Grandview 27th September 1920
September 27, 2020
Vancouver Sun, 19200927, p.3
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Night Music: First Cut Is The Deepest
September 26, 2020
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Snacks Tonight #35
September 26, 2020
Today, the Everloving slaved over a hot stove to create this wonderful plum galette. The local plums have just been wonderful this year.
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The Liberation of Paris: A Racist Whitewash!
September 26, 2020A truly despicable slice of Western history has been revealed: The Americans and Brits insisted that the troops who were to march through Paris at its liberation in 1944 should be all white, regardless of the sacrifices made by British, French and American black soldiers.
The issue arose, according to this BBC report, because General De Gaulle insisted that French troops lead the march. However, most French units were a mix of white and black troops and that just wouldn’t do for the Allies.
In January 1944 Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, was to write in a memo stamped, “confidential”: “It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of white personnel. “This would indicate the Second Armoured Division, which with only one fourth native personnel, is the only French division operationally available that could be made one hundred percent white” …
A document written by the British General, Frederick Morgan, to Allied Supreme Command stated: “It is unfortunate that the only French formation that is 100% white is an armoured division in Morocco. “Every other French division is only about 40% white. I have told Colonel de Chevene that his chances of getting what he wants will be vastly improved if he can produce a white infantry division.”
A suitable French unit could not be found without removing all the black troops and replacing them with soldiers from other units, many of them not even French.
In the end, nearly everyone was happy. De Gaulle got his wish to have a French division lead the liberation of Paris, even though the shortage of white troops meant that many of his men were actually Spanish. The British and Americans got their “Whites Only” Liberation even though many of the troops involved were North African or Syrian.
We were lucky enough to have large numbers of Africans, Indians, black and Native Americans and others fight and die on our side in that war, but we were too sick in the head to recognize them as heroes when the time came. What a miserable load of hypocrites we were.
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Plus Ca Change ….
September 26, 2020
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This was my wrap up of the 2009 BC Provincial election. I thought it might be an interesting contrast with today’s situation which has changed drastically.
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So we had the election yesterday. Overall, little has changed. Gordon Campbell and his BC Liberals were returned to power for the third election in a row, while Carole James’ New Democrats stay as Opposition. The number of seats held by each side was essentially unchanged.
It was, I guess, a perfect recession election where the electorate decided to keep the status quo to get some stability. Regardless of the NDP ads, most voters see Campbell’s middle-to-right policies as safer at this time. And it means that Campbell’s innovative Carbon Tax keeps going, and Gordo will be doing the glad handing at the Olympics next year.
Three matters of interest: turnout, the Greens, and electoral reform.
Back in the 80s when bare-knuckle politicking was BC’s style, the turnouts regularly hit 75%. In the last election in 2005 there was much gnashing of teeth and wailing because only 55% of the electorate bothered to vote. This time, the numbers fell to an astonishing 48%. I haven’t got a clear read on that (though I doubt so many consciously decided to follow an anarchist path of non-voting), but it is the most interesting part of the election to me. Were people too depressed about the Canucks loss that they couldn’t get out of the house? Was it so obvious that Campbell would win? Was the campaign simply so boring?
Then there is the utter failure of the Green Party. They will finish with about 8% of the vote, a fall of at least a point from 2005. And this in an election when Jane Sterk managed to force herself onto the Leadership Debate on TV. They were definitely marginalized in the media, but they were last time too. Even Sterk finished a bad third in her riding. Perhaps the Liberals adoption of a Carbon Tax put such a dent in the Greens that they couldn’t recover. Their failure to move ahead was a bit of a surprise to me as I thought they would do better.
And finally, we saw the death of a form of proportional representation called the Single Transferable Vote or STV. My guess is that it was just too complicated. The benefits (if any) were not sold hard enough to overcome the obvious complications. It needed 60% positive vote to be adopted, but in the end 61% voted against it. I’m happy to see it go as it distanced the elected from the electors even further than today. It would have been the exact opposite of direct democracy.
So, the next four years here will be much the same as the last four. Next time, we will probably have three new leaders to consider.
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Grandview 26th September 1920
September 26, 2020
Vancouver Sun, 19200926, p.30
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Grandview 25th September 1920
September 25, 2020
Vancouver World</i> 19200925, p.9
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Wise Words
September 25, 2020Perfectionism is slow death
— Hugh Prather
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NIght Music: Young, Gifted, and Black
September 24, 2020
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The Joy of Cooking
September 24, 2020
First, let me heap praise on a cook book: Jane Lawson’s wonderful “Cooking Curries“. Every double-page consists of one or two recipes and a gorgeous colour photograph. She covers the widest range of curries from the obvious — India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, for example — to the more obscure — such as Goa, Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Bali, and Kenya. Under her steady guidance, I have learned to mix and make a dozen or more new curry pastes, and she has really taken my hand and led me to a new confidence in using coconut milk and different fruits in my cooking. I picked the book up by chance from Book Warehouse for $7.99 more than a decade ago and have derived hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of education and pleasure from her writing. This was probably the best buy I ever made in a cookbook.
