Bug Eyed: "Green Porno," Directed by Isabella Rossellini and Jody Shapiro

By Robert Enright
From Border Crossings

Is there anyone among us who isn’t fascinated with the way insects look and move? In her most recent film project, Isabella Rossellini is counting on that inclusive fascination. Green Porno is a series of eight short films on the sex lives of insects that Rossellini conceived, and scripted, and in which she performs all the crawly parts. She also directed the first three—Dragonfly, Firefly and Spider—and then turned to Jody Shapiro to direct the final five—Fly, Snail, Bee, Mantis and Worm. Together they are like the Masters and Johnson of the entomological world; there is nothing insects won’t do in their urgent need for sex. By the time these delightful download-friendly films are over (they were commissioned by the Sundance Channel for “third screen” devices like iPods and cell phones), you will have seen everything from sado-masochism to hermaphrodism, and from the symmetry of the soixante-neuf position to the less graceful machinations of headless copulation.

Each chapter in Green Porno is under two minutes in length and has a distinctive look. Acting on the suggestion of Laura Michalchyshyn, Sundance Channel’s Executive Vice President, Programming and Creative Affairs, that the films be “short, green and flashy,” Rossellini began her work. After downloading a number of different films on her cellular phone, Rossellini realized the most successful ones “were cartoons and animation, so that gave me a general idea.” The colours are intense and the films avoid special effects, what Rossellini calls “the most intimidating aspect of filmmaking.” The three she directed use more animation than the others in the series; in Spider the female is a large, two-dimensional creature on a filamented grid; and in Firefly the insects are represented by a collection of lit discs that flicker about a nocturnal, constructed landscape, searching for the right female, while avoiding the “imposters” who mimic the flashes of the species played by Rossellini. “If I get near it,” she says worriedly, “I could be eaten.”

This is not the kind of eating that would give sexual pleasure. Throughout the chapters of Green Porno, the threat of being consumed, or otherwise damaged, is constant. You could be sucked dry by your spidery mate, have your head bitten off by the female praying mantis (all females of this species are better described as preying), or bleed to death after your penis breaks off and is embedded in the female bee who got you buzzing in the first place. There is, admitedly, the pleasurable encounter between snails, whose sexual activity involves a degree of consensual SM. “I can produce darts,” says the shell-backed actress, “I use them to inflict pain on my partner before mating. It turns me on.” A good deal of “oohing” and “aahing” transpires at the end of the snail chapter, and the piece climaxes with a punctuating moan.

Rossellini’s insect surrogates allow her to assume different characters. As the snail, she mischievously informs us that she is able to withdraw her entire body into her shell, “where I can hide my vagina and my penis. I have both.” She leaves only a trace of shiny saran wrap on the ground as she slips back into the double-sexed comfort of her shell. Her earthworm delivery is no less insinuating when she tells us, “I am both male and female. I need to mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position.” Clearly, for the worm, the earth does move.

