You can say anything ... once

 

Make Buns, not Guns

If we're going to talk about free speech and political correctness (as Jordan Peterson loves to do to the applause of reactionary audiences), we ought to begin by examining our terms. I begin this post by maintaining that there really is no such thing as free speech, and neither is there anything definitive[1] about political correctness. Both are what could be called memes[2], and memes can be catch phrases that pretend to be real "things" and are most useful in an age of social media to rally support among people who are less interested in factuality than in ideological short answers to problems.

               Allow me an example around book burning and censorship. I maintain that all of us are in favour of censorship; that each of us has a threshold beyond which written text has no business being tolerated. Our thresholds simply rise and fall at different places and over time, depending on a variety of factors. Do I believe that a children's book depicting sexual violence ought to be burned? Where do I stand on whether to take Huckleberry Finn off the school curriculum because of racist language? Should a high school teacher be sanctioned for making Hitler's Mein Kampf required reading for his History class?

               Everybody supports censorship, so saying "I oppose censorship" is a false statement unless followed by qualifications indicating where one's thresholds lie.

               The same principle applies to free speech and political correctness. Speech that is "free" includes only speech that falls under one's threshold where utterances are deemed acceptable/unacceptable. Children's mouths are washed out with soap if they swear; adults are taken to court and punished if they publicly defame another person, lying in a court trial is called perjury and is a crime for which the perjurer is punished. Speech is not and has never been free in its absolute sense, although the parameters in which speech is not punishable has an aura of freeness. 

              In practice, certain speech is treated like assault and falls outside commonly accepted parameters of free speech. Here again, to blanket-defend free speech is to imply that speech is either free or it's not free; arguing for a polarity which doesn't exist in fact.

               And I haven't even mentioned the promulgation of false information that's become an issue of no small significance in this internet age.

               I have at times supported the argument that distasteful or dissenting speech be allowed a platform, particularly on university campuses. My reasoning for that has been based on a principle that the expression of that which is objectionable, counter-cultural condemns itself in the act. There are problems with that approach, of course, one being that unless an argument in opposition to the unpopular viewpoint is being made in parallel, we risk the gullible being seduced by false or questionable information.       

               Most legitimate advocacy for free speech is about the expression of political opinions contrary to those held by a majority. In effect, the concern is that we're pushing to have non-mainstream statements made punishable. I would say most citizens of Canada are in favour of considering unpopular opinions unpunishable, a right under the Constitution. We are even tolerant of much speech at the margins: "Mayor Smith is a jackass," said at coffee row does not generally result in litigation. It's more likely that if Mayor Smith gets wind of Jake Jones going about saying stuff that impinges on his reputation, that he would simply reply with, "It takes one to know one," and get on with his day.

Considerable free speech advocacy tends to apply the constitutional right to much more than the expression of alternative political opinion. The key to determining what speech can be freed and what speech cannot lies in the effect on the hearer(s). To use speech to ruin a reputation is not substantially different from using matches to burn someone's house down.

         We've all become conscious, I think, of movements that through publicity, sanctions, and/or what's being called cancel culture, have been decrying, even shaming members of the public for uttering certain kinds of speech and writing. Referring back to free speech, this phenomenon could be seen as pressure to move certain speech and writing from the acceptable to the unacceptable corral, or vice versa. 

           You mustn't refer to black people using the "n" word, or to indigenous women as "squ..s." It's called political correctness, and if by politics, we mean the total of arrangements a people have agreed to in order to live together in harmony and peace, then political correctness is probably the right expression. There are ways of addressing people, speaking about people that can prevent or disrupt harmony, and those asserting that this "correctness" goes too far have their own unique criteria for what should be included in correct speech, and what should not.

The argument goes thus: persons are having their freedom of speech curtailed by an expanding political correctness sensibility well beyond what's necessary to maintain harmony. Here again, what is politically correct and what is not isn't a yes/no matter. To say that one is being criticized simply for reasons of political correctness is disingenuous. If I declare I can say unpopular things as my right, then it follows that others have the right to declare what I said bullshit, defending that utterance with the same argument. 

      That old adage, "You can say anything … once," has merit in that it's not a legal question so much as the fact that majorities elect governments (theoretically) and they also have power to counter unpopular utterances … in ugly ways sometimes. It's how human cultures have always worked and if you wish to champion an unpopular cause, it's advisable to weigh the cost, accept the consequence.

On the other side, I'm reminded of Galileo who scientifically determined that the earth was not the centre of the universe … and said so. He was brought up before a church tribunal and ordered to recant on peril of his excommunication. He did. But only in words. Legend has it that as he exited the event he muttered, "… and yet it (the earth) moves!" We need mavericks who steer us out of ignorance into knowledge and ought to thank people like Galileo and Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther who weighed the consequences that conservative stubbornness and resistance to change would bring down on their heads, and went ahead with an unpopular mission. What we don't need are mavericks who drive us back from knowledge into a jungle of misinformation in order to sabotage progress.

