Britain’s Plain English Campaign, has chosen this year’s winners of the Golden Bull, awarded for “the worst examples of written tripe.”
Among the recipients for 2008 was the financial services department at McGill University, for this priceless piece of gobbledygook:
This cycle will inherently deliver an incessant flow of process and systems assessment, improvement, and communication with the related development, distribution, and implementation of necessary tools, education, and support.
Also chosen, Scottish Life, for this response to an endowment policy query:
The growth of the policy is calculated through more than one area of the plan, the annual reversionary bonus is only one area of this growth, the part of the growth rate of this policy is the increased rates of the terminal bonus rate for a policy with a term of 24 years is currently 24% of the basic sum assured and the total bonuses attaching. The terminal bonus is only applied at the end of the plan and is not known to ourselves until this is applied.
And this little gem, from HM Revenue & Customs in a letter to a customer, is deceptively simple at first glance:
Thank you for your Tax Returns ended 5th April 2006 & 2007 which we received on 20th December. I will treat your Tax Return for all purposes as though you sent it in response to a notice from us which required you to deliver it to us by the day we received it.
On the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Bush White House decreed that there would be no coverage of flag-covered coffins returning from Baghdad. It appeared their war would not pass the so-called “Dover test,” named for the Air Force Base into which soldiers’ bodies are flown. A ban on photographs from Dover, or any other armed forces base was imposed, and, to this day, caskets and injured soldiers are generally flown in under cover of darkness.
When Stephen Harper, our own Canadian Bush-lite, as wisewebwoman so shrewdly named him, became Prime Minister, he attempted to enforce the same kind of ban on Canadian casualties returning through CFB Trenton. An outcry by Canadians, led by the families of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan, led to a partial climb-down, and the media are allowed to cover repatriation ceremonies from outside the fence around the base, so long as the bereaved families do not object. To the Armed Forces’ credit, the bodies are always brought home during daylight hours.
As further proof that no tin-pot little dictator is going to tell Canadians what to do, hundreds of people from the town of Trenton also gather around the gates every time casualties are brought home, that they might pay their respects as the hearses pass through the gates.
The First Husband and I sailed into Trenton, during the summer of 2007, on the day a dead soldier was brought home. An escort of F18s flew over the town, followed shortly by the plane carrying his casket. Every single person in the marina, and the majority of people in the town, stopped what they were doing and stood in silence, gazing upwards, many of them holding a salute as the planes flew overhead. It was an incredibly moving experience.
But the real story lies in the spontaneous movement that began after people realized that all the bodies brought home are transported by road from Trenton to Toronto, where they undergo postmortems at the Coroner’s Office. Every time the news breaks that a soldier or soldiers are coming home and are on their way to Toronto, people begin moving out to Highway 401 and the Don Valley Parkway, the highways the funeral corteges must traverse between Trenton and Toronto. Where they can, they stand by the edge of the road, or they line the overpasses and bridges. Some carry the Canadian flag, others throw petals down onto the hearses as they pass under the bridges. Off-duty firefighters and police officers also come out, usually dressed in uniform, as well as veterans, but the majority of those present are just ordinary Canadians, with no connection to the military.
Yesterday, the bodies of three Canadians killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar were brought home to Trenton and, despite the freezing weather – a wind-chill of minus 20 degrees Celsius was recorded on the 401 – thousands of people turned out to mark their passage to Toronto. Traffic going in both directions was stopped or diverted by police as the cortege passed, and the people who had been waiting, for hours in some cases, stood in utter silence as it went by. I wept buckets as I watched it unfold on television last night. If it weren’t 50 miles away from here, I’d be out there, too.
Like many Canadians, I’m ambivalent on our involvement in this horrific war. On the one hand, as an army brat, I love to see pride in Canada’s military being rekindled among civilians and military alike. Liberal governments have always treated the armed forces miserably, forcing them to get by on crumbs from the budget table. While popular international opinion has it that Canada is the most boring place on the planet, we have an extraordinary tradition of military accomplishment, dating back as far as the Boer War and reaching its apotheosis in the trenches of World War I, when Canadians troops fought so fiercely that they captured and held positions that the other Allies had failed miserably to capture, despite many attempts. It was said the Canadians were the troops most feared by the German soldiers, because they just didn’t know how to give up trying.
