[LINK] Flu and the Next Great Depression

Thanks to Will Baird for linking to this worrisome article from the Canadian Press.

A major Canadian brokerage firm has added its voice to those warning of the potential global impact of an influenza pandemic, suggesting it could trigger a crisis similar to that of the Great Depression.

Real estate values would be slashed, bankruptcies would soar and the insurance industry would be decimated, a newly released investor guide on avian influenza warns clients of BMO Nesbitt Burns.

"It's quite analogous to the Great Depression in many ways, although obviously caused by very different reasons," co-author Sherry Cooper, chief economist of the firm and executive vice-president of the BMO Financial Group, said in an interview Tuesday.

"We won't have 30-per-cent unemployment because frankly, many people will die. And there will be excess demand for labour and yet, at the same time, it will absolutely crunch the economy worldwide."

Of special interest might be Cooper's own reaction.

Cooper reminded investors of the economic devastation SARS wreaked on affected cities or countries, including Toronto. But even with that fresh experience to draw from, she admitted it was hard to envisage how widespread the implications of a flu pandemic might be.

"It is a big, big issue. I mean, it's almost imponderable," she said. "I have to admit: the more research I did, the more frightened I became."

[BRIEF NOTE] Peretz and Diaspora Nationalism

Over at The New Republic, Martin Peretz has an article up, "Trying Times", criticizing the coverage of the Gaza withdrawal by the The New York Times. He makes some convincing arguments about poorly-sourced arguments. He also completely fails to miss the point about Gaza, for instance, with paragraphs like this.

"Gaza represents the worst side of Israel's settlement movement." It is actually a very diverse movement, even among the relatively small number of the 8,500 Gaza settlers, perhaps 60-70 percent of whom are children. In fact, most of the Gaza settlers are thoroughly committed to farming the land and have produced fruitfully from it: as much as 15 percent of Israel's agricultural produce. Let's admit it: The Arabs had Gaza for a thousand years. There were no Zionists to blame for its backwardness. Why did they make exactly nothing of Gaza? We will see what they will make of the hundreds of acres of greenhouses the Israelis have left behind. Anyone taking bets?

Leaving aside the very dubious question of whether backwardness justifies colonial occupation, what sort of regime is it that allots a quarter of the land area of a densely populated territory to a population of settlers amounting to a fraction of a percent of the total? Peretz, I fear, fails to take the broader context into account. Whether he is capable of doing this is another question entirely. It's worth noting that a disproportionate number of the settlers were foreigners, immigrants to Israel presumably equally unaware of just what was going on. Diasporas' views are always askew.

UPDATE (5:05 PM) : Accidentally dropped final two sentences added.

[BRIEF NOTE] Wente on Hirsi Ali

In the editorial section of today's issue of The Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente has a page-long interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It's subscriber-only, unfortunately, but Wente and Hirsi Ali together make the excellent point that letting bigots and reactionaries define what a culture is a bad idea.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Hidden Failings of Romeo and Juliet

I admit to being ambivalent about Shakespeare. I came out on this in my reaction to a recent High Park performance of Much Ado About Nothing last month, in my praising of the company and my criticism of Shakespeare's pacing. It's worth noting that although in a corresponding poll on that subject most of the respondents seemed to agree that Shakespeare was a good writer despite his flaws, almost a quarter of the respondents did believe that his had significant flaws which did undermine his reputation as the English-language dramaturge and poet par excellence. I am not alone.

Romeo and Juliet bothers me the most, out of his entire oeuvre. When I first read this play in Grade 10 English class, the simple fact that the two doomed protagonists were teenagers discredited Romeo and Juliet as a play that spoke to the ages about romantic love. If their overheated suicidal fantasy and lust was all that love was about, I wondered, why bother? I still feel that way, I admit. In fact, one reason I prefer Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film version (official website here) to Zefferelli's 1968 standard is that Luhrmann's transports the doomed adolescent lust-fuelled crush into a modern setting for all to appreciate.

What's been bothering me of late about Romeo and Juliet is its setting. Verona is a city in northern Italy, a place were, in the Middle Ages, sovereignty was contested, at the urban level between nobles and commoners, and at the broader scale between free cities and emperors like Frederick I. Northern Italy, Verona included, is a birthplace of the medieval commune, that early version of a mass-participation polity which opposes nobles and the Church against organized commoners. Romeo is the scion of the Montagues, Juliet is heiress to the Capulets, these two families are the major families and leading political figures of Verona, and the survival of Romeo and Juliet was critical to the plans of the two families.

How, I wonder, would the Veronese at large--to say nothing of the Montagues and the Capulets--react to the story, after the initial shocked reaction in Act 5, Scene 3? Friar Laurence himself recognized that his claims were improbable.

I am the greatest, able to do least,
Yet most suspected, as the time and place
Doth make against me of this direful murder;
And here I stand, both to impeach and purge
Myself condemned and myself excused.

Montague and Capulet, struck by grief, only accepted these claims after the Prince agreed with Laurence's story. Did they really believe the two men, though? Or did they, separately or individually, believe that the situation might have been faked, or at the very least aggravated, by the unholy alliance of church and nobles against their two families, ending in the deaths of their children under conditions of mortal sin? How, I ask rhetorically, would the politically mobilized and decidedly violent families contesting political power have reacted to this? I suspect that bloodshed soon followed. It might not be a coincidence that Verona fell to Venetian conquerors in 1402.

In this, I believe, lies the potential for a powerful subversive reading of Romeo and Juliet. I'd pay to see this performance.

[BRIEF NOTE] Devil's in the Details?

Back on the 11th, I noted that mollpeartree had made some interesting observations about the correlation between geekdom and "strict religious observance." princeofcairo objected, and on reflection I added the modifier "very" to that quote. I've no citations at hand, I fear, but I recall that a disproportionate share of conservative Christians in the United States have been educated in the sciences. I'll ask elsewhere for cites. In the meantime, I felt it incumbent to me that this, the construction of strict rules-bound systems actively policed by people devoted to the rules, is also present on the Left. One of the few interesting bits of John Barnes' otherwise Death Porn-obsessed 1995 novel Mother of Storms was the destruction of a self-contained progressive community in the United States of the 2020s, composed of members careful to respect the rules and reluctant to deal with outsiders.

[NON BLOG] Editing

I spent a good chunk of the evening first at a window's seat in Woody's, then at the considerably more louche Zelda's, editing. Almost two years less a week ago, I'd edited an earlier version of this story, mostly on the train overnight from Moncton to Montréal. It has grown and changed since then to become a veritable novella, a coming of age story that transcends its parochial origins to become something worthy. It's a remarkable story, written by a remarkable guy, and I feel privileged to be a witness and commenter.

So much has changed since two years less a week. So much has yet to change.

[CAR] Stories

Looking over the stories I wrote back when I was a callow naïve unknowing undergraduate student, I've realized that they make so much more sense if you assume that the protagonist is me, sexual orientation at all. There was a reason I was so anxious to come out to my creative writing instructor, after all, but still.