonite Doopsgezinde Kerk was the first church in the Netherlands to have a female pastor. In 1911.

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And an early group of Pennsylvania Mennonites and Mennonite-Quakers actually wrote the first formal protest against slavery in America, in 1688. It almost makes a person feel less than completely ashamed of being a white male who grew up in a Christian community, doesn’t it? Though it would help if other Mennonites hadn’t also supported Hitler in his early years of power (as Gandhi did too, until at least 1940), and weren’t currently sitting down for dinner with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Australian anthropologist and filmmaker Roger Sandall once made the sharp observation that the Western middle-classes today are “driven by a masochistic contempt for their Western heritage, and almost as often for the lands of their birth as well.” I think that’s profoundly (and pathetically) true, but there’s also a corollary to that same issue, which is the aforementioned love-hate relationship that nonwhites have with their past oppressors—both sides’ current attitudes derive from the same co-dependent past. And that love-hate feeling isn’t going to suddenly vanish just because they’ve finally gotten here after years of wandering in the Third-World wilderness—especially for the natural-born assholes, who exist at least as much if not more there, per capita, as they do here. Maybe we can arrange a trade: Idiots from here, for smart, cultured, polite professionals from there. Start with the pig-fucking rednecks cruising Main Street Orangeville. (Suggested exchange rate: Three homophobic yokels for one skilled immigrant, of any color.) Add in the morons who put the S’s in backwards on plastic roadside signs, and who use inverted M’s for W’s. Send them somewhere that reads from right to left ... or upsidedown. And top it off with every racist and hairist immigrant bully who won’t let a white man walk down the street or unobtrusively go about his business in the country where he was born, or use a bathroom in the house where he lives, without harassing him.

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If that trade suggestion doesn’t fly, Steve Sailer had an excellent idea: Pay the immigrants who don’t want to assimilate into Western culture to go back to the seventh-century/tribal countries they came from. Leave us in the civilized world with the freedoms we’ve taken for granted for far too long. You don’t see the need for such an extreme measure? That’s only because your freedom to exist unmolested in the country where you were born hasn’t been threatened by prejudiced immigrants and their ass-backward, hopelessly intolerant cultures to the same extent as mine has. So, enjoy that freedom while it lasts. Or were you not aware, for example, that “up to 40 per cent of Muslims [in the U.K.] would rather be subject to religious Sharia law than British law.” In fact, both Canada and the U.K. have already stupidly, stupidly flirted with incorporating elements of that brutally unfair and hysterically oppressive-to-women canon into their legal systems, in the name of our blessed, pigignorant ideology of multiculturalism. In northern Nigeria, some areas have instituted the extreme Islamist Sharia law. Sharia is not supposed to affect Christians, but there have been deadly skirmishes over beer: Muslims have burned down liquor stores, while beer drinkers have stoutly defended for their right to live as infidels. Closer to home, Muslim cab drivers in Minneapolis have refused transport to passengers carrying alcohol—currently, around a hundred refusals of service, for various “holy” reasons, are being logged per month. Now some Muslim cashiers at Twin Cities Target stores have begun refusing to scan pork products, like bacon and pepperoni pizza, and insisting that other cashiers or the customers themselves do it.

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It won’t stop with beer, wine and edible pork, either: They’ve already censored Piglet. That is, the loveable cartoon character has been banned from the Dudley (West Midlands, England) Metropolitan Borough Council offices, after “a complaint from a Muslim employee.” And in Qatar, one bookstore blacked him (or her?) out from hundreds of pictures in a Winnie the Pooh book. As Pastor Niemöller said, first they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I’m more of an Eeyore. Other children’s fables have suffered a similar fate: A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency’s awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims. They came for Piglet, and censored him. They came for the Three Little Pigs, and censored them, with our shameful compliance. But that, of course, is what happens when the energy of a country is bundled into parents and children who never had to fight or risk anything for the freedoms they were born into. Such people predictably take those same freedoms entirely for granted, and will even willingly barter them away, piece by piece. In return for what? Just for a little bit of perceived safety, and to protect their feelings and the feelings of other “persecuted group” members from being hurt by someone else exercising his simple freedom of speech, thought and expression. Or, to frame it in terms of how the “hate speech” laws and human-rights commissions in Canada currently work: “They came for the neo-Nazis, and I did not speak out because I was not a neo-Nazi. They came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out because I was not a Catholic ... plus, I was still pissed about how some of them tried to ban Monty Python’s Life Of Brian back in the ’70s, when they still had the

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power to get away with overtly suppressing the free speech of the Unbelievers.” Religions and cults of course offer a comparable feeling of (soul-) safety as do “hate speech” laws, in equal return for the regulation of the thoughts and behaviors of their followers. Conversely, nothing will sharpen your sensitivity toward the “thought police” like getting yourself into a spiritual, psychological or political cult, and having to think your way out of that. For there, you will invariably realize that you had been lied to and manipulated by your leaders and sheeplike peers at every step of the way. You will also find yourself ostracized by your former friends simply for not going along with the received wisdom of the “minority in power.” Whether one gets called a “sinner” or a “witch,” or a communist in the McCarthy era, or a “blasphemer” in the days of Brian of Nazareth, or a “racist” today, the psychology and intolerance of those doing the witch-hunting and the damning and the Inquisition-ing is exactly the same; only the names have changed. A good test for how much of any culture is worth preserving is simply: What is left after you remove from it all of the beliefs which conflict with the best evidence of science, and all of the traditions which trample on basic human rights? There are many primitive and brutally uncivilized cultures in our world which would survive that test with only their music, art, language, cuisine and clothing intact. Hell, some wouldn’t even make it past that point with the horrendously repressive clothing for their women still in one piece. British people could, in [the view of Muhammad Abdul Bari, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain], benefit from arranged marriages. “I prefer to call them assisted marriages,” he says.... “Alcohol is the worst drug long-term,” he says, and adds that the Government should consider banning drinking in public places, as it has done with smoking.... There should be more modesty too. “You shouldn’t be revealing your body so much that it can be tempting

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to other people. I hope my daughter wouldn’t wear a bikini....” “They came for cigarettes, and I didn’t speak out because I’m a non-smoker—plus, if I ever develop lung cancer, it’s for sure from inhaling second-hand smoke in the dining room of that fishing lodge for ten summers; and your libertarian right to blow smoke rings ends where my nose begins. They came for pork, and I didn’t speak out because I’m vegetarian ... although I’ve discovered, in a moment of weakness, that the sweet-and-sour wings at the Regal Beagle are to die for. They came for bikinis and alcohol....” No! They’re not taking away bikinis and alcohol!! Here I stand firm with the brave and eloquent Muslim apostate, Ibn Warraq: I don’t want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery. If you’re not willing to fight for your beer and pizza and bikinis, you don’t deserve to be living in any part of the free and civilized (a.k.a. “Western”) world. How then to respond to the cultural traitors and their enablers—people of Very Little Brain—who would try to take even Piglet away from us? The American Revolutionary hero and brewmeister Sam Adams predictably got it right: If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom— go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! If we don’t stand up to the religious bullies in this world, when will they ever stop?

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Australia—of all the countries!—actually has exactly the right attitude: Anyone who believes Islamic Sharia law can co-exist with Australian law should move to a country where they feel more comfortable, Treasurer Peter Costello says. A country like, for example, the once-green-and-pleasant Britain: In late 2004, polygamy had become so common among Muslims in Britain that the British were considering recognizing it for tax purposes. The Bishop of Rochester is under police protection after receiving death threats following his claims that parts of Britain are “no-go areas” for non-Muslims.... Dr. Nazir-Ali’s staff took a number of calls at his Rochester home threatening both him and his family, warning that the bishop would not “live long” if he continued to criticize Islam, according to The Times. Just over a year ago [Labour politician John] Reid was heckled by the Muslim extremist Abu Izzadeen in Leytonstone, east London, during a speech on extremism, appropriately. “How dare you come to a Muslim area,” Izzadeen screamed. That picture is mirrored outside London. Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis ... said Labour’s support for multiculturalism risked creating a situation of “voluntary apartheid.” And now, as of autumn, 2008:

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Islamic law has been officially adopted in Britain, with Sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases. The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for Sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. Rulings issued by a network of five Sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Or, as a British Muslim evangelist put it immediately after the 7/7 (2005) terrorist bombings: “We are taking over!” he said. “We are here to bring civilization to the West. England does not belong to the English people, it belongs to God [i.e., Allah].” Anjem Choudary, a thirty-nine-year-old British Muslim leader, hailed September 11 as “magnificent” and its perpetrators “heroes”; he mocked the victims of the London Tube bombings, calls on Muslims to refuse to cooperate with the British police, and advocates Sharia for the United Kingdom. He and his wife are welfare recipients.... On the BBC, he was asked why he didn’t simply move to a state that already has Sharia. “Who says you own Britain, anyway?” he replied. “Britain belongs to Allah. The whole world belongs to Allah.” In 2001, a BBC poll had found that 15 percent of British Muslims supported the 9/11 attacks on America. In 2004, a Guardian poll recorded that 13 percent of British Muslims thought that further terrorist attacks on the USA would be justified.

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An alarming 26%—or roughly 100,000—of younger [i.e., 18–29 years old] U.S. Muslims say suicide bombings against non-Muslim “civilian targets” are cool. That’s really not any more comforting than the 35% of young Muslim Brits who told Pew the same thing after some of them bombed the London subway, killing 52 civilians and wounding another 700 or so. When a quarter to a third of the young adults in a community admit to savagely supporting such cold-blooded and random murder—in which case the real percentage of support must be even higher—that is no mere “extremist wing” of a (falsely presented) “religion of peace.” [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali is an avowed atheist whose criticisms can be seen as attacks not only on radical Islamism but on the religion of Islam over all. George W. Bush was wrong, she says, when he announced that Islam was being held hostage by a terrorist minority: “Islam is being held hostage by itself.” About the 9/11 attacks, she declared: “This is Islam,” and “not just Islam, this was the core of Islam.” So it’s not just a few isolated bad apples, or a case of the (real, Western) victims “crying wolf”: the danger is real. Unless, of course, you think wolves aren’t really dangerous, and “crying wolf” merely embodies an insensitive stereotyping of the lupine community—a “lupineophobia,” wherein wolves are singled out as allegedly being a group of violent, bloodthirsty predators. Indeed, if we were to put ourselves in their shoes ... or their paws ... surely we would see that all they really want is to be understood and accepted for the distinct contribution which they make to the ecological mosaic—a tiling in which wolves and their sharp, pointy canine teeth, and their religious laws, should no more be feared, on a per capita basis, than are rabbits, say, or budgies.

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Or, if it should turn out that there is a real difference in behaviors between wolves and other, more domesticated animals ... well, you can’t make a woolly cultural mosaic or a national quilt without disemboweling a few sheep, right? [H]istorian Bernard Lewis ... told the German newspaper Die Welt: “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the [twenty-first] century.” Shaker Assem and the Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb ut-Tahrir) in Germany work to reestablish the caliphate and institute Sharia. Declares Assem, “People who say there is a conflict between Sharia and Western democracy are right.” CAIR [i.e., Council on American-Islamic Relations] board chairman Omar Ahmad [reportedly] said this to a Muslim audience in 1998: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” What to do, then, when the same dimwits and their gullible defenders in the media scream “Islamophobia” and “racism,” against no greater crime than being quoted accurately as to their real agenda? First, as much as we may live in a Humpty Dumpty-esque world in which “words means whatever an oppressed minority wants them to mean,” Islam is not a race. George Carlin got many a good laugh out of the observation that we drive on a parkway, and park in a driveway; but the idea that criticizing a religion and its followers could qualify as “racism” in any context is something which even our city planners could never have anticipated. So long as we have not stepped completely through the politically correct looking glass to redefine “up” as meaning “down”—so as to not harm the self-esteem of the “uptrodden,” for example—and stopped short of redefining “driving” to mean “parking,” re-

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ligions are not races, and opposition to any religion is, by definition, not “racism.” (Nationalism and ethnocentrism, too, are not “racism”—nor are “fear” or “phobia” equivalent to “hatred”—for anyone with both feet on the real-world side of things.) Another good point to remember, in the face of such manipulative hysteria and hysterical manipulation, is that there are things in this world that one should be frightened of—or should even hate—and where, indeed, to not be deeply concerned would be the height of foolishness. Christianity during the Inquisition and the witch-hunts was one such thing; can you think of another, perhaps more recent example? (The Crusades don’t count, regardless: they were embarked on in response to four hundred years of Islamic persecution of Christians.) As the ex-Muslim Abul Kasem recently explained: Islam ... does not consider non-Muslims as human beings. Therefore, it is useless to talk with Islam about human rights, equality in the eye of law, religious freedom, and freedom of expression, democratic rights, people’s government, universal suffrage, and any universal declaration of human rights. That is why it is impossible to negotiate or compromise with Islam.... Anyone having the slightest humanism, conscience, and compassion should be appalled at the Islamic theology.... [T]he world is permanently divided into two warring camps: the world of humans (Islam) and the world of “animals” (non-Islam). Without wasting time in endless dialogues, let us accept this reality and do what we must do to defend our freedom and civilization. Or, as Winston Churchill put it, in a fight just as noble as just as necessary:

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We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France [and in Canada, and in America, and in Britain, and in Australia, and in every country that knows from experience what “civilization” means], we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island [of Freedom and Sanity], whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.... I grew up as a granola-eating, woolly-headed pacifist, foolishly convinced of the inherent goodness of human nature. I would actually have fit in quite nicely with the people from Rochdale, especially when they got together to buy a 350-acre farm in rural Ontario in 1972, after the government had already foreclosed on their failed Bloor Street experiment. The thing about country living, however, as the Rochdale back-to-the-landers soon discovered, is that it brings you face to face with many different types of “culture” that won’t go away, or even allow you the use of your own property, regardless of how much “respect” you may unilaterally extend to them: “Nobody wanted to hurt the beavers,” laughs Howard Brenner, “so they wouldn’t allow trapping. So the beaver pond grew and grew. They were still into the Greenpeace-hippie-brown-rice mentality and the beaver was, after all, Canada’s national symbol. I guess they forget you’ve got to control the beavers or they’ll flood you out.” Speaking from experience back on the farm in southern Manitoba, you don’t have to live through too many beaver or gopher infestations to develop an appreciation for the at-

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titude of Bill Murray’s character in Caddyshack, fighting the “Varmint Cong”: “Sure, I can kill all the gophers. I don’t even need a reason.” Not that I’d ever encourage anyone to “kill all the gophers,” or all of the beavers. On the contrary, I just want them to STOP FUCKING UP MY YARD. And yet ... and yet ... isn’t life too short and too precious to get so angry about all the slings, arrows, and violent suppressions of free speech and individuality that the world keeps throwing at us? Wouldn’t it be better to just let it all pass “like water off a duck’s back,” as my mother used to say? Maybe Alfred E. Newman was right not to worry. And maybe the Beatles were onto something when they sang that “All you need is love.” And if an idea like that only makes sense when you’re high ... well, maybe that’s a big part of the reason why people get high. And as the ganja starts to kick in, it’s already hard to remember what I was so pissed about ... man. Like the Dead once sang, “May be going to hell in a bucket, babe/But at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride.” If we’ve learned one thing from Jesse Jackson, it’s how to forgive, and respect others. So, right here and now, I fully forgive any and all hurt that has been inflicted on me by every homophobic redneck, every lickety-split Chinese girl, every 54-IQ black criminal without a future, and every latent Perfumed-Garden Sodomite, out of touch with his own violently repressed sexuality, who has ever made me feel unwelcome in my own home and native land. I forgive them, each and every single one. With full heart, I sincerely mean that. After all, that’s what Jesus would do. He was a Hymie, you know—that’s the other thing I learned from Reverend Jackson.

Epilogue The members of the hippie movement in the sixties were seen by traditional professionals as emotionally unstable, mentally ill, and possibly brain-damaged by drug use, while the New Age psychiatrists and psychologists considered them to be the emotionally liberated avant-garde of humanity. —Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain We are odd hybrids, us hippies and ex-hippies. Half highcultured and hi-tech, and half noble savage. Half emotionally liberated, and half mentally ill. Half avant-garde, and half brain-damaged by drug use. But the one thing you can count on when you pass us on the street is that we’re harmless. We may look like we’re not pulling our weight in society, you may catch a whiff of patchouli as you pass by, and one or two of us may even try to panhandle from you. But we believe far too much in “live and let live” to ever push you around from behind, or tell you that you’re not allowed to use “our” washrooms, or hassle

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you for not “walking the right way” down the street on a beautiful autumn evening. More than that, we understand that the prejudices against long hair which give rise to those discriminatory behaviors against us are simply part of your culture. And if there’s one thing we leftists (and former leftists) hold to be self-evident, it’s cultural relativism: the idea that all cultures are created equal, and can only be judged from within their own milieus. That’s why we’d love to be invited out to dinner by the Wari of the Amazon rainforest, whose language, coincidentally enough, “has a term for edible beings, which includes anyone who isn’t a Wari.” That’s also why we’d feel perfectly safe hanging out with the !Kung San (formerly “Bushmen”) of the Kalahari Desert—a peaceful, idyllic people whose murder rate is no higher than Detroit’s. That’s why we deeply admire the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea, who make their living from hunting, foraging, growing bananas in unfenced gardens, and raising a few semidomesticated pigs. Imagine: They have no land shortage, little competition for natural resources, and live in a society in which the people do their best to display mutual deference and be self-effacing. A Garden of Eden, indeed. Is it any wonder that their homicide rate is less than 150 times that of the aggressive, competitive, confrontational United States? Or consider the Fore of New Guinea—a group of fine young cannibals if ever there was one. Until at least the 1960s—ah, there’s that historic decade of liberation and liberal-ation, again—their hunters used a specialized attack called tukabu against sorcerers: “they ruptured their kidneys, crushed their genitals and broke their thigh bones with stone axes, bit into their necks and tore out their tracheas, jammed bamboo splinters into their veins to bleed them.” And then there are the peaceful Samoans, so beloved of Margaret Mead. A people who manage to combine a virginity cult, and tutoring in techniques of rape, in a single

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culture. Can we ever praise them enough for their skill at integrating opposites? If only we in the fragmented West could do the same! Cultural relativism. That’s why we celebrate the lifestyle of the central African Bemba, whose late nineteenth-century villages were thick with “men and women whose eyes have been gouged out; the removal of one eye and one hand is hardly worthy of remark. Men and women are seen whose ears, nose and lips have been sliced off and both hands amputated. The cutting off of breasts of women has been extensively practiced as a punishment for adultery but ... some of the victims ... are mere children ... Indeed these mutilations were inflicted with the utmost callousness; every chief for instance has a retinue of good singers and drummers who invariably have their eyes gouged out to prevent them running away.” That’s why we equally can’t get enough of the Benin, whose African altars were “covered with streams of dried human blood, the stench of which was awful ... huge pits, forty to fifty feet deep, were found filled with human bodies, dead and dying, and a few wretched captives were rescued alive ... everywhere sacrificial trees on which were the corpses of the latest victims—everywhere, on each path, were newly sacrificed corpses. On the principal sacrificial tree, facing the main gate of the King’s Compound, there were two crucified bodies, at the foot of the tree seventeen newly decapitated bodies and forty-three more in various stages of decomposition. On another tree a wretched woman was found crucified, whilst at its foot were four more decapitated bodies. To the westward of the King’s house was a large open space, about three hundred yards in length, simply covered with the remains of some hundreds of human sacrifices in all stages of decomposition. The same sights were met with all over the city.” Cultural relativism. That’s why we go all weak-in-theknees over the Tupinamba people of Brazil, who “loved human flesh. Prestige and power centered on the ritual slaughtering of prisoners.... [T]he killing and eating of these prisoners (who were fattened for the purpose) ‘were joyful events

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which provided these Indians with the opportunity for merrymaking, aesthetic displays, and other emotional outlets.’” The most inspiring part, though, was right after the victim’s skull was shattered: “Old women rushed to drink the warm blood, and children were invited to dip their hands in it. Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it. The body, cut into quarters, was roasted on a barbecue, and the old women, who were the most eager for human flesh, licked the grease running along the sticks. Some portions, reputed to be delicacies or sacred, such as the fingers of the grease around the liver or heart, were allotted to distinguished guests.” Cultural relativism. That’s why we love the Mesoamerican Maya, whose captives “were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming of the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating (sometimes years later) in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways (such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple).” That’s why, when we admire the nature-attuned ways and dream-catchers of the Native American Indians, we should equally celebrate their blood-drenched massacres. Carnage such as “the site of Crow Creek in South Dakota, in what seems to be the year 1325 according to archaeological dating, [where] more than 500 men, women, and children were slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated.” Cultural relativism. That’s why the “nose tombs” in Japan, containing the noses cut off of 20,000 Koreans and brought back to Japan as trophies of a 16th-century Japanese invasion of that country, are nothing to sneeze at. Cultural relativism. That’s why all of these cultures are just as valid as our own “Western, civilized” (sic) one is. And so are the African and Muslim cultures today who enforce female genital mutilation: just a “snip of the clit,” and you’ll