In observing she is cheeky, playing a firefly who swings her body-stockinged derrière back and forth—“If I were a firefly I would light up my ass at night and fly here and there”—is to state the obvious; and in the opening shot of Dragonfly her unmistakable, beautiful face lights up the frame. Rossellini is a bug for all seasons, and her pleasure in making these playful lessons in insect sexual practices is everywhere apparent.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression, though, that buggy sex is all good, clean, deadly fun. The series offers more than a trace of the scatological. In one wacky scene, the snail twists her body into her shell in such a way that “my anus would end up on top of my head.” She completes the scene with the word “unfortunately” only after a trail of green slime oozes onto her cheek. In Fly the ooziness factor increases. The chapter begins, as do all the films, with the conditional form, “If I were….” In this case the conjecture goes, “If I were a fly, a common one, a Musca domestica, you would try to swat me.” This section is an example of the educational side of the series, there are 36 species of fly and Rossellini is concerned that we have our science straight. What follows are some facts about the fly’s ability to see and react. “I can flap my wings 200 times per second,” we are told, and “my eyes see movement 200 times better than human eyes,” both of which skills make the swatting of a fly with a newspaper more difficult. Then the chapter shifts to the insect’s eating habits, performed over a plate of spaghetti and meatballs that could have been served in a restaurant owned by Thomas Demand. The fly spits out a gelatinous dollop of saliva to dissolve the food (Cindy Sherman meets David Cronenberg) and after a little proboscis action, the porno overtakes the green. The operating procedure is something like, “I heard a fly buzz when I dined,” as Rossellini flicks over to mount a life-sized model of a fly that she rides as if it were a customized motorcycle. This model, like all the others, is wonderfully designed by Andy Byers and Rick Gilbert, who headed the production team that worked with Rossellini on the look of Green Porno. The Fly chapter concludes with a gruesome scene in which a medium-scaled fly drifts in like a spaceship from an old Flash Gordon animation and lands on a likeness of Isabella’s decapitated head. (The head looks like the design crew has borrowed some parts from Tom Friedman’s self-portrait as a victim of a motorcycle accident, an idea that the dead drone re-embodies surrounded by pools of blood in the Bee chapter.) The Fly voiceover tells us “our babies grow up in cadavers. They’re called maggots,” and the film ends. To be sure, the chapters have a summary quality about them. After the clitellum, “a kind of muff,” that glides over the worm’s body collects its freight of sperms and eggs, Rossellini concludes the chapter with the declaration that “my little worms will be born in 2 to 3 weeks. The ending is so abrupt that it seems a case of insectus interruptus.”

Rossellini’s subjects carry the weight of a fierce, natural mortality and, as viewers, our inclination is to want to anthropomorphize their behaviour. Cynics among us can see the fate of the drones in the Bee chapter—“we would do nothing, just waiting to have sex”—or the mindlessness of the mantis, screwing away even without a head, as close enough to the male psyche to make inevitable the insect-to-human comparison. But there is a kinder, gentler message in our need to humanize these tales, read in wing and mandible. At the end of the Firefly episode, the male spots what he hopes will be his ideal mate. “There she is. Oh, I hope she’s the one,” and then even more hopefully, “I do believe she’s the right one.” This sweet monologue concludes with the word “yes” repeated three times, and who among us doesn’t hear in the insect’s small voice the echo of Molly Bloom’s orgasmic affirmation at the end of Ulysses? The final sound we hear, watching the twinkling of the coupling fireflies, is a sigh. It carries the satisfaction of the benign weight of a dragonfly on your arm, and is as fragile as the sight of a honeybee’s wing.

Green Porno is distributed by Maximus Films International and will be officially released in May. Three of the films premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and the remaining five premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2008.

Copyright 2008 Border Crossings


Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

By Gary Leupp
From CounterPunch

Dick Cheney wants the Iraqi government installed by the U.S. occupation to sign a “security pact” with Washington by the end of July. (The pact, including a status-of-forces agreement, would be signed by the U.S. president but not constitute a treaty requiring Congressional approval.) U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker has been feverishly struggling to meet the deadline and to commit the next administration to the agreement’s terms.

But that may be a tall order. Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki says negotiations are only in a beginning stage; public opinion is opposed to the pact based on leaked information about its content; and a majority of members of the Iraqi parliament have endorsed a letter to the U.S. government demanding U.S. withdrawal as the condition for “any commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States.”

Few Americans are familiar with the proposed treaty. If they were, they might be shocked at its provisions, ashamed about its naked sadism. It:

grants the U.S. long-term rights to maintain over 50 military bases in their California-sized country

allows the U.S. to strike any other country from within Iraqi territory without the permission of the Iraqi government

allows the U.S. to conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting with the local government

allows U.S. forces to arrest any Iraqi without consulting with Iraqi authorities

extends to U.S. troops and contracters immunity from Iraqi law

gives U.S. forces control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft.

places the Iraqi Defense, Interior and National Security ministries, under American supervision for ten years

gives the U.S. responsibility for Iraqi armament contracts for ten years

Humiliating, right? The sort of conditions most Americans can’t imagine themselves accepting from a foreign occupying power.

