Living in the fallen state of Canada

Diogenes searching for an honest person in Athens

 

One day in the early 1980s I was watching soccer on television with my old friend Reg Skinner, this was at his home in Blackwater, Camberley, UK; when the occasional goal was scored the crowd roared its approval and the players jumped into each others' arms, they were jubilant. Reg, who was in his early 70s, was critical of the effusive emotion. "They never did any of this emotional celebrating over a goal in the past," he said, "they scored and that was it." But this is the way of today's world; we have moved from an introverted world to one that is extroverted and emotionally demonstrative. Now, it's the optics that counts, how it looks, and how it looks is meant for the media, the media wants bigger than life people because exaggerated acts, or acting, comes across better in the media; so we have people jumping up and down when called to be on The Price is Right, high fives and fist bumps, even rolling on the ground as though about to break dance; is this for real? Are they really this happy?  We also have the political class, they will do anything for a vote, including glad handing, huge smiles, laughing and back slapping, lying, prevaricating, making outlandish promises, doublespeak, and kissing babies; now we see Justin running along the side of the street during a Pride parade taking selfies with whoever is sitting there, what a surprise that must have been for these people, he was even wishing a toddler "Happy Pride Day!" Substance doesn't matter, appearance means everything. 

    Image over reality is what is important in politics; Pierre Poilievre removes his glasses and puts on a black T-shirt and we have a new younger contemporary Pierre Poilievre and the stodgy, cranky, critical, and abrasive Pierre is forgotten. I wonder, when did the extroverted prime minister first appear on the scene? Does the public really love a fat man with blonde hair who will build 1950s suburbia on the greenbelt outside of Toronto in 2023? These politicians are men and women for whom caricature is easy; once we had comics, like Rich Little, who could do impressions of these people and their unctuous personas; but impersonation is a dying art, the public have short memories and no longer know who the comic is satirizing.

    Perhaps the oversize politician as celebrity began in Canada with Pierre Elliot Trudeau; we used to be a fairly introverted country, we used to have respect for each other and most of the time this is still true. Pierre Elliot Trudeau was hated in the west, celebrated in the east, and then after years of a rose in his lapel, jet setting with the the stars, a wayward wife, sex with the stars, we were all happy to see him go. We said about him what divorced men say about their ex-wives, "Thank God they're gone!" We also had Brian Mulroney, easily caricatured because of the Jay Leno jutting chin, baritone voice, and singing Danny Boy onstage with Ronald Reagan, the press lapped it up; and we had Stephen Harper, he had negative charisma which might be a kind of charisma, shaking hands with his children as they left for school, a wooden Charlie McCarthy man with no sense of humour. And now we have the son of the Trudeau dynasty, Justin Trudeau, fallen in the polls but not gone.  It's the age of the prime minister as president, or as dictator, the age of polls determining policy, the age of ego, the age of emotion before substance, the age of inevitable failure, the age of integrity fallen to the age of greed and ambition. I think of Joyce Weiland`s quilt in the National Gallery of Canada, quoting Pierre Elliot Trudeau, "Reason over passion", but that was then and this is now. 

    The media and social media emphasize image over substance, and image always includes promoting one's self. An honest person will be like Diogenes who walked the streets of Athens looking for an honest man. But other people are not our problem, most people are still normal people, they may not be as honest as Diogenes would have liked but they're still our people; it is politicians who have power over us who are the problem, and to find an honest politician is bordering on impossible. Diogenes would weep.

Morrissy Bridge in better days

    And so I turn to former Prime Minister MacKenzie King and his diary that is available online; diarists are by nature introverted and thoughtful people, politicians are by nature ambitious and extroverted. There are even several entries regarding us Morrisseys in MacKenzies' diary, two entries refer to John Veriker Morrissy and his son Charles Morrissy, both Members of Parliament for Northumberland riding in New Brunswick, and there is an entry for Dr. Herb Morrissy. Dr. Morrissey is a family hero, a medical doctor who studied at both McGill University and Cornell University in the 1920s; my grandmother had a postcard in her sideboard showing the Morrissy Bridge in Newcastle, NB, the now rusting and closed down Morrissy Bidge named after John Veriker Morrissy. In the late 1990s I was contacted by Dr. Morrissy's daughter, Jane Morrissy Allan, and I met her when she visited here a few years later. I learned a lot about our family's history from Jane.