Some time ago, I wanted to cook supper and had actually remembered to get some chicken breasts out of the freezer to thaw in the morning. I had also vaguely decided that I would make something from “Cooking Curries” and had picked up a stem of lemongrass and some fresh cilantro from Chinatown. Other than that, I had no real idea of what I was going to do. As I slowly sauteed the chicken pieces in an oil and crushed lemongrass mix, I scanned my way through the book until “thai red duck curry with pineapple” caught my 
eye. I chose it because I knew I had most (not all) of the stuff needed to make the red curry paste. The fact that I didn’t have either duck or pineapple was of no concern: I had sauteed chicken and — at the perfect suggestion of my wife — mandarin orange segments.
To cut a fun time of chopping and boiling and simmering and stirring short, we ended up with a pretty darned good meal. A chicken curry over rice, sweetened with coconut milk and orange segments (which, like good anchovies, had melted away leaving just their umami essence), seasoned with a hot red paste (made from homegrown Thai peppers, I am proud to say), and with strong Thai undertones from the lemongrass, lemon zest and fresh cilantro.
The late Vancouver chef James Barber taught that you make do with the ingredients you have; that you cannot not cook something just because you are missing an item from a list; that the spirit and love you put into cooking is almost as important as basic technique. Combining this ethos with Jane Lawson’s already inventive recipes allowed me that night to fully experience the joy of cooking.
Grandview 24thSeptember 1920
September 24, 2020
Province</> 19200924, p.20
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The Damn Towers — Again!
September 23, 2020At the end of August, the developers of the Safeway site at Broadway & Commercial put their heads above the parapet for a moment and offered some sort of tour to engage the community. I applied for tickets as did several of my friends here and none of us ever heard back. Perhaps they were just doing an email scrape for their database.
Now, according to the report in the Georgia Straight, they have made an amended application to the City that pushes the number and size of the towers ever upward. Now there will be three towers of 25-, 29-, and 30-storeys.
In 2013, our opposition to a 36-storey tower brought the Grandview Community Plan to a stand-still for a year. In 2016, when the Community Plan was finally approved, the Vision majority pushed through approval of two towers, of 12- and 24-storeys; a total of 36 storeys. The current proposal calls for 84-storeys of towers on the same site.
Talk about ignoring all the work that went into the Community Plan!
This is a development fight that the younger generation of activists needs to take over, and they need to show themselves now.
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The Broken Promises of Internment
September 23, 2020
Some years ago, when I was writing “The Drive“, I came across a lot of material about the internment of the Japanese in British Columbia in 1942. There were poignant stories of very popular shops having to close, of the missing athletes and scholars at Britannia who simply didn’t show up one morning, of visits by east-enders to the PNE to say goodbye to their friends and neighbours who were being held there before being shipped off to the Interior, of lives and families suddenly disrupted beyond imagining.
The Nikkei Museum on Burnaby has an exhibit starting this weekend called “Broken Promises” about the lives of Japanese in BC in the 1940s.
Grounded in research from Landscapes of Injustice – a 7 year multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, community engaged project, this exhibit explores the dispossession of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s. It illuminates the loss of home and the struggle for justice of one racially marginalized community. The story unfolds by following seven narrators. Learn about life for Japanese Canadians in Canada before war, the administration of their lives during and after war ends, and how legacies of dispossession continue to this day.”
Looks interesting.
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Image: Pirates in Puerto Vallerta
September 23, 2020
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Grandview 23rd September 1920
September 23, 2020
Province</> 19200923, p.5
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Ignoring Judicial Review
September 22, 2020There has been a lot of talk this week about how the Democrats should handle the GOP’s intention to vote on a Supreme Court justice before the next inauguration date. I have read some interesting material, for example, on the value of increasing the number of justices on the Court to eighteen, or even more. But the argument that appeals to me most is that of simply ignoring the Supreme Court entirely.
Ryan Cooper in the (centrist) The Week presents a good case for eliminating judicial review altogether if the Democrats gain the White House and Senate.
“The weird thing about judicial “originalism” is that the explicit principle of judicial review is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. All of that document’s stipulations on how the courts are to be constructed are contained in one single sentence in Article III: “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Actual judicial review was a product of a cynical power grab from Chief Justice John Marshall, who simply asserted out of nothing in Marbury vs. Madison that the court could overturn legislation.”
Cooper reminds us that Jefferson hated judicial review, and that Abraham Lincoln ignored the Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott and habeas corpus cases. He also wants us to recognize that our nostalgia for the Warren Court and its liberal decisions is based on an aberration.
“[C]onsidered in context, the court has been a bulwark of racism, reaction, and capitalist tyranny for almost its entire existence. Rulings enshrining slavery and Jim Crow, protecting racist murderers, banning basically all public health or labor regulation, or legalizing corruption far outweigh the brief and (not terribly effective) period of Warren court decisions.”
He writes that a very small number of other countries have Constitutional Courts but
“[i]n no other developed democracy does basically every piece of major legislation have to run a years-long gauntlet of tendentious lawsuits trying to get through the courts what parties could not get through the legislature.”
Cooper justifies this move because, “when confronted with that kind of ruthless usurpation of America’s republican values, one should be ready to respond in kind.”
I believe Cooper and I get to agree on this line of action from different perspectives. For him it seems to be about efficiency in reversing actions taken by the current President. For me, it returns more power back to Congress which is — far more than the Court — subject to the support of the population, thus imbuing each individual with a tiny bit more power than they had before.
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If Paradise Is Half As Nice
September 22, 2020
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Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 