After the Canadian forces – army, navy, and air force – were amalgamated in 1968, Canadians lost sight of the fact that the Royal Canadian Air Force had been the fourth largest air force in the world after WW2, and that its exploits matched or exceeded those of any other air force, with a roster of “gongs” that included the Victoria Cross, the Military Cross, the Croix de Guerre, the Legion d’Honneur, the Star of Valour, and a veritable alphabet soup of DFCs, DSOs, DSCs, DFMs – to name but a few.
But, and it’s a very big BUT, none of this makes the waste of lives in Afghanistan any more palatable. That benighted land has been the cockpit of Central Asia since time immemorial and no foreign invader has ever managed to subdue its savage tribes. When we were in Ireland last May, I noticed this plaque in the church in which my niece was married:
“He died at Candahar on the 10th October 1880″ it reads.
As of today, 100 Canadians have lost their lives in Kandahar region, while the Taliban continue to cement their hold on the population. And that does not take account of 128 British and 556 American casualties, as well as those of 19 other Coalition forces in other parts of the country – making a total of 955 killed to date in this most frustrating of wars.
Just when you think Canadian politics couldn’t get more boring, they drag you back in with a juicy constitutional crisis. When I heard what Harper had done, I waltzed up to The First Husband in the Foredeck chortling, “Omg, Stevie baby has done it now. He just couldn’t resist the urge to get the boot into the Opposition.” As always, he didn’t even look up from what he was doing, just murmured “What has Harper done now to set you off on another rant.” There’s no point in talking to him about it – he informed me last night, as we were on the way to dinner with friends, that I’m so blinded by my hatred of Harper that I can’t see clear. The bastard; he chose his moment well. I had to be nice to him for the rest of the evening, since we were guests in someone’s house and they weren’t up for a good old Irish-style barroom brawl about politics. (Damn these polite Canadians. But the fondue was delicious.)
I may despise the man (I only hate people who are relevant to my life!), but even I could not believe that Harper would be so stupid, that he was incapable of ignoring his dark side, even at a time like this. Given the chance to bankrupt the opposition parties, he had to take it, and to hell with any mature, decent impulse to achieve all-party unity in a time of national crisis. He miscalculated, thought the other parties would turn the other cheek, and they didn’t. And, in typical bully-boy Harper fashion, first he huffs and puffs – insisting Stephan Dion had no right to take over the government without an election and ignoring his own statements and actions along the same lines in the past – then he shuffles out poor old John Baird, the one-time party Rotweiler, now a sad, closeted shadow of his former self whose only duty seems to be squiring the PM’s wife to charity events, to mumble that, erm, they were withdrawing the measure and could the nasty opposition parties please stop coalitioning and all.
As if. The Liberals and Dippers have smelled blood in the water and they’re circling for the kill. Now, if they could just refrain from biting their own testicles off, we might have a coalition, small-l liberal government by Christmas. Fun times, tra-la.
This is a transcript of a powerful speech given by Stephen Lewis at SRI in the Rockies, a conference of socially responsible investors:
I live in a feminist family, I love it. I believe to the end of my days that the feminist analysis of the exercise of male power is probably the most insightful analysis to explain much of what is wrong with much of this difficult world. And I must say that the more I’ve had the privilege of working in the international community, the more I have come to the conclusion that the struggle for gender equality is the single most important struggle on the planet. You cannot continue to marginalize 52% of the world’s population and ever expect to achieve a degree of social justice and equity: it’s just not possible.
And when you look at the damage that is done to the women, particularly of the developing world, through so many perverse realities whether it’s international sexual trafficking or female genital mutilation or child brides or honor killings or an absence of inheritance rights or an absence of property rights or an absence or laws against rape and sexual violence or an absence of microcredit to give women some sense of economic autonomy or a lack of political representation – whatever the panoply of injustice, discrimination and stigma visited on women it seems to have no end, and it so profoundly compromises their existence.
