The elderly husband is in a wheelchair being pushed through the hospital by his elderly wife. They’ve probably been married for 60 years, but he’s presently vanishing before her eyes. No longer the man she met chasing a dog down a street so many years ago. Now he’s frail and stooped, his shoulders curling forward as if some magnet within his body was  compelling them together. But in spite of this, in spite of his immobility, the hospital slippers, IV bag and bruises crawling up his legs, he’s trying to be cheerful, trying to make the best of things. He says something to his wife, but his voice is a whisper and she can’t hear him. He tries again and it’s the same result. And then he stops trying to talk, and the two of them, so bound, move in silence toward whatever comes next.

I have no idea why the guy brought it to me, other than to remove it from his sphere of responsibility, but it felt like a test. Here, I present you with suffering, what will you now do?

The squirrel lay in a blue recycling bin, ontop of some gravel and a piece of tarp. It’s body no longer worked the way it always had, and whenever it tried to heave itself into an upright position, it could not. Imagine the effort– the desperate and complete effort– it must have taken to do that, again and again and again. The eyes of the animal were terrified and dull, and it seemed obvious that it was dying.

I placed the recycling bin in a shaded place, and then brought out some water and nuts, hoping that over the course of the night it might somehow recover, or die as nature had ordained.

I woke up the next day to see that the animal had lifted itself from the box, travelled perhaps 25 feet, and collapsed on the street. It rose to 40 degrees that day. The situation had become worse, and I could see that my actions had been a feckless half measure, designed to make me feel better more than actually help the squirrel. If I had more courage, I would have killed the squirrel. Or I would have picked him up with my hands, wrapped him in a blanket and carried him into the cool of the apartment. I would have done more than the bare minimum necessary to excuse myself of moral repsonsibility.

It’s funny, when we’re on social media we appear so responsive to suffering, so brave. We stand in solidarity. We sign petitions. We boycott and shame. We make bold proclamations, as if calling troops forth to battle, our virtue and sensitivity shining like fires. But in the real world? When we’re actually called to suffering?

Well, I didn’t do much. My efforts were just enough to make me feel better, you know? I got the squirrel onto the grass, tried to shield it from the sun, and once again set out nuts and water.

As I sat at my desk I could see the squirrel through the window as it lay immobile, occasionaly spasming as it tried to right itself. Other squirrels were arriving, not to help, of course, but to take the nuts I had laid out. It was unbearable to watch, and so I called Animal Services.

They arrived, plucked the squirrel up off the ground with an elongated grabber, swiftly put it into a cage, thanked me for my, I don’t know, participation, and then left. And that was that. The animal’s suffering, the animal’s death, was no longer my responsibility.

Whatever the test was that I was given in the form of this injured squirrel, I am sure I failed. And I cannot help but think of myself online, up to my neck in this absracted reality where we’re all so certain we know what the good is, and how to accomplish it. But when I was literally handed a small opportunity to alleviate another creature’s suffering, my intercession was insufficient, and the unintended consequences of my actions had made matters worse.

I will try to remember this as I move through my days.

******************************************************************************

Heidi hear about Red Hen restaurant. Two-legged owner make two-legger she think BAD DOG leave before dinner!

If some two-legger tell Heidi she have to leave when Heidi about to eat, things gonna get heavy.

Heidi not moving.

Heidi fuck a bitch up.

Heidi well regulated militia.

Heidi shock and awe campaign.

Heidi is Hound of War.

And when Heidi need to eat, Heidi eat.

Heidi eat Red Hen.

Heidi eat Blue Hen.

Heidi eat Yellow Hen.

Heidi eat Fascist Hen.

Heidi eat Progressive Hen.

Heidi eat Space Force Hen.

Heidi don’t care. Heidi eat all the hens. Heidi don’t care politics of hen. Heidi don’t care colour of hen. Heidi don’t care who hen sex with or where hen live. Not important to Heidi if hen or egg come first. Heidi eat both.

Heidi appetite is the law.

It the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, the Beginning and the End.

That all Heidi saying.

And so I did.

