Help the Tibetans

Read this doc on Scribd: Canada-Tibet Committee-Help Save Tibet

Update on Chuck Cadman Affair

So, here's a copy of Prime Minister Harpie's statement of claim. It's a long document. I haven't even read it yet. But if you're dogged and determined, go ahead. I got this (with some finagling) from Stephen Taylor's Constipated Blog, which I read now and then to find out what the other ideologues are saying. If you click on the square box in the upper right corner, you'll get a full-sized page.

Read this doc on Scribd: Statement-of-Claim-Stephen-Harper-stephentaylorca

Spring in the Air...

Some photos of a morning in southern Ontariario. Just a few days after the heaviest snowfall of the winter, and just a couple weeks or so before spring...

The Chuck Cadman Affair

Um, did I mention that Canajun politics get interesting sometimes? Yes, I think I did in the previous post. Here's another example, this one on the federal level.

Canaduh has a minority parliament at the moment. It's been a long moment. Two years of Constipated minority government. And before that, some months of Gliberal minority government. For those who don't follow this, minority government means that the party with the most seats in the House of Commons does not have a majority of the seats, so that whenever a vote comes along, the governing party must depend on some other party to vote along with it. Usually that's one of the so-called "Third" parties, of which there is more than one. There are two: the Floc Québecois, which has seats only in Québec, and the NDP (aka Nearly Demented Party) which has seats only in its own mind. That leaves Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, the official opposition party, which is the Gliberal Party of Canaduh. And there is also the odd Independent Member of Parliament. And believe me, that is odd, because the party system has a stranglehold on the Parliamentary system in this our Dominion of Canaduh.

Which leads us into the latest scandale to hit the House. By my (admittedly hazy) calculations, we've had nearly three years of minority government around here. And that's the true beginning of this story.

Back when the Gliberals led the minority government, the array of forces was so evenly split that one or two votes could totter the teeter and bring down the government. And it just so happened that there was one Independent MP, name of Chuck Cadman, who represented a riding somewhere out there on the left coast. (There's a whole back story there, too. He'd been formerly a Constipator, but was dastardly done out of his re-nomination for his seat. He ran as an Independent and beat the pants off the Constipated candidate who had usurped his place. So, by conviction, Cadman was a Constipator, but he sure as hell didn't owe them much.

Chuck Cadman was also dying of cancer. And this is where the story gets sticky.

The leader of the Constipated Party of Canada, our most beloved Stephen Harpie, lusted mightily after the job of Prime Minister. He dearly desired to defeat the Gliberal government in a vote of non-confidence and thereby trigger an election which he deemed he could win. (And which he eventually did win, although with only another minority...)

There was just such a non-confidence motion coming up, engineered I forget how, but never mind. And Harpie wanted Cadman's vote badly.

But here's the rub. Cadman, even if he agreed with Harpie, was highly unlikely to help bring down the government. And here's why: as an MP, he was entitled to death benefit insurance to the tune of $400,00 or so. Well, his wife was. But if the House dissolved, technically Cadman was no longer an MP. He was, rather, a candidate. And the question of death benefits was up in the air if he died while running for office. So...better for him and his family if he died while actually in office. Not everybody was aware of this, but a sufficient number of people were in the know including, according to his own account, Stephen Harpie.

Nevertheless, a couple of Constipated officials decided to approach Mr. Cadman anyway. And the allegation is that he was offered a $1M life insurance policy if he would vote against the government, and thereby cause it to fall and precipitate an election. Which the Constipators hoped to win.

Well, when push came to shove and shove came to vote Mr. Cadman voted with the governing party, those slippery Gliberals because, to him, a death benefit in the hand was better than Constipator promises in the bush. And furthermore he said publicly that he had been offered nothing more than an unopposed candidacy in the next election and funds to help him campaign as if he were an official Constipator candidate. In other words, no real financial benefit to sway his vote, which would have been totally illegal.

But now, a new biography of Cadman, Tom Zytaruk's book Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, has revealed the alleged machinations of the Constipated Party. The book claims that Cadman, on his deathbed, confided to his daughter about the offer made to him.

Who the hell knows whether this story is true? Only the people who may have made such an offer, and Cadman himself, who is dead.

But the Gliberal Party has been having a field day with this. If the offer was made in bald terms (which seems unlikely...how could anybody be that stupid?) it was illegal as hell. Accusations have been flying in the Common Bawdy House of Commoners.