               In the North American culture as we find it today, public conversation is poisoned by those who weaponize memes like political correctness, freedom of speech, leftist/rightest, censorship, etc., to the point where citizens are herded into adversarial camps stamped with labels they assume to be definitive.  An anatomical analysis of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol should open our eyes to the power hidden in this strategy. Interviews with participants produced no deep philosophical discussions, but rather a recitation of memes deliberately planted in the soil of America by Donald Trump and those riding on his coattails.

               We don't want to witness a repeat of the post-World War I struggle between communists, fascists  and democrats in Germany.  "Almost from the start, the Weimar Republic came under attack from within. Right-wing extremists, meanwhile, used their political power to oppose any democratic system, and to blame the country's WWI defeat on a conspiracy between socialists and Jews. Although the moderate government-maintained power, violence erupted on the streets between the left and right. It was a rough start for this democracy." [3] Relative memes of the time included, "Juden 'Raus," (Jews get out), "Sieg Heil" (Hail to Victory), "Vaterland" (fatherland) and "Lebensraum," (living space, i.e., creating space for the Fatherland by reclaiming land once occupied by Germany and conquering new territory). The denouement of this internal super-partisanship included, of course, WWII, the Holocaust, the deaths of millions in the conflicts and the massive destruction of European infrastructure.

               "It can't happen here" is a childish, foolish sentiment.[4] The NAZI movement started small but gathered steam as the chaos and hardship of the country persisted under massive resentment, hyperinflation, decimation of the middle class, increasing poverty and finally, the Great Depression of 1929. Hard times nourish the desire for a messiah with an ideology: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and so many other ordinary persons gifted with rhetorical skill and a basket of catch phrases, hate memes, and the support of those who hope to achieve greatness on their coattails.

Perhaps the questions about free speech, political correctness and related subjects are answered best by John Pavlovitz in If God is Love, Don't be a jerk, p. 48:

"In this life, you've surely hurt other people and you've done so in one of two ways: either you've accidentally injured someone by saying or doing something that you weren't aware was offensive or painful to them or you've intentionally wounded them because that was either partially or fully what you were trying to do from the beginning. In the former case you were human and in the latter case you were a jerk—and oftentimes you're the only one who knows the truth [of motives behind your actions]."

Or perhaps it's all summarized by the essential humanness that's common to all members of the species, namely their capacities for love of the other versus love of self. One path leads to cooperation and compassion, the other to conquest and power, power that can only come from forms of subjugation.

               Were we all human in Pavlovitz's statement and not bent toward being jerks, free speech and political correctness wouldn't have any currency because following in Christ's footsteps, our faith in the efficacy of love would guide our words and our actions. Like Lion parents teach their children to hunt as their primary task in life, we must see our duty as adult humans to raise our children to be human and not jerks.

 

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[1] Definitive, meaning that a word matches precisely that to which it refers.

[2] Merriam Webster: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from one person to another in a culture.

[3] For a dramatic, fictionalized portrayal of the descent into chaos during the Weimar Republic, I recommend the Netflix series Babylon Berlin.

[4] It Can't Happen Here is a dystopian novel written in 1935 by Sinclair Lewis. I reviewed this novel in 2017 on http//:readwit.blogspot.com and the book is available from multiple sources online. Seen by many as prophetic of the rise of Donald Trump, it was conceived in the Weimar era, in the midst of the Great Depression.

 

Fifty Ways to Lose your Children©

George G. Epp

No one could bring himself to go home until a water-colour sunset dimmed to candle-light in the west and the pall of night descended on bush and pasture and the steep and scrubby banks of the South Saskatchewan. A few had brought flashlights and as they’d all regrouped in answer to the search leader’s whistle, four of us volunteered to continue into the night by the faltering and inadequate light we’d brought with us. I was one of the latter. The rest were advised to head back to their cars and home while there was still dusk enough to find their ways.

               So team-leader Aaron Barstow, Edie Clausen, Donavon Epp and I, Danny Schmidt were left to huddle once more to plot our “strategy;” Aaron had used that word a lot since the Mounties had put together groups for the search and Aaron had volunteered to lead ours. Donavon clicked the switch on his flashlight a few times, banged it against his thigh and shined it upward at his face when it flickered on. I remember he looked demonic lighted that way.

               “Save your batteries,” Aaron said. Donavon switched off his light, stepped closer into the circle.

               “Don’t think my batteries have a lotta life left,” he said.

               “No,” Aaron said. “We’ll only have an hour or two at best.”

