An Unpainted Portrait: Not such a close shave

February 10, 2022

Not such a close shave

Aside from keeping our uniforms in the best possible condition at all times, we were also expected to maintain a high level of personal hygiene. When on parade, for example, a hair out of place, whether it be head or facial, was grounds for serious over-reaction. So when, one fine parade day morning, for some stupid reason I forgot to shave and remembered that fact only as we stood ready for inspection, I knew I was in trouble. At the age of nineteen, my beard growth was less than luxuriant, but this only made things look more obvious. Horrible Harrison prowled the assembled ranks and I waited as he drew closer. Slowly, as a predator stalks its prey, he strolled through the lines of impeccable officers. Unlike a predator, the sound of his boots crunching on the asphalt in the silence of a spring morning gave his location away second by second. With each step, tiny pieces of gravel and the steel hobnails in the soles of his boots met one another and signalled another moment nearer to my doom. He passed behind me first…then around to the front. While maintaining a steady gaze over my shoulder, he stopped a foot in front of me and directly in line with my nose.

Quietly (thinks: oh thank God, he’s in a good mood, he likes me…!) he growled “Have you shaved today mister…” He glanced at my name badge. “…Simmons?” He did a magnificent job of making it sound like “Shithead.” I trembled respectfully, paused, and made an extremely poor choice. Relying on the babyish nature of my chin, I tried to blag my way out of it. “Yes, Sergeant.” I said, instantly feeling myself falling thousands of feet onto cold, jagged rocks…I half-closed my eyes and braced myself. “You have, have you? he almost whispered” “Yes, Sergeant.” (Oh God – I just did it again!) “Oh, I see” he murmured in a thoughtful, almost intrigued way. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him staring across my face, into the distance, perhaps towards a place of execution. I clenched everything I was capable of clenching and one or two other bits joined in for good measure.

After a few moments of silence to heighten the tension, he leaned towards me and without any warning set off an explosion one millimetre away from my face. “YOU BLOODY LIAR!” Obligingly, I jumped a few inches without any help from my legs, my helmet landing slightly askew on my head. “YOU are a BLOODY DISGRACE! GET OFF MY F….” He checked himself. “…MY PARADE SQUARE!” This was delivered with such force and venom that it took a second for me to process that I was being emphatically ordered off the parade square. I’d never seen – or more accurately, heard – anyone ordered off the square before. Wondering what this development might mean for my career, I tried very hard not to soil my underpants. I’d bought some new ones after the grand parade nut-swinging incident, and it would have been a shame to welcome them into the world in such a way. Things just about held together.

However, I’d hesitated a microsecond too long. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, YOU DIMWIT? QUICK MERCH OVER THERE, ‘EFT ‘IGHT, ‘EFT ‘IGHT!” Thus, trembling with every fibre, I found myself ‘merched’ very quickly to a distant corner out of the earshot of the rest of the parade, whereupon he laid into me again with much less volume but the same alarming purple hue to his face. He was genuinely mad. “You f***ing idiot!” he said. “You’ll be outside my accommodation block tomorrow at 0630hrs in best uniform, understand?” “Yes Sergeant”. “Now get out of my sight and get a f***ing shave before you go to class”. I slunk away to have an emergency crap and to ponder both my immediate future along with my stubbly face in the mirror. I didn’t much like the look of either.

The following morning turned out to be one of the very few non-sunny ones we experienced in our time there. In my best uniform – impeccably pressed if I may say so – there I was at 6.30 am, standing disconsolately and in silence outside the drill sergeant’s quarters. Aside from the pulse thumping in my head, all was still. It was also foggy; very foggy. To understand the significance of what this means, I must enlighten you: damp air is the arch enemy of meticulously pressed wool-and-synthetic-fibre uniforms. Mist is an evil little imp that gently and silently removes creases in minutes, but full-blown fog? Fog is the absolute nemesis of the sharpened trouser leg or tunic sleeve. There is no escape from fog. It silently settles upon a pressed uniform and turns it into something resembling chewed newspaper.