And on the Gliberal website. Have a look at these articles:

Harpie Must Come Clean About Allegations of Constipative Bribery,
Gliberals sayHarpie Knew of Constipative Bribery
Harpie Must Explain Content of Zytaruk Tape

And what has been the result of all this fur flying? Prime Mystery Stephen Harpie, who is nothing if not petty and vindictive, has decided to sue the leader of the Gliberal Party, M. Dion and the Outremonts, and several other members as well, for libel. It's a first for the Canajun political system. (See, in Canajun politics, you can say damn well anything you please in the Common Bawdy House of Commoners if it's not un-parliamentary, and there are no repercussions. But if you repeat statements outside the House, you open yourself to law suits. It's called Parliamentary Privilege or something like that.)

The main defence against charges of libel is truth. If your statements are true and proveable, you can't lose. But in this case, proof may be hard to come by. As for statements on the Gliberal website, maybe they can argue that they were only "reporting" on statements made by members in the Common Bawdy House.

Now here's another twist. Cadman's wife Dona, who originally endorsed the tale of attempted vote-buying, will be a candidate for the Constipated Party in the next election!

Did I mention that Canajun politics can get interesting sometimes?

(PS. Anybody who has read this blog knows that I don't use the real names of individuals or parties when I write about Canajun politics. I make up new names to protect the guilty. In this case, however, I did use the real names of Cadman and his wife, cuz you have to give the story some touchstone with reality if you expect to be able to follow it. Now, if you click on the links, you'll get the real names of the parties involved. I can't be held responsible for others' inability to write proper satirical fiction.)

Update on Caledonia

This past weekend a group of Caledonia residents and others staged a small protest outside the home of Julian Fantino, the chief of the Ontariario Provincial Police. Demanding answers for what they see as police inaction and uneven enforcement of the law.

Sometimes Canajun politics gets interesting.

Mr. Fantino wasn't home. He was in Caledonia.

Coincidence? We think not.

There was some controversy because politicians, including Gory Tory the Leader of the Tories, said it was improper to take your protest to a private home. My take on this is that it's fair game, since it's the residents' private homes and property values which have been devastated by the intransigence of politicians. Good on 'em, I say.

Not that it actually did much good on 'em.

The next day I got to hear both Mr. Fantino and the leader of the protest, Merlyn Kinrade, on a Steeltown radio station. They were interviewed separately. Mr. Fantino started off calmly, but as he warmed up, he warmed up, until by the end of the interview he was positively hot under the collar. (In passing, this is my experience with law enforcement people, or anyone accustomed to authority: they have a wonderful veneer of caring and reasonableness. But the veneer is thin. The merest breath of opposition is likely to arouse the urge to exert power.)

Mr. Kinrade, on the other hand, derided Mr. Fantino's remarks. Fantino had suggested that the protesters and others of their ilk needed to do better research. (My question: Research? What better research than actually living there? Mr. Fantino does not make a habit of living where he works. When he was chief of Hawgtown he lived not in Hawgtown but rather the safe white suburbs north, which is where he still lives.) Mr. Kinrade suggested he would let Fantino use one of his bedrooms for a week.

I'm coming across as critical of Fantino and the police. On balance, yes I am. But I truly understand Mr. Fantino's frustration. He repeated that it's not his job to solve the Caledonia problem. He and his forces are stuck in the middle. Clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right. (I leave you to decide which are which.) He also repeated that he has received no directives of a political nature at all. But I still don't believe him.

And his going to Caledonia when he knew that people were travelling to his home strikes me as typical of an arrogant copper who loves to be a smartass and knows he can get away with it cuz he's got a gun. He claims he's having dialogue with the Caledonians. True. Just not all of them.

Larry Fills in the Gaps

Well, of course I was somewhat derelict in my journalistic duties in the previous post. In my provincial arrogance I assume everybody knows who Wiarton Willie is. That's him on the left. And on the right. In the cage.

Willie is Canada's most famous weather prognosticator -- an albino groundhog who emerges (or is coaxed) from his lair every Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. If he sees his shadow, it means that we will have an early spring in good old Ontariario. If not, it means six more weeks of winter.

A few smartasses have sort of worked out that either way, we get six more weeks of winter, at a minimum.

And furthermore, it's been known to snow on the May Two-Four weekend...(Victoria Day holiday for all you loyal British Imperialists.) That's considerably more than six weeks.