What self-respecting people would ever agree to such provisions? Especially after their country’s been illegally invaded and occupied, on the basis of lies. Perhaps a million have been killed by the invaders and the civil strife they’ve unleashed. Two million have been driven into foreign exile, two million internally displaced. Thousands have been humiliated, terrified and tortured by the invaders. Millions’ electrical and water supply still lags behind Saddam-era levels. Millions’ personal security and enjoyment of human rights has deteriorated as a result of the invasion. Why should their leaders sign such an agreement?

No doubt some key figures in the Bush administration have asked themselves that, and here’s what they come up with. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds $ 50 billion of Iraq’s foreign exchange reserves as a result of the UN sanctions dating back to the first Gulf War. These include virtually all oil revenues that under UN mandate must be placed in the Development Fund for Iraq “controlled” by the Iraqi government. $ 20 billion of this is owed to plaintiffs who’ve won court judgments against Iraq, but a presidential order gives the account legal immunity. Bush can threaten to remove the immunity and wipe out 40% of Iraq’s foreign reselves if Baghdad doesn’t cooperate. At the same time, Bush can tell al-Maliki that if Iraq enters into a ‘strategic relationship” with the U.S., the U.S. will arrange for Iraq to finally escape those lingering UN “Chapter Seven” sanctions. Perhaps Bush and Cheney are confidant that this carrot and stick” approach will force the Iraqi government to sign the deal.

But Iranian political leader Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani hardly exaggerates in saying the proposed deal is designed “to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans” and to create “a permanent occupation.” Many Iraqis use similar language. “The agreement wants to put an American in each house,” claimed a supporter of Shiite cleric and nationalist firebrand Mutada al-Sadr. “This agreement is poison mixed in poison, not poison in honey because there is no honey at all.” “Why,” he asks, “do they want to break the backbone of Iraq?”

The mainstream Shiite cleric and politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC; formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq or SCIRI), agrees that the proposed agreement would “violate Iraq's national sovereignty.” He claims a “national consensus” against it has developed. (President Bush in December 2006 met with al-Hakim, calling his “one of the distinguished leaders of a free Iraq,” and he is sometimes mentioned as Washington’s first choice for prime minister if al-Maliki doesn’t adequately put out. So his opposition is especially significant.)

Al-Hakim is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most widely respected Shiite cleric in 60% Shiite Iraq. The ayatollah is thought to oppose the pact but has not yet made a pronouncement about it. Meanwhile the Association of Muslim Scholars, the largest Sunni political group in the parliament, warns that the pact paves the way for "military, economic and cultural domination” by the Americans.

Al-Sadr’s followers staged rallies around the country after prayers last Friday and plan to continue weekly peaceful demonstrations demanding that the Baghdad government hold a national referendum on the security treaty issue. The U.S. opposes such a referendum, aware that pact opponents would surely win.

So Al-Maliki is between a rock and a hard place. He can sign the agreement and continue to receive U.S. support, strengthening the popular perception that he is a U.S. puppet. Or he can submit to the referendum demand, alienating and embarrassing his country’s invaders, revealing to the world the depth of Iraqi antipathy to the occupation. That way he loses U.S. support. Either way he seems headed towards the door.

In January 2007 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Congress that if al-Maliki didn’t cooperate with U.S. forces in suppressing Shiite militias in Baghdad, “he has to face is the possibility that he'll lose his job.” At the same time U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and President Bush were both threatening to end support for al-Maliki if he didn’t “follow through on his promises” to the U.S. In August 2007, after al-Maliki publicly praised Iran for its “constructive role” in Iraq, Bush warned him. “My message to him,” he told the press, “is, when we catch you playing a non-constructive role, there will be a price to pay."

For his part al-Maliki has indicated there are limits to his servility. He sent forces against al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Baghdad in February of this year, but they fought poorly and had to be saved from embarrassment by the mediation of a commander of Iran’s vilified Quds Force friendly with both al-Sadr and al-Maliki. He has refused to break his strong ties with the Iranian government and politely asked the U.S. to leave his country out of its quarrel with Iran. He does not seem wedded to his post or determined to retain it at any cost; “I wish I could be done with it even before the end of this term,” he told the Wall Street Journal in January 2007. “I didn’t want to take this position. I only agreed because I thought it would serve the national interest, and I will not accept it again.” Doesn’t sound like a man who wants to go down in history as the man who sold Iraq to the Americans in the summer of 2008. Likely successor Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim has opposed the deal so far.

