FOCUS
Saturday, Oct. 22, 2016
D5
The time machine is quite a ride HARLEY HAY HAY’S DAZE Everybody has a favourite song. Or two. I think I have about 300. We all have those special songs that rip us right out of the present tense and shoot us back to a moment in another time and place. It’s like a ride on a time machine. Like the first time you get up enough jam to phone that cute girl you’ve had your eye on since the beginning of the school year. For me the song was I Think We’re Alone Now by Tommy James and the Shondells, and I had played that 45 vinyl record over and over again until, with shaking fingers, I actually called Heather M. from our upstairs “extension” phone in Parkvale. I could barely get my pointer finger into that rotary dial. And, of course, her father answered. There was the entire Simon and Garfunkle soundtrack from the movie The Graduate, that even now when I hear Sounds of Silence, I’m back there at that wedding scene at the end where Ben is banging on the window and Elaine turns and yells and, well, that trip in the time machine always makes me a little dizzy. I almost have to pull the car over if it comes on the car radio. The Beatles, of course, always seriously shake up the space-time continuum. Their first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show (I Saw Her Standing There), to their last rooftop appearance (Get Back) who would believe in a million years that Paul and Ringo would still be rocking out in 2016 as 70-somethings! Now that’s a time machine. The first song I ever played in a band really winds the old wayback machine for me. The place: Central School gym. The event: our Grade 9 graduation. The band: The Imperials. The song: Tijuana Taxi by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I can still hear that honk from the old squeeze horn that blatts at the end of that tune. And we thought we were rock stars. Yikes. People have a first kiss song (For Your Love by the Yardbirds), a driving to the lake in your very first car song (Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf), a broken heart song (I have 12 of those), the first dance at your wedding song (Close To You by The Carpenters). The musical memory vaults are different for each person depending on when and where and how they grew up of course, but we all have those song triggers that fuel our own personal time travelling contraption. So I was thinking about that a while back and started writing down my favorite songs from my favorite musical era, the ’60s and ’70s. About five hours and about five pages of tunes later I had a nap and then woke up and said to myself: “Self. You should put together some sort of concert thingy to play some of these songs.” Also: “Self. You could call it ‘The Time Machine Show.’” Then, exhausted, I had another nap. So with a boot in the butt from my long time bud-
dy and bandmate Dave, a two-act list of iconic rock and pop songs emerged from the musty misty longago haze of the peace and love generation. But something interesting took shape with the tunes. Love. The song titles I mean. I realized you could tell a love story with the titles and lyrics of songs and yet have 20 or 30 great tunes – from rockers like Satisfaction by the Stones, to beautiful ballads like Time in a Bottle (Jim Croce) and You’ve Got a Friend (Carole King and James Taylor), to psychedelic classics from Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. From the best R&B like R.E.S.P.E.C.T. (Aretha) and I Feel Good (J.B.) to bands you don’t hear played live very often like The Young Rascals and Three Dog Night. And let’s not forget a couple of get up and dance mirror-ball disco ditties. So all I had to do was enlist the best music producer in town (Morgan) and cherry-pick six of the best young musicians and five (count ‘em) FIVE of the best lead vocalists around, and join with Bull Skit Comedy to handle the production heavy lifting at the Scott Block Theatre and — as members of the great musical British Invasion of the ’60s would say — “Bob’s your uncle!” That took eight months. But now the ole Time Machine is warming up, rumbling away, gearing up to launch the first two weekends in November. And it’s going to be quite a ride. Harley Hay is a local freelance writer, award-winning author, filmmaker and musician.
It’s a tale of two (Middle Eastern) cities GWYNNE DYER INSIGHT Two great sieges are getting underway in the Middle East, one in Mosul in Iraq and the other in Aleppo in Syria. They have a great deal in common, including the fact that the attackers both depend heavily on foreign air power, but they are treated by most international media as though they were completely different events. How similar they are will become clearer with the passage of time. Sieges of cities, once a major part of warfare, grew rare in the course of the 20th century, mainly because of the rise of air power. You didn’t need to besiege cities any more, because you could just smash them to smithereens from the air: Guernica, Dresden, Hiroshima. But that’s not so easy in the era of instant global media coverage. Seventy years without a really major war have allowed us to develop a major dislike for killing civilians from the air. Nobody on either side would have been the least bit reluctant to blast Aleppo or Mosul into oblivion in 1945 if it served their strategic purposes, but moral tastes have changed. They haven’t changed that much, of course, or we would be seeing a horrified rejection of the entire concept of nuclear deterrence, which is based on the threat to extinguish millions or tens of millions of innocent civilian lives if the other side behaves too badly. But when the destruction from the air is piecemeal, with relatively small numbers of identifi-