Click on Willie to go to a little blurb website about him and his hometown.

Was Wiarton Willie Right?

As I stare out the velvet bars of my window here at the Yoni School for Wayward Poets, it is snowing...AGAIN! Mothercorp tells me it's the result of La Niña, the nasty sister of El Niño.

Whatever.

But get this. A few weeks ago, I was also staring out through the slats, and what did I see? This:



I don't ever recall seeing a cardinal in the snow, or hearing one on the first day of February. I've also heard mourning doves and a chickadee. On the more temperate days.

It's hard to believe now when it's snowing yet again. But maybe Wiarton Willie was right and we'll get an early spring.

Caledonia, Caledonia, What Makes Your Big Head So Hard?

Today is the second anniversary of the Six Nations native occupation of the Douglas Creek Estates in Caledonia, in good old Ontariario.

The second anniversary.

I haven't written about it previously. The world is full of occupations and disputes and land claims. Many of them bigger and more momentous. Israel, Palestine and Gaza. That's one big land claim isn't it?

But Caledonia is closer to home.

On Feb. 28/06, the members of the Six Nations took over a land development site called Douglas Creek Estates, on which building had already taken place, saying it was native land and it belonged to them. They blockaded the road, which was in fact, the main street of Caledonia and took over. The blockade caused major disruptions in the town of Caledonia, gave rise to protests by the local residents, and in some cases incited destruction of property and minor violence. Especially during the first year of the occupation, there was a great deal of tension. This abated somewhat after the blockade was finally removed, but other developments since then have ensured that the crisis is not yet past.

That's a little bit of background. If you want more, Google Douglas Creek Estates - Caledonia ON and you'll find that a little industry has grown up around this occupation.

So now we are into year 3. HWSRN just happened to be in Caledonia today, the actual day of the anniversary. He took some photos (from a distance, without getting out of his vehicle, because it is not a place that is inviting to people taking photos, unless you are big mainstream media, and sometimes not even then.)

The Caledonia occupation brings into stark relief all the problems Canada has had in dealing with aboriginals, land claims, and the reserve system. Overlapping jurisdictions exacerbate the problem. 200 year old treaties raise their hoary heads. Mohawk Warriors slip in and out of the territory relatively unimpeded. It's a mess. And the local residents suffer the consequences but don't have any of the power.

Ultimately, the Six Nations are claiming (based on a treaty of 1784) a huge swath of southern Ontario, six miles on either side of the Grand River, for its whole length, which they say was never legally ceded to the government of Canada. It was taken from them over the years by government fiat or shady dealings, anything but an honest trade.

And here's where the difficulty begins. Jurisdictional troubles. The aboriginal question is a federal responsibility. And successive federal governments, of any party you'd like to name, have managed to drag their feet when it comes to dealing with land claims. They seem to hope it will all just go away if they ignore it or prolong the agony.

It's not going to go away. The First Nations have, if not the highest, one of the highest birth rates in the country. (And there's an interesting anthropological study...)

As a result, the state of land claims by aboriginal groups in Canada is a disaster. There have been some successes, but the looming claims far outnumber those.

Furthermore, any action by aboriginal groups inevitably takes place within some province's territory. So the provincial governments have to become involved. This occurs mainly in the area of policing. And in Ontariario, policing of sites like the Caledonia occupation has become a thorny problem, because a native, Dudley George, was killed by provincial police in 1995 at a similar dispute in Ipperwash Ontariario. The current premier of Ontariario, Malton McGuilty was instrumental in setting up the public inquiry that excoriated the previous government's actions at Ipperwash. So, when it comes to Caledonia, he's walking on eggshells. The result is a lot of football tossing. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Many Canajuns I have talked to just want the governments to do something! On the other hand, their opinions about the Six Nations claims are quite divided. Everybody seems to agree, more or less, on the justice of their claims. The natives have begun to develop the idea that they are stewards of the earth. I think this is possibly just another version of the Noble Savage myth, perpetrated by the "Noble Savages" themselves. But the protesters clearly broke laws and have never been called to account for that. The OPP (Ontariario Provincial Police) has repeatedly failed in its duty to enforce the law, and there is not a citizen in the province who doesn't think the reason for that is political manipulation. Malton McGuilty is guilty. And the continued inaction (or, at the least, failure to make visible progress) is made worse by the fact that the Six Nations groups themselves appear unable to produce a united leadership.