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never have to worry about feeling intense sexual pleasure again. Likewise for the East Indians who practiced suttee burials prior to the oppressive British rule—a brutal colonialism which left India with little more than democracy, roads, railways, scientific medicine, a smattering of urban sanitation, and many other undesirable vestiges of white hegemonic value-structures, and out-of-tune-with-nature inventions. Because, if you missed it the first time, all of those nonEuropean cultures can only be evaluated from within their own boundaries. So anyone who places Western valuejudgments on them without actually being part of the culture is, to put it bluntly, obviously at least ethnocentric, probably an outright racist, and very likely a pickpocket as well. The caste system, child labor, pedophilia, rape, fatwas, thinwas, infanticide, genocide, cold-blooded dowry murders—they’re all good and worthy of respect, as long as they’re part of your culture. That’s why when sages and untouchables alike, in India, find scriptural backing for their belief that even a dog born in their country is more holy than anyone born outside the sacred Land of Shiva, all that a culturally sensitive soul like myself can do is nod in silent agreement ... and shame, at being so inherently impure in my own country of birth. That’s why when I see baseball great Pedro Martinez officiating as the guest of honor at a cockfight in the Dominican Republic, or the former NFL quarterback Michael Vick hanging and drowning a dog or two in his celebration of black culture in the rural Deep South, I have to put aside my oppressive male vegetarian prejudices and my Eurocentric concern for animal rights, and simply say: Good for you! Cultural relativism. That’s why when I hear about gangs of Lebanese (i.e., black Muslim) “youths” raping targeted white girls in Australia, or about North African boys packraping French females in Paris, or about women being sentenced to be gang-banged, by tribal councils in Afghanistan, I can only marvel at the efficiency by which these wonderfully diverse cultures have managed to bypass the whole “dinner and a movie” obligation, and get straight to

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the good stuff. They could certainly teach our frat-boys a thing or two! even if it means putting the manufacturers of date-rape drugs out of business. Well, good for them! Cultural relativism. That’s why when the Dine (i.e., Navajo), the Inuit, the Huron, the Cherokee, the Chippewa and the Papago (among others) call themselves “the people,” and when the Zhu/Twasi call themselves “Real people,” and the !Kung San call themselves “the Real People,” and when the South American Yanomamö designate themselves the “True human beings,” I can only declare: Yes! whatever the other six and a half billion of us may be, you are indeed “The People.” The masculine, warring, occasionally gang-raping People, that is: Capture of women is seldom the prime reason for a [Yanomamö] raid but is an expected side benefit. A captured woman is raped by all members of the raiding party, then by everyone back home who wishes to do so, and is then given to one of the men as a wife.... The goal in all warfare among [the Eskimos of northwest Alaska] was annihilation. Cultural relativism. That’s why when I read that more than one and a quarter million Europeans were captured by Muslims from the passengers and crew of American ships in the Strait of Gibraltar between 1530 and 1780, and sold as slaves, with the full support of the Laws of the Prophet ... and when I see that “there is no country in the world today where slavery is still practiced where the justification of it is not derived from the Koran” ... I can only apologetically take back my previously harsh, sodomizing words, and say: Peace be upon Allah. Peace be upon Mohammed. Cultural relativism. It’s why Christopher Columbus (who was half-black, if you believe Malcolm X, and why wouldn’t you?) should have just stayed home more than a century and a half after the Indian-on-Indian bloodbath at Crow Creek, and left the fragmenting, oppressive, patriarchal, lin-

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ear-thinking, Newtonian-Cartesian, imperialist, hegemonic, democratic ideals of the Enlightenment back in Europe where they belong! The world would be a better place. Wouldn’t it? [C]annibalized human remains [have been found] at 25 sites in the American southwest. [Christy G.] Turner believes these are the work of Anasazi Indians who dominated the area between AD 900 and 1700 and used cannibalism as an instrument of social control.... The Aztecs made a state practice of sacrificing captives and their civilization has furnished a recipe for human stew. When the Reverend Thomas Baker arrived in a Fijian village in 1867 he was received with the greatest hospitality, and so far as we know the night he spent there was comfortable. Next morning, when seated on the floor of the chief’s house with his host, he produced a comb, attended to his hair, and without giving the matter a moment’s thought laid the comb on the mat before him. The chief then picked up the comb and stuck it in his own hair.... Rudely snatching back the comb from the chief’s hair, the Reverend Baker sealed his own fate. For this outrage he was promptly knocked on the head, and dragged away, reappearing some time later as Missionary Pie. “We ate everything but his boots” a villager said. Or, as the onetime hippie, poet laureate and Fragglerocker Dennis Lee might have put it: Missionary pie, missionary pie, One of us is chief here, bet you wonder why.

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Preacher on the floor mat, heaven in the sky, Cook me up a batch of missionary pie. Missionary stew, missionary stew, One of us is hungry, bet you wonder who. Bop him on the noggin ‘til he’s black and blue, Cook me up a batch of missionary stew. Missionary soup, missionary soup, Boil him with potatoes and papaya root. Pretty pretty hair comb, pretty pretty boots, Cook me up a batch of missionary soup! *** Unlike the average Fijian chief from a century and a half ago, there are things we can do to improve our once-couldhave-been-great country that don’t involve simply eating all the foreigners and backyard-barbequing the homophobic rednecks. First, let’s rework the “family reunification” immigration concept to be a “friends reunification” instead. After all, who doesn’t like their friends more than they like their family? The latter drive us crazy even if we only see them a few times a year over the holidays. The former, by contrast, are at their best after a long day of work and a few brews in the local pub. They have similar interests as we do, and they’re about the same age, intelligence, and degree of formal education. In short, and quite unlike the average family member, they’re people which any country would be lucky to have. Be honest: If you could choose to leave just one of those groups—family, or friends—behind in the old country ... which would it be? From a more practical perspective, suppose our “reunified friends” were to just come here, lie around, and do nothing but draw welfare and drink imported beer?

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Well, even then, they’re still not doing any worse than the average unskilled son of a brother-in-law of a onceminimally-skilled-and-now-cab-driving immigrant would do under the present family-reunification policy. In conjunction with that new and sensible form of reunification, let’s tighten up the immigration rules so that (i) you don’t even think of coming to this country to work unless you can already speak English fluently before you cross the border, even if that means putting a few ESL teachers (and their big-business employers) out of work; and (ii) only skilled professionals in the top twenty percent of their fields worldwide (or above 80th percentile in IQ) are even eligible to immigrate, with bonus points for being single. Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and your wretched refuse? They can stay right where they are, thank you very much; we’ve already got more than enough of our own picking through the garbage cans outside the Fields Institute. (Of course, fewer immigrants means less work for immigration lawyers, which may force some of them into alternative lines of work with higher standards of morality than they are used to meeting—prostitution, for example; or perhaps driving ambulances rather than merely chasing them.) But any time we can get an upper-echelon geek, a worldclass scholar, or a well-endowed nineteen-year-old stripper who’s just working The Pole to pay her way through college, to replace a Canadian who’s too lazy or too stupid or simply too flat-chested (hmm, I wonder how Jennifer’s doing....) to be employed in the same field and yet still somehow manages to draw a paycheck, I say go for it! Third, we stop accepting fake refugees from the U.S., Jamaica, and the like; we equally shut the door on supposedly oppressed Falun Gong members from China who come here peddling a transparently made-up story; and we go back to accepting real refugees. You know, like we used to do before the mid-’80s and the patronage appointments of well-meaning baboons to the IRB. It’s easy enough to find real refugees: They’re the type of people who wind up in refugee camps, and who want des-

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perately to go back to the countries they’ve fled from, except that doing so would get them killed. People, that is, like my own ancestors. Next: Diversity is a great thing, particularly when it’s not based merely in genetically-determined ethnic or racial differences but rather in the creative diversity which flows from the freedom of expression and individuality. Either way, more power to it. It’s the spice in the curry of life, the lime slice in your Corona, the bronze babes at Caribana and the mädchens at Oktoberfest. In short, it’s the tops, especially when the “diverse” people in question are university-educated— with real degrees, as opposed to anything that requires or encourages respect for postmodernist “thought.” It also helps a lot if those guests in our country are here to celebrate and enjoy Western freedoms rather than to just transplant their own tribal, ethnic prejudices into the First World. And it’s even better if our nation actually needs their skills (i.e., Ph.D. cab drivers need not apply). In contrast to racial, ethic, sexual and creative diversity, however, official multiculturalism was an irretrievably stupid idea from the very beginning, as anyone who’s ever taken so much as an Intro Psych course should have been able to see. All it’s ever done is to get us to detrimentally focus on our ethnic “Rattler” and “Eagle” identities, rather than on our common bond as “Lake Wobegoners.” Multiculturalism is inherently a recipe for conflict. Dump it now. Canada’s urban population is one of the most diverse in the world, true; but diversity and multiculturalism are very different things. Diversity refers to superficial differences, such as skin color or dress.... But culture goes deeper, and cultural practices profoundly different from those of the majority culture—polygamy, for example—are not tolerated in Canada.... Multiculturalism is divisive because different cultures have irreconcilable values. Diversity is not divisive because Canada is built not around an ethnicity or a religion but

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rather around a shared belief in the values of democracy and individual freedom. Unfortunately, however, not everyone who’s “stepped off the boat” to start a new life here shares a “belief in democracy and individual freedom”: Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch, and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking. Alleged “conservatives” like the former prime minister Joe Clark spoke favorably of Canada being a “nation of nations,” meaning Indian nations, Inuit nations, the Quebec nation, the Ukranian-Canadian nation, etc., with nary a thought for what other forces might set up shop in such a wasteland of a concept. The jihad is a functioning version of everything the multicultists have promoted for years. As I said: Dump multiculturalism now. It’s truly “one of the gigantic mistakes” of our time, both as an official federal policy and as a hopelessly misled ideology of unmerited respect for backward, human-rights-violating contemporary cultures. Unless, of course, you want to turn a civilized First World country founded on Enlightenment ideals back into a tribalistic Third World nation, in which case it’s exactly the right way to go: respectful multiculturalism coupled with high rates of unskilled immigration from kinship-mentality regions of the world will ensure that consequence, along with a future of unimagined violence within our own borders. (Ask France. Ask the Netherlands. Ask Theo van Gogh.) Significantly, on average, smart, educated adults have fewer prejudices than do our world’s unskilled pig-fuckers. But that can’t simply be from them being exposed to racial and sexual diversity during their college years: Long-extant socialpsych research has again showed that simple “goodwill contact” between people does little to break down stereotypes. (Plus, affirmative action, for one, actually creates resentment from people who deserve to be in college or the workplace,

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against the “persecuted minorities” who got there only for their skin color or ethnicity or labia, not for their brains or even for good character. It’s also the dismal end of “one law for all.”) On the contrary, there’s good reason to believe that reasonably high levels of psychological/cognitive development produce a lessening of prejudice in their hosts ... in addition to being necessary for a competent understanding of the world around us: Only one-third of adults can reason formally [i.e., use abstract reasoning/logic, and understand how conceptual classes, contingencies, probabilities and combinations/permutations work]. That means that two-thirds of the citizens in a democracy cannot understand the more complex issues facing them both in life and in elections. Those are the same people, generally speaking, who think that their lucky numbers are “due” to come up in the lottery, for example, and who will never understand even the basics of the “genetic lottery.” Further, that dearth of understanding comes not from a simple lack of information on which to make intelligent decisions, but rather from their low (i.e., concrete-thought, or even just sensorimotor) stages of cognitive development. Yet even in Western democracies, such uncomprehending populi form a two-thirds majority. When you import the wanna-be-alpha dregs from low-IQ countries, those people again typically lack the ability, even in principle, to pull their own weight in the First World. Much worse, the same uneducated, low-psychological-stage-ofdevelopment rednecks-by-any-other-name also have, per capita, way more than their fair share of prejudices, and are too often not at all shy about advertising that fact in their intolerant, bullying, violence-prone, homophobic-macho lifestyles. Put another way, if you’re looking for an efficient way to roll back gay rights, women’s rights, and the like ... you’ll love

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the current immigration policies of Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia. Beyond that, and on a much more deadly serious note, it is high time that we addressed the painful reality of discrimination in the Canadian workplace. Not in terms of the continuing grievances of the all-and-sundry minority groups which are already treated with kid gloves—demonstrating yet another use for the hide and hindquarters of our pastoral friend, the goat. No, I am thinking rather of real discrimination, where fully qualified people of hair like myself are passed over like ... well, like Jews at Passover ... in favor of less-qualified but shorter-haired candidates. I’m not saying that a hippie should be hired for a position if he can’t do the work. But if several guys are up for a job, and they all have about-equal abilities, and if one of them has longer hair than the others, the longer-haired dude should get the gig. How else are we ever going to provide a level playing field for all? How else are can we undo the systematic discrimination which has plagued Haight-Ashburians since the 1960s? Gloria Steinem, quoting Flo Kennedy, once observed that there are only a few jobs which require a penis or a vagina—with de facto leader of the feminist movement being, ironically, one of the few which does indeed require the latter “love canal.” Similarly, there are very few jobs that require short hair. Yet every day hiring decisions are made which exclude hippies from their rightful place in the business world. Like the black man said, half a century ago: “They make it impossible for us to earn, to pay much in taxes because we haven’t much in income, and then they say that because they pay most of the taxes, they have the right to have things like they want.... They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can’t deserve our rights.” Today, people of color are rightfully welcomed and encouraged at all levels of the corporate world. But not so for persons of hair. And because of that, to put it bluntly: Hair-

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conscious affirmative action is necessary to address hairbased obstacles that block the path to success of countless people of hair of all economic classes. Yet, that is only the tip of the ponytail. As oppressed hairy people, we have all heard the painful, derogatory shouts of “hippie” coming from short-haired white and black men, not to mention from blond hotties and sweet-looking, disease-free Asian babes. But what’s worse is when we turn on each other, pushing a fellow “long-haired brother from another mother” down for not being “hip enough,” with the most hurtful of names: A hash-brownie. Too embarrassed to show your true tiedyed colors on the outside, so you go through life pretending to be a “normal cookie,” fitting in with the rest of the run-ofthe-mill Mrs. Fields. And it’s only after someone’s eaten three or four of ‘em that he realizes there’s weed inside, and by then it’s too late to do anything except “ride it out.” Or worse, an Uncle Steve. Someone who thinks he’s too good to just lie around smoking pot all day. Someone who’s embarrassed to wear his tie-dye and ponytail, so he struts around pretending to be a businessman. Trying so hard to be a shorthair that he forgets who he is, ‘til eventually he becomes The Man. But that’s what happens to hippies who try to make it in this society, just as it used to happen to blacks: in order to succeed, we’ve had to become imitation shorthairs—dress short-haired, talk short-haired, think short-haired, and express the values of middle-class short-haired culture (at least when we are in the presence of short-haired men). Implied in all this is the hiding, the denial, of our selfhood, our hippietude, our culture, as though they are somehow shameful. When “Negroes” became “blacks” and then (briefly, but no longer) “Afro-Americans,” and then “African Americans” in the United States, it was part of a long, strange trip from the humiliation of slavery to a pride of heritage. In the same way, if we “freaks” and “hippies” (and “hash brownies,” and future “Uncle Steves”) can become “longhairs” and then “hairy people” and then “people of hair” and then “Haight-

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Ashbury Americans,” we too will be able to turn our past humiliation into a source of pride. Of course, in connection with that trip we must also recognize that, for example, a word like “niggardly” is much too close to “nigger” to be viewed as anything other than “a way of slipping the epithet in the back door.” By parity of argument, however, the same must then be true of “hipster” versus the undeniably hairist term, “hippie.” And then also of “hippo,” “hippocampus,” the Hippocratic oath, “hep,” “hepcat,” “hepatitis,” “heptagon,” and Audrey Hepburn: All of those too-close-to-hippie terms must be verboten, as politically incorrect, hairist slurs that no one should ever use. And then, just when it has become clear that “hippie” (and any words which sound even remotely like it, regardless of their etymology) is off-limits ... we Hirsute Haight-Ashburians (HHAs) need to reclaim the word for ourselves as a term of social endearment—just as blacks have reappropriated “nigger” for their own in-group use, while feminists like Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler have repossessed “cunt,” and women (and male rappers) have begun to reclaim “bitch” and “ho.” There is also the matter of reform in our legal system. Nationally, longhairs are imprisoned on average more than seven times as often for drug-related offenses as are shorthairs. Yet, who but a raging hairist would even think of suggesting that hippies smoke seven times as much dope as the rest of the population? Three or four times, maybe; but seven times? No way, man. There could hardly be a clearer indication of hairist bias, and of “hairacial profiling” by our police and in our shorthaircontrolled courts. Such “institutionalized hairism” must stop; and the only way we’ll know it has stopped is when the proportion of hippies in jail is the same as for short-haired whites and Chinese, regardless of how many drug-related, victimless crimes we may have committed in the possession of acid and pot. Maaan. Further, if hippies today are treated like blacks used to be treated—and we are—a formal apology for the wrongs

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done to us by the short-haired whites, blacks, Asians, women and other minorities in power would simply be expected. And along with that, of course, we need to begin discussing the R-word: Reparations. Now, I’m not saying each of us should just be given, say, $5000 straight up, to blow on a new VW van or to watch it all go “up in smoke,” as Cheech and Chong used to say. To get us back on our feet and integrated into the business world, the assistance could be given in the form of tailored clothing and specialty-coffee vouchers, BlackBerry phone plans, or even packets of genetically modified, Roundup Ready seeds, to wean us off the tastier organic stuff. As they say, “Give a hippie a pound of tofu, and he will eat for a day. But teach a hippie to start a tofu-manufacturing plant, providing gainful employment for other members of his otherwise-shiftless community, and buying ingredients locally whenever possible, and one day he may be able to sell it for mega-millions to Disney or A&P, and retire with his water-bong to the Bahamas.” Reparations could also mean putting the money we’ve earned by our untold agonies into scholarships and training, for the careers that have traditionally been closed to longhairs—banking, for example. When was the last time you applied for a loan from someone who had longer hair than you do? Mick Jagger attended the London School of Economics. He could have been the one to break the “hair bar” for all of us—the “Jackie Robinson of Fleet Street.” But he had to drop out: There was no future for the likes of him, there. Early morning classes and sobriety almost seem designed to exclude those of us who would rather stay up ‘til four in the morning than get up at six. But, of course, it would hardly be fair for us hippies to be receiving money for our suffering, before other groups historically more deserving than us have been compensated for the even-greater hardships of their long-forgotten, distant ancestors.

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I am thinking, of course, of the descendents of the slaves. Particularly, of the Grecian slaves kept by Roman masters in ancient times. If we people of hair have been living for decades with the shame and scorn of our past—and present—the Greeks have been carrying an even greater burden for centuries. They, after all, were regarded as sub-human by their owners even while being just as white as their masters were! I am thinking also of the people of the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Raped, pillaged, and kept as forced labor by the plundering ninth-century Vikings—if anyone has earned their share of the R-word reward, it is they. And after our world’s governments have given fair compensation to the descendents of the ancient Greeks, the Orkney Islanders, and the white Europeans captured by Muslims in the Strait of Gibraltar, then—and only then—should we sit down and negotiate reparations for my own persecuted group, the Haight-Ashburians ... as well as, perhaps, for any other groups that may have been inadvertently overlooked. The difficulty with compensating the living Orkney-ites for their historic pain and suffering, of course, is that in the intervening centuries, and in the absence of any governmental programs to help get them back on their feet after being raped, pillaged, and enslaved, most of them have, it seems, already fully integrated themselves into Scottish society. And so they live even as our neighbors—or as someone’s neighbors—with little or no awareness of their tragic and unfair past. Still, thanks to the miracle of modern genetic technology we can determine, for anyone claiming Orkney-ian ancestry, just what percentage of their genes have suffered from Viking oppression (and rape) in the past. The details are complex, but they involve tracing mitochondrial DNA back to a very active and fertile woman known today (via several extant but extremely crude limericks) only as “Orkney Island Betty”:

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There once was a rough wench named Betty A tough Orkney Island sex-kitty Us Vikings would pillage And rape half her village But she got us all hot and sweaty Poetry was never a strong suit for the Vikings; if it had been, they might never have discovered Newfoundland, eh? The bottom line is that anyone today who’s genetically 1/256th Orkney-ian, say, deserves a 1/256th share of the bounty/booty. Where is that money going to come from? In the case of the Orkney-ites, it could only come from the ancestors of the ninth-century Vikings. Or, failing that, possibly from players on the Minnesota Vikings football team, as they have probably done more than anyone in recent times to glorify the rapeand-pillage lifestyle, even off the field. For other ethnic ancestries and persecuted groups the science is much simpler, though the math gets a little tangled. First, it’s a given that all Europeans (except those who were captured by devout Muslims—peace be upon them— in the Strait of Gibraltar) will have to pay for the suffering of all blacks; because even if my own ancestors, for one, never held slaves, we’ve all benefited from that forced labor and inhumane treatment of others. More specifically, whites in North America will have to pay out to all non-whites— including the descendents of the nineteenth-century Italians, and the Irish. (For the latter, this money could be put into, say, a “Papelbon Fund,” to be used for re-signing the top sports stars of the Boston-area teams.) Of course, in the early twentieth century the Irish policemen in New York and Boston themselves treated Italian immigrants with scorn, and so will be required to compensate the latter’s heirs appropriately. The near-genocide of the Native American people is a tougher call, since anyone who immigrates to North America

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today, even just to attend university, is benefiting from that injustice just as much as a “white oppressor” like myself who was born here does. So everyone living or attending school in North America whose ancestors weren’t here five hundred years ago has to chip in for the welfare and ecology of our Native brothers. To be fair, if you’re just half Native blood, you only receive a half-share ... and you also pay out half a share, for being a half-oppressor of those with full blood. So your net suffering is zero. All men will need to pay for the historic domination of all women. White women in turn will have to open their fashionably small purses to mitigate their own part in perpetuating the misery of black women: If you’ve been buying Aunt Jemima pancake syrup or Oreo cookies—black on the outside and white on the inside, like that wasn’t supposed to send a message—you’re part of the problem, sistah, not part of the solution. The reparations for long-standing discrimination against lesbians and gays has to come from everyone who’s heterosexual. Bisexuals pay and receive a half share, so again, like half-breed Indians, they won’t come out on top (as it were). Feminists will be expected to pay white Eurocentric males for their (feminist) use of oppressive phrases like “white man’s [sic] burden” and “The Man [sic],” while insisting on “human” everywhere else. There will be an additional surtax for their collective support of the ideas of leading feminist “thinkers” (sic) like Andrea Dworkin (“Men especially love murder” and “Penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent,” and romance is merely “rape embellished with meaningful looks”) and Catharine MacKinnon (“[S]exual intercourse under conditions of gender inequality ... [is] an issue of forced sex”). Those two wouldn’t have lasted long in Viking society, that’s for sure! Nor would Gloria Steinem have lasted even two minutes in anything resembling science, given her confidently bumbling dismissal of sociobiology.

