Everyone loves politics!

As you may recall, some time ago there was a young American businessman named Nick Berg, who was brutally decapitated by one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Now, two years later, al-Zarqawi has been killed in a targeted airstrike.

CNN interviewed Michael Berg, Nick Berg’s father, to see what he had to say.

O’BRIEN: Mr. Berg, thank you for talking with us again. It’s nice to have an opportunity to talk to you. Of course, I’m curious to know your reaction, as it is now confirmed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man who is widely credited and blamed for killing your son, Nicholas, is dead.

MICHAEL BERG: Well, my reaction is I’m sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being. He has a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed, and I feel bad for that.

I feel doubly bad, though, because Zarqawi is also a political figure, and his death will re-ignite yet another wave of revenge, and revenge is something that I do not follow, that I do want ask for, that I do not wish for against anybody. And it can’t end the cycle. As long as people use violence to combat violence, we will always have violence.

O’BRIEN: I have to say, sir, I’m surprised. I know how devastated you and your family were, frankly, when Nick was killed in such a horrible, and brutal and public way.

BERG: Well, you shouldn’t be surprised, because I have never indicated anything but forgiveness and peace in any interview on the air.

O’BRIEN: No, no. And we have spoken before, and I’m well aware of that. But at some point, one would think, is there a moment when you say, ‘I’m glad he’s dead, the man who killed my son’?

BERG: No. How can a human being be glad that another human being is dead?

O’BRIEN: There have been family members who have weighed in, victims, who’ve said that they don’t think he’s a martyr in heaven, that they think, frankly, he went straight to hell …

You know, you talked about the fact that he’s become a political figure. Are you concerned that he becomes a martyr and a hero and, in fact, invigorates the insurgency in Iraq?

BERG: Of course. When Nick was killed, I felt that I had nothing left to lose. I’m a pacifist, so I wasn’t going out murdering people. But I am — was not a risk-taking person, and yet now I’ve done things that have endangered me tremendously.

I’ve been shot at. I’ve been showed horrible pictures. I’ve been called all kinds of names and threatened by all kinds of people, and yet I feel that I have nothing left to lose, so I do those things.

Now, take someone who in 1991, who maybe had their family killed by an American bomb, their support system whisked away from them, someone who, instead of being 59, as I was when Nick died, was 5-years-old or 10-years-old. And then If I were that person, might I not learn how to fly a plane into a building or strap a bag of bombs to my back?

That’s what is happening every time we kill an Iraqi, every time we kill anyone, we are creating a large number of people who are going to want vengeance. And, you know, when are we ever going to learn that that doesn’t work?

O’BRIEN: There’s an alternate reading, which would say at some point, Iraqis will say the insurgency is not OK — that they’ll be inspired by the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the sense of he was turned in, for example, we believe by his own No. 2, No. 3 leadership in his ranks.

And, that’s actually them saying we do not want this kind of violence in our country. Experts whom we’ve spoken to this morning have said this is a critical moment where Iraqis need to figure out which direction the country is going to go. That would be an alternate reading to the scenario you’re pointing to.

BERG: Yes, well, I don’t believe that scenario, because every time news of new atrocities committed by Americans in Iraq becomes public, more and more of the everyday Iraqi people who tried to hold out, who tried to be peaceful people lose it and join — what we call the insurgency, and what I call the resistance, against the occupation of one sovereign nation.

O’BRIEN: There’s a theory that a struggle for democracy, you know…

BERG: Democracy? Come on, you can’t really believe that that’s a democracy there when the people who are running the elections are holding guns. That’s not democracy.

O’BRIEN: There’s a theory that as they try to form some kind of government, that it’s going to be brutal, it’s going to be bloody, there’s going to be loss, and that’s the history of many countries — and that’s just what a lot of people pay for what they believe will be better than what they had under Saddam Hussein.

BERG: Well, you know, I’m not saying Saddam Hussein was a good man, but he’s no worse than George Bush. Saddam Hussein didn’t pull the trigger, didn’t commit the rapes. Neither did George Bush. But both men are responsible for them under their reigns of terror.

I don’t buy that. Iraq did not have al Qaeda in it. Al Qaeda supposedly killed my son.

Under Saddam Hussein, no al Qaeda. Under George Bush, al Qaeda.

Under Saddam Hussein, relative stability. Under George Bush, instability.

Under Saddam Hussein, about 30,000 deaths a year. Under George Bush, about 60,000 deaths a year. I don’t get it. Why is it better to have George Bush the king of Iraq rather than Saddam Hussein?

