Fifty Shades of Black (6 page)

 

 

Of Beavers and Bullets

K
now what I like best about Canada's national symbol, the beaver?

It's not imperial. Not for us the American eagle with its razor talons, the British bulldog with its gobful of teeth or the ballsy Gallic rooster that struts symbolically for France.

Canadians chose a docile rodent with buckteeth, a potbelly and a tail that looks like it was run over by a Zamboni. We could have opted for a ferocious wolf, a majestic moose, a mighty bison or a fearsome polar bear.

We went with the flabby furball that wouldn't harm a black fly.

Maybe that set the pattern for our provincial emblems because they're pretty bland and inoffensive too. British Columbia has the Steller's jay; Newfoundland and Labrador went for the Atlantic puffin. For Ontario it's the common loon (perfect—what with having Ottawa and all) and New Brunswick stands behind the mighty black-capped chickadee.

I'm not sneering about this. I think it's positively endearing that Canadians chose non-threatening, peaceable symbols to represent their provinces. For our prickly cousins to the south, it's a little different. They go for
state guns
. Arizona has just proclaimed its official state firearm: the Colt single-action army revolver. It's the long-barrelled, six-cylinder shootin' iron favoured by Wyatt Earp and various other sanctified thugs of the American Wild West.

Arizona was late off the mark—the state of Utah has already declared its official state firearm: the Browning M1911, a semi-automatic .45 calibre handgun.

Is the Browning M1911 for hunting elk or target shooting? Nah. Its purpose is to kill people, period. It was developed by gun maker John Browning specifically for the US Army, which had put out tenders for a handgun powerful enough to drop an enemy soldier with a single shot.

I can see how the Army might lust after a powerful heater like the Browning M1911. It's more difficult to figure out why any state legislature feels it needs to honour an instrument the only purpose of which is homicide. You'd think that American politicians might be just a tad sensitive to the idea of venerating a weapon of semi–mass destruction after US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with ­eighteen other unarmed citizens in Tucson by a lunatic armed with—guess what? A semi-automatic handgun.

But then, Arizona has a different take on handguns—a different take on a lot of things—than most of us. It has a state reptile (the rattlesnake)—even a state tie (the bolo). And if you google “Arizona motorcycle seat” you will see an item that's very big among some bikers in the Grand Canyon state. It's a leather motorcycle saddle with a couple of extra features: along the back is a cartridge belt for bullets and on the flank is a holster for a long-barrelled revolver.

Just what I want to see thundering down the highway at me—a biker on a Harley with one hand on the throttle and the other thumbing back the hammer on his hog leg pistol.

Wouldn't raise an eyebrow in Arizona I guess. Former state senator Republican Lori Klein was asked in a 2011 interview if it was true that she carried a raspberry pink pistol in her purse.

“Aw, it's so cute,” she enthused, as she pulled out a .380 Ruger and pointed it at the reporter's chest. The nervous reporter noted that the gun seemed to have no safety mechanism. Klein assured him that it was all right because she “didn't have a finger on the trigger.”

Not every American politician takes a Dirty Harry attitude to guns. One of them once said this at a press conference: “With all the violence and murder and killings we've had in the United States, I think you'll agree that we must keep firearms from people who have no business with guns.”

Sounds pretty reasonable to me, but what do I know—I'm a beaver boy, a Canadian. American politicians ignored the politician when he made that statement.

And that's a pity. His name was Robert F. Kennedy.

 

 

Of Diamonds and Medallions

C
hristmas, in all its weirdness, is coming.

Of course it's weird—flying reindeer? Trees in living rooms? Legions of non-union elves toiling above the Arctic Circle for room and board and one day off a year—you think that's normal?

And isn't it just a tad weird to look forward to a beard-o in a red suit slithering down the chimney in the middle of the night? To welcome a break and enter by a guy whose entire vocabulary consists of three “hos”? We Canucks are pretty happy-go-lucky about it. The Dutch? Not so much.

Dutch folklore features an Old Testament Santa, more Mafia don than jolly saint. In the Netherlands Sinterklaas rewards good kids with candy. Bad kids? Fuggedaboutit. They get a lump of coal.

Personally, I'd go for the lump of coal. I don't have much of a sweet tooth, for starters. Besides, it's been a long time since I held an actual chunk of anthracite. When I was a kid our cellar was half-full of the stuff every winter. I wasn't that enamoured of coal then because I had to shovel it into buckets and hump them upstairs to the fireplace.

So I can empathize with rebellious Dutch kids. Back when coal was the common source of domestic heat, getting a present of a chunk of the stuff was a bit like being slapped with a wet haddock.

