THE SOROS DOCTRINE

George Soros is the billionaire Hunagrian-Jewish-American who spent millions of dollars in trying to defeat Bush, but he's also quite a remarkable philanthropist, a man who didn't start giving away his money into he was well into his sixties. For many years he had been interested in philosphy, even writing his own books on the subject, but after a certain point in time he came to realize that the real self, his true self, was, indeed, a philosophical, contemplative one -- but it wasn't enough. All of that thinking and pondering had created a vacuum, he said, and by doing he escaped from the vacuum and into the realm of the actual. (Or something along those lines.)

Right now there's a boom, an explosion of universities in Phnom Penh, and all of the schools are trying to figure out, hmm, what exactly do we, um, teach, so that these kids can move beyond the thinking realm and into the actual realm? And so there's lots of business classes and computer classes and English classes because this is what the kids will need, goes the common currency of thought. And they're right. But these are the future leaders of Cambodia, these people, and this is a new age in this country, and so we have to be careful, even cautious, about what is taught to them and how it is presented. How it is framed.


I thought of this recently while reading this book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND that caused an academic sensation (if that's not an oxymoron) in the mid-eightites, mostly because it took to task the rather dismal state of education in the elite universities in the States -- your Harvards, Yales and Stanfords, all of which had begun to slowly drop of all the old-dead-white-guy stuff and replace it with it multicultural, possibly revisionist approaches to learning and education.

I'm not going to get into that that here. That's been argued to death a thousand, million, trillion times, by people much smarter and much dumber than me. (There's a lot of the former, a few of the latter.)

But what a university is for is a good question, an obvious question, and one that isn't necessarily asked a lot anymore. Higher education simply is; universities simply are. Next?

And yet...

At the risk of sounding like someone who doesn't have any original ideas of his own (which is pretty much close to the truth), I read a book a few years back (or most of the book; it was pretty tough going, it being a 1950's-British-Marxis-feminist tract and all, so cut me some slack, okay?) called THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing. There was an introduction at the start of the book, a long one, a good one, actually a great one, in which Lessing basically ripped into the state of modern university systems the world over. She is one of the world's most erudite, respected novelists -- and she never went to university. High school dropout, like Einstein and Quentin Tarantino and Robert DeNiro and Peter Jennings. No-name schmucks.

A few points she made that I remember.

1) Universities, especially liberal arts programs, are set up in a very either/or, competitive fashion. Meaning, if you like author X, then you shouldn't respond to author Y. If you like both, something's wrong with you. At a very young age, students learn that there is the Canon (cue the sound of thunder and ominous music), and these are the books contained therewithin, and this is the kind of literature that should be read about and written about.

Got a problem with that? I did, and I still do.

What's lacking is any kind of personal, authentic response to the books in question; the self is left out of the equation. Meaning, we are taught, to a certain extent, to think of books as having this almost mystical 'validity', or 'value', or even 'worth', that exists above and beyond are own perceptions of the text itself.

Hogwash, Lessing says, and I agree. There are books and your responses to them. Period. You may hate a book at age eighteen and love it at twenty-eight and find it decidedly mediocre at thirty-eight. The book has changed nada. You have changed much. The book and you have crossed paths a few times, and you have emerged, altered. The book just sits there, waiting for your response. (I read John Irving's THE CIDER-HOUSE RULES every few years and am always amazed at how different it is.( Waiting for your emotions.

But what's happened? We have a world now where books, and certainly films, are judged as if they are part of a sporting competition. People write movie reviews, especially, that rarely have any authentic representation of the author's feelings.

No, no, no, you say, the author has to be objective. This ain't Oprah. This is literature. He has to view the work for what it is. Personal feelings have nothing to do with true, authentic criticism.

And I say no, no, no, that's b.s. Because if you are a boxer, then you are going to have a different view of ROCKY than if you are an accountant. If your parents divorced at age eight and you remember every little bit of it, then you will respond differently to KRAMER VS.KRAMER than I will. If you were a high school basketball player, not great, no, not giving Jordan a run for his money, uh-uh, but not bad with the ball, then you will respond differently to the Gene Hackman classic HOOSIERS than a non-sports fan will. If you have a particularly keen interest in history and ancient civilizations, then you will view ALEXANDER one way, and the McDonald's manager working the late shift, the one with the receding hairline and whacked stubble dotting his cheeks, will view it another way. (Not that those two people couldn't be the same guy, come to think of it.)