               The futility of it struck me. I recalled being up in LaRonge on a visit some dozen or so years ago and signing up for an aerial search. A plane had apparently gone down somewhere between Prince Albert and The Pas and search command had assigned Nipawin Air to search an area about the size of a postage stamp on the wall map, a full hour east of LaRonge. I and two local men volunteered to act as spotters and we crawled into an ancient 4-seater Beaver on skis and headed out. How our pilot found the assigned area was beyond me, but we flew and flew due east, then west, then east again, our eyes watering with the cold and intense peering down into a vast, undifferentiated forest broken up only by lakes and rivers. We’d been told to look for anything that didn’t fit: the glint of light off metal, a slash through the trees, smoke that might indicate a signal fire. Anything.

               Needle in a haystack; contact lens lost in a meadow.

               “I don’t see any point in stumbling around on the steep part of the riverbank in the dark,” Aaron was saying. “There’s an open field of stubble between this bush and the road, and beyond that, a pasture with a few heifers. We’ll search those looking for, I guess . . . any signs that she walked across there: Kleenex, a footprint, anything.”

               That’s what we did for an hour, walking four abreast with five feet between us. We walked the margin of a harvested wheat field, then the pasture where a half dozen heifers followed us and days of cattle-making-tracks would probably mean that footprints would be indistinguishable, even in daylight. I shone my flashlight in short arcs in front of me with one hand and turned up my collar, zipped my jacket up to my chin with the other. Last night had been the first autumn frost; tonight would—the forecast said—be even chillier.

               As kids, we’d lose things … a lot. I remember the typical conversations:

Me, “But I’ve looked everywhere!”

Mom, “No you haven’t. There’s one place you haven’t looked and that’s where your pencil case is right now.”

Her name is, or was, Tiffany Sadowsky. She’s eleven, is tall for her age at 5’2” with long brown hair. She was wearing a Pioneers club jacket—blue—and jeans. There were eight kids and two adult leaders on the canoe trip that started in Saskatoon and camped at Fish Creek, where it was discovered in the morning that her sleeping bag was empty and Tiffany wasn’t answering when they called. Unfortunately, they’d chosen a cell-phone dead-spot to camp, and by the time the two leaders had rowed downstream far enough to be in cell phone range, a full hour had passed, plus another until the RCMP were able to get to them. Ordered to stay where they were, the young canoeists had yelled themselves hoarse during the wait, had defied orders by making fruitless, short forays into the bush.

All that was three days ago. The StarPhoenix had ferreted out as many details as they could; the photospread of her family made me feel ill, as if the paper would send a card to Tiffany’s mother thanking her for the boost in circulation the loss of Tiffany had created for them. They were a sober-looking family: a single mom, blond and heavily made up for the photographer, an adolescent boy with long, dark hair and a very thin six- or seven-year-old girl with the same long, brown hair of her sister. And then there was Tiffany, sitting on the edge of the couch with her arm around her mother’s shoulders and a grin that was at once mischievous and . . . well, happy.

The facts were few, and so the speculations were many. Coffee row in Rosthern eliminated the rapture, remained equivocal on drowning and third-party involvement in that order. We were content, it seemed, to simply assume that that Sadowsky girl had just disappeared for reasons unknown. Calloused emotions, blasé responses. I kept thinking about “there’s one place you haven’t looked, and that’s where she is.” Do the Mounties know this?

No material thing, no person, no remains of a person can exist without a place. My pencil case was in my school bag where I knew it wouldn’t be, so I hadn’t looked there.

It was 10:30 when we decided to make the walk back to Fisher Road before our flashlights gave out completely. Sadie was sitting up in bed reading when I went upstairs and she needed to know what the day had been like. But there were no tellable details. We walked, we looked, we found nothing.

I checked in on Jamey and Russell who should have been asleep but were building a Lego fort.

Jamie looked up. “Did you find the girl?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid we didn’t. Maybe tomorrow.”

He turned and turned Lego blocks between thumbs and fingers of both hands, got up, sat down on his bed. “Maybe she’s in heaven.”

“Or maybe she’ll be found safe and sound in some warm place. You guys need to go to sleep. School tomorrow.” Jamey is nearly eleven, Russell nine and already showing early symptoms of the second child syndrome: contrary and acquiescent by turns, unnecessarily competitive with Jamey and the odd hint of pleasure in torturing the cat. Russell climbed up to his bunk after three or four urgings and I made to tuck him in, but didn’t.

“I don’t feel sleepy,” Jamey said and I knew what he really meant, that a lost girl out in the cold and dark must be found before the world sleeps.

I lay awake for a long time myself.

I’m a dreamer. My dreams extend the worries of the day into rabbit holes and down dark alleyways. Sometime that night I woke up, my pajamas wet with sweat. I’d been looking, not for Tiffany with the long, brown hair, but for Russell, and then not Russell but Jamey. I ran down long corridors with door after door, all locked and rounding a corner, I ran into Donavon. His face was the face I’d seen in the semi-darkness of the Fish Creek almost-wilderness, demonic, almost sneering. He laughed. Said nothing. Laughed again and then ducked into a door marked MANAGER. I tried to move, shouting ”Tiffany! Tiffany!” but my feet wouldn’t move. And then I fell. Down into a deep well, somewhere like the farm where as a boy I watched my dad and two neighbours pulling a dead calf out of the well. I woke up when I hit the water.

Sadie turned on the light. “You screamed,” she said and wrapped her arms around my head.

I felt breathless, and the familiarity of the art on the walls, I think, the reassuring sameness of the room and Sadie’s caresses slowly brought my heartbeat back to normal. Or near to it. I told her in chopped sentences about my nightmare; she’d been here before. She knew me better than I knew myself.

“I think I’d die if that was Russell . . . or Jamey lost out there,” I said.

“It’s not Jamey and it’s not Russell,” she said. “And it never will be.” She sounded so sure.

Sadie persuaded me to go to church the following morning. “You can go hunting after lunch,” she said, and I acquiesced . . . reluctantly. During sharing and prayer, Pastor Christy prayed that Tiffany would be found, and for her family that they would be comforted. My soul rebelled, do we not know that Jesus will not plow through the shrubs, the rocks and the stones to find a lost girl?

“I’ve got to go,” I whispered to Sadie. She nodded.

“I’ll go home with the Brookses,” she said.

I drove back, parked the car on a field driveway and walked the short, winding trail down to the old, collapsing Fish Creek Church and on toward the river. The campsite was obvious. Police, searchers, thrill-seekers had trampled the grass there and a circle of grey ash remembered the fire around which the Pioneers had gathered for their dinner. A log had undoubtedly served them as a seat as they watched the sparks soar into darkness. I sat. Maybe at the exact spot where a young girl sat gazing into the fire and then did, or didn’t, go to sleep under the stars.

I closed my eyes and sat, just sat. Nothing to do. We’d looked everywhere. The only voices speaking into my silence were the lap, lap, lapping of the water eddying around a rock and the almost inaudible whisper of poplar leaves twisting in the wind, green-tinged with the muted yellow that heralds the dying of summer. In time I sensed a presence. So close that it might be my mother sitting beside me on the log. And the poplar leaves and the eddies seemed to say, “There is one place where nobody has looked, and that’s where Tiffany is.”

“There’d have to be a million places where no one has looked,” I thought. “What’s more, I’ve no idea what places have been searched and what places have been missed.” By now, the RCMP would be telling Sharlene Sadowsky that missing children not found within twenty-four hours are seldom found alive.

In the gentlest of ways, Sadie had hinted to me that my emotional reaction to the missing child of strangers was . . . well, more than usual. I countered that as a father of two children and a mid-grade teacher, I couldn’t help but see my children and my students’ faces in the lost girl. I even recited the last verse of John Donne’s prophetic poem: “Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: It tolls for thee.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “You need to accept that you’ve done what you can. You’ll need to let it go. If not sooner, than later.”

It was early afternoon when I finally left the place that by now had become haunted for me. I had known this place long ago; paddling the South Saskatchewan downstream from Saskatoon to the junction with the North branch had been mine and Donovan’s boyhood goal as adventurers. Twice, we’d put in at Gabriel’s Bridge and then hankering for a change, had Donavon’s dad drive us and his canoe to Saskatoon where we put in at the CPR Bridge.

Our first night’s bivouac that time had been at the very spot where the Pioneers had lost their friend, and probably also their innocence. It was also the place where a snuffling black bear scared the hell out of us, where we disembarked so fast that our provisions got left behind and we had to restock at Batoche—on bags of peanuts and a dozen chocolate bars.

 

Classes had just gotten underway the week before and unremarkably, Tiffany’s story faded with the day-to-day of organizing, teaching, coaching, cajoling and encouraging the twenty-three Grade Sevens I’d been assigned. But it all came back when the StarPhoenix and CTV reported cursorily that Tiffany had been found safe and sound, that a custody battle, a stalking and a nighttime kidnapping were involved and charges had been laid.

Safe and sound. Probably a medical check was done and all her organs deemed to be functioning normally and she had no visible contusions, no broken bones, so “safe and sound.” An answer to prayer.

I didn’t think so, and still don’t.

In about the middle of October, Russell was suspended for two weeks for laying a vicious beating on his best friend, Raymond. It had to do with a Tooney one of them had found in the playground at recess. We left his counselling to the school psychologist but removed most of his privileges at home, hoping for some kind of “born again” change in his attitude. Sadie and I were left with the feeling that Russell would grow up like a kite, picking up on and riding the crests of winds over which neither he nor we had control, possibly crashing with an unanticipated lull in the breeze. How would we live with that? Would we be up to it?

And then there was Jamey. So easy, like a puppy on a leash and so happy to be contained in the radius of that restriction. He never loses his pencil box.

Paul Simon is responsible for an ear worm that recurs for me often, that being the catchy tune in “Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover.” When I sing it in my head these days, it goes, “Fifty Ways to Lose your Children.”