Oh, there's so much more to be said. But I have only one thing more right now. You know, India, Pakistan, most of Africa, parts of Asia...they're all still working through the consequences of colonialism, that virulent strain of thought which presumes that you can take over and actually own somebody else's land, their homeland, their culture. We see it all happening far away.

Caledonia proves that we're still dealing with the colonial past right here.

Want a Brand-New Novel for Free?

My friend Marianne Paul sent this link to a just-published novel by Charles Bock, which Random House is offering for free download, for a limited time.

Here's a screenshot of the web page. Click on it and it will take you to the actual page.

But here's something interesting. The download is free. It's still copyrighted, of course. Nevertheless, it's free. But in the background, difficult to notice under that messy red "Download" button, there is a further copyright message. It says:

© Copyright 2008. Charles Bock. This is our intellectual property, so kindly don't fucking steal it.

What exactly are the implications of this? I'm not sure. If it's free, you can't steal it. Except by republishing it and claiming it as your own. Would anyone actually go to that kind of trouble?

I just don't know what to make of it. This definitely goes to the whole debate over copyright, digital rights, plagiarism and the Net.

Peace Today

All right, don't everybody go and get all mushy on me, OK?

Top 100 Books

I found this list of top books a while back, but I can't remember where it was.

When I look at it I'm surprised at the number of them I've read. Also, it seems quite an arbitrary list. James Joyce at the bottom? But anyway, lists are fun. Titles with an asterisk are those I've read.

1.The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)*
(Great page turner. By comparison, the movie sucked. And furthermore, I don't care what the judges said, you'll never convince me that the whole premise wasn't based on Holy Blood & Holy Grail...or that the controversy wasn't manufactured by the publisher to boost sales of both books...)
2.Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3.To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)*
4.Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5.The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)*
6.The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)*
7.The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)*
(I read the entire trilogy approximately every five years.)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10.A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11.Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)*
(I want J.K. Rowling to stop using the word "revision" for "review".)
12.Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13.Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)*
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
(Saw the movie. Loved it.)
16.Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)*
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)*
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21.The Hobbit (Tolkien)*
(What has it got in its pocketses?)
22.The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)*
(High school required reading.)
23.Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)*
26.The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)*
(See previous post on this.)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)*
(Can't tell you how many times I've read this.)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)*
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)*
(A masterpiece. Again, the movie sucked.)
32.The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33.Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)*
(Ayn Rand makes me want to chew nails...both for her philosophy and her fictional style.)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)*
(Orwell makes me want to chew peyote buttons...just to forget about things for a while...)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)*
(Really well-written retelling of the Arthurian story from the women's point of view.)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)*
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40.The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible
(Too much violence. Too much sex. Too many characters.)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47.The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)*
48.Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49.The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50.She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51.The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)*
(Kingsolver engages in the exercise of writing from several disparate points of view.)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
(Only managed the Coles Notes.)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54.Great Expectations (Dickens)*
55.The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)*
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)*
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)*
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)*
(Oooh...scary.)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)*
62.The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)*
(See above)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)*
(I read this for the first time when I was 12 years old.)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)*
(You really can tell he's from Ontariario.)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)*
(This is a Major Major piece of work.)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)*
(I first read this probably around the same time I read WarrenPeace. I did not then understand why Police Inspector Javert hounded Jean Valjean. Valjean had done his time (originally) and paid his debt to society. What right had Javert to persecute him? I recently re-read it. My opinion has not changed.)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)*
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
(Great movie.)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73.Shogun (James Clavell)*
(Everything I know about Japan I learned from this book.)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
(Great movie.)
75.The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78.The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)*
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)*
(Huxley makes me want to chew peyote buttons...just to forget about things for a while...)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)*
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)*
(Another masterpiece.)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)*
(Everything I know about Toronto...well, actually, I didn't learn it from this book.)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)*
(More high school reading.)
93. The Good Earth(Pearl S. Buck)*
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)*
(I want Redfield to stop using the word "intensely" when he means "intently".)
100.Ulysses (James Joyce)*
(Still working on this one...about two-thirds through it...on my second attempt...I have no idea what it's about.)

Praising Others

Praising others should be part of our daily life and a component of our Dharma practice. Imagine what our life would be like if we trained our minds to dwell on others' talents and good attributes. We would feel much happier and so would they! We would get along better with others, and our families, work environments, and living situations would be much more harmonious. We plants the seeds from such positive actions on our mindstream, creating the cause for harmonious relationships and success in our spiritual and temporal aims.