Engulfed in the low cloud, I tried not to cry while all the beautiful, precise and sharp creases – the best I’d ever managed after a long and anxious evening sweating over the ironing board – fell out almost audibly. As my trousers turned into something akin to black plastic bin bags, I was still there at 7.00 am… I was still there at 7.30 am, as the much thicker fabric of my tunic sleeves transformed into black, dimpled blancmange. Finally, having been passed by just about everybody on the campus on their way to push their appalling, nutritionally-challenged breakfast around battered Home Office plates, the man himself appeared. He was immaculately turned out as always and on the way to partake of his own grim culinary catastrophe. My hyper-alert senses detected a slight but definite pause as he caught sight of me. He’d forgotten I was going to be there! Twat! Without even looking in my direction he paused directly in front of me, stared into the middle distance somewhere off to my left (he liked doing that) and quietly said out of the side of his mouth in a deep, gravelly voice ravaged by years of screaming at little idiots like me; “F*** off, lad. And never – ever – try to bullshit me again”. It was a lesson well and truly learned.

With a palpitating heart and a damp, crumpled uniform, I raced back to my room, changed into my ‘number two’ rig – which was now in much better shape than my ‘ones’ – and with my mind elsewhere, dispiritedly shuffled off to stare at a breakfast of boiled bacon, boiled fried eggs and boiled toast. Entirely due to the fact that I was unable to taste anything at all through the filter of my humiliation and self-imposed misery it proved, without doubt, to be the best breakfast I consumed during the entire fourteen weeks. Silver linings…

It was yet another one of those small growing up moments that Horrible’s use of the word ‘lad’ served to emphasise. As scared of his wrath as I may have been, this incident led to a conversation with him later that day in the bar. Put very simply, the man was a delight to speak with. Wise, kind and funny, he was full of advice and understanding for a too-young man jumping into a big organization. He succeeded in putting me at my ease as well as reassuring me that, despite the events of the previous morning, disaster did not lie around every corner. I wished – and still wish – that I’d known him for longer, and much better; if I had, I might have learned even more.

Phoenix Riting! – February 10th, 2022

February 10, 2022

Here on Hornby, emotions are again mounting around differing beliefs and priorities, and sparks fly in person as well as online. The most contentious split is between ideals of ‘personal freedom’ vs ‘the common good.’ This is framed as an either/or polarization, as if it is impossible to integrate the two in a workable form.

I submit that these are not contradictory ideals. Personal freedom, i.e. the right to decide what to do with one’s own body and life, and to move freely in society (within reasonable constraints), is a fundamental human need. There cannot be a common good when individuals are forced to deny their needs, no matter how lofty the ideals may be. A group of unhealthy individuals doesn’t add up to a healthy whole. Any true and lasting common good comes as a consequence of a society in which most, if not all, individuals have their basic needs met.

More and more, I see a trend on the ‘progressive’ side of the collective conversation, saying some form of, “We just need to accept that this is the way the world is now, get used to it.” Translation: “Suck it up, you babies, personal freedom and choice are passe, get with the times.” But this sort of attitude is giving alt-right groups the fuel they need to convince ordinary Canadians that they are being oppressed by a tyrannical government, and that, clearly, is a very bad idea.

No matter how many minds are made up about how important and necessary such societal changes are, basic needs remain non-negotiable. Many of us can apply the yardstick of ‘the common good’ to set our needs aside for a certain period of time, and we might even feel good about it–for a time. Eventually there will be a breaking point, and that will be different for different individuals. Certain introverts and those from cultures with a long tradition of compliance with authority might find it easier to follow rules indefinitely.

But the fact remains, humans are a social species. We all want this to be over. Most of us have cooperated, received our vaccinations, stayed home, avoided family gatherings and otherwise complied with restrictions. Yet here we are, two years later with no end in sight. We all feel the pressure mounting, and we wonder, might there be another choice?

The government of Denmark has recently rescinded all Covid restrictions across the board, because despite the highest infection rate in the world currently, they see that hospitals are not being overwhelmed because Omicron is a much milder variant than previous ones. Michael Bang Petersen, an adviser to the Danish government, says, “Pandemic restrictions put on pause fundamental democratic rights. If there’s a critical threat, that pause might be legitimate. But there is an obligation to remove those restrictions quickly when the threat is no longer critical.”

This is a pragmatic and reasonable stance, in my opinion. Restrictions and mandates should be temporary and released as soon as possible. Any suggestion that we should learn to live with these changes as some sort of ‘new normal’ frankly chills my bones. If Covid is indeed the new normal, then we will have to learn to live with it, as we live with the seasonal flu. There are worse things than getting sick. Disease has always been a part of life on this planet. The kind of society in which all disease is eradicated is a dream whose cost is just too high.

People are fed up because they fear that this is going to go on and on, and that we will end up more like China than Denmark. They fear that vaccine passports are only the thin edge of the wedge that forces us into a controlled, machinelike society in which all interactions are monitored and managed by our smartphones.