Meanwhile, there’s this other Iraqi item on Cheney’s urgent to-do list: the passage of the Iraq Hydrocarbon Law by the Iraqi Parliament. This was drafted by BearingPoint (a McLean, Virginia-based management consulting provider listed by the Center for Corporate Policy as the number 2 top war profiteer of 2004) in February 2006 and then presented to the newly-appointed Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Al-Shahristani. Shahristani then met in Washington DC with representatives of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips to get their comments on the draft. He promised the International Monetary Fund that the Iraqi parliament would pass the law by the end of 2006, but its members hadn’t even seen the 33-page draft law yet. Months earlier an Oil Ministry official had said that Iraqi civil society and the general public would not be consulted at all on this matter.

A secret appendix to the draft law, according to London-based Iraqi political analyst Munir Chalabi, “will decide which oil fields will be allocated to the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) and which of the existing fields will be allocated to the IOCs [international oil companies]. The appendices will determine if 10% or possibly up to 80% of these major oil fields will be given to the IOCs.” This, in other words, is another national humiliation in the offing. As six women Nobel Peace Prize recipients wrote in September 2007, it “would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model to a commercial model that is much more open to U.S. corporate control. Its provisions allow much (if not most) of Iraq’s oil revenues to flow out of Iraq and into the pockets of international oil companies.”

It is one of those “bench marks” the Bush administration has imposed on Iraq, with Congressional support, as conditions for U.S. withdrawal, but even the most recent revised version, hammered out between Kurdish representatives and the Maliki cabinet, faces tough political opposition. Cheney was hoping this would be a done deal---done quickly on the sly---as of last summer. But al-Maliki still hasn’t delivered, and as a State Department report to Congress in April 2008 notes, labor opposition is formidable: “The 26,000 member Iraq Federation of Oil Unions has voiced its members’ strong opposition to the current draft of the hydrocarbon framework legislation and has demonstrated a capacity to disrupt oil production and refinery operations with strikes.”

Last year union chief Subhi al-Badri declared, “This law cancels the great achievements of the Iraq people. If the Iraqi Parliament approves this law, we will resort to mutiny. This law is a bomb that may kill everyone. Iraqi oil. … belongs to all future generations.” Even the Iraqi minister of planning and development, Ali Baban, has vowed to “resign one hour after [the] passing [of the] oil and gas draft law.” And the Sadrists of course are bitterly opposed.

Add the globalization of the oil industry to the security treaty provisions listed above. Imagine how Iraqi public opinion will react if Cheney and the neocons succeed in forcing this package of laws through the Iraqi parliament. Everybody knows the “return of sovereignty” is a sham, and claims of “democracy” a cover for continued occupation. The “benchmark” capitulations the Americans demand add insult to injury, inscribing in law and veneer of multilateralism that which has been seized by brute force. They oblige those under the boot to kiss it.

The Cheney cabal (exuding Islamophobia and contempt for poor and working people everywhere) seems to actually suppose it will be able to win that degree of slavishness, and to celebrate such crowning imperialist triumphs in Iraq, by the end of the Bush term. They also seem to think they can attack Iran, expanding the “Long War” before handing it over to the next administration. But that would mean provoking the outrage of the overwhelming majority of Iranians and Iraqis simultaneously. Seems just too stupid to believe, even from a rational imperialist’s own point of view. But aside from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, few in Congress have made issues of the security treaty, hydrocarbon law, or plans for a strike against Iran. The mainstream media is for the most part unquestioning, subdued, as the Bush administration continues to subject the Muslim world to unbearable provocations.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu




Our War Against Mother Earth is Unwinnable
Pursuit of power and profit threatens the biosphere

By Robert F. Harrington
From CCPA Monitor
2008

Over the years, the pursuit of power by politicians and of profit by industrialists has led to a state of warfare against mankind’s principal enemy, which for them, strangely enough, is Planet Earth. The plan “to conquer the Earth” has been freely stated since the time of Francis Bacon.