    Here is what Prime Minister MacKenzie King writes about the Morrisseys (spelled Morrissy by family in New Brunswick). A final entry in King’s diary regarding the Morrissys occurs on Tuesday, 29 July 1930, just days before the generalelection of 7 August 1930. King is in his office talking with “Bennett”, probably R.B. Bennett, his opponent in the Federal election and the Conservative prime minister from 1930 to 1935. It is impossible to conceive this kind of informal meeting happening today. King begins by making some comments about Bennett’s appearance, “he looked pretty well but is heavier and flabbier I thought.” King continues, “he then said something our having preserved the amenities & not attacked each other… I told [him] I thought I had been most careful, but that I thought he should not have brought in references to myself & the war in which rearoused & perpetuated prejudices that were most unfair…” Then, they discussed specifics of the campaign, King writes: “That New Bruns. he had counted on giving us 2 seats, that in Northumberland he thought his home appeal to sentiment etc. counted very much. I said Morrissey being drunk during prov’l fight & not getting nomination made him disaffected. He said when he was there Morrissey was working for us, & Burchill was the best possible candidate, he put that constituency [?] down to his own appeal…”

    Then, King quotes Bennett as discussing “the hideousness of drink, the curse it was, how it ruined men’s moral sense & judgment, I told him Cahill’s loss of Pontiac was I thought due to this, & we had lost several seats by personal rows, etc.” This explains something of the negative side of Charles Joseph Morrissy who, like his father, seems to have been a heavy drinker. On the positive side, for King, both John Veriker Morrissy and Charles Joseph Morrissy were influential at the provincial level and in their particular ridings; they not only had numerous political contacts but they were intelligent and hard-working men, dedicated to the Liberal Party.

    Other politicians descended from or who had familial ties with the descendants of Patrick Morrissy and Mary Phelan are Edward Matthew Farrell, a half first cousin of John Veriker Morrissy. Senator Farrell served over twenty-one years in the Canadian Senate, from 12 January 1910 to 6 June 1931 when he died. He was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, on 31 March 1854 and died on 6 August 1931; he worked as a publisher and printer before his appointment to the Senate on the advice of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, later Sir Wifrid Laurier. George Roy McWilliam, a great nephew of John Veriker Morrissy, was born in 1905; he won seven federal elections and served almost nineteen years in the House of Commons for Northumberland-Mirimichi riding. He died on 15 May 1977. 

    Well, that was then and this is now, living in the fallen state of Canada. 

Bee hives near here

Here is the single bee hive behind Mountainview School. My impression is that the bee hive was placed here for educational purposes, but I didn't see any children in the area so I am probably wrong about this. The bee keeper made some honey, and now the hive will be relocated to where he winters his hives. I really enjoyed seeing the bees, it reminded me of when I had a dozen or so bee hives where I lived in the country; it reminded me of two friends, George Johnston and Reg Skinner, who helped get me into bee keeping. 

Honey bees on UBC campus

Walking by the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus last week I noticed honey bees gathering nectar and pollen in the flowers (pictured above). Notice the large pollen sacs on the honey bees' legs. There were also a few bumble bees, and other bees, but the honey bee is always of interest and anyone who has kept bees has a fondness for them. Back in the mid-1970s my friend R.R. Skinner opened his hives for me to observe his bees. That was interesting and I knew right away that one day I would keep my own bees. On my visits to R.R. I would write down pretty much everything he said--I seem to have the ability of sitting and listening to people talk about themselves for many hours in a non-judgemental and fairly passive way--but R.R.'s stories about beekeeping were always interesting, including moving hives on his bicycle and overwintering a hive in his bedroom. Beekeepers can be quite obsessive about bees, and this obsession seems eccentric to people who have never kept bees. But one man's eccentricity is another man's normal life.



Above, the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus.