The place, stripped to a skeleton staff and now loosely populated by the permanent residents– most of whom were confined to wheelchairs of varying complication– was pretty empty. The days, now shapeless and free of plot, offered little and so I wandered hallway after hallway. Seeming more memory than music, the theme song to MASH drifted from one room I passed,

while another was antiseptic and empty but for Trump/Pence banners taped defiantly to the wall, and then through a doorway, I caught a glimpse of a nurse changing a patient’s tracheotomy tube– so intimate and tender as to be virtually erotic. Downstairs, scattered like islands, I came upon people who sat anchored and voiceless in wheelchairs, each one stationed near a window, watching.

There was a church service later in the morning that took place in the same space that hosted Bingo, Pub Night and all our other events. It was Catholic, which occasioned a few religious props being removed from a box and placed on a cafeteria table, and somehow this act was achingly beautiful.

A strong, elderly woman dressed all in black walked in, made the sign of the cross, and then nodded warmly to all who made eye contact. She went directly to a middle-aged woman who was frozen and strapped into a wheelchair, and touched her with a tenderness that exceeded language. Gently, she pulled a favourite sweater over her head, and then smiling,  began to brush her hair—a mother’s imperishable, radiant love, holier than a saint.

An impossibly old woman was reclined, almost prone, in a wheelchair. Blankets and knitted things covered virtually every inch of her body, and her skin was so very thin, her body so frail, that it seemed as if a soft gust might be enough to push her through the veil. A couple of hospital staff tended to her, telling her that her brother would be there any moment now. Her eyes flickered open at his mention, and as if surfacing through water she said, “Oh, I hope so,” and then she fell back down and in to sleep.

Ten minutes later a tall, elderly man, clearly ill himself, entered and sat stoically beside her. With a bible open on his lap he mumble-prayed along with the priest. He never touched her, nor did he say anything to her while she slept through the service, but it was clear that he was her brother. He was her tie to this world, the one now disintegrating around her into a living mist. Drifting in and out, all of time swirling around her, what version of her brother might she have hoped to summon, what memory returning in dream, what ghost to see her home?

It was a startling thing to see in downtown Toronto, this unadorned and pitiless majesty.

Had the bird taken it’s victim in mid-flight, plucking it from unsuspecting air?
Had it tracked it’s prey at great velocity, and then it’s sharp, sudden talons piercing the animal, and then the wood upon which the creature had been scurrying?

My eyesight is not great, and the bird receded back into the camouflage of the tree. I stared up at that tree– that tree which could have been two centuries old– for a long time, hoping to see that world flicker back into mine, but it did not, and this vivid life of blood and bone would remain known but unseen. A reminder on a cold, November day of this other world, of how quickly, astonishingly and with unsentimental finality, it will one day make it’s presence known to each of us.

******************************************

On a winter day while hiking through the woods, Rachelle’s father Terry came across the imprint of an owl’s wings and body in the snow. From the tracks, he could see that it had been following a mouse of some sort, and then swooped down, picking the creature up from the surface and carrying him up and off to death. He took a photograph of the imprint, and it’s amazing to see such a moment crystallized, to see just the shadow of this small and brutal divinity.

It has always reminded me of this poem by Mary Oliver:
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
by Mary Oliver
Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

His pitches were comets from distant and never imagined galaxies. They were rockets, they were bombs, they were terrifying, curving flourishes that made you think you were watching the astonishing dazzle of an alien technology. It was a new kind of physics, one that allowed him to perform stunning feats that lifted us from our lousy, mortal shells,.

He was a blazing fire, a goddamned Demi-God.

Fernandez died in a boating accident on Sunday at the age of 24.

( This is a photograph of Dee Gordon, Jose Fernandez’s teammate. Gordon is known for his speed, not his power, and he is so thin and little that he truly looks like a child out there amongst the gigantic professional athletes. On the first game back after his friend’s death, in his first at bat, he hit a home run, and as he circled the bases he wept like a boy. As he said later in an interview, “I ain’t never hit a ball that far, even in batting practice. I told the boys, ‘If you all don’t believe in God, you better start.’ For that to happen today, we had some help.”)