Eminent historian Arnold Toynbee, in his final volume, Mankind and Mother Earth, identifies the principal roles of government as making wars and controlling people. These roles are now jointly held by politicians and corporatists, for whom warfare has become such an incredible source of wealth that even millions of dollars of Canada Pension Plan money are invested in leading armament corporations. To count on armed conflict as a source of profit is to welcome and exploit the worst kind of human brutality.

Toynbee finds the crux of the human problem to be our focus on material power “to a degree at which it has become a menace to the biosphere’s survival... An increase in man’s spiritual potentiality is now the only conceivable change in the constitution of the biosphere that can insure the biosphere–and, in the biosphere, man himself–against being destroyed by a greed that is now armed with the ability to defeat its own intentions.”

He concludes by citing the exact position we are in today: “Will mankind murder Mother Earth, or will he redeem her? He could murder her by misusing his increasing technological potency. Alternatively, he could redeem her by overcoming the suicidal, aggressive greed that, in all living creatures, including man himself, has been the price of the Great Mother’s gift of life. This is the enigmatic question which now confronts us.”

With the foregoing as a background for thought, great uncertainty is cast upon the qualifications and mental attitude of the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Canada. Both appear to be confirmed globalists at a time when it is becoming clearly evident that local needs should be met as much as possible by local efforts in a world where energy futures are uncertain and reliance on imports for food or fuel needs may become quite problematic.

“One-worldness” already exists in that all earthlings (including ants, hippopotami and humans) live on the same planet. But, just as the planet–one single ecosphere–is divided into scores of ecosystems with different landscapes, different climates affording different crops, and different cultures that have developed in them, so a diversity of countries and traditions have been formulated. Our visibly self-serving leaders have ignoble aspirations, which include seeking a borderless world subject to a planet-destructive economy that has recklessly changed every nation’s natural inheritance into a mess of pottage. This approach involves unceasing war against other nations and the planet itself, obsessive economic ambitions, continuous military brinkmanship, and callous disregard for our common environment. While the real problems of the world go unnoticed, our leaders are steering the economic Titanic at full-bore into the apocalypse humankind has recklessly been creating.

The entire world faces an immense problem calling for everyone’s attention--a problem that must take precedence over all others. It has to do with making peace with Earth and curbing our aspirations in order to become good planetary citizens. This implies stewardship in a sense we have not yet been able to imagine. It fits into the tenets of Christian belief, clearly recognizing the Biblical reminder, “...for the land is mine; for ye are all strangers and sojourners with me.” A huge change in human behaviour is essential to survival: a transition from mundane materialism to a deeply spiritual humility that transcends all religions.

Stephen Harper, George Bush, their respective legislatures, and political parties in general are walking to the edge of an abyss crumbling at its base. The political and economic powers continue to plot their aims in the narrow fashion that has always suited them. Fixated on power, profit, and prestige, they plot ever more grandiose schemes for the world they fancy: a world ruled by corporate and political élites with billions of serfs to serve them. They represent the culmination of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If a single line from one of these three books could be cited to sum up their common message, it is this one from Animal Farm: “All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

An apparently minor economic sales pitch provides an example of how little concern prevails for the integrity of Earth when the priority is making money. It is the publication and distribution of thick Christmas catalogues urging people to buy as “gifts” the thousands of consumer goods depicted on hundreds of full-colour glossy pages. In a recent pre-Christmas period in the United States, 17 billion of these catalogues from 74 retail chains were printed and sent to homes across the country. Their combined weight was estimated at 7.2 billion pounds, and only seven of the 74 different catalogues used recycled paper, according to the advocacy group Environmental Defense. Think for a minute how many thousands of square miles of climate-stabilizing forests were cut down just for this exercise in the promotion of overconsumption.

It is ironic that, while people are being conditioned to fear militant political terrorism, they are never warned about the ecological terrorism that is deliberately practised and condoned, even though it is potentially much more destructive.

An article in a recent issue of WorldWatch magazine, Tar Sands Fever, offers a realistic example of ecological terrorism aimed at perpetuating the lethal addiction to fossil fuels. Here are some facts cited by author Dan Roy Woynillowicz:

Tar sands are composed of 85% sand, clay, and silt, and 12% bitumen, a tar-like substance from which oil can be extracted. Bitumen does not flow like oil, so removing it from tar sands requires vast amounts of water and energy. For comparison, the author suggests, “Imagine mixing a bucket of roofing tar in a child’s sandbox” and then trying to wash the tar from the sand with boiling water.”