able victims, we can get quite upset about it. Every civilian death from bombing in Iraq and Syria – but not the thousands of other civilian casualties each month — is therefore publicly catalogued and condemned. The Russians are taking enormous criticism over their bombing of the rebel-held eastern part of Aleppo (although the indiscriminate “barrel bombs” are the work of the Syrian air force, not the Russians). The U.S. air force has been much more careful about its bombing around Mosul so far, but it too will end up having to choose between bombing the city heavily and seeing the Iraqi government’s attack fail. Both Mosul and eastern Aleppo are Sunni Muslim cities facing an attempted reconquest by Shia-dominated national governments. In both cases the rebel fighters who control the besieged areas are jihadi extremists: Islamic State in Mosul, and the Nusra Front in eastern Aleppo. (In Aleppo, the jihadis number perhaps a thousand out of ten thousand fighters, but they dominate both the fighting and the decision-making.) In both cases the troops on the government side are divided by ethnic and sectarian differences, and largely unreliable. Which is why, in the end, government victory in both countries depends on foreign air power. In Aleppo, the troops leading the attack on the ground are mostly Shia militias recruited from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan and paid for by Iran. Actual Syrian army troops have been decimated and exhausted by five years of war, and those who remain are being carefully husbanded. So they wait for the Russians to bomb the defenders to pieces, and just use the troops to mop up afterwards. In the case of Mosul, the attacking forces are even more varied. The Iraqi government’s regular troops
are mostly Shia, and the pro-government militias are entirely Shia and notorious for treating Sunnis badly. Since almost everybody left in Mosul is Sunni, they are terrified of the government’s troops. The Iraqi government has therefore promised that Shia militias will not enter the city, nor will the Kurdish troops that are assisting in the early part of the offensive. What this means, however, is that very few soldiers will actually be fighting once the attack reaches the edge of the city proper. There will be perhaps 25,000 Iraqi regular army troops in the final assault, of whom maybe half can be relied on to fight. There will be around 5,000 American troops in the area, but they are not allowed to engage in direct combat. And there are about 1,500 Turkish army troops who have been training a Sunni militia north of Mosul (but the government in Baghdad has ordered them to leave). Islamic State’s five or six thousand fighters have had years to prepare their defences, and street fighting uses up attacking troops very fast. Even “precision” airstrikes in urban areas always mean lots of dead civilians, but central Mosul will not fall unless the United States uses its air force to dig the defenders out. Even the current advance across relatively open country south and east of Mosul relies on the massive use of air power to keep the attackers’ casualties down. When the troops reach the city limits, the whole operation will stall unless the US government starts serious bombing in the built-up area. If it does that, then the civilian casualties will be quite similar to those inflicted by the Russian air force in eastern Aleppo. But the Western media will doubtless still find ways to see a huge difference between the two. Gwynne Dyer is a syndicated columnist.
Marching toward a world without genocide BY GERRY CHIDIAC ADVOCATE NEWS SERVICES “When you listen to a witness, you become a witness,” Elie Wiesel often said. Those words are the driving force behind the March of the Living, an event that brings thousands of young people from around the world to Poland every spring. There they visit the places where crimes against humanity took place. The name March of the Living is in stark contrast to the infamous death marches, during which innumerable people perished. They were forced by the Nazis at gunpoint to go from concentration camps in Poland to camps in Germany, as the Soviet army advanced in early 1945. What’s particularly powerful about the March of the Living is that the young people are accompanied by Holocaust survivors who tell them their stories and walk with them. Many of the youths are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the very people the Nazi death camps sought to destroy. The unmasking of concentration camps at the end of the Second World War was a pivotal moment in human history. It was terrifying proof of the dangers of racism and extreme nationalism. The new-
ly-formed United Nations responded by defining genocide in 1948, and the world declared, “Never again!” Throughout the Cold War, “never again” fundamentally meant pointing to the crimes against humanity committed by the other side. But since the early 1990s, we have all been able to look honestly at what happened –- and what is still happening in so many parts of the world. When we scratch the veneer of history, we begin to see that genocide is not only a part of the history of Germany. It’s arguably a part of the history of every colonial power. In some places, it has been glossed over as “civil war.” And it remains part of the story of much of the world today. Studying genocide helps give a voice to the victims. And by listening to survivors, we validate and empower them – and we are changed. We cannot unlearn what they teach us, and we have no choice but to continue their mission. Understanding genocide gives us a powerful lens to look at the world. We see evil exposed for what it is: a horrible and ridiculous lie. When we look at the vast numbers of descendants of Holocaust survivors participating in the March of Life, and see the tremendous contributions they make to the well-being of others, how can we dare
to say that any form of racism can ever be justified? How can we dare to say that those who are suffering from oppression today should not be helped? Indeed when we help others, we help ourselves. Imagine all the good that would be happening in the world today if mankind had only had the courage to save more people from Hitler’s tyranny! Genocide studies have a powerful impact on the education of today’s young people. Although it was already mandated in some jurisdictions (primarily those with a strong Jewish lobby), when I began teaching genocide studies in 2008, there were only a few high school programs scattered throughout the province. Today, Genocide Studies 12 is outlined and approved by the British Columbia Ministry of Education. Many of us have crimes against humanity in our family histories – as survivors, as perpetrators, or as both. When we honour the victims of genocide, we are changed. We have no choice but to work for a more just world. As more of us grow in awareness, we cast a powerful light on the darkest shadow of humanity. We all become witnesses. Troy Media columnist Gerry Chidiac is a high school teacher who has lived on four continents and speaks four languages.