YOU DON'T HAVE TO GET HIT

Have you ever seen a boxing match?

I mean live, in person, close to the ropes, near enough to smell the sweat and taste the fear.

I haven't, but I'd like to. It's a savage, brutal, animalistic sport that has very few redeeming qualities, leading its practitioners to a middle-age filled with nothing but headaches, blurry vision and a faulty memory.

And those are the good points.

Kickboxing is popular here in Cambodia, (and Thailand, too) but I can't get into that form of the sport. Something about adding kicking to boxing seems to take away the, I don't know, basicness of it. For me, boxing is about punching somebody in the face.

"You every get hit in the head sixty, seventy times a night?" Stallone asks Talia Shire in the original (and best, although the first sequel comes close) Rocky. "It starts to hurt after awhile."

Yes, getting whacked that many times one evening does hurt (I'm assuming), and it shouldn't be, well, fun to wathc somebody go through that, but it is. (For some.) Yet it's more than amusement -- it's elemental. It's archaic. Like the hundred-metre dash, boxing is sport and humanity at its purest.

Some people are scoffing or puking right now, but there's an undeniable grace and balance to the sport that can't be denied. (If you know where to look.) It's why two of the literary world's most esteemed writers, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates, have written reams on the sport's spectacles. (Read Mailer's The Fight for a philosophical, thrilling exploration into the 'Rumble in The Jungle' fight against George Foreman that was featured in the documentary When We Were Kings.)

Defending his sport against the naysayers, one of Ali's old trainers said: "What people don't understand about boxing is, you don't have to get hit."

Ah, and there's the rub. That single line -- you don't have to get hit -- encapsulates what many people ignore about boxing: its artistry. Its precision. Its strategy. Its dimensions. That's what attracts the inflated egos of the literati and the drunk guy at the end of the bar at Joe's Pub, the one who always falls off the stool.

I'm thinking about boxing 'cause I picked up a biography of Muhammed Ali, probably the most significant American of the twentieth century (after Martin Luther King and the guy who created The Fall Guy. You ever see that? With Lee Majors, the unknown stuntman, who made Eastwood look so fine, as the song said? That was a good show. So the creator of it deserves my props, is what all I'm saying.) No other sport could have allowed or enabled Ali to transcend the sport and become the icon he became.

Soccer, maybe. Because both soccer and boxing are for poor people. You don't need money for either. Which is why you can find variations of both pasttimes in practically every country in the world. (Maybe even in Antarctica, but I'm not sure. )

Boxing, though, appeals to our instincts to protect and defend and defeat. One person against another. Will against will. Each drawing out the other's energy to draw out, in turn, the best of themselves. Each needing the other they're determined to decimate.

Oooh, good stuff, boxing is. Yes, it is ridiculous. Yes, it is inhumane. But if sport serves as a microcosm for life (and I think it does) then boxing explores that microcosm better than any other. It is an intense, unforgiving bolt of life, in all its bloody, ragged glory. Three or ten or twelve or fifteen rounds of sweat and tears. In the end, a winner and a loser. All of it futile. A spectacle of barbarism.

Donald Sutherland, portraying legendary running coach Bill Bowerman, states in the great movie Without Limits: "Some consider running an absurd pasttime on which to waste our energies. But if you can find meaning in the kind of running you need to be on this team, then maybe you can find meaning in another absurd pasttime -- life."

And if you can find (or are willing) to find meaning in something as pathetic and pointless as boxing, maybe you can find meaning in that other absurd pasttime, too.

"YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IT TO THEM"

"We don't make these societies. We have to deal with them as they are. They live their own realities. They have their own way of taking decisions and preparing their people for them. You have to leave it to them to find their own way of doing it. You have to leave it to them."

-- UN head honcho Kofi Annan, on negotiating with
Libya's Gaddafi (or 'wacky Gaddafi' according to those old Garbage Pail Kids bubble-gum
cards from the mid-eighties)

The above quote is taken from a book I'm reading right now called Deliver Us From Evil, by Wiliam Shawcross. It's basically a collection of his reportings from around the world in the nineties, from Somalia to Libya to Cambodia to Serbia (amongst others). The subscript to the book is 'Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict.'

Living in Cambodia has cemented for me the fact that the world is, indeed, a place of 'endless conflict.' A lot of this book is concerned with Cambodia, especially in the 'UNTAC' years, which is when the United Nations came in and basically ran the country for a period of time before they held their first 'free' elections.

Oh, and what a time it was. Cambodia has changed a lot in ten years (or so I'm told), but it's still, how shall I put it, not exactly 'free'. Not quite a democracy. Not exactly diplomatic and equitable in the way that wealth is spread. There's a great line in the book where Shawcross quotes somebody saying: "Cambodia has become a nation of two hundred very rich families and nine million poor people."

Seems to ring true for me. I was thinking about all the nice cars I see in Phnom Penh, Mercedes Benzes and the like. If you're a rich family here (or anywhere, probably) you will have a car for yourself, one for the wife, maybe one for the kids. So let's three cars per rich family. You multiply that by two hundred families, you get six hundred cars. Which might account for pretty much all of the cars booting around Phnom Penh. (Or maybe not. Maybe there's many more rich people than that. Hard to say here. If you're a head honcho in the government, you're rich -- and Cambodia has one of the biggest cabinets in the whole freakin' world, so that makes for a lotta rich people buying a lotta nice cars and doing a lotta driving.)