It was in the early 1980s that my friend, the poet George Johnston, sat down with me and went over what I would need to establish my own apiary. I ordered some beekeeping equipment through the mail but also drove to Bedford, Quebec to pick up boxes of bees. That's how you buy honey bees, several thousand come in a wooden box with a wire mesh front and a queen bee contained in a small box inside the larger box. You literally dump the bees into a hive like bits of Styrofoam; however, the queen bee is released into the hive only gradually so that she will be accepted by the other bees. How do you release the queen gradually? There is a sugar plug that the worker bees and the queen eat opening a space for the queen to emerge into the hive. If, for whatever reason, the worker bees don't like the queen, they will quite literally kill the queen, which means more work for the beekeeper as she will have to be replaced. There is also a smell to bees, it is feral and reminds us that bees are never domesticated, only contained. I went with George, and possibly with George Elliot, about whom George has written some memorable poems, to beekeeping seminars across the border in New York State. These events were always memorable and enjoyable to attend. I also remember, one time, driving home from Bedford with boxes of bees and beekeeping equipment and the brakes failing on the car... somehow I still made it back home, maybe fifty miles distance. That was interesting...

I used to have about ten hives that I kept in the field, near some apple trees, about a hundred feet behind The Cedars, our house on the Trout River in Huntingdon, (more correctly, Godmanchester) Quebec. I had a big hand-turned honey extractor that I bought second hand, but like many beekeepers I preferred making comb honey. Comb honey is cut directly from the frame, it's honey the way bees make it in a hive, but it also means you've destroyed the comb the bees have made, while with liquid honey you can recycle the frame with the comb on it because all you've done is cut off a surface layer of wax before extracting the honey. You extract the honey by the centrifugal force of spinning the frames. There's money in bees wax that can be made into candles and pollen that some people believe has health benefits, but this should be qualified, if you want pollen for allergies or whatever, you need local pollen since your allergies are to local plants, not pollen from China that has dubious if any value. Beekeepers have always known that bee stings can help relieve arthritis, and this seems to be getting some press in recent years; however, I remember R.R. suggesting that the bee sting acted as a kind of accupuncture treatment, and maybe this is a correct explanation for this .

Unless you've kept bees you may not understand the happiness one can experience opening hives on a hot summer day. The bees are probably fairly passive on such days, but a whiff of smoke passed over the top of the frames seems to keep them busy and diverted from the beekeeper's activities. Never wear perfume or any other scent to an apiary, I've had a nasty experience being stung by doing that. I kept bees for about ten years and was put out of business by mites from across the US border infesting my bees. Don't worry about killer bees, thirty years after I began beekeeping I still don't see them as a problem here in Canada. I remember, as well, lying in the grass near the entrance to the hives and watching bees coming and going, what a wonderful sight that is! They're bringing in nectar, their pollen sacs are full, and some bees are removing dead bees; in the fall the drones, male bees that inseminate the queen on her single maiden flight, are being expelled. Don't forget, all worker honey bees are female. Lying there, in the grass on a summer day, that's when you realize the genuine affection one feels for the honey bee.

W.B. Yeats's Grave, Sligo, Ireland, July 1978

Back in July 1978, I visited my friend R.R. Skinner at Boisville, his home in Camberley, England. We had first met a few years before, in August 1974, after I attended Krishnamurti's Gathering in Saanen, Switzland. After visiting with RR I planned to spend some time in Ireland and flew into Dublin, then after a day or two I took the train across Ireland to Galway and then on to Sligo. It not only rained, it poured rain the whole time I was there. I was miserable. One day I took a bus tour to the grave of W.B. Yeat's, that was probably the same day I also visited Lissidale House, where Yeats stayed in his youth. I did my research for this trip the way poets do their research, which is after the fact... this perhaps accounts for the dismal nature of my trip to Ireland. Years later I decided I would never visit a place where I didn't know somebody, or where I didn't have a reason for visiting (for instance, a conference). The life of the tourist is not for me, it is given to loneliness and self-consciousnss, constant travel, exhaustion, trying to maintain an interest in siteseeing when I'd prefer to be at home reading a book, and associating with some questionable people. It's all perfectly dreadful! So, this is the highlight of my trip to Ireland: Yeats's grave, including the church near his grave, and a Celtic Cross gravestone, all within close proximity to each other. Yeats is (perhaps) the greatest English language poet of the 20th Century.