This is the first chapter of my memoirs. Subsequent chapters are paywalled and can be found on this platform and on my Patreon account. If you would like to enjoy future chapters, which are released at a rate of at least two per month, please upgrade to a paid subscription.
I became politically active and opinionated, in my own right, on September 19th, 1982, when I was ten years old. I had started listening to conservative talk radio when I was around eight or nine but had found it increasingly intellectually unpersuasive and had become a committed CBC listener just after Labour Day.
My mother had enrolled me in Saint George’s, a private Anglican boys’ school that fall, following a miserable fourth grade experience I had had at Kerrisdale Elementary School, where my quirky and inept social style had attracted a life-threatening level of bullying from the other students. Glass bottles had been thrown down on me from third-storey windows; a gang of boys on bicycles had pushed me out into oncoming traffic of a busy road.
So I was now getting up much earlier to attend a school that started earlier and was beyond normal walking distance and started thirty-five minutes earlier than schools in the public system. So I needed a ride. My already high-strung single mother, a former Olympic sprinter, was drinking a lot of coffee in those days and so, on weekday mornings, we would wolf-down breakfast and rush into her tiny turquoise blue Honda Civic, “the Blue Bullet,” she called it.
My mother loved the sensation of speed and had fought, her whole life, and lifted herself out of considerable poverty and abuse, to experience a sense of control. She loved her responsive little car with its standard transmission. At the slightest hint of possible congestion, she would turn abruptly onto a side street or dart in and out of lanes of traffic on an arterial.
Some days, it was as though every morning began as a traveling centrifugal force demonstration. Petrified that I would be hurt in traffic and hyper-vigilant about my physical safety when I was in her presence, my mother would also thrust her right hand across my chest to prevent me from falling forward, just in case my chest-covering seat belt malfunctioned, whenever the car came, as it often did, to an abrupt stop.
My mother both loved and hated driving like this and was alive in a way she had long since ceased being, after giving up sprinting for long distance jogging, following the end of her Olympic career.
This meant that, after three or four cups of coffee, my mother’s body was a blur of rapid movements and fast-twitch reactions on those morning drives. So, when we did have to stop at a stop sign or light, she needed something to do with her hands; and she would begin pressing the buttons of the AM radio presets on our car radio, changing stations every few seconds while she waited for the light to change or the car ahead of her to move.
She was only partly conscious of her agency in all this. I know because she would complain about the station having changed. “Darn,” she would say, keeping her language PG, “I was listening to that!”
I think about those radio buttons as I thought about them then, evidence that when people hurt or inconvenience you, or themselves, they are so often blind to their own actions and agency in the matter.
It was in that car that I was introduced to the joys of CBC radio and, within a week, CBU 690 was the only radio I listened to. My clock radio awoke me with CBC at 7am and I ended every night listening to the ten o’clock news, followed by the comprehensive provincial weather report, the routine, almost prayerful speech act that gave listeners an inventory of every region of the province, where I heard about the weather in far-away places like the Bulkley and the Parsnip as my day wound down. Until the late 80s, the weather report was followed by Book Time, twenty minutes of a soft-voiced CBC personality reading aloud the great novels of the twentieth century. It was from Book Time that I learned about Japanese internment through Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and about the tribulations and dilemmas of twentieth-century Jews through Chaim Potok’s the Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev. And then ninety minutes of classical music recorded in a far-off concert hall would begin and I would fall asleep.
And in between, there was, from 6:30 to 7:30, As It Happens, Canada’s world-renowned and greatest-ever news program, one whose accuracy and dynamism came from calling people on pay phones in the middle of the great events of our times, in the great cities of the world, great cities like the Paris of the Middle East, Beirut.
Beirut had become a veritable Mecca of sectarian militias from throughout the Levant; and I had been glued to the CBC Radio that week for its coverage of Israel’s intervention in the Lebanese Civil War and the punitive expedition sent by the Israeli Defense Force under the command of future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The IDF enabled their allies, the Phalangist militia, a paramilitary organization of Lebanese Christians to enter Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp and indiscriminately massacre the civilians therein. Like those on the ground interviewed by At It Happens, I believed an atrocity, a war crime had been committed.