Times change. Why, just last month a chunk of coal about the size of your ear sold at Sotheby's auction house in Geneva, Switzerland.

For a little over twelve million dollars.

True, it was a rather special lump of coal—found in a mine in South Africa last year and lovingly cut and polished by the finest craftsmen in New York. And they don't call it a lump of coal. They call it the Sun-Drop—the world's largest pear-shaped yellow diamond. (The buyer remains anonymous but I like to imagine he's some faceless, filthy rich Goldman-Sachs junk bond trader who parlayed some of his bailout money into a rock that he hopes will help him Get Lucky tonight.)

It's no secret that expensive things come in small packages, but usually those small things are intrinsically valuable, like the Sun-Drop diamond, a gold nugget or a baggie of Colombian marching powder.

But tin? Whoever heard of paying a million dollars for a piece of tin?

New York cabbies, that's who. One million dollars is the going price for the medallion that must, by law, be affixed to the hood of every legal Yellow Cab in New York City. What's more, it's a bargain.

It would have been smarter to pick one up back in 1937 when they first came out. The medallions sold for ten bucks a pop then. In the last three decades the price of a New York City cab medallion has soared by a gobsmacking 1,900 percent, making it more profitable than gold or oil.

The reason? Same as diamonds: scarcity. There are just over fourteen thousand medallions in circulation, a number that's hardly changed in seventy-five years. The NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission prefers to keep the medallions rare and treasured. So ­treasured that there's a company called Medallion Financial Corporation that exists solely to provide loans to cabbies who want to purchase their own medallion.

And how does a guy, earning a hack's wages, manage to do that? Simple, according to Andrew Murstein, president of Medallion Financial.

“A guy comes to this country, drives a cab six days a week, twelve hours a day, after three years, takes his whole life savings and puts it down to buy a medallion,” Murstein said. “This is a way for him to get a piece of the American dream.”

Sounds more like a nightmare to me, but then so does living in New York City. My pal Eddie says I'm a wuss and I've got it all wrong. He used to drive cab in the Big Apple. “People say New Yorkers can't get along,” says Eddie. “Not true. Once I saw two New Yorkers—complete strangers—sharing a cab. One guy took the tires; the other guy took the radio.”

 

 

Underground with the Viet Cong

I
have no trouble accepting the premise that War Is Hell. I've never fought in one and impending geezerhood pretty much ensures I'll never have to. I thank my lucky stars for that.

But if the fickle Fates decide otherwise and the future finds me outfitted in helmet, army boots and twenty kilos' worth of combat kit on my back I have just one small request to make.

If I have to fight in a war, please don't make me fight it underground.

My recent trip to Southeast Asia included a visit to the Cu Chi district of Vietnam, a swath of lush jungle about fifty kilometres northwest of Ho Chi Minh City. Well, it's lush jungle now, but forty or fifty years ago it was a blasted and cratered moonscape of mud and shredded timber where nothing moved or grew.

That would be a direct result of the five hundred thousand tons of explosives US bombers had dropped on the area. They were trying to root out the Viet Cong who used the Cu Chi district as a military stronghold. All those bombs didn't make much difference because the Viet Cong were underground in an incredible network of tunnels that ran for 150 miles over a 100-square-mile area. But they weren't merely tunnels. The VC had constructed a maze, a complex—a virtual city that was three storeys deep in places. It incorporated sleeping quarters, meeting rooms, a command post, weapons storage, kitchens, emergency ORs—even weapons factories.

Actually, “factory” is gilding the lotus somewhat. A “factory” consisted of a few guys in black pyjamas hunkered down in the dark hammering and hacksawing chunks of bombshell debris.

As it happens, the soil in the Cu Chi area readily lends itself to the construction of tunnels. It's a mixture of clay, sand and rock that, on exposure to air, hardens like cement.

US forces weren't entirely unaware of the presence of the tunnels but they had no clue how extensive they were, and they weren't likely to find out by exploring them. The tunnels were low and narrow, built to accommodate the smaller bodies of Vietnamese, not a GI's strapping bulk. Then, too, the prospect of shimmying into a black void infested with poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, rats AND armed enemy soldiers, all in stifling jungle heat, can't have held much appeal. Accordingly, troops finding a concealed tunnel entrance usually elected to pump in poison gas or toss in a few grenades, fill in the entrance and move on.