Recently there have been a lot of reports here from donor agencies, all of them reiterating the basic common points -- billions have been pumped into this land, and, um, guys and gals, uh, what is there to show for it? A lot of Mercedes Benzes, that's what.

Maybe I was naive about the world before. Maybe I didn't get it. I still don't, not really, but I'm learning. I'm learning that the people in power in poor countries like Cambodia are not all that concerned about the people not in power. They are more concerned with wielding power than distributing it.

Basic, common knowledge, I suppose, but I'm a slow learner.

And, with all of that aid money that keeps pouring on in, I think about the quote at the top of this post. About how countries work according to their own rules and regulations and customs and traditions, whether the outside world cares or not. The mysterious alchemy that makes up a people, a nation, a lanuage, a culture, is just that -- a mixture, a concoction, a potion that can be viewed from the outside, but can't be replicated. It is what it is.

So maybe Cambodia will always be poor. Maybe Cambodia's leaders will always be corrupt. When all is said and done, it is, after all, their country, the Khmer people's, to govern and develop. Perhaps the money from abroad and from here will never trickle through the rice fields of this beautiful land and find a place in the hands of the poor, desperate people that need it the most. Perhaps Cambodia is, in the end, doomed to decades of blunt, unremitting poverty.

The thing is, though, a few weeks ago I visited the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, 'Cambodia's Pyramids', for lack of a better term, and they are massive, and they are many, and they were pieced together with painstaking patience and precision thousands and thousands of years ago, when Cambodia was, in fact, the jewel of Southeast Asia, an advanced civilization second to none.

I think of those temples, and the intricacy and care that went into crafting them. The nobility and ambition of those descendants of my young, good-natured former students, inheriting a country fundamentally wrecked by their own government and others. I think of the basic goodness and openness of the Cambodian people, still there in spite of the horr. I think of what poverty and war and despotism can do to a race.

And I haven't given up hope. Not yet.

Time and history are long; a century is just handful of years, really. The temples of Angkor have sat through century after century, civilization after civilization, war after. They're testaments to what the Khmer people could do and still can do.

And there's still time left to turn things (a little bit) around, still hope, and the final chapter in the history of Cambodia, the one that will first chart and then judge the progress that was made in the hundred years after the Pol Pot decimation, has yet to be conceived, let alone written.

Because if you give up hope, what else is left?

BATTLE ROYAL II: GORY, BIZARRE, PLODDING, ADOLESCENT -- AND A LITTLE BIT GENIUS, TOO

It's rare to find a sequel that's actually any good. In fact, the very words 'a good sequel' would strike many people as an oxymoron. (That was always a strange phrase to me -- an 'oxymoron.' OXY was that pimple-cream stuff, wasn't it? And a moron is an idiot, right? So I always imagined an 'oxymoron' as a nerdy-type dude staring at himself in front of the mirror with zit potion smeared all over his face. But I digress...)

The thing is, not including all of those old serial flicks from the thirties and forties, sequels really didn't get going as an economic and artistic (?) force until the seventies. In the Sixties, you had THE RETURN OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, true, but other than that, I can't think of another one. (Unless you count the sequel to Paul Newman's THE HUSTLER titled THE COLOR OF MONEY, but that didn't come out until the late eighties.) In the Seventies, sequels began to be made, but they were almost always follow-ups to respected, praiseworthy films. (With the exception of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II.) Three Best Picture winners -- THE GODFATHER, THE FRENCH CONNECTION and ROCKY all had sequels made within the Seventies. (Yes, ROCKY won Best Picture. Look it up. Honest.)

Once the eighties hit, all hell broke loose, with sequels to any movie that made even a little bit of money. (CANNONBALL RUN II, which I, um, kind of liked. REVENGE OF THE NERDS II. PORKY'S II: THE NEXT DAY. SHORT CIRCUIT II. POLICE ACADEMY II through, what, VII? Need I go on?) Nowadays, it's almost preordained that if a film rakes in the cash, there WILL be a continuation of the series, like it or not. (You just KNOW that people were CLAMORING for sequels to BRIDGET JONES DIARY, OCEAN'S ELEVEN, THE PRINCESS DIARIES, etc.)

Japan, too, makes its fair share of sequels, and BATTLE ROYAL II is one of them.

It continues the story begun in BATTLE ROYAL, which I wrote about a few days ago. (If you're interested, scroll down. If you're not interested, um, there's some pretty good stuff over at www.cnn.com. News and the like.) That particular film envisioned a near-future Japan where delinquent kids were shipped off to an isolated island to hunt, maim and kill one another, the winner being the only one left standing. (Then again, aren't all islands, by their very nature, 'isolated'? Anyway...) It was a savage, brutal, piercing and funny indictment of the Japanese educational system. In the end, two kids managed to survive, heading back into an uncertain world. There was a grim honesty here that was fresh and bracing.

BATTLE ROYAL II continues the story, as the male survivor of the first film creates his own terrorist organization centralized on a, you guessed it, isolated island; their cause is designed to further the destruction of all adults, not only the ones who forced him to kill and watch his friends being killed. The government sends their own band of teenagers as part of a 'Battle Royal II' game to kill the terrorist punks. Why not let the kids kill the kids?