I fear this as well. That is not a world in which biological organisms with deep seated drives and non-negotiable emotional needs can thrive. We can, and we must create a better world than that.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you! You can reach me at phoenixonhornby@gmail.com.

Simple Living: Tailgate-Party Revolution

February 10, 2022

The Simple Life, Tailgate-Party Revolution. by Maxine Rogers

I have long noticed that the mainstream media will go to almost any length to not report the news. I guess they don’t want to upset their sponsors. For example, in Canada, a country of around 38 million citizens, on Saturday 5 February an estimated 5 million of them were out protesting against the loss of our Charter Rights and Freedoms.

You would never guess this by looking at the CBC. They barely mention the protests and call all 5 million pissed-off Canadians a fringe minority. One of these pissed-off Canadians is the Honorable Brian Peckford, former Premier of Newfoundland. Mr. Peckford is the last surviving First Minister to have worked on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and he has launched a lawsuit against Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Government for their suspension of the Charter Rights over the Covid 19 illness.

Mr. Peckford said the clause that allows suspension of Charter Rights which include freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, security of the person and freedom of movement was intended for a far more serious situation, such as war, insurrection, the state being threatened in its existence or some similar devastation, rather than the emergence of an illness with a greater than 99% survival rate. The reason he was being interviewed on a podcast was that none of the mainstream media in Canada will report on this story.

So, if the CBC will not report on that or on much of anything else then I felt it was up to me to go out and bring eye-witness news to Denman and Hornby. Last Saturday, I set off with some friends to join the Freedom Rally that was starting at Campbell River and would end up at the Legislature in Victoria. The rally organizers asked everyone in the convoy to drive slowly in the right-hand lane with hazard lights on.

We caught up with the convoy just south of Parksville and it was a very jolly event. All the protesters were keeping good convoy discipline and driving safely. The lines of cars, trucks, and transport trucks were decked with Canadian flags. I saw a snippet of Jagmeet Singh saying the Freedom Convoys were flying hateful flags and I would like to ask him just what it is he finds hateful about the Canadian flag?

I have been watching the Freedom protest in Ottawa being livestreamed and have seen nothing but happy, proud and patriotic Canadians waving the Canadian flag. Perhaps Jagmeet needs to get out more and look with his own eyes or maybe he might just want to start respecting the working-class Canadians that he claims to represent and lead.

Anyway, the convoy was a delightful sight with many people flying the Canadian flag on hockey sticks. The sight warmed all our hearts. We passed many groups of supporters, a lot of them with sweet little kids, who were carrying signs of support for the Convoy, such as, “Truckers are our Heroes,” and, “Free Canada.” The overpasses were lined with Freedom Convoy supporters waving their red and white flags. There was a very festive atmosphere. No one was wearing a mask. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta recently came out and said that cloth masks do no good at stopping the spread of viruses so why are we still supposed to wear them?

The convoy was huge. We had to leave it a couple of times for refreshment breaks and when we came back out to the road, there it was still snaking into the distance to the north and south. There has been a lot of loose talk about the Freedom Convoys being made up of racists and misogynists but I was seeing more women than men and it strains credulity to believe that all those women were haters of women. There were a lot of different skin tones among the protesters but I didn’t bother about what races were present because this is not about race, it is about Canadians standing up for their Charter Rights and Freedoms.

It was a long slow drive and we began counting the RCMP cruisers that were parked along the road facing the oncoming convoy, the Mounties sat with their little filming devices in their hands. I was a bit surprised to see one Mounty sitting on the bank by his car, filming the convoy. What surprised me was that he had a full-face rubber mask on to disguise his face, the creature! Who do the Mounties think they are, the Chilean police? Are they ashamed to show their faces? Perhaps, they should be. All we were doing was exercising our constitutional right to peaceful protest and they appeared to be seeking to intimidate us.

The Mountie’s strategy of being the enforcers of illegal government policy is going hilariously wrong at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. Every time the Mounties try to block supplies getting in or harass or arrest peaceful protesters, another group of Freedom Convoy supporters comes up and surrounds their police cruisers, blocking them in. The local farmers and ranchers came up with their big tractors and surrounded the RCMP cruisers at which point, our brave lads in their cop cars were sort of puzzled about what to do next. So, they called the towing companies who declined to come and save their very cold Mounty asses.

