The joy of bigotry
Being an internet junkie with a fair number of pen pals, I get many forwarded messages every week.
Of those, at least one a week enjoins us all to show our patriotism in reaction to some insult or abuse by immigrants, Muslims, even (gasp) liberals.
I’ve seen a message from the man whose Canadian [...]
Reunion, Remembrance, 2000
Her voice was a motor of cigarettes, coffee and draft,
kind, and with all the weary authority of death.
Her laugh was an explosion of bawdy glee,
gusting across an ash tray Armageddon,
smudging the beer rings recording the rounds
on ghost-bleached Formica at the Legion hall.
She said good bye to her first soldier sixty years ago.
Youth’s urgent appointment with [...]
Francis X McKenna Regional Hospital?
The Hugh John Flemming Forestry Centre and the Hugh John Flemming Bridge at Hartland commemorate the late premier’s service to New Brunswick. There is a Senator Richard Hatfield memorial fund at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
There is a monument to Louis J. Robichaud in his home town of Ste. Antoine.
It is past time [...]
Industrial parks and cargo cults
There are primitive tribes, or recently were, who had little interaction with the modern world. The age of aircraft is not so very old.
There were instances when planes crashed in remote jungles and, naturally, attracted the attention of the local residents. They were quite pleased by some of the things they found in [...]
Remembrance
My father used to quote, with amusement, a short refrain:
“You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”
Thanks to Google, I found the verse, and its author, last week.
He was Humbert Wolfe, a British civil servant, critic and [...]
Requiem: The Soldier
Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.
They are speaking together of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin to carry the things they say.
They were [...]