Short SF Review #25: To Bring Down the Steel

"To Bring Down the Steel," by Doug Beason
Appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October 1993

If only our laws weren't so damned intertwined, tied up in self-serving interests; if only things were simpler. Things had been going downhill for years, and it seemed there were only two paths for the nation to follow: we'd either suffocate in the growing heap of conflicting laws, or we'd start over -- wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.

In retrospect the 1990s were one weird-as-hell time, and not only because I was around to experience them. In the 1990s, the twentieth century as it had been understood up to then fell apart, just like that. The Soviet Union was gone, the Cold War had ended, and people all over were left saying to themselves "well, shit... now what do we do?" At least that's how it feels in retrospect. In the West, the 1990s brought with them a triumphalist 1950s-flavoured optimism, and even though so many of its possibilities were left unrealized, at least those possibilities existed. Politically, the end of the Cold War made the United States a global hegemon, and it's only now, almost thirty years later, that the cracks in its dominance are becoming too large to ignore. At the time, what the US said went, and the world was essentially Washington's to reshape.

Science fiction couldn't not be affected by any of this. Despite what some people would have you think, all art is political, and the implications of a unipolar world -- whether included consciously or unconsciously -- influenced what was written. For me, science fiction of the 1990s is a tantalizing bridge between the present and the past: old enough that it can feel slightly out of sync with the world I know, but recent enough that I can still hear it echoing. Thanks to a trove of 1990s Analogs I came upon the other day, I've had another chance to listen.

Doug Beason's "To Bring Down the Steel" is a story you may never have heard of; according to ISFDB, its sole appearance was in the October '93 Analog, a slim volume with its cover dedicated to Grant Callin's "The Carhart Shale," which itself is a more interesting read now that it can be put next to The Martian. It's also one of the few stories I've encountered that has italics in its title.

In the not-too-distant future, a space mining corporation named... *sigh* ...MiningCorp is in the business of exploiting asteroids. As the story begins, MiningCorp has delivered five two-kilometre asteroids into various Earth orbits, but is missing the vital breakthroughs that would allow economic exploitation of the asteroids' resources in space. Instead, the company has hit upon a plan to get the rocks down to Earth safely: by encasing them in vacuum spheres that, thanks to the force of external air pressure, would be essentially buoyant when close to Earth sea level. The plan is for these sealed-up asteroids to be delivered to the Sahara Desert, where they would then be mined, but MiningCorp has a problem; the government of the Saharan Hegemony is upping its landing fees and demanding a 100% increase in mining royalties.

Stu Mendez is MiningCorp's man in orbit, and the story is told through his first-person perspective. In a conference call with his boss, a company lawyer, and a suit from the State Department, Mendez asks why the asteroid can't be landed in an American desert, and is reminded that "all the legislation that's paralyzing the mining industry... so many contradictory laws in our country that it's hard to do anything" say it can't. Instead the State Department orders MiningCorp to station the asteroid above the Saharan Hegemony's capital, with the demand that it stick to the original numbers. With the government also tapping all of MiningCorp's private lines, Mendez isn't able to ask his boss directly what he's meant to do... but he figures it out anyway.

The sphere is completed; the retrorockets are ignited; the encased asteroid is eased out of orbit on a long path that will take it over North America, over the Atlantic, out to the Sahara. But the next set of retrorockets fire too soon, and instead the asteroid stops descending over the Appalachians and drifting straight toward Washington. It ends up directly over the United States Capitol, in fact, for maximum symbolism.  Mendez's threat is clear -- clear enough that I think it's worth quoting here.

"...Congress, the executive branch, and I guess the judicial branch had better hurry and clear up this regulatory constipation that's strangling our nation. In two days, if the problem isn't fixed, that rock is going to crush Washington DC. There's too much at stake for you to be arguing about this. The only way that rock is going to move is if your country gets its butt in gear and starts getting serious about being competitive again."

