HUMAN WRECKAGE

For You, Herr meGeoff, zee Vore Is Never Over

Born in February, 1960, I was amongst the last of the baby boomer brood. Before I was old enough to participate in organized sports and discover the devil’s music, I refought the Second World War daily. The war was close: my father had served, as did many relatives, neighbours and family friends. Our house was filled with actual artifacts – souvenirs of Dad’s (all of which eventually ended up on display in Ottawa’s Royal Canadian Air Force mess); and my toy guns, Airfix soldiers and spring-loaded metal artillery pieces that launched slim finishing nails lifted from Dad’s basement workshop.

My First Communion took place in 1967. It must’ve been a Saturday because afterward Dad took me to the local hobby shop. Those were the days before Sunday shopping. Maybe it was my Confirmation? Anyway, I selected a panzer, a Tiger Mark IV, as my Catholic reward. The tank was destined to be blown to smithereens by ladyfinger firecrackers. The war was everywhere: dirty, rotten Krauts were being dispatched in our backyard, in Sgt. Rock comics, movie theatres and on syndicated American network television shows like Combat and Garrison’s Gorillas. Budda-budda the best, most exciting, most exotic was The Rat Patrol.

Thanks to time well wasted inside the YouTube vortex, I’ve been able to revisit my favourite ever television show. In colour and everything. A search of the Irish rock band Boomtown Rats whom I once anticipated would be the new Rolling Stones instead led me back into the Libyan desert following a 50-year interlude. Two jeeps rigged with heavy machine guns leapt sand dunes and shot up hapless German convoys. To date I’ve watched six of 56 half hour episodes. Despite the show’s absurd historical inaccuracies each once weekly ‘raid’ has so far aged remarkably well. Inside of 24 minutes a somewhat plausible adventure story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and a sub-plot is told.

The Allies’ Western Desert Force was mainly constituted of Britain’s Eighth Army, the famed ‘desert rats.’ It was augmented by Commonwealth troops and free fighters from German occupied countries in Europe. Axis forces consisted of the woefully inept Italian army bolstered by Germany’s hastily formed Afrika Korps. The enemy goal was not so much to drive the British out of Egypt but to move beyond that country and take control of the oil fields of Persia and of course dominate the Mediterranean Sea.

War is a messy business. Nothing ever goes at planned. Desert warfare is particularly tricky: sand and mechanical materiel do not mix well. The front lines were not clearly demarcated, porous. Too few good roads made for vulnerable and tenuous supply lines. The British were wilier than the Germans, improvising, innovating and adapting to the conditions of the North African landscape. The Long Range Patrol, shortly thereafter re-dubbed the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), was formed in 1940. Its mission was to penetrate enemy lines for intelligence purposes. Its members became pathfinders, navigational experts in a monochromatic and ever shifting theatre of sand. In 1941 the elite and now legendary Special Air Service (SAS) commando regiment was conceived and named as such to mislead the Italians and Germans about its combat role and operational capability.

These confounding Rommel raiders, the LRDG and the SAS, are the genesis of The Rat Patrol, a renegade and incongruous quartet of three Yanks and one Brit wreaking havoc miles behind enemy lines. Troy wore an Australian bush hat. Moffat, like Monty, wore a black beret. Hitchcock wore a red French Foreign Legion kepi. Tully wore a standard GI-issue steel helmet. I suspect the headgear wasn’t paying homage to the various combatants so much as acting as character cues to viewers watching a war that was all yellow. I’m now reminded of the bleached, chalky beauty of Three Kings, a caper flick set in Iraq during the first Gulf War and likely inspired by Kelly’s Heroes.

What became of the cast? For the most part, I don’t know nor am I curious. They were good looking and clean shaven, immaculate heroes wearing pressed, comely uniforms amidst the dust and grime 50 miles beyond the front. The actor who played the recurring and always outwitted foe, an Afrika Korps captain, a ‘good’ German, an ethical soldier, still works, starring as the evil and manipulative Victor on The Young and the Restless.

I think Hollywood is a cesspool of unoriginality. I am tired of sequels, remakes and television series revivals. And yet... If a major studio were to revive The Rat Patrol I would happily pay my money at the box office and take my chances in a darkened cinema. My only advice to the would-be producers and writers would be: don’t think future franchise; don’t spend too much time explaining a hopelessly inane and inexplicable origin story; just get to the derring-do; think Mad Max with Nazis.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Ice Man Cometh (Sort of)

Seven, maybe six, possibly eight years ago I was in Toronto on business. I managed to corral a friend for a night on the town after remote office hours. The excursion eventually concluded in a bar on Queen Street - mercifully within weaving distance of my hotel. The joint’s theme was, I vaguely recall, ironic hipster communist, red stars and Groucho Marx and John Lenin and alcohol. Perhaps because of the setting and my friend being a musician and me having had my first novel published, drunken artists unable to make a living off our fields of passion, our conversation turned to politics, specifically the state of the Left.

