Democracy dimming in darkness

Here’s a follow-up-up to last week’s column about how angry, autocratic politicians are working to turn voters against journalists.

Journalists ask questions about questionable government affairs. They dig out facts and write stories that autocratic politicians don’t like because they are neither flattering, nor favourable.

So the autocrats call the journalists names, such as losers and enemies of the people, and urge voters to turn on them. That thinking seeps down into the government’s agencies and their bureaucrats, important sources of information about a government’s work.

When its employees follow the government’s lead, journalists are cut off from the help they need to produce the stories that the public wants and needs.

The Ontario government provided an example of this with its non-helpful approach to journalists trying to cover the story of two teenage girls missing in Algonquin Park.

 I was involved in that story, having been asked by some southern Ontario newspapers to drive to Algonquin Park to assist with the reporting.

I arrived at Smoke Lake air base on Highway 60 and saw the parking area jammed with police, paramedic and volunteer searchers’ vehicles. I went through the open gate and into the aircraft hangar where three OPP officers sat at a table.

I asked them if this was the search command centre and whether the news media would be allowed here. One officer, a polite and respectful young guy (he even called me sir!), said he did not know but he would ask his sargeant on my behalf.

As he left, I was grabbed by the arm and yanked around. I found myself looking at a belligerent Algonquin Park ranger who demanded: “Do you not know how to read?”

That I learned later was a presumed reference to a No Unauthorized Persons sign out by the open gate.

My first thought was to say: “Yes, I can read: enough to have written and published 10 books despite being blind in one eye. Now get your paws off and let me finish my business with the OPP.”

But experienced reporters understand that their job is to stay focussed on the story, not to fight with people in authority. Their editors have lawyers to do that.

As I was being escorted off the property an OPP officer ran up and told me that reporters would not be permitted at the search command area but could get information about the search through the OPP media office in Smith Falls. I thanked him for his help, while resisting the temptation to ask him if he would mind giving human relations lessons to Ranger Bob.

The result was that myself, and a few other media types who arrived later, stood on the Highway 60 shoulder hoping to pick up bits and pieces of what was happening with the search. That created a dangerous situation in which the media people, and passing motorists, could have been hurt.

One reporter, trying to read her cell phone screen in the bright sunlight, absent-mindedly backed into the traffic lane. If a couple of others had not  shouted at her, she could have been hit by a passing car.

The authorities at Smoke Lake were just doing their jobs, although the park ranger could use training on how to do it without the storm trooper tactics.

Their bosses, the autocrats at Queen’s Park, were not doing theirs. If there had been an accident out on the highway, the blame would have rested solely with them.

This is a government that despises the media, in fact is afraid of it, and will do whatever it can to stop journalists from doing their jobs.

Professionally-run governments know how to handle these situations. A professional government operation would have had an information officer at Smoke Lake; someone to organize journalists into a safe area where they could view comings and goings without bothering search teams.

That’s how it works in a democratic world.

But angry autocrats know nothing better than shouting slogans about journalists being ”the enemy of the people” and scumbags working “in the weeds.”

The Washington Post masthead warns that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

I see our democracy dimming every day, and it has nothing to do with advancing age, or having one blind eye.

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Doughnuts do have holes

It was a close call. Very close.

I was driving a narrow dirt road that took a sudden, sharp turn. A turn directly into a piercing July sunset.

I was blinded, and slapped down the visor but still could not see because the sunlight was diffused by the smokey film on the inside of the windshield. I braked and skidded to a stop, just in front of a row of thick-waisted oaks and maples.

No one smokes in my car, but I later learned the smokey film is created by what auto buffs call “off-gassing” from dashboard plastic.

Whatever, it reminded me that there is hidden dirt, often dangerous, that only sunshine will reveal.

That got me thinking about journalism, which is being beaten savagely and unfairly by politicians and their bureaucrats who want people to hear and see only what they think they should hear and see.

Autocratic politicians are working to turn the masses against journalists and their reporting, calling them the “enemy of the people.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford says journalists are “getting into the weeds” when they ask questions about questionable government appointments.

The campaign against journalists is working well for the autocrats. Journalists are being imprisoned or murdered at a record rate around the world. There are fewer reporters, photographers and editorialists to ask questions that voters need to have answered.

Article 19, a human rights group, says that hostility toward the media is becoming normalized globally because of the growing number of “strongman” populist leaders who vilify reporters simply for doing their jobs.

The increasing hostility towards journalists comes at a time of unprecedented job losses in the news industry. The U.S. Labour Department has reported that the American newspaper industry lost almost 60 per cent of its jobs – a total of  271,800 – between 1990 and 2016.