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In fairness, though, when feminists blame men for all of the world’s problems, they are half right. That is, we are responsible for just about exactly half of the unfairness and pain in the world. Who do you think is to blame for the other half? Procrustean compensation for prejudices against short people will be exacted from everyone taller than the individual in question. So, if like Paul Simon you’re around a petite five-foot-five, anyone over five-five-and-a-half, especially a “sponger” like Art Garfunkel, owes you money. Attractive people will have to pay out to ugly ones, ‘cause the latter not only get less sex but also make less money (and thus get even less sex) on average. This is where the hot Asian girls on match.com start to pay for their little yellow prejudices. Bald people, excluding those with criminally bad combovers, get reparations from everyone with a good head of hair, even Haight-Ashburians. Because, let’s face it, we’ve been guilty of insensitively flaunting our best feature, and so of harming the self-esteem of those who live their lives without such gorgeously flowing locks. And finally, where will the reparations for my own people—my homeboys, my higgaz, my fellow aboriginals of the First Woodstock Nation—where will those $ come from? Obviously, from the other groups who have been most guilty of oppressing us with their narrow-minded prejudices and stereotypes, and of taking their frustrations and failures out on us in the first place. That is, from uneducated, pig-fucking rednecks; pidgin-speaking immigrants of all races, creeds, and degrees of wet-backness and repressed homosexuality; and most of all, from poverty-stricken, violent, low-IQ, niggardly blacks. Plus, from anyone with an MBA and no other “real” degree or equivalent life-experience to prove that he can actually think. (As a counter-example of someone with an MBA who can think, in spades, see Steve Sailer’s writings at www.isteve.com and www.isteve.blogspot.com.) How would all of that bookkeeping sort itself out?

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A quick, back-of-the-sanitary-napkin calculation shows that it would be ... well, pretty much a bloody wash, as they say. So, if you were a filthy-rich white man with a bad haircut and a supermodel wife before the redistribution, you’ll still be a filthy-rich white man with a bad haircut and a supermodel wife after. If you were happy-but-poor with long hair and a VW van (with a leaking radiator) before, you’ll be happy-butpoor with long hair and a VW van (with a still-leaking radiator) after. It’s actually pretty much like the old saw about how if you were to take all of the world’s wealth, pool it, and then divide it up equally, within a decade or so the same people who were rich before would be rich again, and likewise for the terminally poor. (Lottery winners who end up broke just a few years after winning millions provide a pretty good test of that idea.) Compare the Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns finds himself bankrupt and homeless, is reduced to collecting recyclables from the beach and turning them in for cash ... and quickly works himself back up to multi-millionaire status. We can learn so much from cartoons ... even non-Danish ones. Sure, in terms of reparations, we’ll all have the temporary thrill and satisfaction of receiving a check for five grand in the mail, and the pleasure of pissing and/or smoking and/or radiating it away ... but it’ll be offset by the agony of seeing our taxes go up by exactly the same amount next April, when the Damned Government tries to take away more of our hard-earned money, for god-only-knows what stupid, inefficient bureaucratic scheme. That’s the beauty of political solutions, though: They don’t need to really be making a difference, as long as they seem like they’re having an effect, and making everyone feel just a little bit better, for just a little while, about this sorry place we call the universe. Yet, even with that $5K check in hand, money and opportunities “only go so far” without self-esteem—a quality generated these days not merely by being praised even for work done incompetently (esp. if you’re part of a minority

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group), but also by taking pride in what others of your skin color, ethnic ancestry, gender or sexual orientation have accomplished, as if you had something to do with it. And you did—simply by having the same skin color, ethnic ancestry, gender or sexual orientation, you’re part of their in-group. And it’s exactly because of that shared pigmentation, cuisine, genitalia and/or use of lubricants/strap-ons that you can understand them (and vice versa) as no one outside of your in-group can. The importance of such support, understanding, and penetration, cannot be overstated. Who, then, can us “inversely uptrodden” people of hair look to as self-esteem-generating role models, to show us that “we can do it too”? This question requires a thoughtful analysis as, Writ Very Large, it affects all of us—black and white (and mulatto/ greyscale), gay and straight (and transgenders), man and woman (and Python-esque hermaphrodites, and hermaphroditic pythons). First, suppose you were a gay-curious high-school student with an interest in the physics of friction, ropes and pulleys, and inclined planes. Sort of like an “S&M Physics Lab” with some “Galileos” and “Bismillahs” thrown in. How do you know you’ll even like it, much less be good at it? Well, you’re in luck. Because it’s been known for over five centuries that gays can do engineering, architecture, sculpture, painting, botany, and can design helicopters and parachutes, every bit as well as straight men can, if not better. Amazingly, we owe all that knowledge to a single person: the ass-banging genius, Leonardo (“Leo”) da Vinci—the man who led the way for gays into engineering. Of course, da Vinci was a faggy Italian doing science, which might not be much inspiration to, say, a gay German considering going into the field. And being a man, he couldn’t be a guide to female “persons of science,” not even if they were lesbian. (Maybe he could be half a guide, if they were bi or transgendered, or just really, really ugly.) So if you were a German, a woman, or a dyke—or all three,

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even—you’d need to search elsewhere for a role model to show you that you can do it too. Richard Feynman’s sister had a Ph.D. in physics, but she was Jewish and liked boys, so she couldn’t help you out either. And obviously, if you add hair length onto all of that as yet another independent variable, it gets even more complex. But the bottom line is that if you can find someone exactly like yourself who’s already accomplished everything you dream of doing, there’s no reason to think you can’t do it too! That’s what role models are for! And if you can’t find a doppelgänger role-model, well, then maybe you should be considering a different profession. Or sexual orientation. Leaving that aside, what would a truly equitable future look like, for our world’s hippies? I see a world of longhair-only schools, providing the educational opportunities which are denied to us in mixed-hair environments. Hippie schools speaking hippie language (“Hiphonics”), teaching our unique “hippie ways of knowing”— the Omniscient Paperclip is just the beginning! Bell-bottoms as far as the eye can see, love-beads in every doorway, and an incense holder on every desk, teaching a hippie culture which every marginalized person of hair can be proud of! I see a Haight-Ashbury Studies (HAS) faculty in every university, where students can learn about the very first stonerphilosophers, from Hippiecles to Jerrystotle. They can read the much-misunderstood Book of the Dead—a tome which, far from giving guidance for the afterlife, actually contains helpful hints for Deadheads on how to pass through obstacles in this life, while on tour. They will study the carefree life of Diogenes who, when he wasn’t busying himself in the agora, lived in a tub—a philosophy dear to the heart of every longhair who’s ever needed a place to crash for the night and been able to find only a couch, a floor or, yes, a bathtub.

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HAS students will also be taught, quite validly, that the Grateful Dead invented hip-hop, via drummer Mickey Hart’s rapping of his own song, “Fire on the Mountain,” circa 1973. Seriously: There’s an unreleased studio recording from 1974. Of course, the recognized sound of hip-hop originated in the Beastie Boys’ sampling of John Bonham’s drum work from Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” with that being done under the direction of producer Rick Rubin—“the most important white boy in hip-hop.” But before those whites and Jews perfected today’s black beats, the equally pasty Dead deserve credit for inventing the concept. The hippie origin of contemporary nigga music was even made explicit in the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”—the first rap single to go gold, from the summer of 1979: I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie, To the hip-hip hop, ah you don’t stop And we haven’t stopped. On the contrary, when blacks accuse white rappers like Eminem of “stealing our music and giving it back to us” ... well, they’ve got it exactly backwards. Because they stole it from us first! Fucking thieves! Our long-haired children will further learn about the most recent, cutting-edge research by Hippiecentric scholars. For example, we now know that long hair behaves like a superconductor, that it absorbs all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum—well, except red, blond, brunette and (a touch of) grey, obviously—that it can convert sound energy to light energy reversibly, and that it can function as a minicomputer to process information. Previously, the only other substance believed by Afrocentric scholars—erroneously, it turns out—to possess those amazing properties was the skin pigment, melanin. And, our kids can finally be taught the truth about Jesus: That, like Steve Wozniak, he was one of us—a long-haired, sandal-wearing Galilean Hippie without a real job, who was tragically born two thousand years ahead of his time, and

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suffered persecutions for that which today’s minorities can only dream of. You won’t read that in your biased history books, of course—books written by shorthairs, for a shorthair-centric society—any more than they would tell you that Cleopatra, Josephine, Beethoven, Haydn, Solomon, Hannibal, Odysseus and Socrates were all people of hair. (Well, maybe Socrates not so much.) Same for Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln. And the Moors. Not that I’d want to come off as a “reverse hairist” myself. After all, some of my best friends are shorthairs.... But if the victors write the history books, then it’s up to the victims to rewrite them! And there are few groups more victimized today than my own: unhyphenated white European males—especially eldest children, who have always carried the added burden of responsibility and stress in being the first of the family to “go where no sibling has gone before”—with long hair. Indeed, us Haight-Ashburians are the newest “persecuted minority”—“the new black,” as the Fashionistas like to say. It’s not that you, as a member of some other oppressed, non-hippie minority group, haven’t suffered or been marginalized or disenfranchised. You have been marginalized and disenfranchised. You have suffered. And no one can ever take that precious badge away from you: It’s your truth. But in being treated today like blacks in America used to be treated, it’s a simple fact that, since the late ’60s, our feelings have been hurt more. African-Americans had a civil rights movement to free them from oppression and bad vibes, but where is the comparable hippie rights movement? Where have short-haired whites, blacks, Native Americans and Asians, female straights and strapped-on lesbians and transsexuals and transvestites, and the cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, all marched in support of the rights of their marginalized, long-haired brothers? Nowhere, that’s where. Indeed, given how many unshaven, white members of the counterculture put their necks on the line in support of civil rights back in the ’60s, the ab-

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sence of black support for us now when we need it most is especially painful, and shameful. Society has failed us, and because of that failure, if blacks and women have little power in the world today, we have even less. And for exactly that reason, if the Marxinspired definition of racism stipulates that only members of an oppressive, privileged majority can be racists, it follows that no hippie—including Yours Truly—can ever be a racist. Or, by the same line of argument, a sexist, either. It’s obvious if you think about it. Because, you may be as white as the snow on Christmas morning, and as stereotypically male as Richard the Lionheart. But all you’d have to do is grow your hair a little too long, and walk around in clothes that signal to the real bigots in the world that you’re not pulling your weight in society, and you’ll find yourself excluded from all the power and privilege that even feminists and blacks take for granted. That, sadly, is what it means to be a “person of hair” in the world today. Through no fault of our own, we’ve been relegated to the lowest rung of the Western power hierarchy: even shorthaired, panhandling bums get more respect from passers-by than guitar-playing hippies do. And so we live as a powerless, victimized out-group, feebly hoping for mercy from the oppressive, hegemonic in-group of feminists, gays, lesbians, blacks, other assorted minorities, and short-haired white men who control the reigns of power. All of that grief and institutionalized discrimination has long been documented in groundbreaking first- and second-wave hippieist texts like The Dialectic of Hair, Are Hippies Human?, Toward a Long-Haired Theory of the State, and The Hippie Mystique. It’s not a “suffering contest,” of course—though if it was, we’d be winning. But the point I’m trying to make is that only in the complete absence of responsibility can any of us ever find true freedom. Anything less than that would simply be “blaming the victim.” And since we’re all helpless victims in one way or another, we must all be equally blameless; there is no middle ground.

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In agitating for hippie rights, we should of course be prepared for a “backlash” from the most intolerant members of the shorthair community—specifically, lesbians (“persons of L”) and blacks (“persons of N”). They are the people, after all, who are the most likely to feel their own “follicular orientation” to be threatened by a hippie celebration of “alternative hair-ality.” By contrast, in having worn our hair “both ways”—from brush-cut short to Steven Pinker, rock-star long, through the full “rainbow” spectrum in between—we’re in a position to know from experience which lifestyle we prefer, and to “speak truth to short-haired power” for that way of life. How many “clit lit” lesbians, or janitorial “il lit” black males, can say the same? Like Hippie Jesus, Gene Roddenberry too was ahead of his time—a true visionary, not least for giving us one of television’s first interracial kisses, even if it was forced onto Kirk and Uhuru by telekinesis. But contra Roddenberry’s vision, the bridges of our starships in the twenty-fourth century won’t have interracial crews, for the simple reason that distinct white, black, yellow and red races won’t exist on Earth anymore, a dozen generations from now. Rather, the whole species will end up as a pleasing shade of light brown. That is, over the next few hundred years intermarriage will rightfully dissolve the whole idea of distinct cultures and races; thus ironically producing, in its own way, the precise opposite of multiculturalism, while simultaneously removing the overt triggers of racism and ethnocentrism in a global genetic and cultural “melting pot.” Consider the gorgeous actress Vanessa Hudgens, whose father is an American of Irish and Native American descent; and whose Manila-raised mother has Filipino, Spanish and Chinese ancestry. What “distinct culture” could Hudgens possibly identify with? And what traditional culture or race or even cuisine could her children possibly identify with? Likewise, the prototypical “Aryan blonde” Heather Locklear is European (Scottish), Indian (Lumbee) and black; while Vanessa Marcil’s father is Mexican and her mother is an

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American of French, Italian and Portuguese ancestry. Überhottie Megan Fox, for her own wet-dreams-inducing part, has Irish, French and Native American blood. These are among the most wildly desirable women on the planet, and they’re absolute mongrels! (For that matter, Tiger Woods is black, Thai, Chinese, white and American Indian. Somewhere in all that he must qualify for affirmative action ... even if, tragically for those who would have liked to help, he never actually needed it, simply for being the best in the world at what he does, independent of his racial ancestry.) So you see, once again, “Love will conquer all.” You can see that on any warm summer evening on the streets around the University of Toronto campus, where testosterone and estrogen rightfully matter far more than do skin color or ethnic background. (Of course, there is still one weapon in the political arsenal which could be used in the misled liberal goal of preserving our world’s distinct cultures: segregation, and its associated prohibitions against intermarriage. Short of that oppressive, liberal-racist agenda, however, multiculturalism will eat itself in the long run.) How, then, can each one of us do our part in ridding the world of racism and ethnocentrism? The answer is obvious: Sex. And lots of it. If you’re a poor black kid with stereotypically large testicles who’s too stupid to use a condom, try getting a white girl pregnant for a change. Or, if you’re a black chick, take a chance on a white boy: his dick may be larger than you’ve been led to believe. If you’re a geeky white guy with an Asian fetish (“Weezer-itis”), seduce a Muslim woman once in awhile: Beneath that formless, life-denying burqa runs the hot Persian blood of a real-life Scheherazade. And you don’t need to spend all of your thousand-and-one nights with her just reading about Aladdin’s “magic lamp,” either. If you’re an eligible Jewish woman who wants to see peace in the Middle East, elope with a handsome Arab man.

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Whose side could your children possibly fight on? Plus, a good Jewish girl must be worth at least seven camels these days; and those versatile animals don’t grow on date trees! Even if no pregnancies were to result from that exchange of bodily fluids, the integrative effects of seeing each other naked will do more to create peace and harmony between the races than any political solution ever could. Like the old saying goes: We don’t kill our enemies, we marry them. (What you may wish you had done in the first place, in hindsight after twenty years of marriage, is a different issue.) Intermarriage is what turned the Anglos and the Saxons into the Anglo-Saxons. It’s what’s turning the poorer, less photogenic Anglo Californians and some of their smarter illegal aliens into the Anglo-Mexifornians. It would have turned the Montagues and the Capulets into the MontagueCapulets if their parents had only let it, ‘cause those kids were really in love, god bless ‘em. And it can turn the Jamaican-Canadians and the Irish-Italian-Americans and the Polished-Asian-Cunnilingists and the Goatworthy-PBOH-Cabdrivers into ... well, into simple Canadians and Americans and Brits and Australians, if we just get our stupid politics and stupid prejudices and stupid divisive stupid multiculturalism out of the way, and let the raw hormones do the work that Nature intended. That would really be “Da Bomb.” And you don’t have to wait for Paradise and seventy-two imaginary sweet white monologues to get it, either: It’s all here for the taking in the here and now, in the only world that we’ve got any reason to believe exists in the first place—the only world that’s worth fighting for. It’s such a simple solution to an otherwise intractable problem, and we could all have such a whole damned lot of fun doing it—by which I mean, making the world a better place, one orgasm at a time. (There are advantages, you see, to being perpetually single and terrified of commitment.) It won’t all happen overnight; but together, two by two—or occasionally three—in just a few centuries we can

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create a world without racism, ethnocentrism, or the most pernicious of human bigotries: hairism. Because I have a dream. I have a dream, that one day in the financial district of Toronto the sons of former hippies and the sons of former bankers will be able to sit down together at a conference table of brotherhood in the boardroom of peace. I have a dream, that the longhairs and the shorthairs can work together, in a world where hippies will be given the same opportunities as the blacks, the yellow-skinned, and the rednecks. I have a dream that the illegitimate kids of groovy hippie chicks will one day live in a world where they will not be judged by the length of their hair but by the uniformly lightbrown color of their skin. Let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we let freedom ring from every BMW and every flower-power painted Volkswagen van, we will be able to speed up that day when the longhairs and the shorthairs will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Grateful Dead toptwenty hit: “I will get by! I will get by! Thank Jerry Garcia, I will survive!”

References [B]efore we can have justice, we must first have truth.... —John Howard Griffin, paraphrasing P. D. East, in

Black Like Me

See www.hiplikeme.com/references.php for live links, where applicable.

he kept going AWOL. Sandy Troy, Captain Trips: A Biography of Jerry Garcia (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995), p. 17. It was his pineapple. Ibid., p. 24: “Hunter had also just gotten out of the Army, and they both ended up living in their broken-down cars in an empty lot in East Palo Alto. Garcia reminisced, ‘Hunter had these big tins of crushed pineapple that he’d gotten from the Army, like five or six big tins, and I had this glove compartment full of plastic spoons, and we 199

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had this little cooperative scene, eating this crushed pineapple day after day and sleeping in the cars.’” stuffing his face with junk food. Chris Willman, “Last Rites of the Dead: A Tie-Dyed Nation Mourns the Loss of Jerry Garcia,” on EW.com, 1994 (http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,298552,00.html): “Particularly in the years since his near-fatal diabetic coma of 1986, Garcia had yo-yoed between health-and-nutrition kicks and milkshake-and-cheeseburger binges.” arteries were like pinholes. Office of the Coroner, County of Marin, “Coroner’s Report in the Matter of the Death of Jerome John Garcia” (San Rafael, CA, 1995), p. 1: “[T]he right coronary artery shows focal areas of approximately 30% occlusion by eccentric atherosclerotic plaques. The anterior descending coronary artery in its mid portion shows an area with hemorrhage into an eccentric plaque with over 85-90% occlusion of the lumen, and distal to this are areas of over 85% occlusion by atheromatous material.” apologize just for being a man. Cf. Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Cf. also Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). See also Robert Sheaffer, “Combatting Feminist MsInformation: Refuting the Most Common Feminist Lies and Pseudo-Scholarship” (http://www.debunker.com/patriarchy.html), for a valuable list of similar resources, both online and offline. cults waiting to happen. See Geoffrey D. Falk, Stripping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment (Toronto: Million Monkeys Press, 2007 [2005]) (http://www.strippingthegurus.com). need not apply. Five Man Electrical Band, “Signs,” Goodbyes and Butterflies (Lionel Records, 1971).

