Major & Minor Notes

Joe Macdonald's Stories & Songs

A Writer Writes

By

My father-in-law was a comedian, a writer and an actor. He had a very successful career and didn’t retire from performing until he was eighty years old. However, he didn’t ever really stop writing and continued to express himself with the written word for the final ten years of his life.

Dave as character Big Bobby Clobber

When my wife and I would visit her parents in Toronto during the holidays or on long weekends, it wasn’t unusual for Dave to disappear from the socializing and we would soon hear him clacking away on an old electric typewriter in some other part of the house – we tried not to take it personally. He actually had two typewriters right up until the end, just in case one broke down and he needed to do some work and couldn’t get the repairs done in due time. I don’t think the typewriter repair market is as competitive as it once had been.

                                                                                                             

One of the last major works he completed was a forty-page essay called Imagine No Religion. It was inspired by the John Lennon song and chronicled his take on the last five thousand years or so of organized religion. Some of it was funny and some of it was insightful and a lot of it was poignantly sad.

But what impressed me the most about this project was the research that he invested in it. Dave never once touched a computer. The internet and Wiki and Google remained a mystery to him.

He did his research the old-fashioned way. He read newspapers, he read countless books and he watched the news. So much of his satirical material was provided by newscasts or late-night Evangelical hucksters. It was remarkable the depth and breadth of his knowledge. As I was reading his essay, I was humbled to find myself learning things from the academic work of an eighty-five year old man who didn’t advance past grade nine. But he never stopped being interested or curious. Or philosophical and funny. And he had a way of keeping those around him interested and curious.

My wife was going through some old papers with some material that he likely never performed or published but some it perfectly captures his wit and I thought I’d share it. They’re silly but they’re fun.

Dave Broadfoot’s The Meaning of Words

Lymph To limp with a lisp
Gargoyle Oyle we gargle with
Pokemon A Jamaican proctologist
Negligent Absentmindedly opening the front door of the house while wearing a see-through negligee. Especially if you’re a woman.
Rectitude The posture of a patient immediately after a rectal examination
Balderdash Rapid loss of hair
Testicle The medical testing of a patient’s ticklishness
Flatulence A special ambulance that only picks up flat people

He’s still making making my wife and me and his friends laugh all these years later.

 

Thoughts and Prayers

By

Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam. That was enough to fill the streets with protesters and spill blood on college campuses and turn elections.  Roughly three thousand civilians died on 9/11. That was enough to be in Afghanistan for sixteen years and invade Iraq under false pretenses. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions died and the Middle East has been a killing field ever since. The world changed that day, they said.

Thirty-three thousand Americans died of domestic gun violence last year and there have already been sixty mass shootings this year. A 9/11 once a month and a mass shooting every six days. It’s come to a point where I see this on the news and I can’t even feel sad any more. It’s like a sports score. How many this week? Ooh, today was the fourth biggest in history and last month was the biggest. The news anchors always say the same things and the usual experts trot out their opinions on possible motives and we get to learn what semi-automatic guns can do because we may have forgotten those details from a report a few weeks ago. Even the music is the same. Each mass slaughter has its own theme music but it all sounds the same after a while. That guy in his studio who composes these sombre pieces of music sure picked the right business because he’ll never lack for work.

If the dead children of Sandy Hook didn’t change anything, if the Pulse nightclub in Orlando didn’t change anything, if the Las Vegas shooting didn’t change anything, why would anyone think another fifty shot today would change anything? Oh, and it’s never the right time to talk about gun control. It’s disrespectful to politicize the issue while families are still grieving. Slaughter, pray, and repeat. Every time.

Every Republican Texas Congressperson received money from the N.R.A. Every one. I counted. The Texas Governor recently tweeted that he was disappointed that Texas trailed California for first place in new gun purchases. Not one of these bastards deserves to send out their thoughts and prayers. And every voter who voted for a politician who is in the pocket of the N.R.A has blood on their hands. And they’re not allowed to be sad. Their thoughts and prayers are meaningless.

No one deserves to die this way, Republican or Democrat. But sending “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the deceased who were actually already praying in a church seems a bit disingenuous.

Ninety-five percent of Republican members of Congress identify as Christian. And nearly to a person, each accepts money from the N.R.A., the greatest terrorist group in America. And those thoughts and prayers aren’t working. God sat out the Holocaust. It didn’t end until people ended it. If God exists, I don’t think American domestic gun policy is high on the priority list. Maybe instead of tweeting meaningless thoughts and prayers, it would be wiser to save the lives of your fellow Christians. The ones you shalt not kill. Until then, you’re on your own.

America, heal thyself.

Uniform Numbers

By

(This is not meant to be a factual presentation. Think of it more as a conversation in a tavern).

