journal features

the long journey

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

St. Catharines, 2011.07.01

Today we celebrated the anniversary of our nation's creation by sitting in traffic for three and a half hours.

And that was just to get from Toronto to St. Catharines. It seems that given the long rainy Spring we've had, everyone was just itching to get away from the city when we hit three days of forecast sunshine during a long weekend. We spent quite a bit of time on the highway, until I could take no more and started an overland route (by which I mean taking normal streets, a process that greatly sped things up).

And so it goes. Kenny loves being down at Grandma's house, and he spent the entire afternoon running around, yelling about stuff, and generally being three. It was great.

Not sure which of us was asleep first, but the day ended with me reading a story to him about Babar the elephant. In this story, Babar is taken prisoner by some other elephants (they with striped ears, who live in a volcanic crater) and fed drugs that kept his natural fight-or-flight response suppressed. Given that Babar is actually King of his city, that would seem to make the story the detailing of the outset of war between the city folk and the crater people. That part of the trouble isn't explicitly told.

rand()m quote

Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

—Hermann Goering