This is not to say that there are not books and films that are better produced, more diligently stitched together than others. Of course. That's what quality and craftsmanship are about.

But art is not produced in an aesthetic vacuum, or emotionless vacuum. It is created by strange, loner-like people with weird, wild impulses that are hungering to express the sentiments inside themselves. And hey -- guess what, kids? To deny that you are a similar person with identical longings when judging such work robs art of its true purpose. It makes you a liar and a cheat, too.

2) The other point Lessing makes, and this is a good one, has to do with people who leave. People who exit. The teachers who stop teaching after a year. The cop who gives up the beat six months in. The student who stops attending classes after a year and a half.

We do not pay enough attention in society, she argues, to people who stop. These are the people who cannot fit into the system. These are the people who do not respond to the system. And these are the people who usually have the most constructive, instinctive things to say.

Instead, what happens is we have thousands and thousands of people who are trained in a particular way of thinking and reacting -- and so is it any wonder that most book reviews and film reviews sound so similar, as if they were all written by the same computer programme? Of course not. This is how the system trains people. This is how the system operates. The people who couldn't fit into the system, who for some reason or another couldn't adapt, have moved on. The world has lost their voice. The neighbourhood has lost that cop. The classroom that needs that kind of teacher has been replaced by the formulaic, institutionalized one.

Point is, as Soros points out, there is great wonder and satisfaction in contemplation -- ess -
entially, that's what university does for you. It gives you four, five, eight years to sit around and think about stuff and write about stuff.

And then at a certain point you have to get out into the world and do stuff, and so what we think about during those years, and how we think about it, does not remain in a vacuum. It is released, to intoxicate or poision the masses. How we think, and how we train others to think, needs to be addressed.

So next time you're teaching a Cambodian, the slow, shy one at the back of the class in the ripped, dirty slacks, or talking to the late-shift manager at Mcdonald's, the heavy guy with the raggedy stubble who doesn't look that bright, truth be told, ask them about what they're reading. Find out if they've seen any good movies lately. Ask for their opinion. Listen for their emotions. The tremor and excitement in their voices.

These are the ones that don't fit into the system, see.

These are the ones to ask.

These are the ones you listen to, carefully.

Before they go.

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


I am pleased to bring to your attention the writing of Brian Gibson, a fellow survivor of the York University Creative Writing program and fellow cross-country teammate of mine on the York Yeomen team that placed third at the Ontario championships in '96. (Brian was the strong, lean, fast guy who placed in the top ten, if I recall; I was the, um, weak, not-so-lean slow guy who placed, uh, nowhere-near-the-top-ten.)

You should go to www.bleedingdaylight.ca and check out the latest novel from one of Canada's brightest young writers, a murder-mystery set at our old alma mater, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

(Oh, and last time I saw him he looked a little different from the author's photo -- but I'm betting he still wears Darth Vader t-shirts.)

WHY I LIKE COMMAS

There's this one scene in the Richard Price novel FREEDOMLAND where there's a mob or a protest or something in an apartment somewhere in Jersey, and the person in charge is either trying to control the crowd or scare the crowd, cupping his hands in front of his mouth to amplify the sound, and he starts saying something like: "The police, are on, the way. You have, to stay, calm." And that replicated so perfectly the way that people talk in those situations when you have a lot of loud people saying a lot of things and you want to be heard, have to be heard: the staggered, staccato monotone, the jagged breakdown of a sentence into easily heard and identifable parts, and I'd never seen it put in print like that, and I thought cool, which is why I've remembered the style, if not the exact wording, of it even five years after reading the book (which you should read, by the way.)

THE COSBY DOCTRINE

I read a transcript of LARRY KING LIVE the other day (because, uh, that's what guys like me do in their spare time, when they can never figure out when the suspender- guy's show is on over here), the one where he was interviewing the author of the second most bestselling non-fiction book in NEW YORK TIMES history, a self-help book called THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE. (And if you don't know what that book is, then you don't exist in the same universe as all of those folks that voted for Bush do.) He's a pastor named Rick Warren, I think, and he said some things that reminded me of a Buddhist expression I heard somewhere:

Your life is not yours. It can be taken from you at any time.