I tried discussing these upsetting events at school but even my Soviet-obsessed Russophile then-best friend Michael Airton did not have much to add. But I remember these conversations because of the significance they and my interlocutors would later take on in my life. For instance, the sharpest rejoinder I received was from Felicity Walker (né Michael Morse) who replied “What’s a Lebanon?” and, after I explained, added, “I don’t know. I don’t live there.”
So, really, my first chance to talk about these events came at the post-church Sunday coffee at the Unitarian Universalist Church. Like most Unitarian Universalists of the 1980s, our congregation was largely composed of elderly patrician atheists with advanced degrees. Only two members of the congregation did not vote for the New Democratic Party (Canada’s social democrats) in provincial elections and they resigned the following spring following Reverend Philip Hewitt’s instructions to his congregants to vote NDP in the general election.
I had petitioned to be released from Sunday School and permitted to stay with the adults in church to listen to Hewitt and his assistant minister, John Quirk, deliver extraordinarily erudite sermons, brilliant talks on Biblical themes but preached from a secular humanist perspective. I was motivated to listen to the sermons not just because of their erudition and profundity but because Sunday school was bizarre and kind of terrible, sort of a dry run for political correctness and identity politics. In Unitarian Sunday School, we learned to make tacos, because cultural relativism is good, and to carve jack-o’-lanterns out of turnips because cultural appropriation is bad.
Sheila Thompson, a formidable grand dame of the church, who had raised money to fund her fall trip to Nicaragua to pick coffee beans for Daniel Ortega’s Sandinistas so that the young men could be sent to fight the US funded Contra insurgency in the jungle, was waxing on about the valour of the IDF in the Lebanese intervention and how, with the Israelis finally becoming a belligerent in the civil war, justice and order would finally prevail.
Although it seems unimaginable today, Israelis, not their neigbhours, were considered the infallible white-hatted good guys of the Middle East among progressives in the early 80s. After all, Israel was originally a Soviet-aligned state for its first eight years until the rise of Gamel Abdel Nasser and it had been ruled by either the Labour Party or Labour in coalition with a communist Zionist agrarian movement, Mapam, from its inception in 1948 until 1977. Although the country had been ruled by conservative secularists for five years, this was widely considered to be an historical aberration by Israel fans. Indeed, in less than two years, Labour would return to power.
As Sheilah took a swig of coffee, I raised my voice and suggested that Israel had just committed a war crime, that it could no longer be trusted, as a state to do the right thing, especially as it was led by the bloodthirsty Menachim Begin, the Labour Party’s implacable foe. (Of course, this was an unfair characterization of Begin but, then again, I was only ten and saw the world in the primary colours ten-year-olds do.)
Sheilah, metaphorically, ripped my head off. And I began to cry. Until I was thirty-nine, I never cried out of sadness but out of fear, as a defensive reaction, to try to dissuade those around me from hurting me further by assuring them that I was already sufficiently hurt.
I have made many political mistakes since that moment, when I became politically conscious, and now, mistakes that mostly could have been avoided, forty-one years of mistakes, some tragic, some comical, most both, a great number extremely embarrassing.
I often think of myself as the Gary Coleman of British Columbia politics. Coleman, you may recall, was the internationally famous star of the NBC situation comedy Diff’rent Strokes, the chubby-cheeked child star, universally beloved in the 1980s, the rest of whose life became an endless series of ever-more embarrassing gaffes and failures, that ended with him working as a mall security guard, living in a manufactured home and winning 0.2% of the popular vote in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election.
But is my spectacular track record of wall-to-wall political failure because I am a Colemanesque figure, trying to recapture my youth as a beloved mascot of the environmental movement of the late 80s and early 90s or does the failure come from somewhere else? Did I make a wrong turn somewhere? And if I did, what was the original mistake?