Our culture is sports crazy. A lot of us grew up with professional sports as an integral part of our lives. And as adults,  young and old, they still might be. I find it easy to forget how much the games we watch have changed though. Change usually comes incrementally, even at a glacial pace, but once you get to be old enough, the distinctions, the evolutions and the devolutions become a little more apparent.

Team uniforms didn’t use to have names or numbers. Baseball was king a hundred years ago and the crowds and the parks were small enough that you could see the players’ faces and knew where they played from year to year. The Yankees were the first with numbers. And they were assigned by your spot in the batting order. Ruth, 3, Gehrig, 4. After that the prestige was to have the lowest possible number because it meant you would make the team. DiMaggio 5, Mantle 7.

The Yankees famous pinstripes came to rise because Babe Ruth couldn’t control his appetites and became heavy and unathletic looking. He missed a half a season in the twenties because it was said he ate too many hot dogs. It was known as the stomach-ache heard around the world. I think it was really syphilis.

Every sport had its traditions. I think football numbers were designated mostly by position. Running backs in the thirties, linebackers in the fifties, quarterbacks lower, to help the officials know who caused which penalty on what part of the field.

Hockey was similar. Goalies were 1, 29, 30 or 31. Defensemen were between 2 and 8, the top scorer was often number 9. Rocket Richard, Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe. The first weird number I saw was Phil Esposito’s. He was traded from the Bruins to the Rangers and he went from 7 to 77. Maybe that was the year of the trade. Then Gretzky and Lemieux made anything cool.

There was a time when a basketball number couldn’t contain a number with a digit higher than five. That’s because when the ref called a foul on you he went to the scorer’s table and told them your number with hand signals in case the gym was loud. Left hand then right. Fifty-five or thirty-three.

When I became a starter on my high school basketball team, there were five good uniforms that breathed and ten polyester ones that didn’t. The good ones were 11, 22, 33, 44 and 55. I was 44. That all changed when all the cool big afro-ed guys from the ABA dunked every which way and everyone wanted to be like them and there were no rules. Dr. J was number six. And there was a guy named World B. Free.

Sports change. They always do. In the fifties, the Cincinnati Reds were known as the Red Legs because the Communist scare made Reds a bad word. And that’s when singing the National Anthem became a regular thing. Sports wasn’t always about patriotism and the military. Sometimes it was just about the games.

If you’ve ever been to a ballgame in the States, you might assume that God Bless America always plays in the seventh inning stretch. Nope. Only since 2001. We used to just sing Take Me Out To the Ballgame.

Beards and sideburns, tennis whites, golf pants, short shorts. Nothing really ever stays the same.

Except the politics.

Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Billie Jean King, Curt Flood, Martina Navratalova, Caitlyn Jenner, Colin Kaepernick. It’s a mighty long line that doesn’t seem destined to end anytime soon.

It still shocks me that sometimes athletes with a social conscience have to drag the rest of us into the present. Some day, we’ll all look back and wonder what the hell we could have been thinking. At least I hope so.

 

 

Patriotism

By

As Canadians celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the founding of this nation this week, I can’t help but contemplate the nature of patriotism. Personally, it comes down to the distinction between pride and gratitude and I’m a lot more grateful than I am proud to be a Canadian.

Being born here, with all its privileges and comforts, is like winning the lottery. But I had no more to do with being born a Canadian than I had influence on the colour of my eyes or the tone of my skin. There’s very little, if anything, that I’ve done that has made this country what it is. While I’ve voted my conscience with little regret, in reality I’m simply a lucky recipient of the hard work and sacrifice of those who came before me. And for that I am not proud. For that I am grateful.

The soldiers and nurses of both World Wars, the social activists, the legislators who envisioned an ethical nation and fought to help forge into reality that which was only once a vision. These are things for which I am grateful.

I’m not proud of Team Canada 1972. It was exciting at the time but in retrospect, they played dirty and played a less elegant game than the Russians. I’m not proud of Terry Fox. His was an individual accomplishment of historic courage and he deserves every ounce of admiration and his legacy is immeasurable. But I had nothing to do with his greatness.

If I were a member of a First Nations People, I might not be so enthusiastic about Canada’s 150th. If this were my ancestral homeland for millenia and an invading colonial power came here, committed genocide, put my family in Residential Schools and still treated my Peoples as second class citizens today, the celebrations might ring a little hollow. If I were a Japanese-Canadian whose family was put into camps in the Second World War because of my ancestry, I might not feel entirely proud of the Canadian legacy. If I were the victim of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, a church which was so integrated with the government for decades that they were almost indistinguishable in some regions, I might not feel such un-conflicted positivity toward Canada.

History is complicated, without doubt. However, as a collective people, there are many things I feel pride in. That we didn’t fight in Vietnam or Iraq II. That we created the idea of peacekeepers before war mongers. That we have health care. That we welcome refugees. That our Prime Minister happily and enthusiastically marches in the biggest Pride parade. The list is longer than I could imagine.