This particular Christian author made a similar point: Look, this is not a self-help book, because self-help books all say: It's all about you, and I'm saying, right from the start, this isn't about you at all. Your life is not yours and yours alone.

That's the gist. (Cool word, gist. Not used often enough.)

We think of our lives as ours, to have and to hold 'till death to us part -- wedding vows of one. We make the rules, baby. We decide the course of our fate. We captain the ship.

I look at it this way. A few years back a homeless lunatic whacked me with the equivalent of a hockey stick across the gut in Tokyo, leaving a nasty bruise that was a gift, if only because had the man thwapped me in the face, I could be missing an eye right now. My life would have been altered in ways I really don't care to think about. He's already taken something from me -- my naive sense of security that only a Canadian can have. (Or maybe a Nebraskan.) He could have taken my pupils, my jugular, you name it.

Whether you look at it in Buddhist terms or Christian terms or no terms at all, your life is hanging by a fragile thread, baby. All of your dreams, aspirations, fears and fragilities are one whisker away from being sliced and diced, late-night style. (I'm not sure what that last part means, either, but I'll go with it.) We all have our personal space and our personal rights and our own personal integrity, yes, true, acknowledged, but there is a truck, see, just down the street, travelling quickly, and you are listening to your walkman, head bobbing, lips mouthing, thinking about that latch on your fridge that just, won't, shut, and you are slowing down, wading to the rhythm of beat and the pulse, while that truck, the one you don't know even exists, is getting ready to mow you down, no questions asked, skid-marks on pavement with brains, blood and skull-bits being mandatory, not optional.

Remember Heathcliff Huxtable talking to Theo on THE COSBY SHOW? "I am your father," he said. "I brought you in this world, and I can take you out." There's the Powell doctrine; this is the Cosby doctrine. Now, I don't know if there's a Father up there bringing us in and taking us out. (If there is, I think he just might look like Cosby -- stern but goofy.) But I know now, more than I did before, that we can all be taken out, whether anybody's in charge up there or not.

This can all be taken from you, this life, and it's helpful to remember that we are taking away other's lives, all the time, constantly. Everyday we take something away from someone else by a warm wave of the hand, a snide comment, or a friendly nod of the head, whether we realize it or not. Not their life, of course, we don't take that, we give them that, we allow them that, but there's a myriad of insignificant acts that shape our interactions that don't conceive or disintegrate our lives, no, but they add to them. They subtract.

There's more to life than life itself.

(Unless you're a serial killer or a soldier or a sniper. Then you do take lives, literally. I met a dude my first week in Japan at a bar: Me: What do you do? Dude: I'm a sniper with the marines: Me: Oh. Thinking -- You kill people; I, um, teach ESL...)

We give and we take. And given that Cosby was always handing out morals like candy to little Rudy, here's one of my own: Try not to take too much of other's lives, and be on guard for those that are taking yours, little by little. (And be forgiving, too. They may not know it.)

WEATHER, CARDS, ALEXANDER...

Hot. Dusty. Blue sky -- all day, every day. Rain, not a chance. Wind, if you're lucky. Cool on your cheek, a reprieve, however brief, from the sun.
Cambodia in November. Late November.
Back home, an Ontario fall, close to winter.
Seasons here don't change. They shift. One moment it's raining each and every day in the late afternoon for forty minutes on end, hard rain, driving rain, and then, click, the channel's changed, the rain's gone, the sun is back, minus the wet, and the long lazy day can begin once more.

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

Reading fiction from home takes on a different weight in a foreign land. One minute you're immersed in a Canadian short story, a familiar story, a domestic story, complete with frigid weather and frigid people, and then you hear a sound, a laugh, up you look, and there you see: casually pedalling cyclos and slowly shuffling women with food balanced on their head and groups of motodops sitting on the side of the road, enveloped in a game of cards, the only game in town, kneeling beside their bikes, all of them leaning against one another, leaning forward, the men and the bikes, and down go the cards! SWAP! When Cambodians play cards, they play, each hand thrust down as if they are sure that this is the one, and then you tilt your head down, to the page, and you're back, back home.