I mentioned this to Pastor Christy. She’s very wise. She said, “I guess we can only lose our children if we assume we owned them in the first place.” For me, this was a poignantly powerful answer. Also, for me at that, at this time, it was no answer at all. Maybe it will be some day.

So much in this world depends on whether or not Tiffany has been truly and lovingly found. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.

There’s another parable that was forgotten by Writer/Apostle Luke. In it, the Prodigal Son never returns, is never found.

 

 

 

 

              

 

SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES, SPEARS INTO PRUNING HOOKS©

George G. Epp

Forward: There’s a prevailing view in our world that militaries and their tools are necessary to protect us from aggression by the militaries and their tools of other countries. My Anabaptist/Mennonite heritage and 80 years of living have taught me that it’s not so, that this philosophy is the same as saying, “We are untrustworthy and misanthropic, hopelessly selfish and greedy and so we must assume that other nations are probably as evil—and likely more—than we are.”

                The settling of differences is often achieved through diplomacy and negotiation but sometimes through violence that escalates until terrible damage and death is the result. The difference lies in the possession of weapons, pure and simple. The Kingdom Christ promised will be a disarmed, peaceable realm, where (metaphorically) “the lion will sleep with the lamb and the wolf and the sheep will graze side by side,” and (metaphorically) “every man will enjoy life seated peacefully under his own olive tree, being blest by the summer sun and the trilling of birds.”

                To this end, I offer this parable.

 

Drill Sergeant Yoshie Hauptmann wouldn’t have needed the alarm to go off at 6:30 every morning. He’d disciplined his body to fall asleep at 11:30 precisely, and as precisely to wake up at 6:30, although he was as punctual at setting the alarm as he was about everything. Just in case. You never know. Be prepared. The devil’s in the details.

                On August 5^th, 2022, he rolled over, sat up gently so as not to wake Anika and padded into the walk-in closet to retrieve the uniform Anika had so carefully brushed the night before. It wasn’t there. He backed out of the closet and closed the door in response, probably, to the ubiquitous advice that unplugging a thing that’s not working usually cures the problem. He opened the door again, but a white robe hung in the precise spot where his uniform should be. He woke Anika. She was as befuddled as he was.

                His duplicate uniform was at the cleaners and they wouldn’t be open until 10:00. He donned street clothes and drove to the barracks. A barrack’s-load of raw recruits were wondering around the parade ground, some in pajamas, some in their underwear. They gathered around Drill Sergeant Hauptmann and informed him that where they’d hung their uniforms and street clothes last night, there were only blue jeans and Hawaiian shirts. Also, that they’d been awakened at 7:00 by what sounded like a choir singing something about sheep grazing.

                With that news, DS Hauptmann took out his cell phone and dialed headquarters in Tel Aviv. They already knew something was up, had already decided that Iran was retaliating for the previous week’s bombing of a nuclear enrichment facility by Israel. “The air force has been ordered to scramble all fighter jets, and land-based-missile command to be ready for further orders. Do your best to …”

                The call was interrupted by “Hang on, Hauptmann,” and the click of a phone being hung up.

                The news flashed down the chain of command via Twitter. When pilots (in street clothes) ran to the hangers, they found every jet had been replaced by a skateboard and where bombs were stored ready to be attached to planes, there was a bowling alley. Missile command examining the silos’ contents found that the ICBMs had mysteriously turned into massive heaps of Swiss Cheese, complete with holes.

                The entire base was gripped by excruciating fear. Officers and privates ran back and forth between rooms, between buildings and the parade ground was awash in Hawaiian shirted civilians carrying baseball bats, hockey sticks, anything they could get their hands on.

Fortunately, relief followed hard upon all this devastating news: Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Russia, Australia, Great Britain were all struggling to understand how their entire military apparatus had turned into food, flowers, game venues and identical Hawaiian shirts. Nobody knew who was who, rank and privilege lost all their markers and most amazingly, every economy discovered that the last year’s military spending had been reimbursed and governments were awash in cash.

Prince William was up early, dressed for a portrait photograph to be taken by Amelia Standingstill, Great Britain’s most celebrated female portrait photographer. At 7:00 precisely, Amelia gasped as she saw poor William through her viewfinder without hat, coat, pants, epaulets and medals and him looking down and wishing he chosen boxers instead of briefs.

                Several arms manufacturing CEOs took their own lives, too hastily, turns out; their factories remained intact, except that all had been retooled to produce solar panels and tidal generators. Go figure!

 

Jerry Pinkstable and Hank Surinamy were neighbours on Colonel Wogey Street in Denver Colorado. Jerry’s first thought when he heard the news of very strange doings was to prepare to defend his family. He reached in and felt around in his night table drawer, but his pistol was gone. In a panic, he ran downstairs to his gun cabinet and found when he opened it that his hunting rifles had turned into gardening tools and his last-ditch, assault rifle was now a cricket bat. Jerry has never, ever played cricket. Somebody goofed.