The magazine industry did not fare much better, losing 36 per cent of its jobs during the same period.

In Canada, the Canadian Media Guild has reported 10,000 lost media jobs between 2010 and 2016.

As losses mount, more people turn to social media sites like Facebook and Google for “news,” which often is gossip, speculation, rumour or information not thoroughly fact checked.

Even some online news outlets are beginning to struggle under the weight of Facebook and Google popularity.

Buzzfeed, the American online media company, announced earlier this year layoffs of 15 per cent, or 220 workers. Verizon, which includes HuffPost, AOL and Yahoo News, announced 800 job cuts in its media division.

Our world is in serious trouble with fewer and fewer professionally-trained journalists. Without them, strongmen, corrupters and con artists do what they wish without anyone informing the public.

Some complain that journalists focus too much on things going wrong in society. Too much negative news, they say. I’ve never believed that because every day I read positive stories of human good.

Negative things are out there and need to be exposed.

That was explained beautifully by a 1962 exchange between Frederick Nolting Jr., the American ambassador to Saigon, and French journalist François Sully, working as a Newsweek war correspondent.

Nolting was upset about negative coverage of the Viet Nam war, which was going much more poorly than U.S. ambassadors and politicians were saying.

“Why, Monsieur Sully, do you always see the hole in the doughnut?” Nolting demanded of Sully.

“Because, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” Sully replied, “there is a hole in the doughnut.”

(This exchange quoted from the 1988 book A Bright and Shining Lie by author Neil Sheehan).

Monday, I personally experienced the ugliness against working journalists.

I was in Algonquin Park freelance reporting on two teenage girls missing since Thursday. I went to Smoke Lake air base to ask the Ontario Provincial Police if they had a command centre there and if I could be authorized to report from it.

I went into the base hangar and asked one OPP officer, who volunteered to go and ask his sargeant on my behalf.

As he left I was grabbed physically on the arm by a belligerent Algonquin Park ranger who demanded to know if I could read, a reference to a No Unauthorized Persons sign at the open entrance gate.

More on that incident in next week’s column.

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Asking the critical question

Reality often is more brutal than fiction.

You realize that when reading The Border, the 2019 novel about the Mexican drug cartels and their American enablers.

It’s a big book, too long at 716 paperback pages and with too many characters and side stories. It is a good book, however, that draws on real-life experiences from America’s longest war – the hopelessly ineffective 50-year-old war on drugs.

It is a heartbreaking novel that lays bare the savagery of the drug cartels, the inhumanity of the drug pushers and the tragedies of the addicts.

It also shows graphically the hopelessness of law enforcement professionals and others on the front lines of a war that consumes them. They soldier on, but the war on drugs is effectively over and the drugs have won.

For all the novel’s 300,000 words, one word is critically important: Why?

“What is the pain in the heart of American society that sends us searching for a drug to lessen it . . . ?” the novel’s central character asks. “I don’t have the answers but we must ask the real question - Why?”

Why did the wealthiest, once most influential and respected nation become the world’s largest illegal drug user? A World Health Organization survey of 17 countries shows America with the highest level of cocaine and marijuana use.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 72,287 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2017, an 10-per-cent increase in one year. There were an estimated 16,800 drug overdose deaths in 1999, so the four-fold plus increase over 20 years is stunning.

U.S. drug overdose deaths now outnumber deaths by gun violence and auto accidents.

Two hundred Americans dying every day of drug overdoses is a strong indicator of a nation in a death spiral. But the question remains: Why?

A start to finding the answer is found in the U.S. attitude toward shooting wars. For various reasons – some bad and some good – America gets into a lot of wars. And, history shows that since ancient times combat and drugs are comfortable bedfellows.

Cocaine was the drug of choice among combatants in the First World War. Amphetamines were taken in large numbers by front line troops in the Second World War.

During the Korean War the Pentagon handed out millions of Benzedrine pills to servicemen, some of whom made up their own “speed balls” by mixing heroin and amphetamine into an injectable mixture.

But drug use among American troops hit new highs during another lost war – Vietnam. The American military issued hundreds of millions of dextroamphetamine ‘go pills’ to troops fighting the North Vietnamese. Researchers have estimated that 70 per cent of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam used some form of drugs in 1973, the year the U.S. was forced to retreat.

Drug use among American soldiers continued, and likely increased, during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Many soldiers return from wars with drug dependence. One study done by the Drug Policy Alliance in New York shows tens of thousands of veterans in prisons and jails, a large percentage for drug-related offences.