Three times, Jose attempted to defect from Cuba to the US unsuccessfully, and after each failed attempt he was put in prison where, still a boy, he shared space with hard and dangerous men. In 2007, at the age of 15, he made the crossing successfully, but not before somebody on his boat was washed overboard. Fernandez, operating on the pure instinct of a boy that age, when right and wrong seem clear, and your body, your entire life, is still radiant and unlimited, dove into the night waters to save the person. He had no idea who had been swept into the ocean, and with each stroke he took, an eight-foot wave grabbed him, lifting him up into the shifting darkness above, before splashing down and submerging him again. The person, somewhere before him, bobbing in and out of sight, was his mother. He got to her, told her to hold tight to his left shoulder, asked her not to push down, and slowly swam her back to the boat.

Imagine that.

Imagine doing something so great with your life.

His baseball career was short and beautiful and joyous. It was something to behold, each start an event I got excited for, anticipating it the same way some other people might anticipate a new Game of Thrones episode or a Bruce Springsteen concert.

He was, in a word, awesome, and his death was a tragedy for the communities he lived amongst, and even beyond, even to a 50 year-old white guy living in Toronto who found himself trying to explain to his wife why he’s crying about the death of some pitcher on his fantasy baseball team.

The boat Fernandez was on the night of his death was traveling around 55-60 mph. He was with two of his friends, both around his age, and it was late. It would have been dark, black even– nothing but the feel of water beneath and sky above. Everything beautiful, the wind and spray and stars in his face, infinity spreading out in all directions…And Jose Fernandez, soon to be a father, moving into the future with such velocity, confidence and hard earned momentum… And then the boat hit a rock jetty and all three of the men died on impact.

Just like that.

They would not have known what had happened.

Our lives are so brief.

We’re all speeding through the dark, the beautiful and the damned, alike, each one of us luckier and more vulnerable than we could ever imagine.

It’s been well over a week now since Ammon Bundy and his militia men took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Oregon.

As the harsh winter falls like ash around them, neither the Federal Government nor The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom have shown even a hint of quit.

****************************

The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom Press Conference, January 14th, 2016

Ammon Bundy: Once again, our intelligence gathering services have had to bring us some very bad news.

On the heels of the death of our great teacher and brother, David Bowie, another true patriot and giant amongst men has been taken from us. Our comrade, Alan Rickman, star of stage and screen, has fallen.

Ryan Bundy: This is bullcrap, man!! Bullcrap!!

Ammon Bundy: Easy brother, easy.

Ryan Bundy: By the hammer of Grabthar, we shall be avenged!!

Ammon Bundy: Rickman died as he lived, with his boots on.

While carrying out an assault on a government facility in Northern California, Rickman was struck down by a hail of gunfire from CIA operatives posing as paramedics. It was a cowardly and treacherous act and….What? Well, where did you hear that? Really? Really? Did TMZ report that, too? Well, geez. Cancer, hunh? Do they think it was planted in his body by the government. Inconclusive, eh? Okay. Okay. Give me a moment. Just bear with me! This is a very stressful time, okay? Don’t forget, I’m fighting tyranny here, for you and your children, so just cut me some slack! I’m doing God’s will, not yours, okay!?

(Conference is interrupted for five minutes)

Ammon Bundy: Okay, thanks for your patience. Sometimes constitutional freedom take a little bit of time.

Our intelligence department has just confirmed that Alan Rickman died under very mysterious circumstances late last night. Naturally, many of my men– myself included–have been shaken to the core by this devastating news. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s not my style, but there were more than a few tears shed last night. Three more of our men, devastated by grief, just like when Ziggy Stardust took his final bow, left the encampment and returned home this morning, and as always we wish them Godspeed.

Ryan Bundy: May our comrades ride as swiftly and surely to their families as Alan Rickman to Kate Winslet, in his portrayal of noble Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility!

Ammon Bundy: As always, we will continue the battle, to be the tip of the spear, just as Professor Severus Snape would have wanted. If he were here right now, he would cast a spell on the government and we would all be enjoying the land that is rightfully ours to profit from.

It is hard to imagine, but it was only a few short weeks ago that my family and I sat around enjoying Rickman’s brilliant work in that modern Christmas classic, Love Actually. Yeah, I can see more than a few smiles in the press gallery, there. Rickman spoke to us all, even godless, liberal media, and he had the truly unique ability to tap into the soul of the white, middle-aged man and speak directly to us.

Ryan Bundy: Lord, I related, I related so hard, for who amongst our clan hasn’t made the mistake of giving our wives a Joni Mitchell CD for Christmas!?

Ammon Bundy: Hallelujah, brother, don’t I know it!