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Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen, “First We Take Manhattan,” I’m Your Man (Sony, 1990 [1988]). gotta go to work.” Sarah Harmer, “Everytime,” You Were Here (Zoe Records, 2000). long, strange trip. Grateful Dead, “Truckin’,” American Beauty (Rhino/WEA, 1970). May 15 history of Atlantis. Henry Mietkiewicz and Bob Mackowycz, Dream Tower: The Life and Legacy of Rochdale College (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1988), p. 43. science of “Mind-Fucking.” Ibid., p. 155. nearby Rochdale. Nicholas Jennings, Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1997), p. 195: “Yorkville was controlled by big-league [real-estate] players now, and the few hippies who hadn’t moved, mostly over to nearby Rochdale College, were powerless to stop them.” draft dodgers. Mietkiewicz and Mackowycz, op. cit., p. 100. “Festival Express.” Janis Joplin, et al., Festival Express (New Line Home Video, 2004). “plays guitar and cries and sings.” Led Zeppelin, “Going to California,” Led Zeppelin IV (Atlantic/WEA, 1971). “capitalist exploiters.” Jennings, op. cit., p. 223: “[Promoter Ken] Walker and the Eaton brothers had to contend with protests from the May 4th Movement (M4M), a radical coalition of students and street people based at Toronto’s Rochdale College. Targeting the promoters as capitalist exploiters, M4M tried to discredit the festival with the slogan ‘Stop the Rip-Off Express’ and a propaganda campaign that

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demanded free admission along with ‘free dope and no cops.’ After a meeting with the coalition, Thor Eaton concluded, ‘These people have a loose grip on reality.’” “clothing optional.” Mietkiewicz and Mackowycz, op. cit., p. 202, 204-5. May 27 “pause that refreshes.” A Coke marketing slogan in the late 1920s. May 29 shiks-appeal. From an episode of Seinfeld (“The Serenity Now,” first aired October 9, 1997) where Elaine is concerned about how she attracts Jewish men. joy of accomplishment.” Richard Stallman, “Why Software Should Be Free” (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html). “democracy under a dictatorship.” John Carroll, “Stallman Leads the GPL off a Cliff,” 2006 (http://blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/?p=1534). squatted on the MIT campus. Reuven M. Lerner, “Stallman wins $240,000 in MacArthur award,” in The Tech, July 18, 1990 (http://www-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html). “A pot, a pan, a Pentium, a hat.” Cf. Sheldon Harnick, Joseph Stein and Jerry Bock, “Anatevka,” Fiddler on the Roof. “technical skills shortage.” Norman Matloff, “Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage: Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration,” 2002 (1998) (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc6.4):

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“It’s hard to open the business section of any newspaper these days without running across an article bemoaning the ‘skilled-labor shortage’ that is supposedly threatening the heart of American business.” Comp Sci graduates. Ibid. (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc6.2.2): “[M]y own surveys of graduating seniors at UC Davis reveal that fewer than half of the graduating seniors in computer science get jobs in programming, and are instead shunted into semitechnical (albeit well-paid) jobs like customer support. Informal comments by colleagues at other universities have confirmed that this is the case nationally.” new, cutting-edge technologies. Ibid. (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc8.1): “[A]ny competent programmer can pick up a new software skill on his/her own, on the job, without formal instruction.” starting at $30-$35K. Ibid. (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc4.2.1): “[I]n spite of wild newspaper stories in 1998 about new computer science or engineering Bachelor’s graduates getting salaries approaching six figures, the going rate was in the mid-$40,000 range, even in high-cost-of-living regions.” June 5 but not for braces. Cf. Bill Cosby, in Felicia R. Lee, “Cosby Defends His Remarks About Poor Blacks’ Values,” in New York Times, May 22, 2004 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E5D71E 3FF931A15756C0A9629C8B63&fta=y): “These people are not parenting. They are buying things for their kids—$500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’” copper-colored feet. Revelation 1:15: “And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace.” See also

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Theprophetess, “Black Jesus of the Bible,” 2004 (http://www.thumperscorner.com/discus/messages/5051/10 27.html). Malcolm X. Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 1: “In a 1963 interview, Malcolm X stridently proclaimed, Christ wasn’t white. Some thirty years later, especially with the emergence of the Afrocentric movement in the black community, many black scholars and church leaders are vociferously repeating Malcolm’s proclamation.” See also Alex Haley, “The Playboy Interview: Malcolm X,” in Playboy magazine, May 1963 (http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/int_playb.htm). Nigger Jesus. Cf. William Mosley, What Color Was Jesus? A Mad Economist Takes a Stroll (Chicago Heights, IL: African American Images, 1997), p. 7: “Ontologically speaking, then, Jesus is Black, for ‘Black’ blood ran in His human veins.” See also John G. Jackson, “Was Jesus Christ a Negro? A Rationalistic Review,” 1933 (http://www.africawithin.com/jgjackson/jgjackson_was_jesus _christ_a_negro.htm). some 54-IQ criminal. Cf. La Griffe du Lion, “Analysis of Hate Crime,” Volume 2, Number 5, May 2000 (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hatecrime.htm): “Blacks, representing thirteen percent of the [U.S.] nation [in 1994], committed more than 90 percent of the violent interracial crime. Fifty-seven percent of the violent crime committed by blacks had white victims. Less than 3 percent of violence committed by whites had black victims. In 1994, a black was 64 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa.” I do too. So did shock-jock Howard Stern: “I grew up the only white man in a black neighborhood.... By the time I hit seventh grade there were only a handful of white kids left in my school. That’s when the beatings began to get regular.... Half of the kids in my school were in a gang called the Five Percenters. [They] hated the white man with a vengeance.

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These guys would choke me and say, ‘You’ll never live to see your fifteenth birthday’—nice stuff like that.” See Howard Stern, Private Parts (New York: Pocket Books, 1996 [1993]), p. 63-8. June 8 hippie is the nigger of the world. Cf. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” Some Time in New York City (Capitol, 1972). June 10 multimedia. See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 49-51, 65-6. peacenik and privacy advocate.” Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” in Time magazine, Volume 145, No. 12, Spring 1995 (http://technohippie.com/archives/stewartbrand.html). Beatle-haired hippie. Brand, loc. cit. “blue boxes.” Brand, loc. cit. dial Vatican City. Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 115. I looked like Jesus Christ.” Ibid., p. 81. hanging around with them. Ibid., p. 83. part by psychedelics.” Ram Dass, in Roger Walsh and Charles S. Grob, ed., Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore

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the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 220. talking paperclip’ came from. Cf. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: The Penguin Group, 2005), p. 250: “Today [Dan Ingalls’ method of moving blocks of information in computer memory] remains at the heart of both the Macintosh and Windows computing worlds. In the early 1970s, however, it was a radically new idea. Called BitBlt, it enabled graphical menu systems to ‘pop-up’ instantly on an Alto screen in response to a mouse click. As much as any single software innovation, BitBlt made the modern graphical computer interface possible.... Ingalls had dabbled in psychedelics and smoked pot to put himself in a more creative, introspective mood.... Years later ... when people would ask about the inventive ideas in Smalltalk [computer language], Ingalls would joke, ‘Well, where do you think these ideas came from?!’” studied acid. Walsh and Grob, op. cit., p. 25: “James Fadiman graduated from Harvard and Stanford universities where he met and worked with Richard Alpert, who later became known as Ram Dass. It was Alpert who introduced Fadiman to psychedelics....” affected by psychedelics.” James Fadiman, in Ibid., p. 33, 37. most important things.” Markoff, op. cit., p. xix. Markoff’s book unfortunately “almost totally overlooks the MIT technoDeadhead community of leftist hackers”—Edward Hasbrouck, “Life Outside the Mainframe,” in Peacework Magazine, August 2005 (http://web.archive.org/web/20070310220609/www.peacew orkmagazine.org/pwork/0508/050814.htm). recovery from alcohol addiction.” Charles S. Grob and Gary Bravo, in Walsh and Grob, op. cit., p. 9-10.

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Tony Blair. Jake Woodward, et al., ed., Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip (New York: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2003), p. 375. Bruce Hornsby. David Shenk and Steve Silberman, Skeleton Key, A Dictionary for Deadheads (New York: Main Street Books, 1994). See also “The Octane Kids!” (http://www.realhornsby.com/octanekids.htm). Patrick Leahy, Al and Tipper Gore. Woodward, loc. cit. Nancy Pelosi. CBS News Staff, “The Skinny: Follow The Money? Nah,” in CBS News, January 4, 2007 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/04/the_skinny/mai n2329383.shtml). Al Franken. Ann Coulter, in Taylor Hill, “‘Deadheads Are What Liberals Claim to Be But Aren’t’: An Interview with Ann Coulter,” 2006 (http://www.jambands.com/Features/content_2006_06_23.0 6.phtml). John Kerry. Brian Doherty, “John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body—and his politics,” in Reason magazine, August/September 2004 (http://www.reason.com/news/show/29236.html): “Kerry’s a Deadhead.” Bill Clinton. Woodward, loc. cit. Ann Coulter. Hill, loc. cit. Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson, “SUVs, Canadians and the Grateful Dead,” October 14, 2005 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8063563). Kenneth Starr. Hill, loc. cit. Jerry Greenfield. “Company News; Ben & Jerry’s,” in New York Times, July 30, 1987

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(http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6D91 73EF933A05754C0A961948260&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes %20Topics%2fPeople%2fG%2fGarcia%2c%20Jerry). Larry Page. David Vise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time (New York: Delta, 2006), p. 22. Mitch Kapor. Brand, loc. cit. Board of Directors of the WELL. Richard Holeton, Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community, and Knowledge in the Electronic Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997) (http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/holeton/chap4/ barlow.mhtml), Chapter 4. Acid Test-organizer. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: The Penguin Group, 2005), p. 153 (http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.01.05/dorm ouse-0522.html): “Brand was also close to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and in 1966 he had helped organize the last of the Acid Tests, which served to launch the Grateful Dead.” Dick Cheney. Doherty, loc. cit. made his candles.” Hill, loc. cit. June 13 security ninnies. Cf. Christie Blatchford, “The truth in a nutshell, or what I won’t read on vacation,” in Globe and Mail, June 27, 2008 (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.200 80627.blatch28/BNStory/specialComment/home): “When we boarded a little later, I asked for the ninny’s name. He refused and hissed, ‘If you make a scene, I’ll call the pilot and you won’t be flying tonight.’”

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prejudices of their own.” James Fulford, “Return of the Nativist?” on VDare.com, 2001 (http://www.vdare.com/fulford/return_nativist.htm). typical of Far-Eastern cultures. See Dave Barry, Dave Barry Does Japan (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), p. 146: “Cheering is very much a designated group activity at Japanese sporting events.... [Y]ou virtually never hear a lone voice yell or heckle. Such a display of individualism would be highly embarrassing in Japan.... [T]he cheering is done by specific groups standing in specific areas and performing precise, unvarying cheer routines, which are repeated over and over and over.” See also Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1989]), p. 23: “I believe that the Japanese are individuals, all 120 million of them. Not all may want to assert their individuality; most, having been so conditioned, do not. But I have met quite a few who want to be taken for distinct persons, rather than as indistinct members of a group. These independent thinkers are disturbed [by the conformist society around them]. In many cases they have withdrawn into the private world of their own mind.” make more money. Jet Staff, “Job Study Shows That Pretty People Make More Money; Ugly Men Make the Least,” in Jet, April 11, 1994 (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_n23_v85/ai_1 5133411). July 2 “Paradise by the dashboard light.” Meat Loaf, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” Bat out of Hell (Sony, 1977). experiences, immensely varied. Cf. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (New York: Signet, 1996 [1960]), p. 87: “All showed morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the

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Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.” “parental uncertainty.” Jared Diamond, “Ethnic differences: Variation in Human Testis Size,” in Nature, 320(6062):488-489: “In [man and apes] large testis size correlates with, and was probably selected [via natural selection in evolution] by, two factors: high copulatory frequency; and high probability that a female will mate with several males during one ovulatory cycle.” See also David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p. 166: “Large testes typically evolve as a consequence of intense sperm competition—when the sperm from two or more males occupy the reproductive tract of one female at the same time because she has copulated with two or more males.... Sperm competition exerts a selection pressure on males to produce large ejaculates containing numerous sperm. In the race to the valuable egg, the large, sperm-laden ejaculate has an advantage in displacing the ejaculate of other men inside the woman’s reproductive tract.... [H]uman male testes account for ... 60 percent more [weight] than that of orangutans and more than four times that of gorillas, corrected for body size.... This size of testes would have been unlikely to have evolved unless there was sperm competition. And it suggests that both sexes pursued short-term mating some of the time.” male sex partners per birth. Buss, loc. cit. See also Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 158, 168: “The uniquely human blend of sociality ... evolved [in Homo sapiens] over many years. The most fundamental [element], a major shift from the ape brand of sociality, was the human nuclear family, which gave all males a chance at procreating along with incentives to cooperate with others in foraging and defense.... Much of human nature consists of the behaviors necessary to support the male-female bond

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and a man’s willingness to protect his family in return for a woman’s willingness to bear only his children.” for many generations. Cf. Steve Sailer, “Tom Sowell’s ‘Black Redneck’ Theory—Ingenious, But Insufficient,” on VDare.com, 2003 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050515_redneck.htm): “[I]n systems of tropical agriculture where land was traditionally cheap and most of the work is weeding, which women can do as well as men—as opposed to manhandling draft animals for plowing—you sometimes see handsome men with 50 or more wives.... [M]any of the children born to the Big Man’s wives might not be his genetic offspring. But their mothers can support them—which means that some cuckoo’s eggs [i.e., those fertilized by a different father] aren’t that big of a loss to him.” big-dicked, freaked-out brotha.” Dan Savage, “Dan Loves Paul,” in Savage Love, July 11, 2002 (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=1129 1). never die easily, do they. Cf. J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd spec. ab. ed. (Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000) (http://www.harbornet.com/folks/theedrich/JP_Rushton/Rac e.htm), p. 18-9: “In one study of college students, testosterone levels were 10 to 20% higher in blacks than in whites.... The average frequency of intercourse per week for married couples in their twenties is 2.5 for the Japanese and Chinese in Asia. It is 4 for American whites. For American blacks it is 5.... Around the world, public health agencies now give out free condoms to help slow the spread of AIDS and help save lives. Condom size can affect whether one is used, so these agencies take note of penis size when they give out condoms. The World Health Organization Guidelines specify a 49-mm-width condom for Asia, a 52-mm-width for North America and Europe, and a 53-mm-width for Africa.”

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Ashley. CNN.com Staff, “Operation PUSH documents financial ties with Jackson lover,” on CNN.com, February 1, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/02/01/jackson.money/index .html). Greek homos.” Al Sharpton, quoted in Laura Ward, Foolish Words: The Most Stupid Words Ever Spoken (London: The Promotional Reprint Company Limited, 2003), p. 192. Socrates himself was black. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1997 [1996]), p. xi, xii, 9, 26. academic political correctness.” John Zmirak, “Learning To Love The West,” on VDare.com, 2004 (http://www.vdare.com/zmirak/041106_west.htm). “friend and ally.” NOI.org Staff, “Farrakhan and the Jewish Rift; An Historic Reference,” on NOI.org, 2007 (http://www.noi.org/statements/rift/recent_history.htm). “potential humans.” Louis Farrakhan, quoted in Derek Brown, “Quotes from Louis Farrakhan,” in The Guardian, July 31, 2001 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/jul/31/race.world1). Farrakhan in 1997. “Farrakhan Meets The Press,” from NBC television’s Meet the Press, April 13, 1997; transcribed in The Final Call (http://www.finalcall.com/national/mlf-mtp5-1397.html). you ask for black coffee.” Louis Farrakhan, quoted in Alex Haley, “The Playboy Interview: Malcolm X,” in Playboy magazine, May 1963 (http://www.malcolmx.org/docs/int_playb.htm).

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“bloodsuckers.” Louis Farrakhan, quoted in Charles Bierbauer, “Million Man March: Its Goal More Widely Accepted Than Its Leader,” on CNN, October 17, 1995 (http://www-cgi.cnn.com/US/9510/megamarch/1017/notebook/). neither a racist nor anti-Semitic. Ibid. easy for white people.” Ibid. intended to wipe out.” Spike Lee, “United Colors of Benetton,” in Rolling Stone, November 12, 1992, p. 6. Bill Cosby. See Marc Sheppard, “Come on Cosby: It’s Time to Come Clean about AIDS,” in American Thinker, November 1, 2007 (http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/come_on_cosby _its_time_to_come.html). father-knows-best sitcoms. Cf. Karen Ritchie, Marketing to Generation X (New York: Free Press, 2002 [1995]), p. 59: “Julianne Malveaux points out that, because of the civil rights movement, Boomers of African-American descent bonded more closely with their own parents. ‘...there is not as sharp a generational divide between black boomers and our brothers and sisters from the so-called silent generation.’ As a result, black Boomers continue to share power, more or less comfortably, with older black leaders. Black Boomers rebelled less against their own parents and family traditions (as white Boomers did) and more against the repressive [white majority] system.” If the rest of the world is against you, you need your parents on your side. Conversely, if while growing up the world is your oyster, you can afford to dis Mum and Dad (as opposed to “whitey” in general) for all of their faults and misuses of power. Either way, you need to find something to rebel against, as a rite of passage from youth into adulthood. As a generalization, then, white Baby Boomers rebelled against the idea that “father knows best,”

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while blacks embraced it, and rebelled instead against whitey. of biological-warfare testing.” Ned Zeman, “Will Smith Rides High,” in Vanity Fair, July 1999, p. 136. younger than his wife.” Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007), p. 176. See also Samuel Francis, “The King Holiday and Its Meaning: The origins of our national celebration of multiracialism and political correctness,” in American Renaissance, February 1998 (http://www.vdare.com/francis/050226_king_holiday.htm): “In the course of the Senate debate on the King holiday, the East office received a letter from a retired FBI official, Charles D. Brennan. Mr. Brennan, who had served as Assistant Director of the FBI, stated that he had personally been involved in the FBI surveillance of King and knew from firsthand observation the truth about King’s sexual conduct— conduct that Mr. Brennan characterized as ‘orgiastic and adulterous escapades, some of which indicated that King could be bestial in his sexual abuse of women.’ He also stated that ‘King frequently drank to excess and at times exhibited extreme emotional instability as when he once threatened to jump from his hotel room window.’” what’s really under there.” Francis, loc. cit. “Hymietown.” Larry J. Sabato, “Jesse Jackson’s ‘Hymietown’ Remark—1984,” in Washington Post, 1998 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/jackson.htm). “Emergency Cancellation Archimedes.” The code to shut down Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet. Or, in the case of the mother of Reverend Jackson’s love-child, perhaps: Earth Girls Are Easy.

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July 20 real prejudices. Nicholas Jennings, Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1997), p. 230-1, quoting music critic Ritchie Yorke: “Almost every country in the world has a local music industry. Canada has the talent but no music industry. There are two reasons for this, I believe: the extreme reluctance of Canadian radio stations to program anything by local artists as if there was somehow something wrong with them. The second reason is that most Canadian record companies are foreign owned and they cannot be bothered sinking valuable profits into making records that few stations will play.” Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot. Ibid., p. 202-3: Lightfoot signed his million-dollar deal with Warner Bros. in 1969; “Joni Mitchell was herself hugely successful by the end of the [’60s] decade.” Leonard Cohen, Neil Young. Loc. cit. The Guess Who. Ibid., p. 215, 217: “It was the late sixties and The Guess Who had just returned to Canada from a grueling tour of the United States.... The Guess Who were invited to perform at Tricia [Nixon]’s birthday party at the White House in July [of 1970]....” drives the overall quality down. Cf. Ibid., p. 232: “In making the [Cancon] announcement, CRTC chairman Pierre Juneau told RPM that the opponents of the regulations would soon be silenced. ‘The prophets of doom, the messengers of mediocrity,’ he predicted, ‘will be overwhelmed by the new generation of competent, creative, confident artisans....’” Contrast that wishful thinking with Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), which documents the widespread hiring of incompetent and illiterate minorities

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over competent and literate majority-group members in the American corporate world. “persecuted minorities” in the music business. Cf. John McWhorter, “The Demise of Affirmative Action at UC Berkeley: Dissecting the Stalemate” (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mcwhorter/mcwhorter_p 2.html): “Affirmative action had come to operate in an environment in which its initial goal had come such a long way towards realization that a policy once intended to bring blacks to the socioeconomic level of whites was now being applied to blacks who had long done so.” Cf. also Peter Brimelow, “‘Immigration Is The Viagra Of The State’—A Libertarian Case Against Immigration,” on VDare.com, June 4, 2008 (http://www.vdare.com/pb/080604_immigration.htm): “The original rationale for quotas was that they compensated American blacks for the lingering effects of slavery and segregation. But all immigrants who belong to the so-called ‘protected classes’—basically non-whites—are eligible for affirmative action preferences, even though they by definition were not in the country to suffer any wrongs.” Cf. also James Fulford, “Libertarians and Immigration,” on VDare.com, June 6, 2001 (http://www.vdare.com/fulford/libertarian_immigration.htm): “Giving affirmative action preferences to the American descendants of freed slaves might have some historic validity, but the Beninese immigrant from Africa is the descendant of slave merchants, and the Sudanese immigrant may be a slave owner himself.” Cf. also Steve Sailer, “Obama Hands McCain The Quota Issue. Will He Use It?” on VDare.com, July 27, 2008 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080727_obama.htm). Mounties didn’t intercept it.” Jennings, op. cit., p. 234-5. “half-Canadian.” “The MAPL System,” 2001 (http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/INFO_SHT/R1.htm): “To qualify as ‘Canadian content’ a musical selection must generally

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fulfill at least two of the following conditions: M (music) — the music is composed entirely by a Canadian. A (artist) — the music is, or the lyrics are, performed principally by a Canadian. P (production) — the musical selection consists of a live performance that is (i) recorded wholly in Canada, or (ii) performed wholly in Canada and broadcast live in Canada. L (lyrics) — the lyrics are written entirely by a Canadian.” “one drop.” Cf. Steve Sailer, “Census follies,” on VDare.com, April 4, 2000 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/census_follies.htm). July 23 mandolin rain. Bruce Hornsby and the Range, “Mandolin Rain,” The Way It Is (RCA, 1986). July 24 “Of course I would.” Peter A. Bucky with Allen G. Weakland, The Private Albert Einstein (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), p. 104. get any work done. Cf. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 28: “Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of.... Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles.... [T]ie yourself up with a woman, and like a chained convict you lose all freedom!” Cf. also Christopher Orlet, “Bachelorhood And Its Discontents,” in New English Review, July 2008 (http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/22098/ sec_id/22098): “Some years ago a noted Japanese researcher analyzed the biographical data of some 280 famous mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists

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and discovered that all peaked professionally in their twenties, at which point their careers spiraled downward. Married scientists suffered the worst decline in productivity. However, those who never married remained highly productive well into their fifties. ‘Scientists tend to ‘desist’ from scientific research upon marriage,’ the researcher told an interviewer.... One theory suggests married men lack an evolutionary reason to continue working hard (i.e., to attract females). Though it [is] likely they similarly lack the prerequisite time and solitude.” may have delayed publishing. BBC Staff, “Darwin ‘was committed to publish,’” in BBC News, March 28, 2007 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6500887.stm). meeting in the afterlife. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 269-71. agnostic. Charles Darwin with Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 94. “terrible loss of time.” Ibid., p. 233. August 11 “Get a job.” Cf. Bruce Hornsby and the Range, “The Way It Is,” The Way It Is (RCA, 1986). freedom of expression.” In The Grateful Dead: The End of the Road—The Final Tour ’95 (Venice, CA: Slow Loris Films, 2005 [2000]), 11:00 – 12:11 (http://www.endoftheroad.com). kept as forced labor. David Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), p. 152, 222, 224.