643

Vive Montréal:

Montreal councillors are proposing a “pedestrian charter” that calls on the province to ban cellphone use while driving and lower speed limits from 50 to 40 kilometres an hour.

Andre Lavallee, who sits on council’s executive committee, said Wednesday the charter is about reinventing Montreal as a world-class walking city.

“Montreal was essentially designed over the years around the needs of the car,” said Lavallee. “Now we must re-think the city around the needs of the pedestrian.”

Rage Aganst The Jerks

Some fifteen year old white kid in FUBU gear at the mall today was talking about how he didn’t like Rage Against The Machine, because they were sell-outs.

It almost made me HULK OUT but being with a co-worker, I had to keep my Bruce Banner on.

Tom Morello’s daddy was a revolutionary, a Mau Mau guerilla who eventually became Kenya’s ambassador to the UN. His mother founded Parents For Rock And Rap, and his great uncle was Kenya’s first elected president.

What of our millionaire friend Zacarías Manuel de la Rocha? He’s in Mexico right now, fighting with the Zapatistas.

You can hate their music, their politics, or their actions, but they were the real thing.

Seriously, fuck that kid.

637

Let’s try this again.

Everything that’s happened over the last year has left me so raw, and so upset that when I revisit any of the hurt, or frustration, I’m right back where I started. I’m as upset as I was in the middle of everything, I’m as hurt as I was, I’m as depressed as I was.

All it takes is just one thing.

…

This postition is untenable. It has to be untenable. There’s no way that this can go on indefinately.

Something’s got to give.

MCFLY!

Sometime yesterday, I began my 27th trip around the sun.

I took a leisurely day, yesterday. Played some Rise of Legends, enjoyed some Uno on Xbox Live (housewives don’t expect you to talk smack, let me tell you), took some pictures of chimpmunks, ate some delicious cake. It was good. The weather and hills took their toll on my knee, but it was good.

When I woke up this morning, I felt much better. My knee, while still a bit sore, wasn’t sending daggers of firey love up my leg anymore.

Unusually, I wasn’t very hungry, either.

It wasn’t until I walked into the washroom that I realized what had happened.

You see, we are all made up of elementary particles, which, according to the Standard Model, form all larger particles in the universe:

…but things are not so simple in this world. The standard model does not answer all the questions science poses, and quantum theory has had to pick up the slack. And so, our understanding must continue to quantum particles:

Quantum particles, it is hypothesized, are simply bits of quantum material (strings or otherwise) which vibrate at different frequencies, giving them their unique properties. All things, in a sense, are made entirely of vibrations.

However, vibrational energy is quantized — meaning it can only equal certain discrete values, which correspond to discrete energy states.

I’m sure you all understand where I’m going with this.

After making some quick calculations on the back of my shampoo bottle and running them through the quantum harmonic oscillator model, I made some disturbing discoveries.

I tried to seek further answers via the Schrödinger equation, but Dirac’s bra-ket notation (as always) served only to make things clumsy.

However, I had learned enough. The state vectors of the energy eigenstate had shifted, but not via a complex phase. I know, it’s crazy, but it’s true.

Approximately 8 minutes before I completed my 27th trip around the sun, there was a powerful solar flare, sending deadly radiation hurtling towards the earth at unthinkable speed:

While our atmosphere protected us from the brunt of the blast, some stray radiation made it through, finding its way into the streets and homes of the greater Ontario area.

The rest of Ontario would not notice, however, for it was only I who had, at the precise moment the flares reached our planet, been in that precise position 27 years prior. I was perfectly aligned, and what happened next should come as no surprise.

The radiation did not pass harmlessly through my particles as they did everyone else. Instead, they knocked through them at a quantum level, spinning them much like a gutterpunk on PCP spins a New York subway turnstile.

This sudden change in force and pressure had dramatic consequences. The polarity of the particles shifted.

While still vibrating, my particles were now vibrating backwards.

I realized all this when I went to the washroom, and my stubble wasn’t there. My face had a slight shadow, but that was it. Certainly not what I should expect after two days without shaving.

That’s when it hit me: I’m travelling backwards through time.

To be more specific, my particles are. While I will move forward day after day, my particles are moving backwards, bringing me ever closer to that day, 27 years ago, when I was first in the position the solar flare found me in.

I know that you’re all as distressed as I am. Find solace in the fact that I am not without a plan, and I do not intend to take this lying down. I will be consulting experts on this matter immediately.

Tomorrow night, as soon as I am done work, I will be watching all three Back To The Future movies consecutively. In addition to an amusing tale of wacky hijinx, the BTTF trilogy is also a treatise on force amplification via the superposition of a number of time-evolving states, and Zemeckis received much scientific acclaim when the script was published in Nature.