I pontificated, hopefully in an undertone, that the Left has always been bereft of sensible economic policy but since it had pretty much dictated social mores in our country, and rightfully so, it was now seeking a new windmill to tilt at and its current bete noire was ecology, us in our environment. Whales, gluten and meat had been forsaken for the grander, abstract concept of global warming. And ‘global warming’ had been hastily re-branded as ‘climate change’ and that sudden zigzag in terminology and definition was cause for alarm to an ad man like me because obviously the primary premise had been flawed and the new message came across as a hasty patch to beta Version 1.0. Where were the R and D, and Q and A, anyway?

Well, dear me, was I ever wrong. Time has told. Science too.

Edmonton is Canada’s northernmost major metropolis. It is a winter city, which is to say that for many months of the year it’s fucking cold. The sun’s on a broken dimmer switch, the days are short and the nights are longer than a Baptist Sunday sermon. A recent Bishop of Rome, perhaps John Paul II, allowed that Hell indeed was a human construct. In my Canadian Hell it is 50 below, I am naked, alone, and I am wet. I cannot imagine further misery. Oh, wait, the songs of the Poppy Family as sung by Paul Anka are on eternal repeat.

Growing up I was never a Cub or a Scout, never a joiner. I’ve always preferred my own company excepting those times when it has just been me with me and there’s nothing left to mutter about, only walls to climb. Rah-rah teambuilding advocates whose exercises were endured throughout my career in advertising only fertilized my latent misanthropy. Knowing all of this, I, in a moment of unhinged transcendence, volunteered for our neighbourhood’s outdoor ice rink maintenance crew.

Outdoor hockey is a tired trope in this country, a marketing cliché for anyone who wants to sell anything wrapped in the prickly and nostalgic wool of soft nationalism. Still, there is something magical about shinny, informal games played without persnickety referees, fewer rules and no padding. Hockey is the best sport on Earth when it’s just played by a group of friends with strangers. Nuances need not be negotiated. No goalies means no lifters, hacking and slappers are tacitly forbidden.

My volunteer motives were threefold and entirely selfish. I wanted to force myself to get out as I can easily and pleasurably pass time engrossed in a book or the sides of a record album. I prefer exercise that achieves a companion benefit or result. I cannot comprehend Lululemon gym hamsters who work out on machines that simulate actual activity. The two-inch diameter watering hose is more than 200-feet long and wound on an iron spool, heavy metal and rubber. Finally, a clean sheet of outdoor ice allows me time travel. Alone on a rink wearing a team sweater, I can again be a kid with dreams of growing up and being as good as Jean Beliveau or Bobby Orr.

Ideally you make ice when it’s between eight and 12 below. You lay down a spray over the entire rink and when you retrace your steps to do it again your first layer will be frozen. A proper hockey ready sheet requires some 40 or 50 hours of labour. Watering a base of turf too heavily in milder weather results in unsightly yellow patches because the drenching displaces soil and minerals which rise. The resulting blotches are overly prone to gouging and spot melting on a sunny day. Our volunteer crew efforts to date have been uncoordinated. I visited the rink twice last week but nobody else was there, perhaps because the outdoor temperature was too warm. Like anyone hours into a new job, I hesitated to take the initiative, worried about making slush and undoing what little we’d already accomplished.

The physical plant for our rink, essentially a big tap, is housed in the adjacent community hall. That public building is a new one. It opened in September, over budget and rife with niggling functionality issues mostly caused by a ‘green’ vision of self-sustainability (except the solar panels were too expensive). So - and mercifully, I think, we were unable to take advantage of an insanely bitter cold snap earlier in December because nothing we needed to flood the space worked properly. The rink enclosure had also been utilized as a construction staging area. Consequently the grass was chewed up, rutted, and the re-sodded portions were never mowed. The field was no longer even a suggestion of level.

It snowed all day Christmas Eve. Think of a street as a shallow trench between kerbs, now imagine it filled, unplowed and compacted. Today, five days past the solstice, the weather gave us a bit of a break. Christ was born between six and three B.C. and so he would’ve turned about 2020 on His birthday yesterday and I was feeling that old myself today when the rink manager called seeking labour. I got into my gear and hustled up the street.

The rink manager ran the snow blower. I followed his path wrestling the pull of a mechanical rotary brush, burnishing our thin layer of ice and the stubble poking through it and too inexperienced to sport ear protection against the roar of the motor. Next we chipped off the snow encrusted along the base of the boards and heaved it outside the confines of the rink. Hockey boards are surprisingly high when you’re wearing boots and standing on frozen grass instead of a thick slab of ice. Our goal this holiday week is to somehow have the rink ready for New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow’s forecast indicates a high of zero, in northerly Edmonton, in late December; I’m not confident but I’ll do what I can – weather permitting.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Feng Schadenfreude

This morning was much like other mornings. I sipped my coffee from a Beatles Apple Records mug. I perused the newspapers. The disc jockey on CKUA had gobbled acid with his breakfast oatmeal and was spinning some bizarre stuff, lame Holiday Inn cocktail lounge torch treatments of classic rockers. One of our tabbies had found his way into an enclosed space and was yowling at a blank wall. The other tore at its fur, scattering tufts on the carpet in the hall.