Prior to strip-mining the land, the boreal forest is clear-cut, rivers and streams diverted, and wetlands drained. Overburden (sand, rocks, and clay overlying tar sands deposits) must be removed and stockpiled to reach the tar sands. Four tons of material are removed to produce each barrel of bitumen. At current production rates, enough material is moved every two days to fill a 60,000-seat stadium. Add to the foregoing that only a small portion of the bitumen may be removed this easily. As much as 80% of the tar sands are deeper and must be extracted by injecting high-pressure steam into the ground to soften the bitumen so it can be pumped to the surface.

Even after extraction, the bitumen is low-grade fossil-fuel that must undergo an energy-intensive process to upgrade it into a synthetic crude oil. Either upgrading of raw bitumen by adding hydrogen or removing carbon may be necessary before refining. In the U.S., about three-quarters of bitumen is refined into fuels for transportation.

The environmental damage is enormous. “Producing a barrel of synthetic crude oil from the tar sands releases up to three times more greenhouse gas pollution than conventional oil,” says Woynillowicz. This is partly caused by the huge amounts of natural gas required to extract bitumen from the tar sands and convert it into synthetic crude. The energy equivalent of one barrel of oil is needed to produce three barrels of tar sands oil. Tar sands development and lobbying by the oil industry have led to a 25.3% rise in Canadian greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. This exceeds a 16.3% rise is U.S. emissions. “Regulations introduced in early 2007 are so fraught with loopholes and gaps that greenhouse gas pollution from tar sands is predicted to triple by 2020... Nowhere in the world is there a form of oil extraction and processing with a more destructive impact on forests and wildlife, fresh-water resources, and air quality.”

Canada’s boreal forest constitutes one-fourth of the world’s remaining intact forests. The wetlands and lakes of the boreal forest are vital habitats for 30% of North American songbirds and 40% of its waterfowl. Planned tar sands development means that 3,000 sqare kilometers could be clear-cut, drained, and strip-mined to access deposits close to the surface. The remaining 137,000 sqare kilometres would be fragmented into roads, seismic-lines, pipelines, and well-pads for in-situ drilling projects. Studies reveal that the boreal system may be pushed past its ecological tipping point, with irreversible biodiversity and ecological effects. The UN Environment Program has named Alberta’s tar sand mines as one of l00 global “hot spots” of environmental degradation. Reclamation of the land ruined by tar sands work undertaken since 1967 is less than 9%, with none of the land officially certified as reclaimed.

Water withdrawals from the Athabaska River, a primary source of water for tar sands development, now threaten the sustainability of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, which is both a World Heritage Site and the largest boreal delta in the world. The tar sands are taking enough water from this river to serve a city of two million people. “But, unlike city effluent waters, which are treated and released back into the river, tar sands mining effluent becomes so contaminated that it must be impounded... One tailings pond at Syncrude’s mining operation is held in check by the third largest dam in the world... The high concentrations of pollutants, such as napthenic acid, which are found at concentrations 100 times greater than the natural environment, are acutely toxic to aquatic life, yet the government has no water quality regulations for these substances.”

Air pollution from this source is enormous, but does not seem to register in the consciousness of our leaders. Prime Minister Harper, not standing at all on guard for the ecological integrity of the Earth, uses the prospect of further tar sands development as a basis for calling Canada an “emerging energy superpower.” (Or should that be “stupor-power?”)

* * *

Our relentless march toward a political, industrial, military and economic crisis recalls a poem by Robert Service, appropriately titled The Reckoning. He concluded with this verse:

Time has got a little bill:
Get wise while yet you may,
For the debit side’s increasing
In a most alarming way.
The things you had no right to do,
The things you should have done,
They’re all put down; it’s up to you
To pay for every one.
So eat, drink and be merry,
Have a good time if you will,
But God help you when the time comes
And you have to foot the bill.

(Bob Harrington—whiteoakpress@juno.com--lives in British Columbia. His most recent book is The Soul Survivor.)