He ran out to make sure the gate in his chain link property fence was locked and discovered no fence and no gate. He ran back into the house and placed Jonathon’s and Sidney’s miniature baseball bats near the door, then ran back to the kitchen for a knife, but wherever a knife had been, there was now a pizza cutter. He felt silly holding one in his hand and making a few ridiculous thrusts with it. He dropped it back into the drawer.

                He picked up a bat and stepped gingerly out onto the front porch. He was startled to see that “that bastard Hank” was mirroring his stance and his weapon on the Surinamy’s front porch. Hank’s six-year-old son stepped out beside Hank, looked at Jerry and said, “Daddy, if your guns went away, and Jerry’s guns went away, prob’ly everybody’s guns went away.” Jerry’s defiant demeanour left, replaced by a sheepishness at the wisdom of a child. He dropped the bat on the lawn, as did Hank and both felt that a ton of rocks had been lifted from their shoulders, although it would take some time before they could admit it.

 

A chapter of Hell’s Angels had bought three adjacent houses on Grady Street in Summerdale, Ontario back in 2019. Every other house on that block had been FOR SALE ever since, but they didn’t care. They tore down the middle house and erected a large garage for their motorcycles. Their weapons were kept on their persons or at their bedsides. Not prone to early rising and having no use for establishment news, they would experience the upheaval of theirs and everybody else’s world for themselves.

                At 10:15, a bearded, barbed-wire-tattooed Jason Farthing awoke, sat up, scratched his ample belly, pulled on a black muscle shirt and reached for the leather jacket that he’d left hanging on the bedpost. What came away was not his jacket, but a plaid sportscoat whose only nod to leather was in the elbow patches. Jason hung it back up, shook his head, went for a pee—in response, probably, to the ubiquitous advice that unplugging a thing that’s not working usually cures the problem—and came back. The plaid sportscoat was still there, hanging from the bedpost. What’s more, the hand gun he kept under his pillow at night was not under his pillow.

                Jason pounded on every bedroom door in the house screaming, “OK, you jackasses, who’s the wise guy. Joke’s over!” A few doors opened, a few arms appeared, a few hands gingerly held out plaid sportscoats with leather elbow protectors and every coat with a pen clipped into the breast pocket.

                Eventually the world news registered via Aaron “Frisky” Patterson’s Facebook account. He rushed out to the garage and, you guessed it, where fourteen Harleys and Yamahas and Phantom Blacks had stood, there now were fourteen high-end racing bikes.

Aaron was probably the most astute of the chapter membership. First, he thought, “Strange, this is not military hardware.” Then he thought, “Military hardware intimidates; motorcyclists in packs wearing Hell’s Angels decals are intimidating, that’s what we set out to be. Whoever did this is smart, like me.”

He ran his hand across the new leather of the bicycle’s banana seat. It reminded him of the first back he’d had as a kid back in Laird, Saskatchewan. He went back upstairs and put on the plaid sportscoat with the leather elbow pads and took the racing bike out for a spin.

                It felt really good except that the jacket didn’t match his leather pants. He stopped on a country road, took off his pants and hung them over a barbed-wire fence and gleefully headed west in his boxer shorts and the greenish-plaid sportscoat with the leather elbow protectors.

                He was enthralled by the singing of the birds on the fence wires.

 

Joe Biden was nearing the midpoint of his presidency and like everyone, he was shaken by the news as it unfolded from around the world. Most astounding to him were the images of the Pentagon on TV—before and after. Whoever or whatever force was at work had exercised some cosmic geometry and turned it into a circle. Furthermore, it was now a school; offices with their maps and strategic planning documents and international intelligence apparatus were all gone, replaced by classrooms. The signage out front and back now read “Plowshare College,” and President Joe chuckled because he’d actually been listening in church and knew where the name came from. His attorney-general opined that it must have something to do with agriculture, an easy mistake to make.

               

Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada approached the new governor-general with a request to prorogue parliament, a request that was denied. “You’re suddenly befuddled and clueless, Justin,” she said. “and you can’t wrap your head around no fighter jets, no tanks, no army. Well join the club. Go back and write a budget and a throne speech. Trust me. It’s gonna be fun with all that new cash and all those personnel freed up to fight climate change. Right up your alley, nuh?”

                And the world unfolded as it should. War- and terrorism-refugees started to drift home, people (who seem always to need some kind of a war) became obsessed with saving the planet, cleaning up oceans, rivers and lakes, planting trees, building renewable energy infrastructure, building better hospitals and better schools, ensuring food security, all these and more creating jobs, jobs, jobs.

Street gangs filled their pockets with rocks at first, but gave that up when their thrown stones would turn into potato chips the instant they left their hand. Everyone knows how hard it is to throw a potato chip with any degree of accuracy. A few, in desperation, turned themselves into book clubs.

                Most importantly, the world of the poor, the rich, the powerful, the ordinary, celebrities and heroes, artists and poets, writers and readers, laborers and thinkers, all could finally count on a good night’s sleep. The sounds of snoring could at times become deafening.

                CBC reported later, two years later, actually, that Putin had made a demeaning remark about the Ukrainian president at an international conference. Apparently, the Ukrainian president stuck his tongue out at Putin in response, at which the UN general secretary was reported to have remarked, “My goodness, will this aggression and counter-aggression cycle never end?”

                In Israel/Palestine all the walls and barriers came down, missiles and personnel weapons were nowhere to be found. And amazingly here, the power that had demilitarized the nations had added a twist: whether faces and clothes were different or just appeared to be, observers could no longer tell who was Jewish and who was Arab. Authorities soon tired of having to ask people whether they were Jewish or Palestinian before telling them whether or not they were allowed to stand or walk, here or there. There was nothing for it, finally, but to declare the entire area a democratic, secular state with politicians elected by universal suffrage, police armed with little more than good will and compassion, and everyone worshipping the same spirit of God’s goodness and mercy … side by side.

The Beginning

               

The Crown Rust Tempest in a Teapot

OATS

 

Trevor Lake noticed it for the first time while walking through a ripening oats field on an otherwise-glorious July morning—July 26^th, 2025, to be precise. Somehow, the individual plants looked more … well … tired than they should. He pulled one entire plant up and examined the roots, then the leaves where he noticed reddish splotches forming. He examined a few more plants, walked in toward the middle of the field and discovered that the spots were fewer, but still general. It seemed as if someone had gone through the field with a sprinkler of rust-coloured paint. The worst areas were right along the creek bank.

                Trevor knew what it was: Some variety of fungal rust. But only after looking it up on line and realizing that there were several dozens of oat diseases ranging from viral to bacterial to fungal, Crown Rust being the most common. He’d grown mostly canola and wheat until the passing of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had shifted the demand toward locally-grown and consumed food crops, and the price of canola plummeted.

                Over coffee at the PetroCan on the highway that runs through Shermen, Saskatchewan, Trevor announced what he had seen, thinking to warn neighbours who’d made the same crop-switch for the same reasons.  “You’d better look at your oats,” he said, “especially you, Sam. You’ve got Buckthorn growing along the creek and it’s a primary host for the fungus’ sexual development.”

                “What?”

                “What?” was exactly what Trevor had said when he first waded through Danika Thompson’s column in GRAINEWS. He’d read it three times before concluding that his oat crop would probably be lucky to return input costs, that he should have bought a resistant strain of seed. “The fungus develops on the Buckthorn and migrates to live on oats … and sometimes barley, I think.”

                “What the hell is Buckthorn?”

                “Well, it’s that shrubby plant with the little yellow flowers and … and, I think, black berries.”

                Sam’s face wore a mask of skepticism. It was, in fact, Sam’s default look whenever problems went in search of solutions. “I’ll bet Monsanto or Bayer are behind this … again,” he said. “You’re probably gonna tell me next that there’s a spray I can buy for five-thousand dollars that’ll fix the problem!”

                The Monsanto/Bayer “conspiracy” to rob farmers of as much of the profits of their hard work as possible was a perennial topic at coffee row, ever since Percy Schmeiser got shafted for planting seed on which Monsanto held an exclusive patent. That was way back in the 1990s, before the two companies joined forces to perfect the art of “ripping all the profit out of agriculture and turning it over to rich corporate owners and shareholder men in suits, laughing all the way to the bank”. At least that’s how Willie Turner loved to put it to anyone prepared to listen. Willie didn’t farm; he and Don Castle were local business interests who were well aware of the fact that their good fortunes leaned heavily on the success or failure of local agriculture.

∞∞

Everybody who lives in or near one knows that rural towns have mysterious networks down which news and opinions flash at the speed of light. The dilemma of the oat crops was particularly vexing to John and Cecil Skowring who were in the middle of building a mill to capitalize on farming changes by producing locally-grown, locally-consumed rolled oats. The content of the PetroCan coffee row conversation, plus the Skowring’s complaints about their misfortune, plus the unbridled assertions on everything by Sam and his wife, Mabel, got pumped into the network in minutes. Like a Corona Virus, peculiar versions of the Crown Rust story spread through town and countryside. The Buckthorn/fungus transmission version was far too complicated to transmit in casual conversation. What wasn’t too complicated and got digested and regurgitated were the following:

• ·         Bayer put spores into their RoundUp chemical so farmers would have to buy their remedy for Crown Rust,
• ·         The Canola people were spreading rust spores with crop-spraying planes to urge farmers back to buying their seed,
• ·         The Robin Hood Mill in Saskatoon was conspiring with the canola people and Bayer/Monsanto to shut down the mill in Shermen before it even opened,
• ·         There actually was no such thing as Crown Rust; just a story made up by Trevor for some unknown reason.