The Mounties sent in more cruisers and tried again and were surrounded again by a huge number of just ordinary cars and trucks from the surrounding area. This morning, 6 February, I was delighted to watch what looked like every horse club in Southern Alberta show up mounted on beautiful horses, decked with those glorious Canadian flags Jagmeet and the Trudeau boy find so hateful, and ride in to support the protesters.

You see, Government can only govern with the support of the people. Once millions of Canadians are prepared to do such things as sleep in their tractors in the freezing Alberta night to protect a peaceful protest, I would say the people have withdrawn their support and the government no longer has any legitimacy.

The protest at the Legislature in Victoria was noisy, good natured and fun. All the Denman and Hornby people who went enjoyed it hugely. I will end with some of the slogans I saw painted on the protesters’ signs: “Stand for Freedom or Kneel to Oppression, I prayed for a miracle and got a Convoy, Freedom 4 all, Let’s Make Justin a Drama Teacher Again!, Science that Can’t be Questioned=Propaganda.”

Letter to the Editor – Stewart Goodings

February 10, 2022

Letter to the Editor of the Islands Grapevine

Ottawa used to be my hometown, so I have taken a keen interest in news about the trucker convoy which has occupied Canada’s capital for the last two weeks. Of course, protests on Parliament Hill have always been a regular feature of life in Ottawa. And I agree with so many observers who have acknowledged that peaceful protest is an important right for Canadian citizens.

What is happening in Ottawa is not peaceful protest. It is a blatant denial of the rights of fellow citizens to enjoy safety and security and choice in their own home. Friends in Ottawa have written to tell me of truly aggressive behaviour by convoy participants—for example, ripping masks off people who have made their own choice to respect public health guidelines, urinating and defecting (sic) on private property, honking their vehicle horns at all hours of the day and night, interfering with health care workers going to their work, intimidating senior citizens wanting to get some fresh air, and so on.

Then there is the total disruption of normal life and business for thousands of people who live in the central part of Ottawa, as well as convoy participants flying Trump flags, Swastikas, Confederate flags, and disrespecting national monuments. Need I go on?

And now we have a small number of people from our own two islands proudly supporting this type of irresponsible behaviour by taking their vehicles to Victoria to cause a similar disruption to life in the provincial capital.

As for the Islands Grapevine, each issue seems to be more and more filled with letters from conspiracy theorists, and supposedly intelligent people who display total, or wilful ignorance of science. Even your resident poet seems to be obsessed with writing odes with ludicrous references to conspiracies and Nuremberg trials. It used to be enjoyable to read your weekly publication. Now it frequently induces only high blood pressure and a desire to breathe some clean air instead of the vitriolic abuse spouted by many of your letter writers.

Let’s get a grip on things, folks, and behave like sane and responsible human beings. And truckers, and all your fellow travellers, please go home, get vaccinated and help everyone recover from this pandemic.

Stewart Goodings.

Letter to the Editor

February 10, 2022

Letter to the Editor

Vaccine protesters have often said that the current vaccines are ‘experimental’. They rarely, if ever, explain what they mean and this leads a commentator like myself to ask a few questions. When does ‘experimental’ become accepted for them? Or rejected? How long do they think the ‘experimental’ phase lasts? Does the ‘experimental’ phase end when authorities pronounce the vaccine safe? As vaccines are often developed after the onset of the disease they attempt to prevent, aren’t such vaccines always ‘experimental’? Was the polio vaccine I scarfed down in early 1960’s ‘experimental’?

Another area vaccine protesters completely ignore is the methodology behind the authorization of any vaccine. As there is no such thing as a perfect vaccine—one with no side effects at all—authorization is granted on the basis of a risk assessment. All vaccines exhibit some harmful effects. So in order to assess the usefulness of any vaccine we have to look beyond individual ‘rights’ to communal ones. And the only method we have to do so is ‘risk assessment’ based on the ratio of beneficial to harmful effects determined by a communal count of events. Let me repeat: we cannot escape this common form of assessing danger. Indeed we all do it when we jaywalk. Arguing from individual rights alone asks us to never authorize a vaccine if a single person is harmed. This is not tenable for communal protection. But vaccine protesters deliberately say nothing about the validity of communal ‘rights’ even though they are reserved in Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which protesters so loudly proclaim as definitive. They attempt to divert our attention by quoting spurious figures for deaths from the vaccine itself. We are asked to take as our authority Drs. Bhakdi and Burckhardt. I read their non-peer reviewed preprint—which gave results from 15 autopsies, selected by relatives, not researchers, as to the cause of the deaths. It was stated that the only common factor was the vaccine shot given anywhere from 7 to 180 days before death occurred. There was no indication that the researchers gave any thought to other possible factors in the 15 deaths.