This second story lacks the clever, visceral punch of the first film; it's almost a war film, with many battle scenes that are quite clearly modeled on SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It's slower, and talkier, and may, well, bore more than a few viewers.

Having said that, I think this is, in many ways, a deeper film than the first one. The first film's tagline was: "Would you kill your best friend?" This one's may as well be: "Now that you've killed your best friend, how does that make you feel?"

Angry, this film answers, angry and ready to lash out at the world. Ready to condemn anyone and everyone over the age of eighteen.

The plot veers in a direction I never expected it to, concerning itself with terrorism both local and international. How are terrorists made? Why do they do what they do? Well, this film explores that concept as part of a larger investigation into how violence-as violence- messes people up, physically and psychologically. Most action flicks dispense deaths and violence like trick-or-treat candy. This one acknowledges that violence is painful and confusing and disruptive and chaotic. Characters from the first film have evolved from normal kids to savage terrorists; the government leader (and inept parent seen on the receiving end of an indifferent, disgusted phone call from his child) who killed himself at the end of the original has a teenage daughter that is trying to understand why her father was killed, and who did it, and why. The victims become terrorists, all in the name of world liberation. And they deal, emotionally and continuously, with the ramifications of their actions. They hurt and bleed and cry and wonder why. And plot to change the world.

It's kind of a kooky story, truth be told, and its politics and point of view is decidedly adoles --
cent -- and that's the point, and that's why it works. If I was fifteen years old, I would have been cheering the protagonists on. It's an adolescent revenge fantasy on the surface, filled with good kids who are striking back at their oppressors in the name of a larger goal, the liberation of mankind. A manga come to life. It is not a mature film because these kids are not mature; this is what violence has done to them, and now they are trying to use violence to achieve what they consider to be honorable, humanity-serving goals. It's messages and morality are somewhat simplistic, but hey -- if your audience is the younger generation, you can't make everything subtext. It doesn't hurt to be clear and obvious, sometimes.

Look, this is a violent, action-packed film, as the ads say. It's meant to titillate and entertain. But it does so with a reserved intelligence that is absent from most American films. It is very violent, yes, but the film doesn't shirk from that violence -- it pauses to examine the roots of that violence, its sources and its effects. It continues the spirit of the first film but it has a resonance and underlying morality that is an extension, not a retread, of the original.

Most sequels are the same story -- just bigger, longer, more. BATTLE ROYAL II fits that mold, but it's not afraid to be complex and contemplative. (In between the gunfire and spurting blood, of course. This is, after all, a 'Battle Royal' movie.) The filmmakers could easily have just trotted out a gory retread, but they have gone out on a limb and chosen a bold approach that acknowledges the central gimmick of the first film, incorporates it into this second chapter, and then tries to somehow merge within its narrative the seemingly disparate elements of present-day concerns regarding international terrorism with the universal teenage fears of growing-up and getting old.

A bizarre combination, yes, and not always successful -- but boy, both of the Battle Royal flicks use violence and satire in a combination unseen in western cinema. Stark and funny and scary and absurd, these films are. Kind of like adolescence.

UFOS, GHOSTS, CHRISTMAS, MISSING SOCKS AND THE TEMPORAL POSSIBILITIES OF THE UNIVERSE, CHRIS ROCK, THE VASTNESS AND SMALLNESS OF THINGS

Random thoughts on a Sunday morning...

The thing I don't understand about ghosts is, if there ARE ghosts, why don't they ever show themselves at nine o'clock on a Saturday night in the middle of Times Square? Why don't they reveal themselves in broad daylight during the seventh inning stretch of a Yankees game?

Maybe there are certain rules that ghosts follow. They might have their own system set up, and we -- the living -- are just unaware of what it's all about. They may have their own union or something, mandating when and how they can reveal themselves, and to whom.

That might explain why you never hear of the ghost of Japanese geisha showing up in Sarnia, Ontario. Just doesn't happen. You never see the lonely, desperate spirits of the poor people slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge wandering around a mall in Toronto. Why is that? It makes me think, should ghosts exist, which I'm on the fence about, that there ARE regulations. There IS a code. Maybe they have everything planned out. You can't just cross over between continents. You can't jump back and forth in time.

If they do, in fact, exist, they always decided to roam around abandoned buildings at two a.m., revealing themselves for only a moment or two to a selected few, which leads me to suspect that they have a plan. They have a plot. There's a system at work.

I have the same questions about U.F.O.'s. Why doesn't one just land in the heart of Tokyo? I'm tired of this we-saw-it-late-at-night-hovering-above-a-cornfield-in-Nebraska stuff. Just show up on the White House lawn, for once.

For God's sakes, simpy REVEAL yourselves!

Once and for all.

Is that too much to ask?

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It's the beginning of the month, a December month, 2004, and the sun is shining, the air is hot, the streets are dusty, the sky is blue. Somewhere in the world the Christmas season is taking hold, I'm sure of it, I REMEMBER it, but here, in Phnom Penh, aside from the odd Christmas tree put up in stores to humor and entice the foreigners to unleash their American and Cambodian cash, there's little reminder of Kris Kringle and his merry men. Somewhere, I'm sure of it, Kris and his elves are working feverishly in their workshop, working their asses off to meet that deadline that is only a few weeks away. I'm not knocking Santa, he works hard, does is best, and Christmas Eve is only one night and all, but I think he left Cambodia off his flight path. I think Santa should think about adding Southeast Asia to his list next year. The kids could use him.

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You know how you can never find your OTHER sock, the one that makes a pair? I'm convinced that there is some kind of a rip, maybe even a portal in the space-time continuum that has been programmed or designed simply to allow those socks to leave this particular dimension and enter another one parallel to our own.

Think about it. Everybody always loses the 'other' sock. Where do they go? They're rarely found. Maybe it has something to do with the idea of a 'pair' itself, and socks, no matter what material they're made of, represent something in the universe that is not meant to be PART of a pair. Yes, yes, we have two feet, requiring two socks, but maybe the universe is sending a kind of signal, via the missing socks, that two feet are one foot two many. That we're wasting one of those feet. That that extra foot is, in fact, a form of gross excess. So the universe, perhaps of its own free will, perhaps through the deliberate machinations of a higher being, allowed a portal to be created that was specifically intented to go after those socks. To nab them before we could find them. Maybe they're tossed into some elaborate junk drawer that exists on the border between this dimension and the next. All those socks, millions of them, waiting. A symbol of our waste. Marooned in the purple, starless vortex of the space-time continuum. Wondering what they did wrong (if socks have consciousness, of course.)

Sometimes the universe does send messages, you see, and the 'missing' socks may be one of them: Don't waste things. Use what you have. On one foot you can do a lot, is what these missing socks may be saying.

(I'm not crazy. I swear...)
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This is a Chris Rock line, and it's so funny in its simplicity and logic that if it doesn't make you laugh, then that implies that my written delivery is not nearly as funny as Rock's spoken delivery, which will offend me. Greatly.

"You know when a plane crashes, and the only thing that ever remains intact is the 'black box'? Why don't they just make THE WHOLE PLANE out of that box?"
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I was talking to an old Swiss gentleman at a restaurant the other day, a retired chap who had spent thirty years playing music in and around Asia, and he was on a visa run from Thailand, first time to Cambodia, only staying in Phnom for a few days, in fact, and he was asking me about the city, where to go, what to see, how much to pay the motodope drivers, and I was answering him as best as I could, not even thinking about my answers too much, and it only struck me later that I had once been a kid from St.Catharines who, only twelve, thirteen years ago, played hockey every Saturday or Sunday morning at Bill Burgoyne arena for seven, eight years (usually there, yes, but also at the Haig Bowl, the arena down by the General Motors plant, but not too often at that one) and now I was most definitely not a kid and I was nonchalantly throwing off my knowledge about Cambodia to a slightly grizzled and weathered but kindly foreign gent and, while my information was not necessarily INSIGHTFUL, no, it was, more or less, ACCURATE, and it made me think about how far we can go in life, literally and figuratively, how much we can learn, how confident we can become, how vast and how small our own little worlds really are.

BATTLE ROYAL

If you ever think American movies are a getting just a little bit TOO violent, I recommend that you check out a Japanese flick called BATTLE ROYAL.

This is a movie where the whole point is to watch teenagers slaughter each other for fun.

And you know what?

It actually DOES have a point, one that it expresses brilliantly.

In Japan, the education system is war. Students are competing against each other, literally, for the best spots in the best kindergarten. Seriously. If you get into a good kindergarten, see, it means you get into a good elementary school, which means that you can then go to a good junior high school, leading to a good senior high school, leading to a top-notch university, which inevitably gives way to a high-level company, which leads to a prosperous, successful life.

BATTLE ROYAL the movie is about a time in the near future when unemployment is high, and most kids have rebelled, refusing to go to school. The government decides to take some of these kids and group them together on an island. Once on the island, they are then given weapons and forced to kill each other. There's about fifty of them. The winner is the only one left alive. Go to it, kids. Have fun.

("Why are you doing this?" one of the kids asks. "Life is tough," is the answer. Which may be the most accurate encapsulation of educational philosophy there is. We're preparing you for life, and if it's too much, well, so is life. You endure or you die.)

A brutal, sadistic idea. What's particularly unsettling is not necessarily the violence itself, but the age of the perpetrators and victims. These are all teenage boys and girls, and, unlike in American movies, they LOOK like teenagers because they ARE teenagers. And they shoot one another and fire arrows into each other's necks and lob chopped-off-heads filled with hand grenades stuck in their mouths, all of it punctuated by the patented bloody gore best found in Japanese movies. This is a flick that could never be made in America, because a) kids killing kids would never make it past the ratings board and b) violence in American film rarely is used to accentuate a well-thought out theme; in Japanese movies, violence is usually the icing on the cake -- in American films, violence IS the cake.

But there IS a point, you see. I think the film works as a potent metaphor for the Japanese school system. Some kids give up right away, killing themselves. Others try and plot against the adults. The 'transfer' student is right away seen as a source of suspicion. There are only a few adults portrayed at all in the movie -- the leader of the 'Battle Royale', a lazy oaf who first appears menacing and fierce but later is seen lackadaisically munchng cookies and whose own daughter tells him on the phone to not bother coming home, him being such a loser and all. Another adult, a parent of one of the kids,is seen in flashback, hanging from the ceiling, killing himself but leaving a note draped around the rope essentially telling his kid: "You can do it!" The older generation cops and out kills themselves, but hey, you kids will do just fine! Do as I say, not as I do.

These are what these kids are facing. They distrust the adults in their lives and rightly so. A game is created by adults designed so the kids themselves can kill each other. And what's the reward? Life. Which means, inevitably, a life of failure and incompetence. Of job insecurity and emotional indifference from your own family and the younger generation. Of rote conformity and fear of youth.

The whole thing is a brilliant critique of the modern Japanese educational system, and, to a lesser extent, Japanese society as well. It's a bitter and piercing expose, and it's told through the means of a really warped, twisted, violent suspense tale.

You can get off on this movie on either level. It works as an action/suspense story, kind of a Japanese version of LORD OF THE FLIES meets THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME.

But there's another layer, a deeper, darker layer, one that becomes more disturbing the more you think about it and the more you know about Japan. This is a perfect example where violence on screen is not only justified, but essential. It's blunt and raw and a little bit ludicrous and always painful.

The film ends with a little bit of hope and words of advice, if not warning, to the younger generation -- "keep running."

I'd be inclined to see that as a positive note. A ray of sunshine, if you will. Sometimes things get better. Sometimes you CAN escape the game.

The thing is, like life, hope can die quick, and the game is rarely over when it seems to be.

There is, after all, a BATTLE ROYAL II.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?

Last week in Wisconsin six hunters were killed by another hunter originally from Laos, and a member of a persecuted minority group, the Hmong, I think, that sought protection in the States years and years ago. Apparently, the Laotian hunter had wandered over onto their land and had shacked up in one of their look-out posts. Arguments ensued. Shots were fired. People, more than a handful, died.

(Because I'm an erudite, sophisticated guy, the first thing I thought of when I heard the story was that scene in Ivan Reitman's Stripes, where Bill Murray is trying to convince Harold Ramis that the two of them should take the military vehicle they are guarding out for the weekend into neighbouring Czechoslovokia. Ramis is worried about the danger. "It's Czechoslovakia," Murray says. "It's like going to Wisconsin." Ramis replies: "Yeah, well I got the sh-- kicked out of me in Wisconsin once, so I'm not going." Which proves that a) we always bring our own past, personal experiences into any situation, that b) I don't know much about Wisconsin if the first thing I think of is a twenty-year old movie, and that c) I watched Stripes way too many times as a kid.)

The thing that interests me about this story is not necessarily the killing; sad as it is, people go utterly, completely ballistic more frequently then we would like to admit. (Larry King, interviewing America's Most Wanted's John Walsh about Scott Peterson, the man charged, now convicted, of killing his pregnant wife, asked how someone could commit such a hideous, un -
speakable act. Walsh, who lost his own son to a nut, and has made a living looking into the dark heart of man, said: "Larry, it happens all the time.") No, what interested me about this was the fact that some of the accused's friends and relatives maintained that he was a good man, an honorable man, even a magic man.

What's that? A magic man?

That's right -- they believe that he has special powers, can connect with the spirit world, the whole deal.

Many Cambodians, whose country borders Laos, would nod their head in agreement, in sympathy and solidarity.Most of Cambodia is rural, which means that most of the country is poor, and uneducated, and not able to compare news stories featuring complex human emotions with old Bill Murray movies. They believe in magic. Hell, it's not even magic, the way we think of it -- it's reality.

There was this 'magic' cow a few months back out in one of the more remote provinces, and when people were sick, ailing, even dying, they could visit the cow, and be licked, that's right, licked, and all would be cured.

And if you read the papers often enough hear, you'll come across quite a few stories that relate how this or that villager was arrested or beaten up on suspicion of being, that's right, say-it-to-
gether-now -- a sorcerer.

The tragedy in Wisconsin is fascinating for a number of reasons. It brings into play questions of nationalism and regionalism, of racism and territorial rights. The Laotian say he got lost, and was up in the hunter's perch while trying to find his way home; he says the other hunters taunted him, using racial epithets, in addition to firing first. In Laos, apparently, the idea of hunting on pre-determined sections of land doesn't really exist; I guess it's kind of a free-for-all on open land. The surviving hunters say this dude shot first, unprovoked.

Who knows what happened. But this is an example of what can happen when you take a person from a very, very different culture, like Laos, and expect him to understand, even after ten, twenty years, the customs and conditioning of a country like the States.

Don't get me wrong -- no matter how you cut the dice, the guy has serious mental problems, and there's no question that he fired first, in my opinion, or that he will have to face the consequences of killing six innocent people. I think he snapped, is all, and I think he'll pay the legal price. He'll go away for a long time.

And yet the underlying racial tensions that were dug up to the surface won't go away. The questions will linger. He is from Laos, and they are Wisconsin boys, born and bred, and never the twain shall meet. There are many Laotians in Wisconsin, apparently, and the inevitable fallout from this little incident serves as kind of a tragic microcosm of what can happen when cultural misunderstandings collide. Both the States and Canada are immigrant countries, always have been, always will be, and until people start accepting that we are, well, different, then we'll never be able to recognize and celebrate the more common similarities.

Bottom line, the idea of him having 'magical powers' is ridiculous. He comes from a culture that believes in reincarnation, that believes that the sins we commit in this life will have bearing on the form and presence we will take in the next life. If you are bad, you will be a low, filthy creature in the next life. Our karma takes us from one plane of existence to the next, until finally we get it right.

How absurd. Every good Wisconsin boy knows that there is no such thing as reincarnation. A good Jewish boy in the Middle East died a long, long time ago, and then he came back to life, and if you don't believe in what he's offering, well, you're going to burn in hell for all eternity. Simple as that. You give your life to him and his father, or you pay the consequences down below.

How can all those Laotians (and Cambodians, and Thais, and about, oh, two, three billion others) have everything so mixed up?

Stepping outside of your own religious and cultural mindsets and beliefs is very, very difficult to do, and I suspect that the Laotian community, unfortunately, is not helping their friend or their own welfare by stating their belief concerning the accused's powers, no matter how sincere their intentions are. When a violent act like this occurs, people don't want to read or hear excuses -- let alone mystical ones. It's hard enough understanding another race's beliefs in the best of circumstances.

In the end, it's necessary to remember that concepts like 'magic' and 'faith' are relative.

Six people dead from gunshot wounds are not.

FUTILITY, NIHILISM, ALAN THICKE, PAUL ROAZEN, JOHN STUART MILL, WEST COAST AVENGERS, THE UNDERGROUND MAN AND, OF COURSE, THE GARY COLEMAN DOCTRINE

Last night on a British discussion show called Hard Talk, the host, a tough black woman who is the ultimate, no-holds barred devil's advocate-to-end-all-devil's advocates, asked Canada's Stephen Lewis, the UN Representative for Aids in Africa, whether he is ever frustrated, fed-up, ready to throw in the towel, simply because this monumental medical and humanitarian task is too massive to contemplate, let alone act upon. Let alone solve.

"Of course not," he said. "What good has ever come out of futility?"

Ah, futility. Despair. The acknowledgement that the world is a cruel, unfair place, and that we are doomed to small lives made even smaller by the realization that life is short and death is long.

This is what we can learn in university, what we should learn, but I think too much of this concept has permeated our daily lives, to the point where effort itself and the urge to help your fellow man has become a quaint, almost antiquated position, rather than the driving, relentless force it should and must be.

One of the advantages of a liberal-arts university education is that it allows you to examine and roll around in your heads concepts that you had never considered before -- or, if you had thought about them, such an education gives you a forum to discuss these ideas in a little more depth than your Grade 13 high school English allows. (Oh, that's right -- there is no more Grade 13, or OAC, in Ontario high schools anymore. But you get the point. I hope.)

The most interesting class I took in my freshman year at York University in those long-ago and far-away autumn days of '94 was called 'Psychology and Politics'. I had no idea what I was in for. I was a film major who loved movies and novels. Period. Any ideas about psychology I had were probably formed by Alan Thicke (a Canadian, by the way, from Kirkland Lake, Ontario) on Growing Pains, his character being a stay-at-home psychiatrist dad and all. (If you think I'm joking, you probably don't know how much t.v. I used to watch.) What I knew about politics came from Oliver Stone's J.F.K. and Spike Lee's Malcolm X. And maybe the old 'Royal Canadian Air Farce' (on the radio, before they had their t.v. show) and the political sketches on Saturday Night Live (Dana Carvey as Ross Perot and the elder Bush, and Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukkakis in one of the debates, saying my all-time favorite line: "My parents were little people. Little, swarthy people...")

The teacher's name was Paul Roazen, a skinny, crusty, curly-haired bespectacled old character. A few things impressed me right away:

1) He was an American. I'd never had an American teacher before. (I'd met Americans before, of course, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Buffalo and Orlando, but had never had much of a, I don't know, conversation with one.) This was different. This was exotic.

2) He had not only written books, but had actually published them. He was a Freud expert, Roazen was (and presumably still is, if he's still alive), and I was stunned, floored by the fact that I could actually go to the York Library and read books written by somebody who was teaching me. I barely knew who Freud was, but I was greatly impressed that Roazen had interviewed Freud's relatives -- sister, cousins, the whole extended family. (He may even have tripped on the carpet in their homes, which would have been a Freudian slip.) I remember reading his book 'Brother Animal', not because I was interested in Freud, really, but because it was very cool to read a book and have the author of said book mumble 'good morning' to me on a twice-weekly basis. I didn't get many published, bona-fide authors speaking to me at my high school in St.Catharines. Of course, I can't really remember, now, ten years on, what 'Brother Animal' was actually about, but that's irrelevant; the fact was, at the time, he had written it, and I could read it, and that was enough.

3) Roazen had actually been employed, lectured, taught at Harvard. I was amazed by this. I knew that Harvard was a real, honest-to-goodness, like, I don't know, place, but it existed in some other, distant realm of existence. (It still seems to, actually.) The closest I'd been to Harvard was watching that Joe Pesci movie With Honors with Greg Gaspari and Eric Daigle at the Town Cinemas on Geneva Street in St.Catharines, the one starring Brendan Fraser and Joe Pesci, the one where Pesci plays a homeless person who crashes lectures at the school. ("I may be a bum," Pesci says, "but I'm a Harvard bum.") I would have been impressed if Roazen had actually been to Harvard, if he'd walked around the campus or checked out the dorms or even eaten in the cafeteria of the place; the fact that he had been a lecturer there, well, that was enough to make me want to listen to him. And I did, sitting in the front row of the lecture hall each and every morning of the class, watching as he strolled into the room looking like he had something very, very important to say.

4) Roazen refused to use a microphone, the little ones that professors attach to their lapels. The fact that professors got to use microphones at all impresed me; the fact that this dude refused that honor made him an intriguing and eccentric fellow right from the first day. I didn't know why he abandoned the mike, until I heard him speak. The thing is, Roazen liked to speak. He liked to roar. He liked to lecture without notes and pace the room and bellow not only to the back of the room, but to the back of the room beside the one he was teaching in.

("Become who you ARE!" he screamed one day, quoting Nietscheze the week we were reading 'Beyond Good and Evil.' He loved that line, Roazen did. Because of him, and his intensity, so do I.)

Two anecdotes that sum up his character, as I remember it:

Anecdote one:

The morning after the Academy Awards. A bitter-cold, snowy March day. Roazen sits at the desk at the front of the lecture hall, reading through the results of the Oscars in the paper. He looks mystified. He shakes his head. He looks up and startes at me, 'cause I'm sitting in the front row, right in front of him. In the line of fire, so to speak.

"I haven't heard of any of these people!" he says, almost in an accusing tone, as if I had had something to do with the fact that the Best Supporting Actress winner remained a mystery to him. I said nothing, smiling a goofy freshman smile. What was I supposed to say? (I wanted to say: "Sir, you're a sixty-five year old neurotic intellectual who gets off on interviewing Freud's sister -- why should you know any of these people?") He continued to stare at me, then sighed, at what I'm not sure. Maybe his own age, or my inability to explain modern Hollywood's social structure. Maybe both.

(I used to think he was an out-of-it old coot for not recognizing even the most famous of actors, until I found myself in Asia for five years, scanning the Internet and reading about the latest celebrities, muttering: "I haven't heard of any of these people!")

Anecdote two:

Roazen was speaking passionately, roaming the room, and then he looked up and noticed that one student, a freshman girl (freshwoman?) I recognized from my film class, was not taking any notes. (Actually, in Canada we usually just say 'first-year', not 'freshman', but anyway...)

"You're not interested in what I have to say?" Roazen asked her. "You can remember all of this?"

"Oh," the girl said, somewhat surprised. "It's not that. The thing is, I'm a film major?"

Roazen glared. "AND?"

"And so, you know, I don't feel the need to take notes? Because pen and paper and all that kind of stuff are on the way out? Because film is the future?" Every sentence ending in a question.

Roazen, stunned. Roazen, speechless. Roazen, still. Unmoving. The only thing moving was his head, as he scanned the room, looking at the rest of us for help, support, understanding. I saw his whole life flash before his eyes -- once, he had been in the same room as Freud's sister, unlocking the secrets of the the master's mind; once, he had been at Harvard, teaching the best and the brightest of America's elite; and now, now, here, here, he was in a lecture hall in North York, Ontario, Canada, of all places, far removed from Vienna, light years from the ivy-league of Boston's best, and --

Ah, but it was pointless. He sighed, and continued his lecture.

Roazen's class was the first one that royally, even galactically, messed with my head.

Because he set it up in an interestingly sly and deceptive way, you see.

The first book we read was John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'. Mill was the nineteenth century British child prodigy who had read all of Shakespeare and most of Milton by, like, eight or something ridiculous. (Ah, but by age eight I had read all of WEST COAST AVENGERS and X-FACTOR and ALPHA FLIGHT, the jewel in Marvel Comics crown, as far as I was concerned. WEST COAST AVENGERS being the California branch of the the regular Avengers, the super-hero team with Captain America as their leader, usually accompanied by Thor and Iron-Man and the Hulk and Ant-Man and the Wasp, and they're usually based in New York, right, but then they started out this L.A. branch, see, and I bought the first issue, the one with the super-archer Hawkeye as their leader, bought it at Muskie Bay cottages in the north of Ontario while I was on vacation as a kid, and I saw on the Net that Hawkeye is now a bad guy, went crazy or something, which is blasphemy, in my book. And X-FACTOR had the original X-Men back together, because, unlike the movies, Wolverine was not part of the original group, no, he didn't join until, like, the seventies. This is the group that had Angel and the Beast and Marvel-Girl and, best, of all, Iceman, who was so cool, literally, and I remember he got his own limited series, four issues it was, and I read the first issue sitting in the still-being-built kitchen of our new house on Evangelista Court, by the lake, dust all around, me sitting on the unfinished counter, and oh do I remember that. And ALPHA FLIGHT, well, that was a Canadian super-hero team based out of Ottawa, which was really, really cool. Their Captain was Vindicator, later Guardian, whose suit resembled Captain America's, except with a Canadian flag instead of a Yankee one, and he actually looked quite a bit like a Canadian-made super-hero called Captain Canuck, who was also very cool. So I don't think John Stuart Mill had read any of these Marvel Comics, you know, so he had his flaws, he did. That's all I'm saying.)

Mill patented the idea of utilitarianism -- the greatest good for the greatest number of people is what's best for society. People are logical, rational creatues, Mill stated. If you give them the opportunity to do good, to look after others, to help out society, mankind will choose this option. Mankind will take care of its own and look out for its own.

Sounded good to me. Made sense. 'On Liberty', the text, was a bit dry, but hey -- the guy probably popped it off in an afternoon or two, right? In between composing symphonies or establishing the British legal system or whatever he did in his spare time.

And then, well, then Roazen gave us the next text to read.

Doestoevski's 'The Underground Man'.