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because of the way I look.” In Tie-Dyed: Rock ‘n Roll’s Most Deadicated Fans (1995), 58:58 – 59:30. August 14 Hispanic culture. Cf. Murray Weiss, “Booby-Prize Bid: Foxwoods Casino Sued Over ‘Busty’ Barbs,” in New York Post, July 22, 2008 (http://www.nypost.com/seven/07222008/news/regionalnew s/booby_prize_bid_120933.htm). distinctiveness of all cultures. Cf. Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. 37: “Former Quebec premier René Levesque was frankly dismissive of the multicultural game. ‘Multiculturalism, really, is folklore,’ he once said. ‘It is a ‘red herring.’ The notion was devised to obscure ‘the Quebec business,’ to give an impression that we are all ethnics and do not have to worry about special status for Quebec.” resentment that ‘outsiders’ had been.” Muzafer Sherif, O. J. Harvey, et. al., Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma, 1961 [1954]) (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Sherif), p. 78. Fourth of July.” David Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), p. 173. out-group were crystallized. Sherif, op. cit., p. 208. two sides of the Cold War.” Berreby, op. cit., p. 200, 209. goodwill contact. Sherif, op. cit., p. 209: “[C]ontact situations did not prove effective in reducing friction. Instead contact situations not conducive to interdependence were used by our groups for overt acts of hostility and further exchanges of unflattering invectives.”

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achieve a common goal. Sherif actually observed different endings in two similar experiments, performed earlier: “In the first, the boys ganged up on a common enemy and in the second they ganged up on the experimenters themselves.” Those earlier results corresponded to the two groups uniting against a common enemy—i.e., against another group of boys who just happened to be in the area—and, in the second case, to them turning on the group (of experimenters) in power over them. See PsyBlog, “War, Peace and the Role of Power in Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment” (http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/war-peaceand-role-of-power-in-sherifs.php). into a larger room.” Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1995 [1983]), p. 197. shared work comes to the fore.” Berreby, op. cit., p. 191. See also Elliot Aronson, Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001). on the sports field. Cf. Steve Sailer, “How to Instill a Love of America,” on VDare.com, 2000 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/patriotism.htm): “You can get people to bond across racial and class lines, but seldom by preaching at them. For example, UC Berkeley students are constantly exhorted about equality and interracial solidarity. But the only place on campus where black and white students can be seen making sacrifices for each other is on the football field. Black and white college football players are far more likely to eat lunch together or listen to each other’s music than are their more articulate and politically correct fellow students simply because they have to play together as a team in order to win.” you are all traded.” Quoted in Steve Sailer, “How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America,” in National Review, April

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8, 1996 (http://www.isteve.com/JackieRobinson.htm). Italics added. to bind us.” Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. 82, 197-8. “Muslim-Canadian.” Christie Blatchford, “We’re so polite that we can’t see a danger hiding in plain sight,” in Globe and Mail, June 21, 2008 (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.200806 21.BLATCHFORD21/TPStory/?query=Christie). cultural dis-integration. Cf. Steve Sailer, “Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also…Oh, Wait, Make That ‘Weakness,’” on VDare.com, July 1, 2007 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/070701_diversity.htm). black Muslim “youths.” See Donald A. Collins, “Camp Of The Saints Comes True In France. Let’s Stop It Happening Here,” on VDare.com, November 8, 2005 (http://www.vdare.com/collins/051108_camp.htm). See also Steve Sailer, “The Sailer [Immigrant Buyout] Scheme: Well— Why Not?” on VDare.com, November 27, 2005 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/051127_buyout.htm). in the fall of 2005. Marina Jiménez, “How Canadian are you?” in Globe and Mail, January 12, 2007 (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.200 70112.wximmigrant12/BNStory/National/). recent public policy in Canada.” Robert Fulford, in Globe and Mail, February 19, 1997. Quoted in Martin Loney, The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), p. 152. “melting pot.” Yet, see Jeffrey G. Reitz and Raymond Breton, The Illusion of Difference: Realities of Ethnicity in Canada and the United States (Toronto: C.D. Howe Institute, 1994), p. 8:

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“[C]ontrary to the comfortable assumptions of many Canadians, Americans are, in fact, more likely to favor cultural retention—at least in intent. When examining actual cultural retention, however, as indicated both by subjective measures of ethnic identification and by behavioral measures such as ethnic intermarriages, Reitz and Breton find no systematic differences: assimilation rates and economic opportunities for minorities in the two countries are similar.... [I]n those U.S. cities with the greatest ethnic diversity and the largest experience of recent immigration, many observers of demographic trends have questioned the continued relevance of the metaphor of the melting pot, a development that has paralleled the rise of the multiculturalism ideology in Canada.” taking easy refuge. George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 33: “[I]mmigrants who live in an area where they can find many compatriots who share their culture and language are much less likely to learn English.” aren’t learning English in school. Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program, and How to Fix It (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002), p. 138-9. ups their voter base. Ibid., p. 24, 79. union-backing NDP. Ibid., p. 111: “The NDP wants higher immigration levels and less selectivity even though that policy, if implemented, would further depress wages, weaken labor unions, and undermine social programs.” poor workers to rich employers. Ibid., p. 109-10. See also Borjas, op. cit., p. 90-2, 184-5. See also Martin Collacott, “Time to debunk immigration myths: Greater thought should be given to how many people Canada can absorb,” in National Post, January 15, 2000

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(http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~gborjas/HeavensDoor/Nation al_Post.htm): “Exhaustive studies in the three major receiving countries, the U.S., Canada and Australia, have found that immigration does contribute to the aggregate growth of the economy but that, apart from the transfer of billions of dollars from workers to employers ... it has very little impact on the incomes of current residents.” contract-out to cheap labor. Stoffman, op. cit., p. 114. less than 25% of new immigrants. Ibid., p. 30. “family reunification.” Ibid., p. 27-8, 88. killing America. Steve Sailer, “What Feminist Celebrity Eugenics Teaches Us about Immigration Policy,” on VDare.com, 2000 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/feminist_eugenics.htm): “The 1965 Immigration Act ‘family reunification’ policy gives priority not to immigrants who would most benefit the American public as a whole, but to recent immigrants’ siblings, parents, and adult children. Plus those relatives’ spouses and kids. This is flooding the country with mediocrities admitted only because they are previous immigrants’ brothers-in-law.... Of the 660,000 foreigners the U.S. accepted as permanent residents in 1998 ... only about 14,000 came in exclusively because they were skilled or educated.” 1% of the country’s population. James Bissett, “Immigration must be an election issue” (Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, 2008) (http://policystudies.ca/index.php?option=com_content&tas k=view&id=191&Itemid=27). whopping 23% over 25 years. “Annual Immigration by Category, Citizenship and Immigration Canada” (Ottawa, ON: Citizenship and Immigration Canada) (http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/menufact.asp).

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43% of new immigrants. Daniel Stoffman, “When immigration goes awry,” in Toronto Star, July 14, 2006 (http://www.thestar.com/Canada2020/article/106702). three-quarters of T.O.’s population growth. Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program, and How to Fix It (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002), p. 186. housing prices sharply up, and wages down. Ibid., p. 184: “Because almost half the immigrants come to Toronto, wage compression is felt most keenly in that city. Rapid population growth, fuelled by immigration, has driven up the price of housing.” See also George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 96: “[T]here is no immigration surplus if the native wage is not reduced by immigration. In other words, if some workers are not harmed by immigration, many of the benefits that are typically attributed to immigration—higher profits for firms, lower prices for consumers—cease to exist.” proportion of the total population. Stoffman, op. cit., p. 106. jobs they create. Ibid., p. 107-8. work menial jobs for less. Ibid., p. 117. See also Borjas, op. cit., p. 79: “[I]mmigrants take jobs that natives do not want at the going wage.... This does not say, however, that natives would refuse to work in those jobs if the immigrants had never arrived and employers were forced to raise wages to fill the positions.” slaughterhouse and construction jobs. See James Fulford, “USA Today—Gone Tomorrow?” on VDare.com, July 25, 2001 (http://www.vdare.com/fulford/usa_today.htm): “Meatpacking plants employing native-born workers have closed all over the country, and new ones opened employing immigrant labor.” See also Joe Guzzardi, “View From Lodi, CA: Rolling Stone vs. American Workers,” on

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VDare.com, March 17, 2002 (http://vdare.com/guzzardi/rolling_stones.htm): “By working for $11 an hour, a third of the going union rate, and through their willingness to endure conditions no American would tolerate, [Hispanic construction crews] have shut American construction workers out of jobs....” tickets in parking garages. Stoffman, op. cit., p. 114-5. medium-skill jobs. Loc. cit. become more productive. Cf. Fulford, op. cit.: “China’s average standard of living is much lower than the U.S.’s in part because they have all this cheap labor, and thus don’t feel the pressure to mechanize industry.” See also Sam Francis, “Economic Man Turning Against Mass Immigration,” April 1, 2004 (http://vdare.com/francis/economic_logic.htm): “[T]he cheap labor that mass immigration provides has helped keep American farm technology in the Dark Ages and caused American agriculture to wither in the face of global competition....” wealthiest city in the world. Stoffman, op. cit., p. 184. See also Martin Collacott, “Time to debunk immigration myths: Greater thought should be given to how many people Canada can absorb,” in National Post, January 15, 2000 (http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~gborjas/HeavensDoor/Nation al_Post.htm). “black-focused alternative school.” Kristin Rushowy, “More black-focused schools?” in Toronto Star, January 31, 2008 (http://www.thestar.com/News/article/299106). Cf. Michelle Malkin, “Liberal Bigotry And The New School Segregation,” on VDare.com, July 29, 2003 (http://www.vdare.com/malkin/libs.htm). How’s that for gratitude. Cf. Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. 113-4: When approximately 250 sons of Croatian immigrants left Canada to fight in defense of

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Croatia, “I wondered which country they would choose if one day obliged to: the land of their parents, for which they had chosen to fight, or the land of their birth, from which they had chosen to depart?” See also Thomas Leung, quoted in Stoffman, op. cit., p. 146: “I am a Canadian citizen today but I am also a Chinese. If there is a war, no matter what, I would go back to China and fight for China.” founded this country. Cf. Richard Gwyn, quoted in Stoffman, op. cit., p. 127: “It was English-Canadians who explored the greater part of the country, cleared it, and settled it. It was they who contributed the overwhelming majority of men who died fighting in wars for democracy and freedom. It was they who created almost all of the country’s political and legal infrastructure.” August 17 come up to your knees.” Monty Python, “I Like Chinese,” Monty Python Sings (Virgin Records, 1989). persecution in the United States. Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program, and How to Fix It (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002), p. 160. approval rate of 60 to 90%. Ibid., p. 85-6, 157. a new passport. Cf. Kevin Michael Grace, “Breakthrough In Canada!” on VDare.com, November 26, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/misc/grace_breakthrough.htm): “[D]estroying or falsifying your documents is the best and fastest way to become a new Canadian.” Osama bin Laden. Stoffman, op. cit., p. 173.

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August 20 Phil Lesh. Grateful Dead bassist, renowned for the low frequency range of his instrument. “Sundown.” Robert Everett-Green, “Gordon Lightfoot: The way he felt,” in Globe and Mail, June 26, 1999 (http://www.corfid.com/gl/press/press04.htm). injected John Belushi. Associated Press, “Cathy Smith Ends Prison Term for Belushi Death,” in Daily News of Los Angeles, March 17, 1988. See also Jean Sonmor, “Canada’s most famous folk singer still an intense artist,” in Toronto Sun, November 10, 1996 (http://www.corfid.com/gl/press/press14.htm). August 27 “Find me somebody to love.” Queen, “Somebody To Love,” Greatest Hits (Hollywood Records, 1992). seven years of immersion. Cf. George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 33: “In 1990, for example, 37 percent of the immigrants who had been living in the United States for at least ten years did not speak English ‘very well.’” “best and the brightest.” Norman Matloff, “Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage: Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration,” 2002 (1998) (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc9.6): “Quite contrary to industry’s claim that the H-1Bs are ‘the best and the brightest,’ in an article in the September 1999 issue of the American Society for Engineering Education’s magazine Prism, an engineering professor in China warns his nation that the engineers being produced by Chinese

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universities are not good enough for China to compete in the global high-tech market. The U.S. industry also claims that the imported professionals are better trained than the Americans. Yet again to the contrary, Professor Chen Lixun complains in the article about China’s ‘obsolete teaching content and materials.’ Professor Chen says the educational system in China produces students who cannot think independently or creatively, and cannot solve practical problems. He writes that the system ‘results in the phenomenon of high scores and low ability.’” See also Steve Sailer, “Brookings Does Diversity, Sort Of,” on VDare.com, January 23, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/brookings.htm): “Our immigration system isn’t set up to bring in the best and brightest even from nerd-fertile regions like southern India. In 1998, only 11.7% of legal immigrants were admitted for ‘employment-based’ reasons. [And that includes the workers’ spouses and children!] In contrast, 72.0% got in because they were related to somebody, typically a recent immigrant.” hire more of the latter. Cf. Matloff, op. cit. (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#faq23): “A manager who is, say, from India and came to the U.S. as a student will often hire others in his own image.... [I]mmigrant entrepreneurs tend to hire from their own immigrant ethnic groups; those jobs are largely not open to natives.... It is very common to see a company department, or even an entire firm, in which the technical staff is all Indian or all Chinese.” lack the gene to understand. Contrast Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, quoted in Stephen R. Covey, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (New York: Free Press, 2005 [2004]), p. 14: “The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1000X but by 10,000X.” Contrast also Joel Spolsky, “Hitting the High Notes,” July 25, 2005 (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html): “The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers

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instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.... Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.... The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time.” August 28 torture them before death.” Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 151. woolly mammoths, horses, and camels. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 339: “When Indian hunters arrived, they found the Americas teeming with big mammals that are now extinct: elephantlike mammoths and mastodonts [sic], ground sloths weighing up to three tons, armadillolike glyptodonts weighing up to one ton, bearsized beavers, and sabertooth cats, plus American lions, cheetahs, camels, horses, and many others.” or just machismo. Ibid., p. 340, 347: “According to the interpretation that seems most plausible to me, the outcome was a [hunting] “blitzkrieg” in which the beasts were quickly exterminated—possibly within a mere ten years at any given site.... Clovis mammoth kills prove to have been only partly butchered, suggesting very wasteful and selective utilization of meat by people living amidst an abundance of game. Some hunting probably wasn’t for meat at all but for ivory, hides, or just machismo.... We are all too familiar with the blitzkriegs by which modern European hunters nearly exterminated bison, whales, seals, and many other large animals. Recent archaeological discoveries on many oceanic islands have shown that such blitzkriegs were an outcome whenever hunters reached a land with animals naïve to humans.”

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become your wasted life.” Roger Sandall, “In Bluebeard’s Castles: Life and death on the reservation,” 2006 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_In-Bluebeard'sCastles.php). See also Roger Sandall, “What Native Peoples Deserve,” 2005 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_WhatNative-Peoples-Deserve.php). September 5 one low skill immigrant family.” Mark Krikorian, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 179-80. See also Steve Sailer, “Americans First: What’s best for the citizens we already have?” in The American Conservative, February 13, 2006 (http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_02_13/article.html). See also Paul Nachman, “A Patriotic Immigration Reformer’s Thoughts On The New Case Against Immigration,” on VDare.com, July 29, 2008 (http://www.vdare.com/nachman/080729_immigration.htm). proles. George Orwell’s name for the uneducated, lowerclass laborers (proletariat), in Nineteen Eighty-Four. average white IQ to complete. La Griffe du Lion, “Educating a Black Elite,” 2000 (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm): “Degrees are being granted to students possessing IQs from 98 to 103, as upper bounds.” free movement throughout the world. Cf. Norman Matloff “Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage: Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration,” 2002 (1998) (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc9.6.1): “[I]n the case of foreign nationals of extraordinary talent, our immigration law should indeed facilitate the ability of employers to hire such workers.”

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fifty to eighty percent of the work. This is basically the “80/20 rule,” which has been verified across a wide range of disciplines, including software development. The corollary is that there’s around a 20:1 ratio in productivity between the best and the worst workers, and that the bottom 20% do only around 4% of the total work in the field—they are the incompetents who could and should be fired, and you wouldn’t even notice they were gone. See Steve McConnell, Code Complete (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 2004), p. 681: “Talent and effort among individual programmers vary tremendously, as they do in all fields. One study found that in a variety of professions—writing, football, invention, police work and aircraft piloting—the top 20 percent of the people produced about 50 percent of the output.... The results of the study are based on an analysis of productivity data, such as touchdowns, patents, solved cases, and so on. Since some people make no tangible contribution whatsoever and weren’t considered in the study (quarterbacks who make no touchdowns, inventors who own no patents, detectives who don’t close cases, and so on), the data probably understates the actual variation in productivity.” See also Matloff, op. cit. (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc10.1): “Studies show a dramatic 10-to-1 variation in programmer productivity, by virtually any criterion—time to finish a product, number of errors, and so on. (See for example, in Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, Dorset House Publishing Co., 1987, p. 44ff.) In other words, the best programmers work 10 times faster, produce 10 times fewer errors, and so on, than the worst ones.... Some studies have shown an even more dramatic range. Time to complete the writing of a program varied in a range of 20-to-1 in one recent study. (P. Lutz, ‘Comparing Java vs. C/C++ Efficiency Differences to Interpersonal Differences,’ Communications of the ACM, 42 (10), 1999, cited in Building a Workforce for the Information Economy, National Research Council, 2000.).... In other words, raw analytical talent, not paper credentials, is what really counts.”