The blue circle is two kilometres in diameter, centred on the US Capitol. This was generated by the Google Maps radius tool at obeattie.github.io/gmaps-radius/

With his threat made, Mendez orders the US government to repeal seven hundred and thirty-eight laws -- described only as "every one of them senseless, every one nearly overturned in Congress but tabled because of pork-politics" -- and I can't help but be reminded of how so many legislators today think things like net neutrality, Medicare, or the numberless programs being crushed by the latest trainwreck of a tax bill are "senseless." The writer reminds us that Mendez isn't a bad guy, really; hell, he even reminds them to evacuate the District of Columbia, because he really has no plan to keep from crushing the government into powder. "But even with a million metric tons of rock dropping onto their lap," he says, "do you really think that will give them enough incentive to turn the country around?"

The story ends with two news clippings -- one that, between confirming that MiningCorp got everything it wanted, makes a "Zero Crime Rate in Nation's Capital For Second Straight Month!" boast that really does not look good -- just for starters, consider the consequences being suffered by the evacuated population of Washington, for example, which was 595,000 in 1993, and who haven't been able to go home -- and one that establishes that the US is now using the vacuum spheres as weapons against "an undisclosed foreign country," because that what's the use of that sweet, sweet hegemony without making the entire world serve you? For me, though, what the story really ended with was an exceptionally bad taste in my mouth, and the lesson "if terrorism will enrich you, you should do it, and if you have a power that others lack, you should force other people to do your bidding."

I'm confident that's not the author's own reading of the story, but that's the thing with stories, as with anything else -- you can't put vacuum spheres around a story. Politics always find their way in, and what's perfectly straightforward and normal and unremarkable to one person can very easily be horrifying to another. As a story, "To Bring Down the Steel" is shot through with the sort of politics that continue to dominate in the right wing today; it even has the same knee-jerk recognition of the environment as a good thing, I guess, before hitting the whole "we need to stop STRANGLING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT" button again and again.

In talking to a friend about this story, she remarked that it was something that could never have been written after 9/11. I agree with that assessment, but want to go a bit beyond it as well -- this is a story that, I think, could only have been written in the 1990s. Like I said, it was one weird-as-hell time.

Previous Short SF Reviews:

• #24: "Perspectives" (W.R. Thompson)
• #23: "Ministry of Space" (Warren Ellis, et al)
• #22: "When Planets Collide" (Gold Key Comics)
• #21: "You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)
• #20: "The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)
• #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
• #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
• #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
• #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
• #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
• #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
• #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
• #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
• #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
• #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
• #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
• #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
• #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
• #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
• #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
• #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
• #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
• #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
• #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)

A Horizon of Desperate Events

Black holes are unpleasant things to be around, and that's not just because they're places so warped that mathematics means nothing inside them. All the familiar rules get twisted up around them, and if you're not skillful or you're not paying attention it's easy to end up getting your big, shiny starship trapped forever. Given the right black hole, you could cross the event horizon and the only indication would be all the light of the universe winking out behind you. You're perfectly fine, for the moment -- but you're always getting closer to the singularity, the ultimate destructor.

This is kind of how I feel about modern politics, specifically the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union. Seventeen million people decided it would be a totally rad idea to skim the event horizon, and come now, it couldn't possibly be as bad as the rest of the crew was saying. Except now the universe has gone out behind them, and every trajectory in spacetime leads closer to the singularity, and they're realizing that playing chicken with a black hole is, in fact, not the wisest decision anyone has made.

I'm seeing commentary pop up now -- Charles Stross, for one, has a good rundown here -- that the UK may not have crossed the event horizon after all, that there's still a way out of the situation and a way to stay in the European Union. Whether it's a second referendum to say "actually, about that, wasn't that a capital joke, simply capital" or clauses in the Scottish and Northern Irish constitutions that could give them vetos over leaving the EU if you squint, there's a lot of desperation out there to walk it back.