An interesting experiment is to try to say something nice to or about someone every day for a month. Try it. It makes us much more aware of what we say and why. It encourages us to change our perspective so that we notice others' good qualities. Doing so also improves our relationships tremendously.

A few years ago, I gave this as a homework assignment at a Dharma class, encouraging people to try to praise even someone they didn't like very much. The next week I asked the students how they did. One man said that the first day he had to make something up in order to speak positively to a fellow colleague. But after that, the man was so much nicer to him that it was easy to see his good qualities and speak about them!

--from Taming the Mind by Thubten Chodron, published by Snow Lion Publications

Upcoming Jack Kerouac Movie

Curt Worden left a comment in my post about Jack Kerouac from Sept/07 to tell us about a new documentary about Kerouac called One Fast Move Or I'm Gone. There is still not much detail available about where we can see this film, but Curt says it will be forthcoming.

I didn't want to leave his comment languishing in the back pages, so I'm posting about it here. I'm sure Kerouac fans everywhere would want to know about it. Click on Curt's name to go to the website, where you can view a trailer.

And here's a screenshot of the web page:

Remember the Maine!

Today is the anniversary of the day the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbour in 1898. According to the Naval Historical Center, more than 260 sailors were killed.

I wonder how many Murricans now know that "Remember the Maine!" became the rallying cry of the Murricans in the subsequent Spanish-Murrican war. As a Canajun, I wonder how many Canajuns ever knew that. I remember hearing the expression as a kid, but I suspect it wasn't until much later that I learned anything at all about what it meant.

And only today did I decide to research it a little bit. But somehow, some of the details were familiar.

The Maine was sent into Cuba during the Cuban independence struggle with Spain to protect Murrican citizens. This is a (sometimes) legitimate (and often-used) rationale for establishing a military presence in trouble spots around the world. In this case, the US was not engaged in open hostilities with the Spanish, and the Spanish government had reluctantly agreed to the ship's presence in the harbour. Everyone was wary and working to avoid trouble.

But then the Maine blew up. In the immediate aftermath, Spanish officials were instrumental in the rescue operations, which led the captain of the Maine to believe that Spain might not be responsible for this disaster. However, a US Navy board of inquiry ultimately came to the conclusion that the Maine had been the victim of a mine. The board, however, did not assign blame to anyone.

Nevertheless,this conclusion inflamed Murrican public opinion, aided and abetted by the "yellow" press, and it wasn't long before the tension escalated into outright war.

But in fact, even at that first board of inquiry there was some doubt about the conclusion that a mine was responsible for the explosion. Some said it was spontaneous combustion of a coal bunker right next to an explosives magazine that caused it. Later studies also raised this possibility, perhaps even more strongly, but there has never been a definitive conclusion.

Now, US history is liberally sprinkled with iffy examples of so-called provocation, the latest one being Iran's putative nuclear program. (I shouldn't pick on the Murricans about this sort of thing, though. World history is full of this. Any excuse to go to war, it seems...) And somehow or other, elements of the mainstream media always seem to be available to fan the flames of nationalist outrage. It seems the rabble-rousing press played a large role in instigating and supporting the Spanish-Murrican war.

The more things change, eh? And who played a pivotal role in garnering support for the current Iraq war? The media, of course. Rather than doing their real job, they bowed and scraped before their political masters and misled the Murrican people. Who are the "yellow" journalists of today? Fox News, maybe? Who never let the facts interfere with ideology? But they were not the only offenders. Nearly all of the big media joined in.

Was the destruction of the Maine a deliberate act of war by the Spanish? Was it a phony provocation? Or an accident? It's hard to say. I don't think the Spanish did it. The Spanish-Murrican war lasted four months and ended with the downfall of the Spanish empire and the possession by the US of nearly all of Spain's colonies, including Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. It made Teddy Roosevelt famous. It set the course of history. Look at the names above. They are all still central to US policy. John Hay, who later became Secretary of State, called it "a splendid little war".

Alas, there is no such thing today as a splendid little war. Even the little wars, the six-week Mission Accomplished wars against relatively weak blow-hard regimes have a nasty habit of degenerating into interminable death traps. Fortunately, we still have the media to beat the jingo drums for us.