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sweet white raisins. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007), p. 137: “Luxenburg[’s] most celebrated example concerns the rewards of a ‘martyr’ in paradise: when retranslated and redacted the heavenly offering consists of sweet white raisins rather than virgins.” “white wedding” suits. Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Washington, DC: Regency Publishing, Inc., 2005), p. 106: “September 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta packed a ‘paradise wedding suit’ into his luggage on that fateful day, although he was unable to change into it because the airline required him to check all but one carry-on item. A letter found in Atta’s bags spoke of ‘marriage’ with the ‘women of paradise ... dressed in their most beautiful clothing.’” September 9 in Kandahar. Tim Hortons, “Tim Hortons brings a taste of home to troops in Kandahar,” 2006 (http://www.timhortons.com/en/about/news_archive_2006h. html). September 12 withering horror of this. Cf. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (New York: Signet, 1996 [1960]), p. 54. September 18 Heineken-shaped.” Cf. Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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September 25 Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Harmony Books, 1979), p. 28: “[A]ny man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.” between intelligence and income. La Griffe du Lion, “2048,” Volume 2, Number 4, April 2000 (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/2048.htm): “IQ is the biggest single correlate of income.” “Jefferson effect.” Cf. La Griffe du Lion, “The Effect of Urban Flight on IQ Distribution,” 2002 (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/city.htm): “[E]scape from the inner city is a highly selective enterprise. It is an option open mostly to the right half of the bell curve [i.e., to people with above-average IQs]. Consequently, urban flight creates a cognitive discontinuity where the city meets the suburbs. Left behind in the city is a human residue wanting in human capital. Unemployment, welfare dependency, drug addiction, coarseness and incivility are its hall-marks, low IQ its nub.” (Italics added.) Cf. also Barack Obama, quoted in Hank De Zutter, “What Makes Obama Run?” in Chicago Reader, December 8, 1995 (http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/archive/b arackobama/): “[G]et a job, get rich, and get out. Instead of investing in our neighborhoods, that’s what has always happened.” See also Bruce G. Charlton, “Social class differences in IQ: implications for the government’s ‘fair access’ political agenda,” in Times Higher Education, May 23, 2008 (http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2008/05/social-classiq-differences-and.html): “[H]igher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social [i.e., socioeconomic] classes.... In general, the more precise the

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definition of social class, the larger will be the measured social class differences in IQ and other biological variables.” broaden “intelligence.” See Dan Schneider, “The Dan Schneider Interview 4: Steven Pinker,” 2007 (http://www.cosmoetica.com/DSI4.htm). See also Linda S. Gottfredson, “The General Intelligence Factor,” in Scientific American Presents, Winter 1998 (http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligenc e/cache/1198gottfred.html). Friday-afternoon pillorying. Cf. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007), p. 219: “In an era where there was little enough by way of public entertainment, a good public burning or disembowelment or breaking on the wheel was often as much recreation as the saintly dared to allow.” lowering it in the country. Steve Sailer, “Flynn Flips: IQ Tests Do Matter,” on VDare.com, September 3, 2007 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/070903_flynn.htm): “[T]he urban-rural IQ gap has narrowed from six points to merely two in recent decades as the countryside has come to enjoy most of the stimulations of the city.” Of course, a narrowing of that gap could equally come from a downturn in, or increased mechanization of, the rural economy, driving the displaced, low-IQ manual laborers into the city some years after their smarter cousins had made the same trip. Cf. Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 47: “In the years between 1945 and 1960, the mechanization of Southern agriculture marginalized unskilled farm labor. Sometimes lured by the promise of a better future and sometimes driven off the land, a vast number of at time cruelly displaced black and white sharecroppers migrated to the Northern cities.” New immigrants also flock disproportionately to our cities, so if those same immigrants have low IQs, that too will narrow the gap between the city and the country averages.

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“the idiocy of rural life.” Loc. cit.: “Thomas suffers from what Marx would later call, unkindly, ‘the idiocy of rural life.’” Steven Pinker on down. See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003 [2002]). See also Steve Sailer, “Pinker’s Progress,” on VDare.com, November 24, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pinker_progress.htm). genetic component to intelligence. Cf. David Brooks, quoted by Alex B., “The Progression of IQ—a response to David Brooks,” September 14, 2007 (http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/09/progression-of-iq.php): “A meta-analysis by Bernie Devlin of the University of Pittsburgh found that genes account for about 48 percent of the differences in IQ scores.” IQs of identical twins raised apart. See Steve Sailer, “Pioneer Fundophobia,” on VDare.com, December 12, 2001 (http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/pioneer.htm): “The Minnesota Twins study ... found that, on quantitative tests of IQ and personality, identical twins reared apart were systematically much more similar than fraternal twins raised apart. Remarkably, separated identical twins were more similar than fraternal twins raised in the same home.” See also Steve Sailer, “Why Do We Keep Writing About Intelligence? An IQ FAQ,” on VDare.com, December 3, 2007 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071203_iq.htm). October 27 “Sea-Fever.” John Masefield, “Sea-Fever” (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sea-fever/). October 28 believe in God. Steven Pinker, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion”

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(http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004_10_29_rel igion.htm). Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 291. viewed as being white. David Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), p. 90: “[C]ategories can be redefined, as ‘white person’ has been in the United States to include the once-rejected children of Irish and Italian immigrants....” teams to racially integrate. See Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (New York: Routledge, 2002). Tommy Harper. Ibid., p. 125, 147-53, 170-1. November 19 gratitude. Cf. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (New York: Signet, 1996 [1960]), p. 120. November 29 broke something in me. Cf. Griffin, Black Like Me, p. 130: “It was a little thing, but piled on all the other little things it broke something in me. Suddenly I had had enough. Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation—not of myself but of all men who were black like me.” December 12 thought of any more hairism. Cf. Griffin, Black Like Me, p. 120: “I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try

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passing back into white society. I went out only at night for food. My heart sickened at the thought of any more hate.” N-people. Cf. The Mayor of Mitchieville, “Guy Earle, activist,” July 19, 2008 (http://mitchieville.blogspot.com/2008/07/guyearle-activist.html). way to control lice. Steven Dutch, “Military Technology— Selected Themes,” 2001 (1998) (http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/WestTech/xmilitar.htm). any way they liked. Loc. cit. opposition to the war.” Loc. cit. wiped from this world. Cf. Griffin, op. cit., p. 15: “All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence.... I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin’s past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness.” December 17 some really good weed.” Cf. Griffin, Black Like Me, p. 121: “I ordered food and was served, and it was a miracle. I went to the rest room and was not molested. No one paid me the slightest attention. No one said, ‘What’re you doing in here, nigger?’” December 19 part of it, anyway. Cf. Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. 180: “The word ‘racism’ is a discomforting one: it is so easily vulnerable to manipulation.... During the heat of altercation, we seize, as terms of abuse, on whatever is most obvious about the other person.”

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right hands mutilated. Griffin, Black Like Me, p. 138. fish needs a bicycle.” Cf. Irina Dunn: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” kinship-based African culture. Cf. Roger Sandall, “Dereliction Express: Care and maintenance in Africa and beyond,” August 2006 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_DerelictionExpress.php). for the same library doors: Cf. Griffin, op. cit., p. 163. one of those stereotypes. See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003 [2002]), p. 204: “With some important exceptions, stereotypes are in fact not inaccurate when assessed against objective benchmarks such as census figures or the reports of the stereotyped people themselves. People who believe that African Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites, that Jews have higher average income than WASPs, that business students are more conservative than students in the arts, that women are more likely than men to want to lose weight, and that men are more likely than women to swat a fly with their bare hands, are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct. People’s stereotypes are generally consistent with the statistics, and in many cases their bias is to underestimate the real differences between sexes or ethnic groups.... Stereotypes can be downright inaccurate when a person has few or no firsthand encounters with the stereotyped group, or belongs to a group that is overtly hostile to the one being judged.” See also Steven Dutch, “Dutch’s Laws of Just About Everything,” 2003 (2001) (http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/dutchrules.htm): “All stereotypes have at least some basis in fact.... All stereotypes have a basis in fact? Maybe not, but if I said ‘almost all’ or ‘most,’ people would have wiggle room to

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rationalize that their particular problem stereotype was entirely due to somebody else’s prejudice.” December 31 when they’re not polite. Talking Heads, “Psycho Killer,” Talking Heads: 77 (Sire Records, 1977). Wilber’s fatally flawed. See Geoffrey D. Falk, “Norman Einstein”: The Dis-Integration of Ken Wilber (http://www.normaneinsteinbook.com). January 11, 2008 walking these streets. Cf. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (New York: Signet, 1996 [1960]), p. 123: “Their looks said: ‘You white bastard, you ofay sonofabitch, what are you doing walking these streets?’ just as the whites’ looks had said a few days before: ‘You black bastard, you nigger sonofabitch, what are you doing walking these streets?’” competent whites. Cf. La Griffe du Lion, “Smart Fraction Theory II: Why Asians Lag,” Volume 6, Number 2, May 2004 (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm): “[B]lack Africa is utterly hopeless with less than two percent qualifying for smart-fraction jobs [i.e., bookkeepers, credit clerks, lab techs, salesmen, secretaries, and higher-IQ work]. The demise of colonialism sealed its economic doom.” (Italics added.) experience in commercial farming.” Basildon Peta, “Harare may force banks to fund black farmers,” in IOL, January 10, 2006 (http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id =vn20060110061257518C122253). cause a famine. Cf. Steve Sailer, “Darfur v. Zimbabwe: Is U.S. Foreign Policy Just An Elite Plaything?” on VDare.com, May 18, 2008 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080518_darfur.htm).

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Cf. also Sam Francis, “Why Not Admit Some Real Refugees?” on VDare.com, July 1, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/francis/zimbabwe_famine.htm). See also Sam Francis, “Neoconservative Applauds White Despoliation In South Africa,” on VDare.com, April 8, 2004 (http://www.vdare.com/francis/white_genocide.htm). February 3 be more than this.” Tom Brady, interviewed by Steve Kroft, 60 Minutes, December 23, 2007. March 19 essay by Julian Baggini. Julian Baggini, “Spongers,” in New Humanist, Volume 123, Issue 2, March/April 2008 (http://newhumanist.org.uk/1738). bringing in workfare. See Maeve Quaid, Workfare: Why Good Social Policy Ideas Go Bad (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 172: “The history of workfare in Ontario is the story of trade unions and special interest groups that were resolved to never permit the proposed ‘community service’ aspect of workfare to be implemented, regardless of how well or badly workfare was designed (and it could have been better designed). Thanks to government bureaucrats who never bought into the idea of workfare in the first place, the ‘work placement’ (as opposed to job search or training) dimension of workfare never really materialized. The socialworker culture in Ontario, supported heavily by activists and lobby groups, favor classroom training over work experience.” not pulling their weight.” See Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 160, 163: “A tit-for-tat behavioral strategy [could] evolve, providing that a mechanism to detect and punish freeloaders evolves in

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parallel.... Freeloaders seize the benefits of social living without contributing to the costs. They are immensely threatening to a social group because they diminish the benefits of sociality for others and, if their behavior goes unpunished, they may bring about the society’s dissolution.” March 31 “booby prize.” Cf. Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 171: “Black novelist Toni Morrison was ultimately convinced she had won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize on merit. Yet Morrison admitted that lobbying for the Pulitzer on her behalf by forty-eight prominent black writers was a source of stress. ‘It was too upsetting to have my work considered as an affirmative action award.’” “vaginal affirmative action.” Cf. John Tierney, “A New Frontier for Title IX: Science,” in New York Times, July 15, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15tier.html?_r =1&8dpc=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin): “The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be ‘Title Nined’ say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.” Cf. also Nicholas Stix, “Is Science Sexist?” July 22, 2008 (http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2008/07/isscience-sexist.html). Cf. also Wendy McElroy, “Dumbing Down Education,” January 22, 2000 (http://www.wendymcelroy.com/partisan/012200.htm). being smarter and working harder. Cf. Scott Adams, “Hard Work” (http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/hard_work/).

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April 12 Eddie Van Halen. Interviewed by Billy Corgan, “Corgan and Van Halen: Billy Interviews Eddie,” in Guitar World, April 1996 (http://web.archive.org/web/20061109122105/www.guitarw orld.com/allaccess/interviews/1996-04-corganvh.html). April 29 – May 4 nothing higher than itself.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Valley of Fear,” 1915: “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.” mounts of the devils.” Quoted by Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (New York: Prometheus, 1995), p. 342-3. Cf. Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008 [2006]), p. 121: “‘[Homosexuality is] against Islam,’ said another [French Muslim]. ‘Muslim fags don’t exist.’” Au contraire! 85-IQ fairies. See J. Philippe Rushton, “Indians Aren’t That Intelligent (On Average),” on VDare.com, September 26, 2007 (http://www.vdare.com/rushton/070926_indians.htm): “In this article, I summarize the evidence for an average IQ of 85 in the group designated South Asian/North African. The people of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, the Gulf States, the Near East, Turkey and North Africa have an IQ just below the world average of 90.” (Italics added.) “Bismillah.” BBC Staff, “Queen album brings rock to Iran,” on BBC News, August 24, 2004 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3593532.stm). flush-worthy. Cf. Ayesha Ahmed, “Poisoning the Infidels with Feces in UK and US,” on Islam Watch, February 14, 2008 (http://www.islam-watch.org/ayeshaahmed/PoisoningInfidels-with-Feces.htm).

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turn to manic, homicidal violence. Cf. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007), p. 227: “Having met some of the products of this [Islamic] ‘education’ system, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, I can only reiterate that their problem is not so much that they desire virgins as that they are virgins: their emotional and psychic growth irremediably stunted in the name of god....” virgins in the Garden of Eden.” Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Washington, DC: Regency Publishing, Inc., 2005), p. 104. shocked us personally.” Robert Hunter, A Box of Rain: Lyrics: 1965–1993 (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 20. bread and eat it.” Faisal, quoted in Gane S. Gerber, “AntiSemitism and the Muslim World.” In David Berger, ed., History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1986), p. 88. Tamal Indian medicine man. Rock Scully and David Dalton, Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), p. 55. outpost of the West.” Steve Sailer, “Latin American Immigration Unlikely to Spark a New Renaissance,” on VDare.com, 2004 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/latin_american.htm). have completed high school. Cf. George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 59: “Less than 1 percent of Mexico’s adult male population has completed a secondary [i.e., high-school] education.” homophobic rednecks. Cf. Joe Guzzardi, “Will Hispanic Honor Killings, Homophobia Be Our New ‘Community Standard’?” on VDare.com, September 24, 2005

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(http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/050924_hispanic.htm): “[F]or a Hispanic to actually have homosexual sex with a gay man, even when blatantly deceived, can only be redeemed by murder.... According to a March 2002 U.S. Department of State report, violence against homosexuals remains common in Mexico.” they’re “macho” nonetheless. See Athena Kerry, “Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also…Ethnic Come-ons,” on VDare.com, February 8, 2006 (http://www.vdare.com/misc/060208_kerry.htm): “Mexican men are widely despised among young (white) women for whistling out car windows, yelling crude and offensive remarks, or simply leering obnoxiously at anything that walks past with a hint of estrogen.” See also Brenda Walker, “Top Ten Reasons Why the US Should Not Marry Mexico,” on VDare.com, January 17, 2007 (http://www.vdare.com/walker/070117_top_ten.htm): “In some Mexican states, men may freely kidnap women for sex, a custom known as ‘rapto,’ which is regarded as a harmless amusement by men despite the unsuccessful attempts of women’s groups to criminalize it.” See also Brenda Walker, “Mothers Against Drunk Driving: Successful Reformers—Or Hypocrites from Hell?” on VDare.com, June 19, 2008 (http://www.vdare.com/walker/080619_madd.htm). legislated back to work. Rob Ferguson, Paola Loriggio and Francine Kopun, “TTC moving again,” in Toronto Star, April 27, 2008 (http://www.thestar.com/GTA/Transportation/article/418964) . for his nostalgic tale.” Doobie Brothers, “What a Fool Believes,” Minute By Minute (Warner Bros/WEA, 1978). handled the air traffic controllers. Stacy Hirsch, “Reagan presidency pivotal for unions,” in The Baltimore Sun, June 8, 2004. (http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-

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bz.unions08jun08,0,1761456.story?coll=bal-businessheadlines). “Request Stop” program. Toronto Transit Commission, “Your Safety Partner” (http://www.toronto.ca/ttc/safety.htm). homoerotic tizzy. Cf. Bruce Bawer, “The Times, It Ain’t aChangin’,” in Pajamas Media, June 25, 2008 (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-times-itain%E2%80%99t-a-changin%E2%80%99/): “[New York Times Magazine contributing writer Noah] Feldman insisted that ‘a hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures— even intolerant ones’.... [T]ell this to gay people in Amsterdam, where ten years ago they felt safer than anyplace else on earth and where Muslim youths now beat them up in broad daylight in the middle of town.” hideously unattractive hags. See Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1998), p. 29: “[W]omen have always been able to use their sexuality as a means to upward mobility. Is closing this avenue down (assuming that this were even possible) what women necessarily want? All women? Obviously the answer depends on whether one is on the receiving end of such perks or is left out, an angry ‘third party.’” (Italics added.) totalitarian, brainwashing. Cf. Alan Charles Kors, “Thought Reform 101: The Orwellian implications of today’s college orientation,” March 2000 (http://www.reason.com/news/show/27632.html): “The [PC] people devoted to remolding the inner lives of undergraduates ... share views that place us directly on the path of thought reform.” See also Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999 [1998]). See also Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in

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Women’s Studies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 22, 38, 59, 81: “[Margaret:] I really hate some of the thoughtpolice stuff that’s going on now in universities, and it was going on earlier in Women’s studies than elsewhere.... I think there was silencing of people, there was exclusion, and certainly there was shunning.... [Silvia:] My experience has been that feminism has been just as conformist and stifling of creative thought as the most right-wing religious groups.... Questioning the authority of feminism or the heavyweights within the movement is akin to heresy, and is basically treated as such.... [Patai and Koertge:] Women’s Studies teachers [engage in] standard proselytizing tactics such as providing comfort and support for neophytes, denouncing the enemy, rejecting opinions that contradict or complicate the party line, and engaging in rituals of confession and celebration to keep the faithful pure and committed.” And finally, from p. 191, 196: “‘[M]ortification’ practices such as mutual criticism, surveillance, denunciation of deviants, confession, and so on [as practiced in Women’s Studies] ... serve to strip away much of a person’s previous identity. They transmit the message ... ‘that the self is adequate, whole, and fulfilled only when it lives up to the model offered by the community’.... Women’s Studies programs, in their bunker mentality and tendency to cut themselves off from the rest of the university in the name of feminist commitment, do function in some respects like cults and communes.” See also Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds (Rocklin, CA: Prima Lifestyles, 2001). heterophobic victim cookies. See Patai, Heterophobia. sexist bullies. Cf. Joanna Glass, quoted in Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. 175: “I believe it is important to point out that the rabble-rousers [in the white-male-excluding ‘debates’ on voice appropriation and Writing Thru Race] are not unlike the wife-beaters of the gender they so despise.

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They are bullies. Their behavior should not be condoned by anyone, of any political or sexual persuasion.” have clearly worked so well? Cf. Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993), p. 197: “[W]hen you are done discriminating, it is hard to reassert the principle of nondiscrimination. That’s if you ever are done, of course: no affirmative action program in the world has ever been declared successful and ended as no longer necessary.” belong to the ‘oppressive’ majority.” Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (New York: Encounter Books, 2006). Extract at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest _contributors/article671959.ece . Mary Lefkowitz. See Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 132: “As a veteran equity feminist, Lefkowitz fought long and hard against the old boy network that once discriminated against women scholars. She believes it is being replaced by a new network, an old girl network of feminist preferment. ‘Just like many revolutions,’ she points out, ‘It becomes as bad as what it replaced.’” Steven Pinker. See Steven Pinker and Elizabeth S. Spelke, “Pinker Vs. Spelke: A Debate” (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_ind ex.html). blackness as negative.” Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1995 [1983]), p. 170. magister. James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed: How Galileo’s Telescope Changed The Truth and Other Events in History That Dramatically Altered Our Understanding of the World (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 1995 [1985]), p. 48.

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like we raise girls.” Gloria Steinem, in “Men, Women and the Sex Difference,” ABC News Special, February 1, 1995. isolation of their own home.” Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993 [1992]), p. 259-61. making societal changes.” Steinem, op. cit., p. 260. “few good men.” Ibid., p. 340. totalistic ideology. See Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 183: “Feminism ... bids to be a totalizing scheme resting on a grand theory....” lives as men can.” Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” in Boston Review, October/November 1997 (http://bostonreview.net/BR22.5/okin.html). “potential rapists.” Addressed by Patai and Koertge, op. cit., p. 126-31. “hermeneutics.” Ibid., p. 122. “ovulars.” Ibid., p. 121. Evil Other. Cf. Ibid., p. 36: “[Margaret:] The tendency... to always take an either/or, an us/them, and all-good/all-bad approach, this tendency very much characterized Women’s Studies.... There was a certain process of Othering....” members of the out-group. Muzafer Sherif, O. J. Harvey, et. al., Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma, 1961 [1954]) (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Sherif), p. 208.

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“professional victims.” Cf. Robert Carroll, quoted in Geoffrey D. Falk, “PVs,” January 12, 2008 (http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/January2008.asp#12). Dead and Living White European Men. For a data-filled, statistical evaluation of the contributions of Dead White Men to the rise of civilization, see Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (New York: HarperPerennial, 2003). See also Steve Sailer, “Q&A with Charles Murray on Human Accomplishment,” UPI, October 16, 2003 (http://www.isteve.com/2003_QA_with_Charles_Murray_on_ Human_Accomplishment.htm). See also Steve Sailer, “Culture’s Bell Curve,” in The American Conservative, November 17, 2003 (http://www.amconmag.com/11_17_03/review.html): “Dead white European males dominate his inventories, despite Murray reserving eight of his 21 categories (including Arabic literature, Indian philosophy, and Chinese visual art) for nonWestern arts.... In the sciences, 97 percent of the significant figures and events turned out to be Western.” See also Peter Watson, “Lost in the swamp of modernity,” in New Statesman, October 29, 2001 (http://www.newstatesman.com/200110290021): “In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-Western ideas of note.” inferior (in both morality and skills).” Cf. Patai and Koertge, Professing Feminism, p. 51: “[F]eminists often claim that the morality and value systems of oppressed groups are inherently superior to those of the oppressors, whose long history of exploitative behavior has demonstrated their moral bankruptcy.” number of times during the swim.” Sherif, et. al., op. cit., p. 154. dragging their economy down. See James Bissett, “Immigration must be an election issue” (Ottawa, ON:

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Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, 2008) (http://policystudies.ca/index.php?option=com_content&tas k=view&id=191&Itemid=27): “51% of those immigrants who have landed [in Canada] since the early 1990s are living below the poverty line.” See also Martin Collacott, “Time to debunk immigration myths: Greater thought should be given to how many people Canada can absorb,” in National Post, January 15, 2000 (http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~gborjas/HeavensDoor/Nation al_Post.htm). Contrary to the optimistic analysis of George Borjas in Heaven’s Door (p. 58-60), Canada too has “followed the trend in accepting a greater proportion of unskilled migrants. By 1995, recent immigrants were earning 40% less than other Canadians and we were experiencing many of the problems he has identified in the U.S. While we continue to receive many immigrants with impressive qualifications, the larger numbers and declining skill levels of the lesser qualified have caused an overall decline in immigrants’ ability to contribute to the economy.” Borjas based his calculations on old data, from 1980, well prior to our mid-’80s immigration reforms (i.e., increases), resulting in an unfounded optimism on his part. See also Kevin Michael Grace, “Breakthrough In Canada!” on VDare.com, November 26, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/misc/grace_breakthrough.htm), quoting Daniel Stoffman: “[Borjas] was disappointed when I informed him … that the skilled portion of Canada’s immigration intake was down to 23%. ‘Why did it shrink way down?’ he asked from his Harvard office. ‘Why did the Canadians allow this to occur?’ Because the Canadian program had been taken over by its clientele, I said, who insisted that the family class be expanded.” a mere 95. Steve Sailer, “America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve,” on VDare.com, 2000 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/iq.htm): “According to two separate methodologies employed by Herrnstein and Murray, the average IQ of recent immigrants and their children is somewhere around a mediocre 95.”

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110 IQ. La Griffe du Lion, “Educating a Black Elite,” 2000 (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm): “An IQ of 110 is frequently cited as a minimum requirement for a bona fide bachelor’s degree.... 120 is low for an Ivy Leaguer....” See also Bruce G. Charlton, “Social class differences in IQ: implications for the government’s ‘fair access’ political agenda,” in Times Higher Education, May 23, 2008 (http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2008/05/social-classiq-differences-and.html): “The ‘ex-poly’ university has a threshold minimum IQ of 100 for admissions (i.e. the top half of the age cohort of 18 year olds in the population—given that about half the UK population now attend a higher education institution), the ‘Redbrick’ university has a minimum IQ of 115 (i.e. the top 16 percent of the age cohort); while ‘Oxbridge’ is assumed to have a minimum IQ of about 130 (i.e. the top 2 percent of the age cohort).” love-hate. Cf. Sam Francis, “Mass Immigration Creates Terrorist Haven in Europe,” on VDare.com, 2001 (http://www.vdare.com/francis/terrorist_haven.htm): “In Holland ... Muslim immigrants have invented what reporter Adriana Stuijt calls ‘a new form of terrorism against the civilian population at large.’ ‘“Muslim cultural organizations” have turned the streets of Antwerp and Rotterdam into main battle grounds for Muslim-fundamentalist male criminal youth gangs who deliberately attack, rob and invade ethnoEuropean cultural events and throngs of shoppers in the large shopping districts’.... In Belgium last summer, gangs of Algerian and Moroccan youths attacked Flemish citizens holding an annual fair.” Leftards or something. Cf. Steve Sailer, “What’s Wrong With the Democrats? The identity-politics party doesn’t know how to appeal to middle Americans,” in The American Conservative, July 31, 2006 (http://www.amconmag.com/article/2006/jul/31/00007/): “While Democrats esteem themselves as more socially prestigious than Republicans, their electoral prospects are undermined by the faint whiff of failure that many

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Democratic voters exude, the impression that they resent their country and compatriots because they haven’t quite fulfilled their own potential.” bring to the table. See George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 102: “[T]he historical experience of a century ago probably has little relevance for the contemporary experience. The United States has changed radically, and what was beneficial then need not be beneficial now.” to have a female pastor. “Mankes-Zernike, Anna (1887– 1972),” in Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/M3685.html ). slavery in America. “A Minute Against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting, 1688” (http://www.qhpress.org/texts/oldqwhp/as-1688.htm). See also Joseph Walton, ed., Incidents Illustrating the Doctrines and History of the Society of Friends (Philadelphia, PA: Friends’ Book Store, 1897). See also J. S. Hartzler and Daniel Kauffman, eds., Mennonite Church History (Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Book and Tract Society, 1905). their birth as well.” Roger Sandall, “When I Hear the Word ‘Culture’: From Arnold to Anthropology,” 1980 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Archive_Literature-andPolitics_When-I-Hear-the-Word-Culture.php). Steve Sailer. Steve Sailer, “A Buyout Option For Europe’s Muslims?” on VDare.com, 2005 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/051106_buyout.htm): “A pushpull policy could be very effective in getting Muslims to go away. European countries should combine the push of a crackdown on welfare and crime with the pull of a buy-out offer. Returning to the old country with a sizable nest egg would be alluring to many who haven’t assimilated into the

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European middle class.” See also Steve Sailer, “The One Word Grand Strategy for Westerners and Muslims: ‘Disconnect,’” on VDare.com, August 13, 2006 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/060813_disconnect.htm). Sharia law than British law. Daily Mail Staff, “No tolerance for no-go areas,” in The Daily Mail, January 8, 2008 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-506497/Notolerance-areas.html). flirted with incorporating elements. Michael Nazir-Ali, “Extremism flourished as UK lost Christianity,” in The Telegraph, January 11, 2008 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1574695/Extremis m-flourished-as-UK-lost-Christianity.html): “There is pressure already to relate aspects of the Sharia to civil law in Britain.” See also Laura Trevelyan, “Will Canada introduce Sharia law?” in BBC News, August 26, 2004 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_cor respondent/3599264.stm). to live as infidels.” Brenda Walker, “Time To Dump The Diversity Visa,” on VDare.com, June 1, 2004 (http://www.vdare.com/walker/diversity_visa.htm). customers themselves do it.” Katherine Kersten, “Shariah in Minnesota? Radical Muslim activists go fishing in troubled waters,” in The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2007 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/cc/?id=110009832). from a Muslim employee. Mark Steyn, “Making a pig’s ear of defending democracy,” in The Telegraph, October 4, 2005 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opini on/2005/10/04/do0402.xml). Qatar. Camper, “Disney’s Piglet banned in Middle East!” January 28, 2007 (http://www.qatarliving.com/blog/camper/disneys-pigletbanned-in-middle-east).

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I’m more of an Eeyore.” Steyn, loc. cit. matter could offend Muslims.” Sean Coughlan, “Three Little Pigs ‘too offensive,’” in BBC News, January 23, 2008 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7204635.st m). perceived safety. Cf. Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1998), p. 204-5: “On one of the stalls in the bathroom right outside the classroom in which I was teaching, I read that one out of every two women will be raped in her lifetime. Such statistics did not seem questionable to the young women in my course, who claimed to be willing to give away much in exchange for the security they felt they lacked. Far from appreciating freedom (academic or other), they acted as if they were living in a society in which others’ words and actions were a constant threat. Having no personal experience with societies where speech is regulated, where speech codes are the norm, where personal behavior is highly regimented and there is no freedom of association, these students have no trouble thinking they might like such a society if only it made them feel safe. An atmosphere of panic, bolstered by atrocity tales, is clearly a prerequisite if zealous solutions are to win support. And in my experience, a great deal of the feminist teaching that goes on, particularly in lower-level women’s studies courses, is designed to induce precisely such feelings of panic.” human-rights commissions. See Mark Steyn, “Please send more complaints,” in Maclean’s, April 23, 2008 (http://www.macleans.ca/canada/opinions/article.jsp?cont ent=20080423_31672_31672&page=1). See also Mark Steyn, “But we were getting along so well!” in Maclean’s, June 4, 2008 (http://www.macleans.ca/canada/opinions/article.jsp?cont ent=20080604_84794_84794&page=1). See also Kathy Shaidle, “The Kafkaesque Show Trial of Mark Steyn,” in

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Pajamas Media, June 11, 2008 (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-kafkaesque-show-trialof-mark-steyn/). See also Kathy Shaidle, “First They Came For… Canadian ‘Hate Speech’ Totalitarianism Is Not New,” on VDare.com, May 6, 2008 (http://www.vdare.com/misc/080506_shaidle.htm). See also Kathy Shaidle, “Free Speech vs. Muslim Sensibilities,” in FrontPage Magazine, February 26, 2008 (http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=95F305 57-369D-47BA-AC6E-99C0CB173C43). wouldn’t wear a bikini.” Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, “Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension,” in Daily Telegraph, November 10, 2006 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1568881/Dr-BariGovernment-stoking-Muslim-tension.html). And then commit adultery.” Ibn Warraq, in Norman Geras, “A lively debate about values,” October 11, 2007 (http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/10/a-livelydebate.html). See also Ophelia Benson, “Can we talk?” October 11, 2007 (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id =2070). you were our countrymen.” Samuel Adams, Speech in the State House of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, August 1, 1776. Treasurer Peter Costello says.” SMH Staff, “If you want sharia law, move: Costello,” in The Sydney Morning Herald, February 23, 2006 (http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/If-youwant-sharia-law-moveCostello/2006/02/23/1140670199148.html). recognizing it for tax purposes.” Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Washington, DC: Regency Publishing, Inc., 2005), p. 73. according to The Times.” Evening Standard Staff, “Bishop of Rochester under police protection after receiving ‘death

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threats’ for saying Britain has no-go areas for non-Muslims,” in Evening Standard, February 3, 2008 (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23435402details/Bishop%20of%20Rochester%20under%20police%20pro tection%20after%20receiving%20'death%20threats'%20for%20 criticising%20Islam/article.do). mirrored outside London.” Shiraz Maher, “Muslim Britain is becoming one big no-go area,” in The Sunday Times, January 13, 2008 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article317 6455.ece). situation of ‘voluntary apartheid.’” BBC Staff, “Bishop warns of ‘Islamic areas,’” in BBC News, January 6 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7173599.stm). county courts or High Court.” Abul Taher, “Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts,” in Times Online, September 14, 2008 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4749 183.ece). it belongs to God.” In James Brandon, “A defiant Islam rises among young Britons,” in The Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 2005 (http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0711/p01s04woeu.html?s=hns). world belongs to Allah.” Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008 [2006]), p. 90. USA would be justified.” Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (New York: Encounter Books, 2007 [2006]), p. 82-3. wounding another 700 or so.” Investors.com Staff, “What Muslims Really Think,” in Investors.com (http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?sec id=1501&status=article&id=264727636679817). See also Brenda Walker, “Muslim Fifth Column Polled,” on VDare.com Blog, May 23, 2007

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(http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2007/05/23/muslim-fifthcolumn-polled/). Mark Steyn gives lower numbers, in op. cit., p. 76: “On the first anniversary of the July 7, 2005, Tube bombings, the Times of London commissioned a poll of British Muslims. Among the findings: ... 7 percent agree that suicide attacks on civilians in the United Kingdom can be justified in some circumstances, rising to 16 percent for a military target.” See also Phillips, op. cit., p. 83: “Following the London bombings, a poll found that ... one in ten [British Muslims] supported the attacks on July 7, and 5 percent said that more attacks in the UK would be justified, with 4 percent supporting the use of violence for political ends.” “religion of peace.” Spencer, op. cit, p. 41-2: “Sayyid Qutb, one of the twentieth century’s foremost advocates of violent jihad, taught (without a trace of irony) that Islam is a religion of peace. However, he had a very specific kind of peace in mind: ‘When Islam strives for peace, its objective is not that superficial peace which requires that only that part of the earth where the followers of Islam are residing remain secure. The peace which Islam desires is that the religion (i.e. the law of the society) be purified for God, that the obedience of all people be for God alone, and that some people [i.e., us beer-drinking and pork-eating infidels] should not be lords over others. After the period of the Prophet—peace be on him—only the final stages of the movement of Jihaad [sic] are to be followed; the initial or middle stages are not applicable.’ In other words, Islam is a religion of peace that will come when everyone is Muslim or at least subject to the Islamic state. And to establish that peace, Muslims must wage war.” this was the core of Islam.” Barry Gewen, “Muslim Rebel Sisters: At Odds With Islam and Each Other,” in The New York Times, April 27, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/weekinreview/27gewe n.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin).

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disemboweling a few sheep. Cf. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The famous phrase was coined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, in defending the crimes of Joseph Stalin. See Bruce Bawer, “The Times, It Ain’t a-Changin’,” in Pajamas Media, June 25, 2008 (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-times-itain%E2%80%99t-a-changin%E2%80%99/). end of the [twenty-first] century.” Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Washington, DC: Regency Publishing, Inc., 2005), p. 221-2. Western democracy are right.” Ibid., p. 189. accepted religion on earth.” Ibid., p. 190: “Ahmad has since then claimed that he was misquoted, but the reporter who heard him stands by her story.” scream “Islamophobia.” Cf. Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008 [2006]), p. 85: “‘Islamophobia’ is not phony or even psychological but very literal—if you’re a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified.” years of Islamic persecution. Spencer, op. cit., p. 129-45. See also Roger Sandall, “Religion and Violence,” February 2008 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_Religion-andViolence.php). defend our freedom and civilization.” Abul Kasem, interviewed by Jamie Glazov, “Non-Muslims: Worse than Animals,” in FrontPage Magazine (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID= CBA566EA-A36C-470D-9DD6-88D752FA5A4B). we shall never surrender.” Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons, June 4, 1940.

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they’ll flood you out.” Henry Mietkiewicz and Bob Mackowycz, Dream Tower: The Life and Legacy of Rochdale College (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1988), p. 208. STOP FUCKING UP MY YARD. SFUMY. enjoyin’ the ride.” Grateful Dead, “Hell In A Bucket,” In The Dark (Arista, 1990). Lyrics by Dick Cheney’s old friend, John Perry Barlow. I sincerely mean that. Cf. Ken Wilber, “On the Nature of Shadow Projections in Forums. Follow-Up #2,” June 13, 2006 (http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/50). Epilogue anyone who isn’t a Wari.” Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999 [1997]), p. 51. !Kung San. Loc. cit. homicide rate. Adam Kuper, The Chosen Primate: Human Nature and Cultural Diversity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 142. veins to bleed them.” Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: The “Prion” Controversy and the Public’s Health (New York: Touchstone, 1998 [1997]), p. 78. Quoted in Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004), p. 89. virginity cult. Pinker, op. cit., p. 368: “Derek Freeman and other anthropologists found that Samoan society in fact had widespread adolescent resentment and delinquency, a cult of virginity, frequent rape, reprisals by the rape victim’s family, frigidity, harsh punishment of children, sexual jealousy, and strong religious feeling.”

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prevent them running away.” H. Ling Roth, in Roger Sandall, “Out of Africa: Always the Same Thing,” 2004 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_Out-of-Africa.php). all over the city.” H. Ling Roth, in Sandall, op. cit. and other emotional outlets.’” Roger Sandall, “What Native Peoples Deserve,” 2005 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_What-Native-PeoplesDeserve.php). allotted to distinguished guests.” Alfred Métraux, in Sandall, loc. cit. staircase of a temple.” Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 172. slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated.” Roger Sandall, “10,000 Years of Nostalgia,” 2005 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_10,000-Years-ofNostalgia.php). “nose tombs.” Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005 [1997]), p. 429: “‘Nose tombs’ in Japan still contain the noses cut off of 20,000 Koreans and brought to Japan as trophies of a 16th-century Japanese invasion of that country. Not surprisingly, loathing of the Japanese is widespread in Korea, and contempt for Koreans is widespread in Japan.” smattering of urban sanitation. See Cezar Tigno, “Country Water Action: India Toilet Technology for Human Dignity,” in Asian Development Bank (http://www.adb.org/Water/Actions/IND/ToiletTechnology.asp): “In the late 19th century, India’s British colonizers attempted to build the first modern sewerage system in the country. But after 138 years of colonial rule, only about 232 out of 5,161 towns or cities had partially

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functioning sewers.... About 70 percent of India’s entire population still lacks improved sanitation facilities [i.e., flush toilets].” Things are thankfully changing for the country’s “untouchables,” however: “Sushila can now hold her head high and look at people in the eye. She no longer carries a bucket of human feces on her head.” It’ll do wonders for a girl’s self-esteem; somebody tell Gloria Steinem.... a pickpocket as well. If not a scoundwel, a wobber and a wapist. Cf. also Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. x: “[M]ulticulturalism [is] a cult whose defenders responded to criticism by vilifying the critic.” Pedro Martinez. AP Staff, “Video Shows Pedro Martinez at Cockfight,” Associated Press, February 7, 2008. cockfight. Like the saying goes, “Don’t bring a vagina to a cockfight.” Or a knife to a gunfight, either. Michael Vick. United States of America v. Michael Vick, “Summary of the Facts,” 2007 (http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/vick-summaryof-facts-070824.pdf): “32. In or about April 2007, PEACE, PHILLIPS, VICK, and two others ‘rolled’ or ‘tested’ additional ‘Bad News Kennels’ dogs by putting the dogs through fighting sessions at 1915 Moonlight Road to determine which animals were good fighters. PEACE, PHILLIPS, and VICK agreed to the killing of approximately 6-8 dogs that did not perform well in ‘testing’ sessions at 1915 Moonlight Road and all of those dogs were killed by various methods, including hanging and drowning. VICK agrees and stipulates that these dogs all died as a result of the collective efforts of PEACE, PHILLIPS, and VICK.” black Muslim.” See Paul Sheehan, “Tolerant, multicultural Sydney can face this difficult truth,” in The Sydney Morning Herald, August 29, 2001

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(http://web.archive.org/web/20031013193104/http://old.smh .com.au/news/0108/29/opinion/opinion5.html). white girls in Australia. James Fulford, “Racial Gang-Rape: The Sequel,” on VDare.com, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/fulford/racial_rape.htm). See also Sam Francis, “Racial Gangrape: Another Diversity Disaster,” on VDare.com, 2001 (http://vdare.com/francis/gang_rape.htm). Dine, Inuit, Huron, Chippewa, Papago, Zhu/Twasi, Yanomamö. Bernard Ortiz De Montellano, “Evolution and Multiculturalism,” Annual Meeting of the American Association of Science, February 20, 1994 (http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&fi le=article&sid=89). Cherokee. James Fulford, “How To Write About Immigration, Abortion Etc. (If You’re Differently Brained),” on VDare.com, April 10, 2001 (http://www.vdare.com/fulford/how_to_write.htm). !Kung San call themselves. Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 60: “[A]nthropologists have recently started to refer to the !Kung San by their name for themselves, the Ju|’hoansi, which means ‘the Real People.’ The Real People’s name for both Europeans and non-San Africans is !ohm, a category that includes predators and other inedible beasts.” was annihilation.” Ibid., p. 149, 153. Strait of Gibraltar. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007), p. 181. Columbus. In Alex Haley, “The Playboy Interview: Malcolm X,” in Playboy magazine, May 1963 (http://www.malcolm-

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x.org/docs/int_playb.htm): “Columbus, the discoverer of America, was a half-black man.” Indian-on-Indian bloodbath. Note, however, that while Native Americans were massacring each other 150 years before Columbus, some Afrocentric “scholars” believe that America was actually discovered before 1492 ... by black explorers. If so, cultural diffusion from those earlier contacts would of course be one possible origin for the hithertopeaceful Indians’ increasingly savage behaviors toward one another. They had to learn it from someone, eh? See Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Warren Barbour, “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs,” in Current Anthropology, Volume 38, Number 3, June 1997 (http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&fi le=article&sid=73), p. 419-41: “According to Van Sertima’s hypothesis, the Nubian rulers of ancient Egypt (25th dynasty, 712-664 B.C.) organized an expedition with the help of the Phoenicians to obtain various commodities, including iron, from sources on the Atlantic coast of North Africa, Europe, and the British Isles during the late 8th or early 7th century B.C. This expedition allegedly sailed from the Nile Delta or the Levant across the Mediterranean, through the Pillars of Hercules, and down the Atlantic coast of North Africa, where it was caught in some current or storm that sent it across the Atlantic to the Americas. Following the prevailing wind and ocean currents, the expedition allegedly sailed or drifted westward from some unspecified location in the eastern Caribbean or the Bahamas to the Gulf Coast of Mexico, where it came into contact with the receptive but inferior Olmecs.... The Nubians subsequently provided the impetus for the building of pyramids and ceremonial centers and introduced a number of technological innovations and practices (mummification, cire-perdue metallurgy, the symbolic use of purple murex dye, weaving, etc.) which presumably influenced Mesoamerican religion, mythology, customs, and even the calendar.”

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recipe for human stew.” Wade, op. cit., p. 155. might have put it. See Dennis Lee, “Alligator Pie,” in “Dennis Lee, Poems” (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/lee/poem7.htm). a villager said. Roger Sandall, “See Here, Ms Truss,” 2005 (http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_See-Here,-MsTruss.php). which would it be. Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program, and How to Fix It (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002), p. 188: “The Australian position is that if family reunification is important to someone who has moved to Australia, it can best be achieved by that person returning home. When the regulation was changed, Ruddock went to ethnic organizations and asked immigrants, ‘Why do you want your parents here anyway?’ It turned out that many were just as happy not to have them.” eligible to immigrate. See George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 101: “A simulation of the U.S. economy suggests that the per capita income of natives would rise substantially if the country switched from the current immigration policy, which admits a mix of skilled and unskilled workers, to one that admitted only skilled workers....” (Italics added.) Falun Gong members. Stoffman, op. cit., p. 168. For why Falun Gong members would more likely be found persecuting others—as an alleged “homophobic mind control cult” (http://www.rickross.com/reference/fa_lun_gong/falun305.ht ml)—than being persecuted themselves, see Rick Ross, “Falun Gong” (http://www.rickross.com/groups/falun.html). patronage appointments. Stoffman, op. cit., p. 52, 164.