Alan Rickman told the difficult truths. His portrayal of complex antagonists is what made me want to get into the business of fighting for the Constitution and taking over government buildings. I had always hoped to find an adversary as strong and charismatic as Rickman– a Hans Gruber to my John McClane.

We will miss him truly, madly and deeply. May a flight of angels carry you home, brave soldier.

]]> http://michaelmurray.ca/militia-men-on-alan-rickman/feed 0 http://michaelmurray.ca/david-bowieoregon-standoff http://michaelmurray.ca/david-bowieoregon-standoff#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:50:50 +0000
Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$cat_ID is deprecated in /home2/michafe9/public_html/wp-includes/category.php on line 378

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$category_count is deprecated in /home2/michafe9/public_html/wp-includes/category.php on line 379

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$category_description is deprecated in /home2/michafe9/public_html/wp-includes/category.php on line 380

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$cat_name is deprecated in /home2/michafe9/public_html/wp-includes/category.php on line 381

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$category_nicename is deprecated in /home2/michafe9/public_html/wp-includes/category.php on line 382

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$category_parent is deprecated in /home2/michafe9/public_html/wp-includes/category.php on line 383
http://michaelmurray.ca/?p=5632 It’s been over a week now since Ammon Bundy and his armed band of Constitutional enthusiasts took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Oregon. There’s been no hint of resolution to their standoff with the government and things are becoming increasingly tense.

************************************

The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom Press Conference, January 12th, 2016

Ammon Bundy: Our intelligence officers have informed us that David Bowie has passed away. After careful study we have confirmed this as true, and not some prepared government disinformation constructed to demoralize my patriots. The news came as an absolute shock to The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, and we feel that we’ve lost a brother in our fight against tyranny.

Ryan Bundy: He was our Diamond Dog, may the Lord hold him in his sweet embrace! Swing low, sweet chariot!

Ammon Bundy: David Bowie was a formative presence in my life. It was difficult for many of us, confused young militia men marginalized by government tyranny, to come to grips with the strange and new feelings we were experiencing while growing up in remote Nevada.

Our constitutional urges were so strong and they felt so true, yet still, the mainstream shunned us for them.

David Bowie…. okay okay, just give me a sec. His passing there, guess it dug deep… Giving me feelings… You know how you put stuff in a closet and you don’t look in there, and then something happens one day and it all just comes spilling out in tears, gunfire and arson? That’s what this is like. I’m just a little emotional here, but let me tell you, if there’s one thing David Bowie taught me, it’s that it’s okay to be different, and I will be different for the Constitution, knowing that it is okay to enforce my interpretation of the Constitution on the nation by any means necessary.

Ryan Bundy: Hallelujah, they named a knife after the shape shifter! Bowie was the man!!

Ammon Bundy: As you might imagine, many of the men are shaken, some so much so that all of their resolve has left them. We lost five men to grief last night. Crippled by sadness, they drove home to their wives and families, and soon will be watching the NFL playoffs and listening to their favourite David Bowie songs. We wish them godspeed. However, the rest of us have rededicated ourselves to the struggle David would want us to fight. David Bowie, apart from being a creative genius, generous spirit, and fashion icon, was first and foremost a patriot, and he would want us to continue in our battle against tyranny.

Ryan Bundy: Anybody who slept with Susan Sarandon and lists Frank O’Hara amongst his favourite poets is okay in my books! He’s my starman in the sky!

Ammon Bundy: And so, until the government– stooge to the bird lobby– cedes to our demands and gives us, The People, all the land they own, we will remain, defending freedom.

We will be heroes.

Ryan Bundy: Please, American patriots, do not forget to send in food and snack donations, keeping in mind some of the warrior’s dietary restrictions, such as nuts and gluten! Nuts and gluten are weapons of tyranny! Just press Donate on the Donate tab on our Facebook page. Long live our Space Oddity and death to tyranny!

This took place over the killing of Cecil the lion. This particular animal, one of the most famous and iconic in Africa, was lured out of the animal sanctuary in which he lived by a hunting party that had tied a dead animal to a car, and later shot with a crossbow by an American dentist (Walter Palmer), and then after two days of bleeding and being tracked, was shot and killed by the same dentist with a high-powered gun, and then left, beheaded and skinned.