Personally, I think it's not going to happen. Things have already gone too far for that. A wound can be healed, but it can't be uninflicted. Words, once said, cannot be unsaid. Democracy is an axiom of the United Kingdom and the European Union, and saying "whoops, just kidding!" undermines that whole foundation. I know it would be better for everyone for the UK to stay in the EU; my personal preference is for them to stay.

But they can't, not anymore. Look at it this way: if you took a shit on your boss's desk, how well-disposed do you think she would be to your frantic, frenzied apologies, your begging to not be fired, when she discovered you wiping your ass with a dayplanner? We've all experienced times in our lives where we wish more than anything we could rewind time, use the Omega-13 to correct a single mistake, but that never happened for any of us and I highly doubt it's going to happen for the UK.

The EU is not going to take a punch to the face with a smile. They're going to break the UK to the greatest extent they can, pour encourager les autres. Even as someone whose background is English, who knows people over there who are already broken by this -- I honestly can't say I blame the EU, or that I would do any different were I in its place.

In their way, institutions can be as cold and as mechanical as black holes. We forget that to our peril.

On a Rail to the Future

If you were to take a measuring tape to one of the many railways embedded in or buried under Toronto's streets -- not recommended, incidentally, because those tracks are heavily used -- you'd find something unique, if a bit pedestrian. Every railway has a track gauge, which is just how far apart the rails are. The miniature railways you'll find at certain tourist attractions may have only a fifteen-inch gauge, while the broad-gauge railways of India, Pakistan, and San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit are five and a half feet wide. In Toronto, you'd find that the rails are built to a gauge of 4 feet, 10 7⁄8 inches -- just slightly wider than standard gauge -- and nowhere else in the world will you find operating tracks built to that specification.

It's not because Toronto wanted to be unique and special. It goes back to 1861, when the first horsecar lines started operating in the young city; the rails were built with that specific gauge so that the carriages in use at the time could themselves take advantage of the rails. As the streetcar system expanded, the track gauge was maintained so that the same equipment could be used across the entire network, and as the Toronto subway was initially aiming to use streetcar-derived rolling stock, the underground railways use the same track separation because of one decision a hundred and fifty years ago.

Why do I bring this up? Because it's a simple illustration of how history echoes; not only can simple choices have wide-ranging consequences, but the past reverberates in the present.

These rails haven't even been used for fifty years, and yet they're still here.

This is not something a lot of people appear to understand. Case in point: Hillary Clinton, the presumptive heir to the Democratic presidential nomination because, well, her last name is "Clinton." Back in 2010, while she was still Secretary of State, she commented on the issue of African economic development, but in the sort of tin-eared way that only a Westerner who thinks history is "just a bunch of things that happened" could.

"For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century," Reuters quoted Clinton as saying. "We've got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let's make money for everybody."

Think back to rails for a moment. Toronto's unique track gauge is the result of a simple choice a hundred and fifty years ago, but it's not going away. To remove it from the face of Earth would not only mean tearing up eighty-two kilometers of streetcar lines, but the complete re-railing of nearly a hundred kilometers of subway and the retrofitting of hundreds of subway trains and streetcars. It would take a supreme effort to make the gauge go away.

The Western conquest and occupation of Africa lasted for decades. It carved scars that will never heal. Just as the outlines of the Roman Empire are visible in the shape of the world today, two thousand years later -- hell, there's a legend that says wagon wheel gauges go back to ruts cut by Roman chariots -- in the forty-first century, the damage that the West caused to Africa, and Asia, and, hell, anywhere that wasn't the West, will still be visible.

It will take a supreme effort to for the conquered and oppressed regions of the world to heal. It is not something that can just be "got over." To make a statement like that betrays not only privilege but unthinking privilege, and helps illustrate why Clinton is fortunate she's going against candidates as oozily unlikeable as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

History is loud, and we live in an echo chamber. The voices of the past still whisper today.