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

An ode to courage, daring, ambition, stealth: Alexander the Great, quoted:

My friend, if by deserting from the war before us
You and I would be destined to live for ever, knowing no old age,
We would do it; I would not fight among the first,
I would not send you to the battle which brings glory to men.
But now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us
In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,
Let us go.


Which I take to mean: Unfortunate, yes, but Death is here, there, above, beyond us, around us. So live, now. Fight. Revel in glory. Commence.

THIS IS A LONG TIME AGO

I've always loved this quote from comedian Gilbert Gottfried: Did people in ancient Greece walk around saying: 'Gee, this is a long time ago...'

It cracked me up at fourteen. It cracks me up now. (Which says something about how much I've matured, but...)

I can't even figure out why it makes me laugh so much, but I remembered it recently when I was reading one author's take on Alexander the Great, and his explanation of how we can't judge yesterday's standards by today's morals.

I was reading a biography of Alexander and his conquest of most of the freakin' world, and I wondered: Why did most of these people, these conquered people, give themselves so freely to this young punk after their land was invaded, their fields razed, their citizens slaughtered?

The explanation was, well, in those times, that was what people did. Plain and simple. If your land was invaded, and your side lost, sorry, pal, but you gave up any authority you had to the rightful victor, like it or not.

Similarly, those who judge Alexander's seemingly endless desire for more and more lands to dominate as essentially barbaric may have a point, but they're also missing the point, because he lived in a 'pre' time --pre-Ally McBeal, pre-Freud, pre-Victorian, pre-Christian, pre-everything. The way we've been conditioned to view the world cannot possibly mesh with how he saw the world. Was it right? Was it wrong? Irrelevant. It was, period. You can't project backwards. You don't have to agree with the way things were. But you have to acknowledge the way things were, acknowledge the framework through which people saw the world. Alexander believed himself to be a descendant of Zeus. Oracles were consulted regularly for advice (oracles being the primitive version of Dr.Phil.) War and conquest were the standard by which success was measured. Aristotle was a soldier and a scholar, and saw no contradiction between the two. The world was an unknown entity, there to be fought over, divided, and contemplated upon, preferably in white loincloths, I'm guessing.

Think of it this way. Three thousand years from now, scholars, future Aristotles, may look back at our time, at 2004, and marvel at a world so divided by culture and religion, by linguistic differences and theological clashes that led to the deaths of thousands of innocents. Three thousand years from now, there could be one race of yellowish/brownish/blackish/whiteish type people, and the teenagers of that future era will read their history texts (or have them implanted in their heads, I guess) and laugh at how primitive, unsophisticated and basic we were.

From our horizons, Alexander and his ilk were basic, yes, ignorant of human psychology, sure, and overly dependent on oracles and sophistry, uh-huh, but their legends endured. Their exploits inspired. Alexander was so well known he was written about in the Bible and the Koran. Not bad. Which of today's leaders (or conquerers) are mythic enough to make the cut three thousand years from now in some as-yet-to-be-written gospel?

Just think: As you butter your bagel and watch Katie Couric on the Today show and settle into your comfortable cubicle at work and bop around town looking for a Dairy Queen so you can nab a Blizzard for lunch, diet be damned, you are also living and breathing right here and right now in that land known as 'a long time ago.' People thousands of years from now (assuming the world will still be around, and I think it will), college kids whizzing around the skies in vehicles too abstract and surreal to contemplate, are studying your life and your values, your diet and your weapons, your judgements and choices, and they're snickering, these kids are. Sighing. Wondering how you could be so ignorant. Wondering how you could be so skeptical. So naive. They're relieved, these futuristic sophomores, that humanity has somehow managed to advance past that barbaric and primitive Dark Age known as the 21st century.

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO NOW?

Should I stay or should I go?

To Myanmar, that is.

Not that I'm planning to travel to Myanmar in the next few weeks (or Burma, or whatever the country's calling itself these days), but it's a question you have to ask.

Why? Myanmar has an utterly corrupt military dictatorship that rules the country with an iron fist, as the saying goes. How corrupt? They had free elections about a decade ago, and the democratic party, the party that actually, like, advocated, you know, DEMOCRACY, won, and the government said, basically: "We don't care."