The favourite explanation was the one involving crop-spraying planes; a few farmers had used them to spray RoundUp in spring; everyone had seen and heard the planes; there were far too many to just be doing weed spraying. What’s more—some said—Buckthorn isn’t a thing … nobody’s ever heard of Buckthorn and they’d know it if it existed.

                Trevor was horrified by the rumours and theories, especially after the whole thing was being attributed to him as the perpetrator of fake news, or possibly as a co-conspirator with who-knows-how- many people and companies that stood to benefit. How Trevor would benefit wasn’t included in this narrative; it was enough that he was making up a story about Buckthorn and fungi and other bullshit to cover his tracks. (“Most likely, Bayer is cutting him a fat check,” was a nuance that would be added later.)

                 Sam never checked his oat fields. Possibly because he felt more comfortable with the conspiracy theories than with the thought that come harvest time, his crop would be two-thirds or less of what he’d anticipated, and his swather and combine pickup would turn a rusty red as he harvested. He vaguely remembered stories of wheat rust in the 1950s; surely crop rust wasn’t a thing anymore.

                In desperation, Trevor tracked down freelance writer Danika Thompson, thinking to bring her to Shermen if she’d be willing to verify his news as being factual, not fake. “Why don’t you just have them read my column, you know, the one you referred to?” She had too much going on to come out now, she said.

                Trevor thought about that, but given the community climate, he guessed that the reporter would be construed as another attempt by him to cover his ass. He was right; he realized it when he got replies to emails he sent to Don, Willie and Sam. 

            There's no arguing with conspiracy theory; anything you say to the contrary tends simply to prove that you’re either in on the plot … or else have been taken in by it.

                Trevor wanted to scream, “Why the hell are you all so damned dumb?” But what would be the point? It wasn’t their lack of smarts that bound them to see conspiracy behind their problems; Sam was known to be a successful farmer and Don and Willie passable businessmen. 

                He went on line and printed all the references to Crown Rust … it made him feel better to know that he was right … according to the experts. He also read somewhere that conspiracy theories arise when there’s a power, wealth or education imbalance. That it’s natural to assume that there are elites with the power, wealth or education that allow them to move things and events … while common folk have too little of any of the three to allow them to move anything of importance, and so they feel like they’re always being done to instead of doing. They resent their powerlessness.

                He’d also read that conspiracy theories generally arise only for momentous things, like presidential assassinations, pandemics, unusual fires and such. That big things call for big explanations. This puzzled Trevor because his bringing up this Crown Rust thing was surely a tempest in a teapot. He should have been thanked for his research. He could only assume that the Monsanto/Schmeiser debacle was the big event, and he’d only been guilty of reopening that festering resentment.

                The messenger often takes the first bullet.

                What startled him most was the research that showed how impossible a massive conspiracy can be. To successfully scatter rust spores across the province would take both the cooperation and the absolute secrecy of a great many people. If among all those cooperating conspirators even one person should experience a twinge of conscience and “blow the whistle,” the conspiracy would have to collapse. Even in a family’s conspiracy to give Uncle Ike a surprise birthday party, the likelihood of total solidarity around the plan almost never happens. The article Trevor read and reread ended with, “There are no really big conspiracies, even though there are plenty of little ones.”

                Harvest came early and by August 20^th, Trevor had his oats in the bin and had washed the rust off his equipment. He went out with his tractor and a few cables and began pulling up all the Buckthorn shrubs along the creek and burning them. He was minding the bonfire when he noticed Sam’s pickup dusting across the oat stubble. Sam pulled up, exchanged a perfunctory greeting with Trevor and after a minute of both staring into the fire, said, “You never told us which variety of oats is resistant to this rust stuff.”

                Trevor pulled out his notebook and pen and wrote a couple of names, tore off the sheet and handed it to Sam. “These aren’t guaranteed to be perfect, but tests have shown them to suffer the least from Crown Rust.

                In the end, the only defenses against conspiracy-theories-run-amok … are facts. Facts experienced first hand or, at least, facts endorsed by a trusted friend.  Trevor decided that if he had the whole thing to do again, he’d invite Sam over, ask him if he knew what was happening with his oats and have him come up with the answers.

                But then, Sam had been known more than once to declare that behind the internet and the “mainstream media,” there existed a massive plot to keep the public ignorant and confused, to “bamboozle us with lies and bullshit.” At a conversation like this once, Trevor had imagined a field of thousands of reporters, social media billionaires, fat-cat politicians and corporate elites charging at an unsuspecting public with syringes full of lies ‘n bullshit, all having agreed in advance that this inoculation would be in everyone’s best interests.

                He sighed and forked another Buckthorn shrub onto the fire, watched it flare, heard it sizzle.            

 

 

                 

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