Then there is the infamous Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) which is a self reporting system for the U.S. only (Canada has its own) to which health providers are legally required to report. ANYONE can fill out the VAERS reporting form (I have read it); it does not ask directly for a cause of death but does ask if death occurred. The only way to determine cause of death would be to select reported incidents claiming a link to a vaccine and subject them individually to a rigorous analysis including autopsy. In reporting 150,000 Americans dead from vaccines Jessica Rose and Matthew Crawford did not do this—I have read their report as well. They attempted through statistical means alone to estimate the rate of under reporting anaphylaxis events on VAERS on the premise that anaphylaxis strikes within minutes of a vaccine shot and thus is unequivocally caused by the jab. They did NOT examine in any way causes of actual deaths reported. Having worked out that under reporting was 41X for anaphylaxis (for every reported anaphylaxis case there were 41 unreported), which they admit is a ‘ballpark’ figure, they apply this figure to VAERS reporting of claimed vaccine deaths to get their 150,000 largely unreported ones. Remember at no time did these researchers look at the actual cause of death, if reported, and VAERS does not ask directly for the cause of death.

We have the demand for complete and systematic testing implied by the word ‘experimental’. And we have a research ‘study’ put forward by Bhakdi and Burckhardt which meets no experimental standards whatsoever. Far too small a sample; no control group; no indication of compounding factors; no description of methodology—in short, no science; and a ‘study’ from Rose and Crawford purportedly linking deaths to vaccine but created entirely by statistical manipulation. And when presenting us with the ‘evidence’ for a massive number of deaths due to the vaccines, they do not present us with related figures for the incredibly high number of vaccinated persons who have suffered no side effects; both are necessary for risk assessment. If 15 deaths is enough to prove to vaccine protesters that vaccines caused them, can I put forward my dozen or so friends who have suffered no ill effects from three shots to prove vaccines don’t cause deaths? If you think both claims are ridiculous by any scientific or logical standards you are right.

And then we have the Freedom Truckers. A large number of reasonable Canadians who feel they have some grievances which are being ignored. Among them swim a very small group claiming they will hold Ottawa to ransom until the unelected Senate dissolves our elected national government and puts the country under the direction of the last symbol of real autocratic government in Canada—our Governor-General along with a council of true believers. As they agitate to actually remove much of the political freedom for millions of Canadians they prate about their rights to do so. Like ‘Trumpeters’ and Republicans in Congress they wish to do away with both democracy and freedom, and do it in the name of democracy and freedom.

We live in a cultural age where opinion is sacrosanct; I am entitled to it and you can’t question it. This leaves us with the elephant in the room: what if your opinion is based upon demonstrable lies which you try hard to get others to believe are true. How are we to respond when you hide behind the bulwark of sincerity, individual ‘rights’, and opinion ‘sanctity’? Perception becomes all and those of us who actually believe that there are some provable truths are just whistling in the wind. The truth is what an individual says it is. Evidence is unnecessary. Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism rides again.

Oakley Rankin

Grumpisms

February 10, 2022

Letter to the Editor

February 10, 2022

February 6, 2022

Editor,

The Islands Grapevine,

Dear Editor,

I was impressed (and by that I mean painfully so) by the bulk (not by any means the credence) of anti-vax, anti-mandate, anti-regard for Public Health in the February 3^rd, 2022, edition of the Islands Grapevine.

I suppose there is a sense from some that pummeling the Islands with tons of tomes espousing outlandish outlier opinion (and prosaic propaganda) canonizing the incongruously overwrought Freedom Convoy will in some way justify the positions stake out.

One wonders how the residents of Denman and Hornby would react if a similar subjugation of honking noise and fossil fuel excess clogged the hearts and/or the ferry terminals of both our island communities.

And stayed for a week or a month or forever until the government was overthrown.

I do realize that toppling governments might appeal to a segment of our two communities.

We are all tired of the virus, the means to control/manage it. However, masking, vaccination, vaccine mandates, care for the exhausted health professionals and others on the front lines (including the 90% of truckers who are vaccinated) and, perhaps most importantly, respect for Public Health guiding us through this monstrous maze are essential to the way out of this pandemic-evolving-into-an-endemic Ferris Wheel.

Regards,

Bill Engleson RSW (Retired and Non-Practicing)

Denman Island

www.engleson.ca