Out on the front porch grey cigarette smoke snaked and swirled away, hotter than the freezing air. Not much higher up, the moon, a pale smudge on fading navy paint behind muslin cloud curtains, hung frozen solid. Somebody somewhere fired up a motor; a lazy idiot using a machine for a sweepable skiff of snow, I thought; during the winter sound carries much as it does over water, sharply. Then the jackhammering began nearby in earnest. Nobody in their right mind busts up concrete in mid-December when it’s 20 below. I worried that a City crew was attempting to expose a compromised water main. Swell, a couple of days without running water. Great. I leaned over the railing and peered down our street.

Our very fine house is situated in what is now considered a desirable inner-city neighbourhood. The river valley, the University and hipper-than-thou Old Strathcona are all within walking distance. Downtown is across the North Saskatchewan River, a ten minute drive or train ride. The community is long established and its trees are described as old growth. Some folks with too much time on their hands are advocating for expensive and pretentious retro-decorative light standards and street signs. Some of us are quite content with the status quo.

Neighbourhoods like forests regenerate over time. Older homes are demolished and replaced by newer models with better insulation and more reliable and safer hidden working guts: PVC pipes, mandated smoke detectors and electrical wiring that doesn’t require hockey tape to function. Interior millwork reflects current décor trends and fashionable materials. Street life isn’t very different for the most part. Infills generally blend into our sloped roof bungalowscape once their new build sheen has been subjected to the wind and the weathering of a season since builders and owners tend to respect the existing character of the community. Generally.

There’s no accounting for taste. Three doors down and on the other side of the street the Borg have begun colonizing Edmonton: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. Somebody postmodern and gauche has commissioned a black cube of a home complete with black windows. The architectural style is sort of Prairie-Brutalist, Nazi bunker with a second storey. It might look all right in a moon crater in a low budget sci-fi film. At least we don’t live in its shadow nor have to look upon it directly.

Our local devil’s radio suggests that there’s some feng shui involved with the design of the simple square – the steel and concrete fortress is worth a million alone, never mind the lot! For instance the front door is actually located on the side of the house to confuse floating evil which only manifests from one direction. There are whispers of a small exterior courtyard hidden within the confines of the cube, very feng shui though impractical in this climate (Where do you pile the snow even if you're shifting it with a gasoline blower?). Maybe grocery store tabloid astrological charts and Facebook memes of affirmation guide the construction and labour of sub-trades?

The jackhammer was working on the new neighbourhood blight. Cracking a surface poured mere weeks ago. Something was wrong, out of sync with the crass micro-universe. Expensive. Good. Now the noise didn’t seem so irritating. I smiled upon the misfortune of the strangers sullying my street. I do not ever want to get to know the Borg because I might actually like them; I will never be assimilated.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Through a Mirror, Cracked

America’s Central Intelligence Agency has stated with “high confidence” that state sanctioned hackers in Russia interfered in last November’s presidential election. Apparently the secure servers of both major political parties were breached but only e-mails deemed detrimental to the Democratic campaign were leaked. President Obama has ordered an investigation. President-elect Trump who has eschewed daily intelligence briefings (there’s a joke in there somewhere) has dismissed the CIA’s allegations. He said somewhat insightfully that if the election had gone the other way and losing Republicans had decried the Kremlin’s influence they would have been derided as conspiracy theorists.

The world of espionage is, to purloin a poetic phrase from T.S. Eliot, “a wilderness of mirrors.” Author John le Carre titled one of his spy thrillers ‘The Looking Glass War.’ James Bond film buffs will recall the climax of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun.’ The assassin hunts 007 in his labyrinthine fun house where killing is a great game enhanced with mirrors. Bond eventually gets his lethal drop on Scaramanga by posing as a pop-up cut-out of himself. What was unreal and expected became unexpectedly real.

The audacious beauty of the Russian hack is that “high confidence” is suspicion but not definitive proof. If it did not happen, the perception that it did is an equally effective result. Either way Moscow is a crafty and powerful global puppeteer; there’s no tell-tale hanging chad. Red state voter suppression laws are likely more culpable for the Clinton Inc. defeat, yet there must be a certain cold comfort in believing the debacle was engineered in part by the security apparatus of a hostile foreign power. Whatever evidence exists, if any, remains in the shadows.

The existing State of the Union is a fine state of affairs indeed. A concerned northern neighbour reluctantly concludes that both of America’s political parties are more concerned with advancing their respective ideologies than prudently seeing to the needs of the country they were created to serve. Political discourse is so toxic that what might be a pressing matter of national security simply mirrors partisan schoolyard hard lines: “Yes they did.” “No they didn’t.” The fact remains that someone has artfully hammered another wedge into a country that is already displaying all the symptoms of a major crack up.