And what has happened through the developing world latterly in many parts and which is so unsettling, unnerving, so profoundly compromising are the patterns of physical and sexual violence. The World Health Organization just did a quite astonishing study. It interviewed twenty-five thousand women in fourteen countries about physical and sexual violence. It found that the lowest levels of violence were in Japan at 14%, and the highest levels were in rural Ethiopia at 71%. And when they looked at the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada they found interim levels of 30-35%. So they saw that this was a pattern so deeply entrenched, whether it’s marital rape or sexual violence from intimate partners or domestic abuse, these patterns are overwhelmingly entrenched.
And then when you get destabilization in countries they are further accelerated. A country like South Africa is a good example, where you have 5,700,000 people living with HIV and AIDS in a population of somewhat over 40 million. Incredibly enough, South Africa is a country where eight hundred to a thousand people die every day of AIDS-related illnesses. And in the most recent year for which statistics are available, which is 2006, there were 52,000 reported rapes. And everyone knows that reflects only 5-10% of the actual number because women are so reluctant, for a whole range of reasons, to actually, formally, to report the rape and begin to engage in a police and judicial process.
And it gets worse still when there is conflict. When there is conflict it goes right out of control. I don’t understand what these berserk lunatic predatory male sexual behavior – how it happens under conflict – but it happens and it never seems to end. And it’s not merely on the continent of Africa which I admit is a continent I love, but throw your minds back to the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The President of Indonesia just apologized to East Timor for the sexual violence that was unleashed by his forces when they tried to prevent the independence of East Timor. In the Balkans, I remind you a white, Western country, or countries, in the Balkans you have several military commanders who have come before the International Criminal Court charged with crimes against humanity rooted in sexual violence. The same is true for Colombia. There seems to be no part of the world which is exempt.
But in parts of Africa it really is astounding what is taking place. In the post-election violence in Kenya, suddenly more and more women were turning up at the hospitals, raped and subject to the most grotesque sexual violence. In Zimbabwe, an organization which I am involved with and to which I will refer at the end, AIDS-Free World, that Lisa mentioned in the introduction, I can’t go into details, which you will understand, but we have been over the last few weeks in an unnamed country in Africa, interviewing and taking affidavits under formal legal terms from the women who have been raped by Mugabe’s Youth Corps as Zimbabwe has ground down over the last several months. And Terror Camps were created –that’s what they’re called – to subject women associated in any way with the political opposition to insensate sexual violence.
And I was recently in Liberia, meeting with the President of Liberia and the Minister of Gender and the Unicef representative and they were telling me that the majority of rapes now in Liberia – after the civil war is over but the raping continues – the majority of rapes are committed against young girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. And everybody knows what’s happening in Darfur, that need not be explicated at length. For five years now the entire world has agreed that there is a genocide taking place and for whatever unconscionable reason we’ve never been able to bring it to an end. I mean, forgive me but this is not the Taliban in Darfur. These are Janjaweed militia commanders on horseback! And it is entirely possible to have subdued that and brought it to an end if the world cared a tinker’s dam for what was happening in that country.
And in the case of the Congo, you have a war on women. You know, if I may make a somewhat more intellectual observation, rape is no longer a weapon of war. Rape has become a strategy of war. You rape women in such numbers, so savagely that you humiliate entire communities through the women. The women hold the communities together. On the continent of Africa, nothing happens without the engagement of the women, particularly at the grassroots, particularly on the ground. And what happens is that the entire community is subdued, oppressed, overcome by these roving bands of marauding militias, who rape the women, move the community off the extractive resources, which is what they want, or turn the women into sex slaves and the men into the laborers who do extract the resources. And it’s hideous, the consequences, and it’s been going on since 1996. More than a quarter of a million women have been raped. And what is so unfathomable about it is everyone in a position of power knows, and it continues. I’ll never never comprehend.