I will keep you informed, true believers. Save heart, for I will not be bested by a foe so small as the sun.

630

From the mid-60s to the early-80s, Western culture experienced a period known as the ‘Consciousness Revolution’. It started with Vietnam protesting, and the development of counterculture for counterculture’s sake. Green, feminist, black power, and a number of other movements came out of this period. There was a generation gap, with the Greatest Generation on one side, and the Baby Boomers on the other.

This is the environment in which the Baby Busters and the Generation X crowd were born and raised.

Gen Xers (as I’m sure you all remember), grew up at the end of the Cold War, and watched multinational corporations come to power at the same time as the Soviet Union collapsed, developing cynicism and disdain for the works of the generations past. We can call this cynicism The Nirvana Effect.

In any case, Gen Xers tended to band together, and build their own works and communities, rather than rely on the ones they inherited. Whether it was a revival of political action, development of record labels, or the entrepreneurships which led to the dot-com boom, they banded together, and built things.

…and then, of course, came the hilariously and iteratively named Generation Y. Gen Y grew up with computers in their schools, didn’t watch the Challenger explode, and only saw the Berlin Wall fall in history class. IT has always been a part of the world around them, and like Gen X, they banded together, and built things. While these things may consist of elements as distasteful as pop punk, emo and That’s So Raven, they still built things.

However.

There was a gap of several years between Gen X and Gen Y. Not a big one, just a few years. The people born in this gap are creatively called Generation XY, or The No Generation (although I prefer The Doom Generation).

They grew up in a very narrow transition period. Young enough to enjoy The Simpsons as a cartoon when it first aired, and old enough to enjoy it as comedy genius when the Cape Feare episode aired. Old enough to remember when Nintendo led the world out of the darkness after The Great Video Game Crash.

They watched the Berlin Wall fall, and were the last people to be born with any memory of life during the Cold War. They grew up with Carmen Sandiego and TMNT, and watched technology move from the realm of research and sci-fi into BBS networks, and the creation of the World Wide Web.

However.

There aren’t really many of them, comparatively speaking. They’re not large enough of a demographic to be marketed to by advertisers, or addressed by politicians. The ‘great albums’ of the late 80s and early 90s had already been written and released, and the great TV shows were absent, or incomprehensible. Too late to have seen Battlestar Galactica, and too young to know what the fuck was going on in Twin Peaks. They had Saved By The Bell instead, which, while featuring a cast of characters and a puntastic premise (Principal Belding. Saved By The Bell. Bells go ‘ding’. Get it?), still sucked hairy goat balls.

This generation is markedly characterized by a complete lack of association or identity with the popular or political movements that were present as they grew up, or that developed afterwards. They did not band together, they did not build things. They just watched the world as everything happened around them.

…

While usually I can fake being part of the older Gen X world with my overwhelmingly Gen X friends, or pretend like I understand what the fuck those little Gen Y jerks are on about, I can’t do it today.

Today, I feel exactly like the out of place person-without-a-culture that I am.

empty chairs at empty tables

One week until my birthday. It sneaks up on me year after year, and year after year I move a little further away from youth and comfort. I’ll be 27 next Monday.

I know that every angsty person clad in black says this, but when I was young, I never expected to make it past 25. Not because I’m some kind of JAMES DEAN DANGEROUS LIVING REBEL WOOOOO or anything — but because of my father, and everything that comes along with being his son. On the off-chance that I somehow make it to 30, I had figured, I’ll be some strange new ‘old’ person, full of wisdom and responsbility and experience.

Now that I’m nearly there, I see that this is not the case. If and when I make it to 30, I will be the same person, foolish and irresponsible, only with a few more years of experience at said foolishness.

When I was much younger, I said that the best part of growing up is the fact that you don’t have to. This may still be the case, but I’m getting older regardless.

…

I own more things right now than I’ve ever owned in my life; I have a good computer, a good video game system, a great TV, a lot of fantastic books and a lot of amazing music. I don’t know if it’s survivor guilt left over from Rideau Street, but I have way too much when so many people have so little. How can I ask for a new gadget or another pair of boots when my house is so full that I need to give away boxes of old things just so I can fit new things in their place?

If any of you had plans to pick me up a card or a little toy or something, please take that two or three dollars and buy a street kid something to eat instead. That would be a wonderful birthday gift.

Statue Picture

As of this week, my LiveJournal is half a decade old.

I really should find something better to do.

Edit: Also I have Apoptygma Berzerk stuck in my head. This must be penance for a lifetime of sin.

Edit 2: The lifetime of sin wasn’t worth it.