Another answer to “Why” might be found in America’s fading dream. The promises of equality for everyone and opportunities for all have been left unfulfilled.

Immigration control, crumbling infrastructure and a growing chasm between super haves and growing numbers of have nots are among challenges depressing the national spirit. The challenges are not being overcome, or even effectively addressed, because of political polarization creating two opposing Americas.

There is a lesson in all this for Canada, which has its own serious and growing drug problem.

Canadian government agencies tend to jumble and confuse statistics, but the Public Health Agency reported an increase in opioid overdose deaths of almost 36 per cent in 2017 over 2016. There appears to have been another increase – of almost 10 per cent – in 2018.

There likely are many answers to the question of why drugs are destroying American and Canadian societies. Another critical question is how stop it. The answer is simple: end the political partisanship madness and work together to end this crisis.

That won’t be easy because as The Border novel implies, the tentacles of the drug trade reach into high financial circles, and governments.

Thoughts of chipmunks roasting on an open fire

I need to confess: I have harboured bad thoughts about chipmunks. Murderous thoughts.

I know, chipmunks are cute and fun-loving little critters. They have drawn millions of smiles as the Disney characters Chip and Dale and have enthralled children in comic books and video games.

And Alvin and The Chipmunks made chipmunks world famous with their blockbuster hit The Chipmunk Song (“Christmas Don’t Be Late”) in which Alvin wishes for a hula hoop.

I never really took to that song, preferring instead The Twisted Chipmunk Song, which headlined the 2000 Christmas album Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire.           

The reality of chipmunks is that they are rodents. Mice and rats are rodents and people don’t consider them cute and cuddly.

Also, chipmunks dig holes. Not just holes, but holes that are connected by tunnelling systems as elaborate as the catacombs of Paris or Rome.

Despite having millions of acres of forest to dig in, chipmunks prefer to conduct their excavations in gardens, lawns and septic beds. Lovingly planted seeds and bulbs have no hope of sprouting in chipmunk territory.

When they are not digging up my property, chipmunks are eating. They never get full. National Geographic Kids magazine says that a single chipmunk can gather 165 acorns in a day.

They carry off acorns, stolen bird seed, and anything else they can mooch, in cheek pockets that can stretch three times the size of their heads.

Many people view chipmunks as social creatures, animated and friendly and always willing to participate in a friendly game of tag. They often are seen chasing each other but these are not friendly games of tag. They are angry, hot pursuits to recover food one chipmunk has stolen from another.

Chipmunks also are not friendly with other critters. They are at constant war with the blue jays who visit our feeding stations.

They chase the jays off the seed piles then squeak and chipper at them not to come back. The jays sit in the trees, jeering loudly in protest and waiting for an opening to swoop in and grab a mouthful of feed.

There are pauses in the war when the chipmunks have filled their cheeks with seed and must return to their catacombs to store it for winter hibernation. Unlike bears they don’t sleep through the winter but get up often to eat their stored food, then go back to sleep. 

They sleep well on their full stomachs. The National Wildlife Federation says that a sleeping chipmunk’s heart rate slows to four beats a minute compared with the hyper rate of 350 beats a minute when they are awake.

All this is interesting information but it does little to subdue my murderous thoughts, which increase when I think about chipmunk reproduction rates. Female chipmunks can give birth twice a year, producing two to eight pups each time.

I have counted as many as eight chipmunks around the bird feeding stations. I calculate that if half of them are females producing eight pups each twice a year, that’s 64 new little chipmunks to put up with each year.

These calculations nourish my murderous thoughts. A possible 64 new chipmunks a year over 10 years is 640 chipmunks, and so on.

Far too many. I need to start reducing their numbers. Rat poison? Mechanical traps? Pellet gun?

I have read that you can buy fox urine and spread it around their tunnelling areas. They sniff it, fear that a fox is waiting to eat them and move away.

That sounds like the product of a super-charged marketing imagination. Besides how does anyone go about collecting pee from foxes?

As I ponder these thoughts, I hear a chipping sound and feel something at my foot.

I look down and see standing on the toe of my shoe a cheery looking chipmunk. He stares up at me with bright, saintly eyes and squeaks happily.

I’m not fluent in chipmunk talk but he seems to be saying: “Why so glum, chum? Relax and have some fun. Wanna play a game of tag?”

He jumps off my shoe and races toward the bird feeders.

That little face is so adorable. My heart melts; my murderous thoughts evaporate.

Some rodents are cute and cuddly.