This Is About Independence

I was keenly aware last month that it might well be the last time I ever visted the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not that I had foreknowledge of my death--though I hope that's a long way off yet--but because in the not-too-distant future, there may not be a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland anymore. Not if the YES vote in Scotland gets its way. Back in August, things were still at a slow boil: the NO side was consistently polling double-digit leads, and I was one of the few on my side of the Atlantic who even knew the referendum was going ahead. The only evidence I found for it was on my last day in the country, when I found a pro-independence sticker someone had left in Victoria Station.

The red symbolizes the blood that the newborn Scottish Empire will drown its English oppressors in, no doubt.

Today, everyone's blood is hot. It's less than a week to the vote and anticipation is running high--and on the NO side, so visions of near-apocalyptic problems should Scotland go its own way. From complaints of BBC reporting bias to rumors of MI5 agents in Scotland and whistlestop tours by Westminster's premier talking heads, the English political establishment is throwing all its weight into the "Better Together" camp. No doubt the government will sponsor a last-minute love-in for the Unionist side on Tuesday or Wednesday, much like the Canadian government did in Montreal's Place du Canada just before Quebec voted in 1995.

I've seen a lot of speculation that the reason Westminster is throwing so much weight into this is down to North Sea oil, oil that would become Scottish--and that's a pretty damn good motivation for a government to be committed to the unionist side. If Montreal was afloat on a sea of petroleum, I doubt Quebec's referendum would have taken the same trajectory.

But I don't think that's the whole story. It's not just about wealth, or power, I think--it's about fear.

Fear of failure. Fear of the idea that Scotland's independence would mean that the United Kingdom, which stood for three centuries against Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Margaret Thatcher's poll taxes, has failed.

Recently, Rachael Acks wrote a piece about divorce that you should read in any event, because it's rad. As I chewed on it, I realized that with just a few word replacements, it resonates with what's going on in Scotland today. Change "divorce" to "separation" and "screaming arguments" with "civil wars," but the idea that separation means that a country has failed is a strong one. Look at the United States, for instance: in the Hotel America you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. On the face of it, it's ridiculous--no country lasts forever, but what this policy does ensure is that when the United States does fall apart, it will be with screaming and gunfire and the throwing of dishes. I'm confident the States would never see a referendum as peaceful as Scotland's, because there is no place for it in the laws as they currently stand.

It echoes with a problem prevalent in our culture, I think; the notion that your life can be cheapened by other's choices. I'll admit there are risks inherent in Scotland going its own way, but there are risks in everything. A lot of the commentary I see from NO supporters, especially English NO supporters, revolves around how they would feel to have the United Kingdom separate--it's such a deep-seated notion that the first phrase I wrote there was "to have the United Kingdom break apart," as if the Scottish referendum is the equivalent of throwing fine china at the floor, and afterward everyone will have to sweep up and make do with what shards are left.

"We're not a failure," Rachael wrote. "Our relationship is not a failure. Because we made each other stronger, better people. We loved and supported each other through thick and thin until we reached a place in our lives where we couldn't support each other in that same way any more. It's time to continue loving and supporting each other in a different way."

Scotland and England made each other stronger, too. But just because a relationship has existed, that inertia alone shouldn't justify why it continues to exist if there's enough reason to reconsider--and with the way the polls have turned toward YES in the past months, a lot of reconsidering has been done up past Hadrian's Wall.

If Scotland chooses independence, it's not a failure of the United Kingdom. It's just a new day.

The Politics of Science Fiction

It felt like I'd had just enough time to catch my breath before yet another controversy enveloped science fiction. I swear, sometimes it makes me pine for days past, when I was bashing my keyboard just because and I was entirely ignorant of what all those Real Writers were up to in their golden palaces flying through the rarefied heights.

Except there never was a time like that. Nor was there ever a time before politics in science fiction. But that didn't stop Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds from weighing in in USA Today of all places recently, in a column about how, in his mind, there's no place for politics in science fiction.

My brief rebuttal: bullshit.

My longer rebuttal: this is some bullshit, man.