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Diversity is a great thing. Of course, in practice it’s actually a little more complex than that. Cf. John Lloyd, “Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,” in The Financial Times, October 10, 2006 (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c4ac4a74570f-11db-9110-0000779e2340.html?nclick_check=1): “The core message of [Robert Putnam’s] research was that, ‘in the presence of diversity, we hunker down,’ he said. ‘We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us’.... When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust.” Cf. also John H. McWhorter, “The Campus Diversity Fraud,” in City Journal, Winter 2002 (http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_1_the_campus.html): “In truth, ‘diverse’ college campuses are among the most racially balkanized places in America. Separate black fraternities and sororities thrive. They first emerged in the early twentieth century, when white fraternities and sororities didn’t welcome black applicants. Today, black Greek organizations are thoroughly unenthusiastic toward whites.... In addition, black students typically cluster in their own section of the dining hall, throw their own parties, have their own theme houses, and leave college with a separatist ideology that they often didn’t hold when they first arrived.” democracy and individual freedom.” Stoffman, op. cit., p. 15-6. have promoted for years.” Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008 [2006]), p. 89-90. Enlightenment ideals. See David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: The Free Press, 1998). See also Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).

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exactly the right way to go. Cf. Paul Craig Roberts, “Affirmative Action + Non-Traditional Immigration = Doomsday Machine Aimed At American Majority...,” on VDare.com, April 3, 2001 (http://www.vdare.com/roberts/politically_correct_hate.htm ): “With the assimilation of whites blocked by deconstruction in the classroom and immigration creating a majority of ‘preferred minorities’ with privileged legal standing, academic standards will not be the only white construction to bite the dust. America’s destiny lies in Third World culture.” fewer prejudices. See Victoria L. Guthrie, Patricia M. King and Carolyn J. Palmer, “Higher Education and Reducing Prejudice: Research on Cognitive Capabilities Underlying Tolerance,” in Diversity Digest, Spring/Summer 2000 (http://www.diversityweb.org/Digest/Sp.Sm00/tolerance.html ): “[I]ntellectual development is significantly related to levels of prejudice toward African Americans, levels of prejudice toward homosexuals, and tolerance ... higher levels of prejudice are more likely to be found in individuals who evidence lower levels of intellectual development.” life and in elections. Herman T. Epstein, “The Fourth R: Or Why Johnny Can’t Reason” (http://www.brainstages.net/4thr.html). Consider also Steven Dutch, “Dutch’s Laws of Just About Everything,” 2003 (2001) (http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/dutchrules.htm): “The best idea I ever heard was that voters should have to recite the Bill of Rights verbatim before being allowed to vote. Failing that, we could attach a ten-question multiple choice exam to each ballot. Votes would be weighted by percent correct. With electronic voting, we could scramble the questions to prevent cheating. Certainly if you’re too dumb or slack to follow an arrow from the candidate’s name to the correct punch hole, or make sure the ballot is correctly done, you have no right to complain about the outcome.” “genetic lottery.” Gregor Mendel’s ratios (i.e., probabilities) of smooth vs. wrinkled peas come right out of the abstract

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consideration of all possible recombinations of the genes involved. The ability to do such combinatorial thinking is one typical indication that a subject is at the formal/abstract reasoning stage of cognitive development. And, species are abstract classes of animals: If you can’t think in terms of abstract classes in general—e.g., “autos” or “fathers,” taken not merely as plurals but rather as classes abstracted from your experience of concrete objects—you can’t think in terms of species, either. The raccoon species or class, for example, is not just a collection of all the world’s raccoons. Rather, in programming terms, it is the abstract “template” or “blueprint” (which cannot be directly experienced) from which all individual, concrete raccoons are instantiated, as instances or members of the class/species. All of that is beyond the ability of the average adult, even in the developed world, to understand ... even though the most advanced (i.e., 99th percentile) children begin to grasp the ideas at age ten. a penis or a vagina. Patricia Holt, “Making Ms.Story: The Biography of Gloria Steinem, A Woman Of Controversy and Contradictions,” in San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 1995 (http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1995/09/24/RV65259.D TL). we can’t deserve our rights. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (New York: Signet, 1996 [1960]), p. 44. “hip enough.” Cf. John McWhorter, “The Demise of Affirmative Action at UC Berkeley: Dissecting the Stalemate,” (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mcwhorter/mcwhorter_p 2.html): “This discrepancy [in the continuing low average scores of middle-class African-American students on standardized tests such as the SAT] today stems less from deprivation than from a cultural tendency which expresses itself in black culture regardless of class, namely the welldocumented one of black children to associate doing well in school with selling out to ‘whiteness.’ The few hopelessly

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nerdy black kids such as myself plow on in the face of this, but often at the expense of general social acceptance, and the majority of African-American children inevitably fall into line to some extent with this evaluation of scholarly achievement with ‘the other,’ even in comfortable middleclass circumstances.” they are somehow shameful. Cf. Griffin, Black Like Me, p. 184: “[I]n order to succeed, [the black man] had to become an imitation white man—dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful.” pride of heritage. Cf. Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993 [1992]), p. 44: “When ‘Negroes’ became ‘blacks’ and then ‘African Americans’ in the United States, it was part of a long journey from the humiliation of slavery to a pride of heritage.” Cf. also the renaming of dinosaurs from “brontosaurus” to “brachiosaurus” in Steve Sailer, “Jurassic Park III,” UPI, July 18 (http://www.isteve.com/Film_Jurassic_Park_III.htm). epithet in the back door.” John H. McWhorter, “Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage In Black America,” 2001 (http://multiracial.com/site/content/view/189/39/): “In January 1999, David Howard, the white ombudsman to the newly elected mayor of Washington, DC, Anthony Williams, casually said in a budget meeting with two coworkers ‘I will have to be niggardly with this fund because it’s not going to be a lot of money.’” repossessed “cunt.” Gloria Steinem, in the Foreword for Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues (New York: Villard, 2001 [1998]), p. xiv: “By the time feminists were putting CUNT POWER! on buttons and T-shirts as a way of reclaiming that

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devalued word, I could recognize the restoration of an ancient power.” “bitch” and “ho.” Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Vintage Books, 2003 [2002]), p. 36: “[Blacks] have added a positive meaning to nigger, just as women, gays, lesbians, poor whites, and children born out of wedlock have defiantly appropriated and revalued such words as bitch, cunt, queer, dyke, redneck, cracker, and bastard. more than seven times. La Griffe du Lion, “Politics, Imprisonment and Race,” Volume 8, Number 1, April 2006 (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/prison.htm): “According to the last decennial census a black man was 7.4 times more likely than his white counterpart to be found behind bars.” Reparations. Cf. Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. 124, 126. “up in smoke.” Cf. Jonathan Kay, “Six reasons why Stephen Harper’s government shouldn’t deliver an apology,” in National Post, June 11, 2008 (http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/arc hive/2008/06/11/jonathan-kay-on-residential-schools-sixreasons-why-stephen-harper-s-government-shouldn-t-deliveran-apology.aspx): “[T]he five-figure per person payouts from the federal government to make amends for the [First Nations] residential schools program has caused a deadly upsurge in binge drinking in many northern communities—an outcome any idiot would have foreseen.” locally whenever possible. Buying locally keeps the money in the community/country, and saves on transportation/fuel, which lessens our dependence on foreign oil. Or did you think it was just a “leftist moonbat” thing? You know what else would decrease the demand for oil? Fewer immigrants. See Steve Smith, “A California Reader Says Immigration Will

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Makes It Impossible To Drill Our Way Out Of The Oil Crisis,” on VDare.com, August 31, 2008 (http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_083008.htm#b2). Mick Jagger. “Mick Jagger,” Contemporary Musicians, Volume 53 (Thomson Gale, 2005). people of the Orkney Islands. See Roger Sandall, “An Australian Dilemma: Reconciling the Irreconcilable,” in Upholding the Australian Constitution (The Samuel Griffith Society, 1997) (http://www.rogersandall.com/Archive_AboriginalPolicy_An-Australian-Dilemma.php). Minnesota Vikings football team. AP Staff, “Jury: Williams guilty on one count in Vikings boat party case,” Associated Press, 2005 (http://www.sportsbooks.com/news/sports_betting/179219.ht ml). See also Seattle Times Staff, “NFL wire notes: Koren Robinson named in sex scandal,” in The Seattle Times, October 16, 2005 (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/seahawks/20025638 70_nfl16.html?syndication=rss). See also CBS Worldwide Inc., “911 Call Released In Vikings Boat Party Case,” on wcco.com, October 13, 2005 (http://wcco.com/vikings/Minnesota.Vikings.football.2.35198 8.html). treated Italian immigrants with scorn. Paul Gottfried, “Attack Of The Pod Person I: Amnesty To Remake GOP,” on VDare.com, 2004 (http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/lesser.htm). benefiting from that injustice. Cf. Father Michael Pfleger, quoted in Bernard Chapin, “Why I Feel Absolutely No White Guilt,” in Pajamas Media, July 11, 2008 (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-i-feel-absolutely-nowhite-guilt/): “[We must be] honest enough to address the one who says, ‘Well, don’t hold me responsible for what my

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ancestors did.’ But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits ... throw away all the money you put into the company you walked into because your daddy and your granddaddy and your great-granddaddy, unless you’re willing to give up the benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation cause you are the beneficiary of this insurance policy!” Men especially love murder.” Andrea Dworkin, in Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p. 148: “Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder.” by its nature, violent.” Quoted in Barbara Mikkelson, “Rape Seeded,” on Snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinnon.asp). embellished with meaningful looks.” Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976–1987 (New York: Dutton, 1988), p. 14. issue of forced sex.” Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 185-6: “Abortion policy has never been explicitly approached in the context of how women get pregnant; that is, as a consequence of intercourse under conditions of gender inequality; that is, as an issue of forced sex.” dismissal of sociobiology. See Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993 [1992]), p. 145; also see Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1995 [1983]), p. 246. For the details contra, see Geoffrey D. Falk, “PVs,” January 12, 2008 (http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/January2008.asp#12)

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and Geoffrey D. Falk, “Zaftig Snuff Tigers,” February 4, 2008 (http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/February2008.asp#4). Simpsons episode. “The Old Man and the Lisa,” first aired April 20, 1997. “only go so far.” Cf. Bruce Hornsby and the Range, “The Way It Is,” The Way It Is (RCA, 1986). part of a minority group. Cf. Bernard Ortiz De Montellano, “Multiculturalism, Cult Archaeology, and Pseudoscience,” in Francis B. Harrold and Raymond E. Eve, ed., Cult Archaeology and Creationism: Understanding Pseudoscientific Beliefs about the Past (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1995), p. 134-51 (http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&fi le=article&sid=95): “[C]hildren acquire self-esteem by accomplishing increasingly complex tasks, by learning, and by being able to use what they have learned.... [O]ne of the most important characteristics of successful people is accurate perception. A curriculum that consists primarily of assertions of black superiority with little development of critical thinking, of high expectations for performance in an effort to develop self-esteem, will ultimately be selfdefeating. Stevenson, Chen, and Uttal ... compared black, Hispanic, and white children in Chicago and found that the self-evaluation of African American children exceeded their actual achievement scores. Stevenson’s group felt that this was due to blacks not getting, or not incorporating, reliable and accurate feedback on their performance. ‘Teachers praise the children for modestly good performance instead of pushing them to do better’.... Stevenson points out that praising work that is substandard, often on the pretext of protecting the self-esteem of the child, does not do the child any favor, because one of the most important sources of children’s self-esteem is realizing that they have mastered a challenging task....”

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“Fire on the Mountain,” circa 1973. “Mickey Hart and The Marin County Collective, 1972–1973” (http://www.mjckeh.demon.co.uk/jc/miscdet.htm#mhmcc). studio recording from 1974. Davis Gans, “Grateful Dead Hour no. 500,” April 20, 1998 (http://www.dead.net/features/grateful-dead-hour-no-500). “When the Levee Breaks.” Andy Fyfe, When the Levee Breaks: The Making of Led Zeppelin IV (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2003), p. 131. white boy in hip-hop.” Corey Moss, “What’s Up with That Guy in the ‘99 Problems’ Video?” April 5, 2003 (http://www.mtv.com/bands/r/rubin_rick/news_feature_0405 03/). “Rapper’s Delight.” Rolling Stone Staff, “Rappers Delight: The Sugarhill Gang” (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/6596093/rappers_d elight). ah you don’t stop.” The Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill Records, 1979). giving it back to us.” Quoted in John H. McWhorter, “How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back,” in City Journal, Summer 2003 (http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html). stole it from us first. Or maybe Hart, with his intense interest in world rhythms, picked up the idea from some Third World culture. History is not clear. melanin. Bernard Ortiz De Montellano, “Multicultural Pseudoscience: Spreading Scientific Illiteracy Among Minorities,” in Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 16, No. 1, Fall 1991 (http://www.csicop.org/si/9111/minority.html).

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Cleopatra. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1997 [1996]), p. xii, 9, 14. Josephine. Ibid., p. 133. Beethoven, Haydn, Solomon, Hannibal. Malcolm X, in Alex Haley, “The Playboy Interview: Malcolm X,” in Playboy magazine, May 1963 (http://www.malcolmx.org/docs/int_playb.htm): “Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven’s father was one of the blackamoors that hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, was of African descent. And Solomon.” See also Peter Brimelow, “Invisible Men,” on VDare.com, 1993 (http://www.vdare.com/pb/taylor_review.htm): “[Jared Taylor, in Paved With Good Intentions] tracks several years of self-feeding press references to the heinous scandal of a white Stanford student hanging a caricatured blackface Beethoven on the door of a black student (who, as it happens, had insisted Beethoven was black).” Odysseus. Michael Elby, “Ancient Greco-Roman descriptions of Egyptians,” 2000 (http://www.geocities.com/enbp/quotes.html): “In describing the skin tone of Odysseus, Homer used the word melanchroiês—a form of the same word that other Greeks sometimes chose to describe Egyptians, and one that is the source of much Afrocentric misunderstanding. If taken literally, the word would mean ‘black-skinned’; however, it is clear from the context that Homer means ‘of swarthy complexion’ rather than racially ‘black,’ and intends to describe Odysseus regaining his youthful color.” Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln. Lefkowitz, op. cit., p. 200, footnote #29.

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Moors. Malcolm X, in Alex Haley, op. cit.: “Whole black empires, like the Moorish, have been whitened to hide the fact that a great black empire had conquered a white empire even before America was discovered. The Moorish civilization—black Africans—conquered and ruled Spain; they kept the light burning in Southern Europe. The word ‘Moor’ means ‘black,’ by the way.” (Of course, so do “Negro” and “nigger,” eh? Be careful what you wish for.) more victimized today. See Bob Allen, quoted in Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 181: “We have institutionalized a counter-white-male bias. We’ve created a new group who are being discriminated against.... You’ve got no access to legal recourse or power. We have institutionalized discrimination against one group. When does it end?” “the new black.” Cf. Steve Sailer, “Is Brown the New Black? Assimilating Latinos into the Politics of Victimhood,” in The American Conservative, March 10, 2008 (http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_03_10/feature.html ). precious badge. Cf. Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 77: “[Mary] Daly’s expressions of solidarity ... are particularly objectionable to black women, who see her as ‘appropriating’ oppression that ‘belongs’ to them.” privileged majority can be racists. Cf. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (New York: Encounter Books, 2007 [2006]), p. 60: “Jews [in Britain] were not considered to be a minority because of the prevalent Marxist analysis that racism necessarily involved power, and since Jews were seen to be powerful, they were part of the majority and so could never be victims. Anyone from the Third World, however, was suitably powerless and therefore their values had to trump

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those of the majority. And anyone who resisted this was pronounced guilty of racism or xenophobia.” “suffering contest.” Cf. Patai and Koertge, op. cit., p. 51: “Comparing types and degrees of oppression is a tough business, and, not surprisingly, it has led to much hostility as one group elbows another for pride of place in the contest for ‘most oppressed’ status.” we’re all helpless victims. Cf. Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1994]), p. 95: “[T]o see oneself as a victim of history rather than as one of its victimizers, is to confer on oneself a delicious sweet-and-sour confirmation of one’s own existence: deliciously sweet because you cannot be denied; deliciously sour because you have been brutalized. This life you lead is not your fault.” “backlash.” Cf. Christina Hoff Sommers’ debunking of Susan “Backlash” Faludi’s dismal, flailing and failed attempts at rational thought and competent scholarship, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 147-9. Cf. also Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 227-55. pleasing shade of light brown. For a less happy ending, see Steve Sailer, “Mapping Human History,” on VDare.com, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/human_history.htm): “Th[e] notion that the entire world will soon consist of one beige race is both highly popular and highly dubious. I see little statistical evidence to suggest that there will be significantly greater racial admixture in either Asia or Africa anytime in the 21st century … and that’s where most humans will live.... Most of the growth in racial mixing will be restricted to regions where intermarriage has been a long tradition (primarily Latin America and some remote islands) or are immigrant

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magnets (presumably North America, Australia, and Western Europe).” Vanessa Hudgens. Ruben V. Nepales, “Vanessa Hudgens: ‘I love being a Filipina,’” in Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 9, 2007 (http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/entertainment/entertain ment/view_article.php?article_id=81617). See also Lynn Barker, “Interview: Zac Efron, Vanessa Anne Hudgens: High School Musical,” in TeenHollywood, May 17, 2006 (http://www.teenhollywood.com/d.asp?r=123403&c=1038&p =10). Heather Locklear. Mario de Valdes y Cocom, “The Blurred Racial Lines of Famous Families: Locklear,” 2008 (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/fa mous/locklear.html). Vanessa Marcil. E! Online Staff, “Vanessa Marcil: Profile,” in E! Online (http://www.eonline.com/celebrities/profile/index.jsp?uuid= ba1bf713-6488-434d-aa0d-84227c2f85e7). Megan Fox. Sirius Radio Staff, “Megan Fox on family background and celebrity inspired tattoo from Maxim Radio,” on Sirius Radio (http://www.sirius.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Sir ius/Page&c=BackStageAsset&cid=1181270896791). Tiger Woods. Steve Sailer, “Is Love Colorblind?” in The National Review, July 14, 1997 (http://www.nationalreview.com/14july97/feature.html). too stupid to use a condom. See Edwin S. Rubenstein, “National Data: Penicillin is No Match for Immigration,” on VDare.com, November 14, 2007 (http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/071114_nd.htm): “In 2005 ... approximately 68 percent of gonorrhea cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control occurred among nonHispanic blacks. The infection rate for blacks ... was 18 times

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that of non-Hispanic whites and 4 times that of Hispanics.... Syphilis, a rarer though more virulent STD, infects blacks at ... over five times the non-Hispanic white rate ... and about three times the Hispanics rate.... Similarly, blacks and Hispanics—each with about 13 percent of the U.S. population—accounted for 49 percent and 18 respectively percent of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses, respectively, in 2005.” we marry them. David Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), p. 221: “A saying in one African tribe supposedly held, ‘They are our enemies. We marry them.’” Anglo-Saxons. Steve Sailer, “It’s All Relative: Putting Race in Its Proper Perspective,” on VDare.com, 2002 (http://www.vdare.com/sailer/presentation.htm): “[I]ntermarriage is what turned the Angles and the Saxons into the Anglo-Saxons. And one way to raise the intermarriage rate is to cut back on immigration. Here in California, native-born Americans are something like three times more likely to intermarry than immigrants.” (Italics added.) Mexifornians. Cf. Victor Davis Hanson, “Mexifornia, Five Years Later,” in City Journal, Winter 2007 (http://www.cityjournal.org/html/17_1_mexifornia.html). work that Nature intended. Sailer, op. cit.: “[I]n the long run, intermarriage is the most fundamental solution for extended families at odds with each other.” rednecks. Cf. Steven Dutch, “The Consumer Society,” 1998 (http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/westtech/XMODERN2.HTM): “[A] ‘redneck’ was somebody who had to work outdoors, becoming chronically sunburned in the process. (The term was once highly pejorative, but with entertainers like Jeff Foxworthy using the term, it has lost much of its force.)” I will survive.” Grateful Dead, “A Touch of Grey,” In The Dark (Arista, 1990).

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trademark of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings, Inc. “Pentium” is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. “Timbits” is a registered trademark of Tim Hortons Inc. “Volkswagen” is a registered trademark of Volkswagen AG. “Playboy” and “Playmate” are registered trademarks of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. “iPod” is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. “Visual Basic,” “.NET” and “VB.NET” are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. “Microsoft” and “Access” are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. “Rockman” is a registered trademark of Dunlop Manufacturing, Inc. “Aunt Jemima” is a registered trademark of Quaker Oats Company. “PV” is (not) a Registered trademark of Professional Victims of America.

About the Author Geoffrey D. Falk is the author of The Science of the Soul: On Consciousness and the Structure of Reality, Stripping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment, and “Norman Einstein”: The Dis-Integration of Ken Wilber. He studied electrical engineering and physics at the University of Manitoba. Following that, he kicked ass as a best-in-class computer programmer. He currently divides his time between writing, software development (www.crmfrontiers.com) and music composition (www.myspace.com/geoffreyfalk).

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