In August of last year, Eve Ensler, the magnificent dramatist and writer of the Vagina Monologues went off to the Congo to see for herself what was happening and she spent a month or more and she came back and wrote an immensely powerful essay, the first words of which were, “I have just returned from Hell.” And I do not have the emotional equanimity to read to you the case histories that Eve set out. But after she came back suddenly the Undersecretary General of the United Nations, John Holmes, goes off to the Congo, comes back, writes an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times and calls it the worst place in the world for women. The Undersecretary General of the United Nations, who appears before the Security Counsel on a regular basis, and then suddenly there’s a front-page piece in the New York Times, and a front-page piece in the Washington Post, and a front-page piece in the Los Angeles Times, and Anderson Cooper of CNN does a twenty-minute segment on 60 Minutes, and everybody is caught up in the anxiety and urgency of what is being done to the women – it’s impossible to say in a way that can be absorbed what is happening to the women.
In the city of Bukavu in the Eastern region of the Congo there’s a little hospital called the Panzi Hospital where a lovely group of surgeons attempt desperately to repair the reproductive tracts of the women. This is rape that isn’t merely the gang-raping of eighty-year-olds and eight year olds, although that takes place. It’s rape with mutilation and amputation and guns and knives. Guns shot into the vaginas of women. I’m speaking to a sophisticated audience that cares about human issues – there is a medical term in the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu which I never in my adult life expected to encounter: it’s called “vaginal destruction.” And Eve Ensler has appeared before the Security Counsel, and we had an ostensible peace agreement, part of which peace agreement provided an amnesty for the militias that were doing the raping. And the war never ended. And the raping continues. And the war is now resuscitated. And so bad have things become that Condoleeza Rice, on June 19th, at the Security Council, introduced a resolution branding sexual violence as a matter of international peace and security. That had never happened before. And we have seventeen thousand United Nations peacekeepers in the Congo, the biggest peacekeeping mission in the world, and we cannot protect the women. And everyone knows its happening. And everybody knows that if we increase the numbers of peacekeepers, or the United Nations agencies did their job on the ground, or we confronted the government of the Congo in a way that no-one has had the courage to confront, we could perhaps abate the violence. But I have to tell you it’s so monstrous, and it’s so rooted in gender inequality, that it makes one feel not just tormented but dismal about the prospects for human behavior.
“Vaginal destruction” Now there’s a phrase that should ring down through the ages in infamy.
I really don’t understand why this man has not received the Nobel Peace Prize. While the prize itself has been tarnished by some of the Laureates chosen over the years (Yasser Arafat? Menachem Begin?), I’ve no doubt the money would be put to good use.
The website for the Stephen Lewis Foundation can be found here.
Canadian memorial, The Brooding Soldier, at St Julien, Belgium. This column marks the battlefield where 18,0000 Canadians on the British left withstood the first German gas attacks, the 22nd-24th of April 1915. 2,000 fell and here lied buried.
On the day TFH and I visited, a coach-load of British secondary school kids were picnicking in the little park beside the cemetery. At first, it was jarring to see the boys, teenagers like most of the soldiers being commemorated here, laughing and flirting with their female schoolmates. But then I realized, this is how life should be, not the pointless sacrifice of young lives that took place here. (Post edited later for clarity)
So Stephen Harper and his Tories are back in power, again with a minority government, even though they won eighteen more seats. The cost to the taxpayers of this little exercise in democracy was $300 million so, lemme see . . . three hundred million smackeroos divided by eighteen . . . divide into three hundred, carry one, switch hands . . . give me a minute here, I’m not that good at this sums stuff . . . heck, where’s the calculator thingie on this . . . okay, I got it . . . whoa, that’s SIXTEEN MILLION BUCKS PER, give or take a few hundred thousand.
What was it that the late June Callwood said? “The beaver, which has come to represent Canada, as the eagle does the United States and the lion Britain, is a flat-tailed, slow-witted, toothy rodent known to bite off its own testicles or to stand under its own falling trees.” We chose our national symbol well.