This week, I was confronted with a major health crisis. It was life-threatening. So much so that as my wife and I were rushing to the hospital, I was giving her my banking information and telling her what she should try to sell my guitars for after I was gone.

When we got to the Emergency intake, I opened my wallet and along with my PetroCan card and my Subway card, was the green card with my picture on it. Within minutes of slapping it down, I was whisked away into the care of teams of dedicated medical professionals. Between the administrators, the nurses, the doctors, the orderlies, the technicians, the volunteers and the interns, in the space of twenty-four hours, there must have been at least twenty people who contributed to saving my life. All with great dedication. Each showing great care, sympathy and humanity.

Personally, this was the perfect confluence of feeling pride in and gratitude for being a Canadian. And if on the first of July, I’m watching Peter Mansbridge introduce some East Coast dance troop I’ve never heard of or some Northern singers whose language I don’t understand, and if I have the good fortune to crack a nice cold bottle of Molson, it will only be because of that little green card with my picture on it. And I will know exactly what patriotism means to me.

Happy Canada Day!

On the Wicked Dying

By

When famous people die, the beloved ones anyway, there’s a natural tendency to remember how much they meant to us, how it’s sad they died when they did and how the world is a slightly diminished place. I felt that way about David Bowie’s death. But truth be told, I hadn’t listened to his new music in years, if not decades.  I think he was a good person, as much as any one of us is, but I don’t know for sure. But he was a significant part of some of my younger years and for that reason it made me sad.

In polite society, when complicated characters die, let’s say a Ronald Reagan, it becomes more nuanced. Beloved by tens of millions, loathed by as many or more and regarded as somewhere in between for the majority, when the eulogies come we tend to err on the side of  “if you can’t say something nice…”. I would suggest that this is a pretty good default position for a great majority of these circumstances. We’re all complicated, each of us with our redeeming qualities and our character deficiencies and to be judged on a black and white scale when we’re mostly all varying shades of grey seems ungenerous.

Ghandi was racist toward black Africans. MLK was a philanderer. JFK too. Maybe they all were. There were only a handful of Presidents before Lincoln who weren’t slave owners. John Lennon was probably a real asshole most of the time. People revere Mother Theresa while many think she did some bad, bad things. And the list goes on.

Roger Ailes died today. He doesn’t fit into this narrative for me.  He was an evil man. A television genius, he entered the political field in the sixties. From Nixon through Reagan and Bush and Fox News, he’s done more than any other in the last fifty years to make America the mean, dumb, paranoid, racist, sexist, fearful place that it currently is. A sexual predator himself who created an environment that condoned such behavior, he died with his reputation destroyed. Without him we wouldn’t have had Bush, Palin, O’Reilly, Trump and just about every other mean, racist and sexist provocateur who makes millions spewing lies to an audience whose ignorance has been cultivated for generations. He didn’t create our most base and crass emotional tendencies but he did more than anyone to exploit them. How much blood stained his hands?

And it was all for money.

Of course, he’ll have an expensive funeral and his ancestors will live well for generations. His family may have loved him and maybe he had some friends who are now sad. He’ll be remembered as a pioneer of a certain kind of media. But he pioneered nothing to be proud of. He most certainly did exponentially more harm to his industry, his country and this world than he did to better it.

Dying doesn’t deserve respect in and of itself. We all die. The way we live deserves respect. It’s not that I’m happy he died. He was old and powerless and the immense damage had already been done. I simply wish he’d never been born. We all would have been better off.

Our Short-Term Memory

By

A lot of historic events happened in my early lifetime but I was too young to remember them or understand them. The Beatles, assassinations, Woodstock, the Moon Landing, Canada-Russia Series, Vietnam, Watergate. I only knew of these events years later and in a historical context. Ten years later, I was voting.

There are young adults who only know of 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as historical events. And I doubt very much that their textbooks featured nuance if there were any chapters dedicated to them at all.

Which brings me to George W. Bush. He has come out of the shadows because it’s safe. He knows he’s not the worst president of all time anymore because of Trump and he is trying to rehabilitate his image, re-casting himself as the affable grandpa who is a humble guy and not as bad as we remember. Could we have been wrong? No, we weren’t wrong because he’s not. He’s a war criminal. He was president and lied his nation into a fake war with real casualties. Hundreds of thousands if not millions dead and maimed. He broke the Middle East. And now he’s goofing around with Jimmy Kimmel and the ladies on the View and joking with Ellen.

That’s it. Our memories are only about a couple of election cycles long. Beyond that, the rest is history.

And when Trump starts his first new war, everything dominating the news cycles these last six weeks will melt away. Politics stops at the water’s edge. And the media will fall in line. And though Trump will likely be politically irrelevant fifteen years from now, Ivanka Trump will be doing the talk show circuit and everyone will talk about her great new memoir and how she hasn’t aged a bit. And the band played on.

%d bloggers like this: