My Best Friend

This is Kudda, the gentle giant, with our daughter Tuula, Spring, 2006.

Pappa Kudda (October 23, 2001-August 24, 2009

It was 'bloat'.

Monday, he was normal: Smiling, eating, whining for his night walk. We went. He poo'd. He got his cookies at night as usual.

At about three a.m, he started whining. We thought it was diarrhea, because he got that sometimes. So we let him out. By five he was back in, panting. My wife got me up again at about 6:30. We didn't know what it was then. So we checked Dr. Google. It looked like bloat. But there was no good reason for it.

Our vet opened at 8. We called, left a message and said we were coming in. Kudda was in the basement, panting. I tried to rouse him, using his usual 'doo-da-doo' bugle call, which means walk. Nothing. I went down and he looked truly frightened. His tongue was weirdly blue. We got him upstairs and I hoisted him into the car, because he couldn't walk. I raced wrong-way down our construction-wrecked high street and brought him to the vet's. The nice girl in pale pink scrubs at the vet said there were no Dr.'s yet, but that, in any case, if it was bloat I should take him to emerg immediately. The nearest one was Yonge and Davenport, way across the city.

I raced across town, all the way saying, "Kudda? Kudda?" We got there. I shabbily and hastily parked the car and went inside. I shakily related the circumstances to the triage nurse. The vet had called ahead. Immediately, they brought a gurney. I opened the back hatch, where Kudda was. He was not moving. They put a stethascope to him.

Nothing. 8:59 a,m.

I did the business and made the arrangements. Then I went outside into the perfect late summer day and just sat on the curb for awhile.

I drove home without him.

At dinner there are usually a few tossed treats as I cook. Then, after we eat, more. When we put the kids to bed, he whines because he wants his walk. Last night it was quiet.

He pissed me off a lot sometimes. But he was such a great dog. He bracketed my day. His walk was the first thing I did. It was the last thing at night.

He was the first member of our family. My son and daughter have never known a house without him. He always slept in doorways, as Kuvaszok often do. We called him the Shnork. for his habit of sticking his considerable snout into peoples' crotches and sofa cushions, flipping the cushions merrily.

Once, in an off-leash area of the park, he decided he was going to elude me. When he did this little game, he danced around in a kind of 'na-na-na-na-na-na you can't catch me' way, Then he took off. I chased him and watched in horror as he ran across Parkside Avenue. As he did so, he almost took out a motorcycle cop. I continued to chase him for half an hour. Finally, he just ...stopped. He let me leash him up and we headed home. I was so mad, that I didn't notice the siren until the cop wheeled his motorcycle right into my path. I was threatened with arrest and the destruction of my dog. Cooler heads prevailed with the arrival of another cop. I got out of there with my dog, he with his life.

He wasn't so lucky this morning.

Paranoid, American Style

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."

- Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"


It's hard to look, from a perch up in Canada, at the mass bad craziness surrounding the American health care debate and not think, "WTF is wrong with these people?". Y'know, the ones who benefit from Medicare who are out there decrying any public involvement in health care as Nazism, Socialism, or cause for 'the tree of liberty to be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants'.

But as Hofstadter pointed out (47 years ago), there is a strain in American politics, that while thankfully small, is nonetheless loud. And koo-koo (Scott Horton, writing in Harper's over two years ago, concisely pointed out the symptoms of the current strain of Amerinoid Psycho-Pathology). And, in the age of YouTube and ratings-crazed cable news. the kooks make good pictures. What's going to lead the newscast, the Preznit's sober explanation of the reasonable-ness of a public option? Or an incensed 'patriot' loudmouth screaming, "Don't Tread on Me(dicare)!"? Exactly.

Thing is, this probably ain't about Health Care. It's more about The Fear of Now on the part of angry, white folks facing irreversible demographic change. And that fear manifests itself in the willingness to believe, in the face of all factual evidence to the contrary, that the President isn't a natural born American. That he wants his 'Death Panels' to 'pull the plug on Grandma'. That he's a Nazi. Or Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or some toxic hybrid of all-of-the-above. Mostly, though, it's likely due, in large part, to the fact that his skin is brown. And that, increasingly, so is a large part of the U.S. population.

Of course, similar ravings about government over(goose)-stepping were heard from the left end of the spectrum during the eight-long years of Bush 43, especially the fulminating about fascism. However, at that time, the fulminators, when depicted in the media, were done so in an incredibly unfavourable light, their patriotism questioned. The current bunch are, more often than not, described as 'ordinary citizens' 0r, (on Fox, say) as patriots.

Jon Stewart and his writers ably skewered this glaring relativity and pointed out the inherent irony of the New Victim-hood by describing these 'conservatives' the 'new liberals'. In deft juxtaposition, they did a 'What they said then, What they say now' segment which was, while hilarious, incredibly incisive in exposing the hypocrisy of the right-wing punditocracy. They are ideologically consistent but morally relativistic (strangely enough, one of the fundamental criticisms leveled against 'Teh Left' is moral relativism).

The most baffling thing is that those griping the loudest seem woefully ignorant that they live in a nation whose government is constrained by what is probably the most elegantly designed and fully considered political document ever, The Constitution of The United States of America. That, and the fact that those most loudly defying a public;/single payer option in health care are also the same group who are safely ensured care under a public;/single payer option in health care: It's called Medicare.

But then it's not really about health care. Rather, it's a manifestation of fearful nativism which is as American as apple pie. Or the right to take a semi-automatic weapon to a presidential town hall.

Facts be damned. Fear the future. Where paranoia is powerful, there is no place for facts.

Update: The Globe's Konrad Yakabuski took on this very subject, Hofstadter and all, on the last day of last year. It's an excellent piece and highly recommended. But, as the folks in the comments say, "First!" Anyway, I am a bit chuffed with my 'ahead-of-the-curve'-iness and all.

Is that so wrong?

Travelling While Brown

Apparently, right now in our country, if you travel abroad and your skin isn't pearly white, or robustly pink (Why did Brenda Martin get a private jet ride out of a fetid Mexican jail, again?), you stand the chance of being denied return to your country of citizenship, the country whose passport you hold. What other conclusion can one reach after the abysmal treatment given Ms. Mahomud? Or Mr. Abdelrazik. Or Mr. Mahar.

Or whomever else may be guilty of the newest (yet un-announced) trespass against Canadian law n' order: Traveliing While Brown.

Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse. We should all have become aware of 2nd-tier citizenship provisions having been apparently enshrined when the last Israel-Lebanon skirmish occurred. You will recall that Canadian Citizens in Lebanon at the time of the conflict were left to fend for themselves until the current government was pressed to fulfill their (our) obligations to them.

Now that Ms. Mahomud has been returned to her 12-year old son here in Canada, checked for infirmities contracted while detained, she's announced that she will proceed with litigation v. Regina.

Here's what some of our fellow citizens have to say about that. Kinda off-putting, I know.

That noted, one hopes she succeeds in her legal adventure, lest all or any of us set foot out of the country proudly carrying a precious document which has been dangerously devalued by the actions, or lack thereof, of those currently in government.