So what was it like for the Viet Cong who lived in and fought out of the Cu Chi tunnels? Not good. Aside from being carpet-bombed almost daily, they suffered from a variety of pestilences. A captured Viet Cong document indicated that at any given time more than half the underground troops were stricken with malaria and that “one hundred percent had intestinal parasites of significance.” Human beings aren't designed to live in tunnels. The air was bad, the diet was pathetic and the denizens had to learn to live in a permanent hunch in pretty much perpetual darkness. Viet Cong who didn't die outright suffered from severe vitamin deficiency that left them with enlarged heads, weak eyes, bad hearts, swollen feet and severe respiratory infections.

Sixteen thousand Viet Cong fought out of the Cu Chi tunnels during what they call “the American War.” Twelve thousand of them lie buried in graves that carpet the outskirts of the tunnels.

Do the math. Three-quarters of the troops fighting for Ho Chi Minh in the Cu Chi tunnels died there. Clearly the whole tunnel offensive was a devastating defeat for the North Vietnamese forces.

And yet . . .

The official name of the nearest city is Ho Chi Minh City, not Saigon. It was changed in spirit the day a Viet Cong commando squad briefly but humiliatingly took over the US Embassy in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Those Viet Cong operated out of the tunnels at Cu Chi.

The war is over and, incredibly, Western tourists are warmly welcomed in Vietnam. We can even tour short sections of the tunnels at Cu Chi—sections that have been purposely enlarged to accommodate our Western bodies. Even at that it's a cramped and uncomfortable experience—unimaginable as a way of life.

As one sweaty, wide-eyed Canadian tourist said, emerging into the sunlight from the Cu Chi tunnels, “No wonder they won.”

 

 

Armed and Out to Lunch

W
hat do you do when you realize the guy who lives next to you is nuts?

I don't mean “eccentric” or “dippy.” I mean stark staring, bring-the-butterfly-nets nuts.

I thought about having him arrested, but I think he's got more pull with the cops than I have. Besides, he's pretty big—and he has a mean streak that stretches from here to Baghdad. I'm not talking about my personal next-door neighbour—he's fine (besides I've still got his lawnmower). No, I'm talking about OUR neighbour—the US of A.

Why do I think America's nuts? Let me count the ways. Let's start with the cartoon characters the Republican Party offered for presidential consideration last time around. Let's see . . . there was Newt the crook and Michele the loony; Cain the serial stickman and Rick Santorum, whom even the atrocious Ron Paul called “atrocious.” At the bottom of the barrel they found a corporation called MITT, hooked it up to Lyin' Ryan and that's the ticket they ultimately went with.

But when you see how some other American elected officials turned out, maybe R&R Inc. wasn't such a nutty combo. Consider Judge Tom Head of Lubbock County, Texas. During the run-up to the election, the judge warned in a TV interview that if Republicans lost, the US would be invaded by United Nations troops. If Obama got the nod, Judge Head solemnly informed the TV audience, he would “hand over sovereignty of the US to the UN” and send in “UN troops with the little blue beanies.”

Let me repeat: this is a judge speaking. He is a representative who was (presumably) democratically selected and elected as the candidate most suitable to interpret the laws of the country.

It isn't just Texas either. Lawmakers in Virginia recently wrestled with the problem of rising sea levels. Scientists have confirmed that those levels along the Virginia coastline have already risen a foot and are still rising. Grudgingly the lawmakers voted to fund a study of the problem—but only if all mention of “climate change” and “sea-level rise” was stricken from the bill. Reason? Because, said a spokesman for the Republican majority, “‘sea-level rise' is a left-wing term.”

Unfortunately, American nuttiness doesn't restrict itself to legislative bodies. It begins in the schools. A student by the name of Hunter Spanjer recently ran afoul of school authorities in Grand Island, Nebraska.

The boy is not your typical school delinquent; Hunter is four years old and deaf. Like most deaf people who use sign language, Hunter has a “nickname” gesture that he uses to identify himself. He points his index and middle finger together while he balls up his thumb and other fingers behind it. When Hunter introduces himself, he holds out his hand in this configuration and shakes it once or twice. That's how he says hello and it's kind of cute. Like a toy pistol. Hunter—get it?

Grand Island school officials got it. They ordered Hunter to cease and desist using the gesture because Grand Island Public Schools has a zero tolerance policy against “any instrument . . . that looks like a weapon.”

Including a chubby pink fist attached to a four-year-old deaf kid.

Meanwhile, at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, officials banned water pistols, sticks, knives, even pieces of string—presumably because they might be construed as weapons.

But concealed pistols and automatic handguns? No problem, bring 'em on. Florida gun laws prohibit any local restriction on the carrying of guns.

In 2010, 170 Canadians died by guns, which is grisly enough. The number of Americans killed by guns in the same period: 8,775.

Bad enough when your next-door neighbour is nuts.

Even worse when he's armed.