Anyway

Although there’s lots in the paper about it, and people wear­ing pop­pies are every­where, Remem­brance Day seems to have less of a hold over Cana­dian life than Anzac Day in either New Zea­l­and or Aus­tralia. Anzac Day com­mem­or­ates the Anzac (Aus­tralia and New Zea­l­and Army Corps) losses at Gal­lipoli in the First World War on April 25th each year. It is extremely import­ant to New Zeal­anders, no mat­ter what their polit­ics — Anzac Day enjoys unusu­al rev­er­ence in a coun­try where emo­tion­al pub­lic rituals are oth­er­wise absent.

As a child, I nev­er went to the Dawn Ser­vice (liv­ing on a dairy farm, the cows are milked at dawn wheth­er it’s Anzac Day or not). Nev­er­the­less, it seems the right time of day to me, the sun slowly rising up the autum­nal sky, her­ald­ing a new day while the liv­ing remem­ber the sac­ri­fices made by so many. I under­stand why the Remem­brance Day ser­vices here start at 11 am, but emo­tion­ally dawn means so much more.

Remem­brance Day and Anzac Day are both days for remem­ber­ing and mourn­ing and won­der­ing what it will take (or, indeed, if it’s even pos­sible) for humans to learn to nego­ti­ate with words rather than muni­tions. The cur­rent news from much of Africa reminds us all how hard that is.

As I write this the res­ults of this year’s U.S. elec­tion are not yet known. There are reports of long lines to vote, of people vot­ing who haven’t voted before, this all adds up to a sense that this year is his­tor­ic. Part of it is prob­ably that blogs and the appar­at­us around them (searches, aggreg­at­ors, microb­logs) are so much more pre­val­ent now that the voices of many dif­fer­ent people are com­ing through in a way far more access­ible to those of us who don’t live in the U.S. than they were four years ago.

And so many of those people sound as if they’re con­vinced that if their side does­n’t win, the U.S. will fall off a cliff and nev­er be able to recov­er, a view some­what at odds with the view that the U.S. is a great and robust coun­try. Maybe it’s just elec­tion­eer­ing, as some Amer­ic­ans have said to me when I raised the issue, maybe not. In Canada the res­ults of elec­tions make the coun­try veer one way or anoth­er, but not change dir­ec­tion rad­ic­ally; there isn’t the fight over who gets to appoint the supreme court judges, for example, that there is in the U.S.

The bit I have found most dis­con­cert­ing in the whole pro­cess, which has been going on for months now, is the demon­isa­tion of each side’s sup­port­ers, the assump­tion they’re not intelligent/patriotic/… enough. The level of vit­ri­ol hurled around is astound­ing, not only at the can­did­ates them­selves, but at their sup­port­ers, and I’ve found myself won­der­ing how the U.S. will cope after this elec­tion, when (or wheth­er) the tribes will talk to each oth­er again, how soon they’ll start up again with the pre­par­a­tions for the next con­test. One of the few writ­ings I’ve seen that have explained it to me is from Chris Lott; read the com­ments as well. I guess I tend to live in coun­tries where the polit­ics mostly fall with­in the realm of what I find reas­on­able; were I to live in anoth­er coun­try, my reac­tions to the machinery of polit­ics might be dif­fer­ent. This elec­tion is show­cas­ing the jost­ling of the fed­er­al and the state, the clash­ing of the world views, and the con­front­a­tion of the tribes with the oth­er tribes. 

The news has been almost uni­formly bad, these last couple of months. What had been com­plaints of too much money chas­ing too few good assets has now turned into the rout of too little money being avail­able to buy any assets, prov­ing yet again that there is no intrins­ic value to any­thing oth­er than what someone will pay for it. Ice­land, Ukraine, and Hun­gary are being bailed out by the IMF, Japan­ese banks are being restruc­tured again, and people are anxiously draw­ing par­al­lels with the great depres­sion and con­vin­cing them­selves that this set of cir­cum­stances is dif­fer­ent enough for safety. 

And in the mean­time, the sun is shin­ing, while the autumn leaves are fall­ing and make sat­is­fy­ing crisp sounds when you walk on them. I showed off my latest pro­ject at a Sun-intern­al con­fer­ence last week, got lots of good feed­back, and am hav­ing a lot of fun work­ing with a great team of people. It almost seems sur­real, this exper­i­ence of real work and life placed against the back­drop of what’s brought on the news as often as you can stand to watch or listen to it.

We cer­tainly do live in inter­est­ing times.