Their spiritual leader, Auu San Kyuu (the spelling of her name is horribly wrong, but forgive me) has been under house arrest for a few years now, maintaining her solidar-
ity with the people. (She's the daughter of the last honest leader of the country, and she's given much of her life to forwarding the pursuit of democracy in

So, the dilemma is:

If you visit Myanmar, and meet its people, and witness its beauty, you're feeding the regime. You're planting money in the pockets of the military. You are, essentially, advocating and enabling a dictatorship to continue, and even thrive.

The counterargument is:

Myanmar is poor. Myanmar is needy. The PEOPLE are needy. If you go there, you will be buying their food, staying in their hotels, purchasing their products. You will be giving money to people who need it. You will be helping honest people improve their lives.

Difficult choice.

I don't know what the right answer here. On a massively lesser scale, in Cambodia you can buy cheap DVDs of the current Hollywood releases for three bucks a pop. Is it illegal? You bet. Are you helping the government continue their piracy? Uh-huh. Are you also allowing small-time business owners to STAY in business so that they can continue to feed their family. Yes. So what to do?

Don't know.

The good thing about living in a poor country is that it makes you THINK about these issues. In Canada (or Japan, or Norway), you can buy a DVD, and travel abroad, and not worry too much about where your money is going, and who it is profiting.

Here, in this hot, wretched land, the most basic, fundamental human elements -- travel and barter -- become moral dilemmas. It's a lesson, if you look at it that way. It's a continual reminder that the elemental functions of humanity reveal other, more complex shadings the further away you are from home.

GIVEN TIME

The other day Clinton unveiled his new presidential library amidst rain, wind, and three former presidents. (Gerald Ford was sick.) Speeches were made, photos were taken, false political smiles were plastered on one and all -- and a monument to one person's life was opened for all the world to see. Apparently, you can walk around and click buttons on various computer consoles arrayed around the whole library and you can pretty much see what Clinton was doing on every day of his freakin' life.

Which got me thinking (which I try to do as rarely as possible, by the way) that it would be cool if we could all of have our own, expansive library dedicated solely and squarely to the centre of our universe: ourselves.

Wouldn't it be cool? I know, I know, a lot of you are young, meaning under forty; now that I'm almost thirty, I'm redefining the boundaries of what is YOUNG and what is FREAKIN' ANCIENT. But still -- think about it.

Rooms and halls devoted to you. To what you did each and ever day, week, month, year. Clinton was the very definition of an overachiever. (I'm reminded by an old teammate describ-
ing Michael Jordan: "The difference with Michael was, he had more natural talent than anyone else on the planet, and yet he was also an overachiever. He worked harder than anyone else. You rarely get those two things together in the same person." I think the quote applies equally to Slick Willie.) Clinton was the kind of guy who was campaigning coming out of the womb, I'm sure, complimenting the doctor's slap-to-the-buttocks and reassuring him that it didn't hurt, no, not at all, in fact he kind of enjoyed it, truth be told.

Now, we're not all overachievers. We're not all replicas of The Man From Hope.

Still. It's interesting to think about.

As people wandered around the rooms dedicated to your life, what would they see? What pictures would be on the wall? What achievements of yours would be listed in thick, leather-bound books? What would make people stop, and read, and consider.

What will your legacy be, is what I'm getting at.

(Michael Jordan once said: "I don't have a legacy. I have a life." Meaning, I can't worry about what people will say about me after I'm dead, because I'm alive right now and I have some living to do. Words I agree with completely. But it helps, sometimes, to consider our actions today in the context of how they will be perceived tomorrow.

If it's all over now, God forbid, and you have shuffled off this mortal coil, and next week, at a windy, rainy ceremony (attended by no former presidents, no past prime ministers, only by your close friends and families), the doors to your new library are opened -- what's inside?

As the people you've loved weep and remember and examine all that you've left behind, all that you've accomplished, what do you think they will see? What will make them stop and dab their eyes and marvel in pride?

And what will make them pause and look around in wonder at the marble halls, not because it is so grandly extravagant, no, but because it is so small compared to the person you were and the person you might have become, given time...