Special deleted scene

My various primal needs to eat and/or be sheltered have, in their own little complex way, led me to spend this past evening assembling a portfolio of writing samples. Funny, this life thing.

So just to be totally clear, it was that—rather than unbridled vanity—that prompted me to go digging through my hard drive in search of pieces of writing from assorted degrees of back in the day, and then indulging in a little bit of self-reading. And yeah, I'd be lying if this didn't make for a somewhat soppy nostalgic exercise with the occasional exhortation under my breath of how goddamn awesome I used to be. I tried to cut down on the creepy old-lady-scrapbooking vibe by watching Fridays without Borders on Showcase at the same time. I think that helped.

(Aside: This exercise in barely-watching/mostly-listening prompted the discovery that those ads for Quest telephone personals that they run wall-to-wall during commercial breaks in that programming lineup—for reasons that boggle, absolutely boggle my mind—have ripped off the baseline from "With or Without You" by U2. You heard it from me first, Island-Records-copyright-guy ...who's accidentally surfed here-for-no-obvious-reason. I want a cut of the settlement. And a bass signed by Adam Clayton.)

Somewhere between hearing Paul "P.T." Thomas expound about his desensitization to breast implants and watching Adam Glasser tell a therapist about how his girlfriend left him, unbeknowst to me, in some previous episode of Family Business, I stumbled across an old chunk of copy from November 2004 that I did for my column "View from the Rear" in Incite magazine. As best I can recall, it began life as a digression within one month's piece that I had clipped out and set aside as a neat starting point for some other month. In fact, I distinctly remember feeling rather chuffed that I'd be coming at that month's deadline with a 300-ish word head start. It smacked of, well, organization.

Anyway, me being me, "some other month" turned out to be 40 and counting. And not doing that column anymore, and not feeling particularly inclined to add another 900-odd words onto what I had, and having actually had parts of what I'd written now be, in that great authorly phrase, superseded by events, I had this dismal realization that it was sort of useless.

Except, thinks I, as filler for the blog! Requires limited effort, maintains illusion of fresh content, re-emphasizes brand strength of back catalogue. Sheer genius.

Besides, George Lucas takes shit like this, sticks it on DVDs, and gets people to already own a Star Wars box set to buy whole other ones. I present my leftover crap for free.

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Samuel Huntington is a creepy old bastard who gave the field of international relations a delightfully dreary new theory a few years back which he dubbed “the clash of civilizations.” Sam basically carves the world into about ten ethnic chunks, claims that the cultural and values-based gulfs between them are unbridgeable, and postulates that we’re destined to spend the next century or so slaying one another across these fault lines. I bet Sam was a real hit at parties.

The theory can be fairly readily summed up as “the clash of funny headgear.” Essentially, people in turbans will never get along with people who wear baseball caps, people with yarmulkes will never get along with people who wear headscarves, and people in ushankas will never get along with whatever hats people in sub-Saharan Africa can afford.

If you’ve ever meandered through some banal corner of Brampton, you probably will not have noticed a significant amount of mortar fire hitting neighbourhoods with sombrero-wearing inhabitants originating from some apartment building reportedly containing a guy in a fez. I don’t think Huntington has ever been to Brampton, though.

Neither, to the best of my knowledge, have two notable followers of his thinking: George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Now, speaking as someone who’s dealt with the eyestrain and brainstrain that customarily follow slogs through a thick wad of Huntington in poorly-photocopied coursepack form, I can assure you that Bush probably hasn’t read him—the Flesch-Kincaid grade level being the primary barrier. (Thankfully, George has Dick, Donald, Condoleeza and Paul to do his reading for him.) Likewise, I don’t know if bin Laden finds time for reading pompous crap from some old white guy when he could be sacrificing a goat or something.

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