(I'd never heard of it. First thing I thought of was that old Gary Coleman t.v. movie. You ever see that one? On the right track, I think it was called. The one where he played this shoeshine boy in the New York City subway system who had never, I mean never, been above-ground, on the street, amongst the people. Not even for a hot-dog or a ball game. Lived in a coin-locker, he did. Can you believe that? And I saw that when I was very young and very impressed, him being Gary Coleman, and all. I mean, c'mon -- this was Arnold from Different Strokes. And here he was living underground. And at the end of the movie, he actually walked up the steps, up, towards the light, the light of the street, of day, of out there, and I remember that very clearly, watching that ending with my brother on the small t.v. in the family room of our old house on Bayshore Crescent, and what a wonderful feeling that was, triumphant, really, to see little Gary rise, conquer his fears and go up, and if you laugh or scoff at my emotions towards an early-eighties Gary Coleman flick, go ahead, be my guest, but I guess that means that you have never been young, or you've forgotten what it was like, forgotten how glorious such a piece of art can be, forgotten what it's like to be moved so powerfully, so forcefully, so much at so young an age.)

The exact specifics of the narrative escape me, but the 'underground man' was a depressed, lonely creature who haunted the streets of, what was it, Moscow, maybe? Disconnected from society. Distrustful of fellow man. Alone.

"Yes, yes, yes," Roazen argued. "Man is good, man is rational, man is proper. But what about this quote from Doestoevski's hero?"

Sometimes it's fun to smash things.

Again:

Sometimes it's fun to smash things.

The truth of that floored me. The undeniability of that wiped me clean. He was right. Sometimes it is fun to smash things. How does Mill explain that?

I realized that they had designed this course to screw with my head. They had succeeded.

And the rest of the semester was a fascinating examination of how indiviual psychological inclinations affected the course of large-scale political systems. They started by introducing conventional outlines (a la Mill) of how society should and will be run, and then they introduced, Roazen and his teaching assistants did, an element of darkness, savagery, even malice into the equation. How can these two streams co-exist?

We'd go to the lecture twice a week and then go for a smaller tutorial group to discuss what Roazen had talked about.

Much talk was about the nihilistic 'underground man'. I remember my t.a., a long, grey-haired dude in his late thirties, saying: "There is no such thing as a nihilist, because a true nihilist would kill himself."

Hmmm, I thought. I think I wanted to ask: Um, could you explain 'nihilism' again? But I didn't.

This was the same t.a. who stated: "When Marx died, he was not a Marxist. I repeat: When Marx died, he was not a Marxist." I remember realizing that this was supposed to be impor-tant and momentous, what he was saying. I nodded. We all nodded, the other students and me. The tone was very solemn. The t.a. let the silence build, crest, disappear. I think I wanted to ask: Um, could you explain 'marxism' again? But I didn't.

(What do you want? I was eighteen. And, um, come to think of it, if you do understand Marxism, drop me a line, will ya?)

The point is (and I do have one, or I did, or I've forgotten it, but it's here somewhere) that a lot of what university is good for is introducing young minds to concepts they have not encountered or considered before.

It's good to learn about nihilism. It's good to learn about the dark side of man. It's good to ponder that. Art, the best art, concerns itself with the dark, inevitable downslide of human existence. We are doomed, the best art says. It recognizes the fallibility of man, and the inevi-
tability of that fall. That's what makes drama, drama -- the conflict of our futile strivings.

But in the real world, in life, outside of the movie theater and the lecture hall, away from the world of the novel, such thinking leads...nowhere. Nothing can be built on nothing.

And I think Western culture has created a kind of negative vortex centred around the denigration of possibility and the triumph of cynicism, where all sincere, guided, directed effort can be deemed passe and, even worse, naive.

The great danger is that nihilism can seem to be viable amonst young people.

Why bother to stop AIDS in Africa, we ask. What's the point, we wonder. Do-gooders be damned. Best to wallow in our own negativity and refuse to begin.

But there are people out there who are emerging from the underground. Who are seeking a better way for their fellow man. Yes, yes, as the shoddiness of most of the world attests to -- sometimes it is, it is fun to smash things. Students need to be taught that. They need to know that their negative, destructive impulses are not unnatual, no, not all -- they're human. But you remember Animal House? Remember Tom Hulce, trying to decide whether or not to sleep with the teenage chick, and there's a devil and an angel on each shoulder, whispering in his ear? That's our education, giving us the good and the bad of life. Kids have to know about that. Need to know about that.

To give, extend and embrace those sentiments, though, out in the real world, to use the root of those dark and dangerous feelings as a philosophy and an approach towards life, can lead only to spiritual and moral bankruptcy.

It can only lead down.

In another class, 'Good and Evil', I learned about Plato and the cave. We're all in the cave, unsure of the world beyond. We all have faulty perceptions. We're all misguided. We all acknowledge the evil that men do.

But my hero as a kid sure as hell wasn't Plato, and I learned a similar lesson early on.

Let's call it The Gary Coleman Doctrine, shall we?

You're either Gary Coleman living in the subway, refusing to go up, comfortable in the darkness. Or you can take the leap and walk the steps and see what's up there, in the light, while everybody else stays down below, in the cold, comfortable in their complacency as they watch and listen to the trains go by, carrying people to and from work, all day long. While they sit, and suffer, and revel in their misery.