It was a big story, and it completely dominated all of my social media streams. People were heartbroken (Jimmy Kimmel wept on his late night talk show while talking about it) and generally, the public was mad enough to club the dentist to death. Threatened from all quarters and publicly shamed, Palmer closed down his practice and went into hiding.

In the midst of this raging solidarity of hate, many people took the time to point out that other atrocities, many unimaginable, were taking place in the world, too, and maybe we could pay the same attention that we do to an animal being killed, to a person being killed? I mean, in terms of popular outrage, Sandra Bland, a black woman who mysteriously died in police custody after committing a traffic violation, was running a distant second to Cecil the lion.

It’s a meaningful observation, that, but I don’t think we should jump to the conclusion that the public values the life of Cecil over Bland.

Every single person on the planet can be angry and disgusted at the thought of a rich, white American, a dentist of all things– a person who makes fake smiles for a living– going over to a poor continent, and then killing, for his pleasure alone, an awe-inspiring creature that’s both a beautiful national symbol and resource.

The horror is plain for all to see. It’s a simple story upon which everybody can agree, and it isn’t as politically toxic or geopolitically complex as racism, police brutality and entitlement, or Boko Haram. You don’t need to be informed to have an opinion on Cecil’s demise—what happened was awful and wrong. There was unanimity on this issue and it wasn’t politicized. For a moment, there was a debate-free zone on the Internet, which I think was a huge relief. For once, people could feel that they were right without having to engage in a long, complex debate, without actually having to defend their position.

We process what we’re capable of, and this was an uncomplicated story that was easily digested and then agreeably shared amongst peers. It’s not the most important story of the day, but it has great symbolic weight, and like an emoji, is breezily transmitted without the necessity of much background context or rumination.

The outpouring on Facebook isn’t evidence of a preference for the superficial over the substantive, or of some political polarity, but of people finding agreement, even celebrating it, and existing in a cease fire for a moment. And in this place where right and wrong are universally agreed upon, they find that their voice– which doesn’t carry very far in the humdrum prose of their daily lives– is now amplified, becoming powerful and vivid, strong enough to go places their bodies will never travel.

One of the repeating themes I’ve encountered is that people cannot believe that somebody who made them laugh so much could possibly have such a sad and broken interior. There’s an obvious lack of empathy in such a position, in that these people cannot see a life beyond the surface one that they so greedily absorbed. To be a celebrity in our culture is to give up one’s interior, becoming a vessel in which the schizophrenic projections of the public push everything else out. It must get awfully stormy in there, and in the end celebrities exist as sacrifices to our need, the actual person (or self) tossed beautiful and adored into the raging, all-consuming volcano of our culture.

Williams himself said that in America they really do mythologize people when they’re dead, and prophetically, he’s now being mythologized. His death means whatever we need it to mean. For some people, it’s a clarion call to awaken the public to the insidious dangers of depression, to others it’s about the dark weight that many comedians carry with them on stage. Everybody seems to have something very real and personal that they feel in his death, but usually end up cannibalizing Williams in an attempt to find some sort of meaning, and perhaps even redemption, in this small, solitary and very sad act.

However, the one thing that seems universal is that everybody is declaring Robin Williams a genius. Although I am of the right age to have experienced the full sweep of his career, I was never much of a fan. I mean, I don’t have a favourite Robin William moment, and like a lot of people I saw a riot of pathology in his performance rather than genius. His need was so great and his onslaught so relentless, that I found it completely exhausting to watch him. He drained me, and I just wanted to hug him into stillness, letting him know that everything was going to be okay, even if it wasn’t.

His comedy was based on recognition rather than content. Middle-of-the-road and Baby Boomer friendly, he was an unfiltered convulsion of mimicry and pop culture references. He was elliptical, swinging from one character to the next before you could think about what he was actually saying, apparently being content in simply getting a reflex response from the audience instead of a contemplated one. You laughed because you recognized his characters, not so much because of what they were saying. It was nostalgic, even old-fashioned, and in a weird way I think Williams would have made for a fantastic silent movie star, so exaggerated was his stage personality. Creating the manic illusion of edge, Williams was safe and not very challenging. He had kind and vulnerable eyes, and always seemed to want to please us, for us to feel good about ourselves, and I think we loved him for that rather than his talent.