First off, for the record, I speak as a writer who's recently published a blatantly political science fiction story: "Three Years of Ashes and Twenty Years of Dust" in Strange Bedfellows. I tell you, it was hard coming up with a proper mode for that, but only because Hayden Trenholm was looking for stories in which politics and ideology were front-and-center. Politics are never strangers to science fiction, or writing of any kind--most often they're just hanging back in the shadows, lurking at the edge of the page, guiding the author's arm as the story takes shape. Hell, I have personal experience with that as well: my upcoming story, "Each Night I Dream of Liberty," is set on a sea-based libertarian community. I'm no libertarian, and that absolutely colors the work. I'm pretty confident that if the same notion the story runs on was taken up by a libertarian author, it would not particularly resemble what I produced.

Fish don't notice the water, except when they find themselves flopping on the bottom of a boat. People don't notice the air, except when we take a walk through the airlock without a spacesuit. In that vein, readers don't notice politics in science fiction, so long as those politics match their own.

Politics has always been with science fiction. For someone who knows the sordid history of science fiction fandom, the notion of it being otherwise is ridiculous: the very first World Science Fiction Convention, way back in 1939, was characterized by the wholesale ejection of multiple members of the Futurians, one of the New York fan groups active at the time, after the distribution of a pamphlet that railed against how "the event was run by coercion and dictators."

The problem with politics are the assumptions you carry along with them, that are hidden beneath them like contraband under blankets. Take how Reynolds starts off his column, about how in the Good Old Days™ when Men were Men (and when Women often had to write under Male Pseudonyms to be taken seriously), science fiction was open and diverse, headlined by people as varied as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein.

Because if a bunch of white men doesn't represent diversity, really, what does?

Reynolds mentions Larry Correia, one of this year's Hugo nominees, that he's been getting a lot of blowback. Thinking about it, though, considering that he posted a recommended nomination slate that included Toni Weisskopf, editor at Baen Books and whose post a while back fanned the flames with its talk of cultural divides between "us" and "them," and swine-that-walks-like-a-man Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, who was kicked out of SFWA last year for using its Twitter feed to disseminate one of his racist screeds... well, what the hell conclusion did he expect me and others to draw? Something other than the winks and nods that say "come on, let's really get those lefties spun up in a tizzy."

Working to nominate people to the Hugo slate who are widely known specifically because of political stances they have taken is not an apolitical act.

there must be a controversy, I'm posting again

Oversight, Looking Under

Here's some free advice for today. Never get too close to people you look up to; they can only disappoint you. I say this because of the latest flap to engulf SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which brewed up out of weekend rumors and exploded onto the net yesterday. The context is a bit involved, going back to last year's controversy about cheesecake chain-mail chicks on the cover of a professional industry magazine and certain comments within, so I'd recommend reading this link for the details, and potentially also this takedown before you go any further.

So, yeah. That petition. Full of appeals to the First Amendment, of course--which is irrelevant in this circumstance, because the First Amendment only prevents the government from abridging free speech. SFWA, as a private organization, is not required to let anyone in particular use its bullhorn. Given that the signatories are of an age that predates the present-day educational system, you'd think they'd have learned that in Civics class. What really gets me is that writers, of all people, can work themselves into such a tizzy about the prospect of editorial oversight.

The point of editorial oversight is a simple one: to keep crazy stuff you didn't intend from getting into the pages. This is why newspapers have things called editorial boards. Just because the Bulletin, the magazine at the heart of this, is a publication funded by SFWA, it's not obligated to accept submissions by SFWA members. Under the new rules proposed for the Bulletin, its editor would engage in the "proofing and review process with select volunteer and board members." Because, as we all know, any editorial oversight whatsoever leads inexorably and immediately to politically correct Stalinism, and contributors will no longer be able to talk about how good lady editors looked in bikinis in the pages of an industry journal.

the horror

Especially for writers, this is rich. I'm still just getting started out in this game, but one of the first lessons I learned was this: you are never the best judge of what you write. I send all my stuff to beta readers as much as possible before I try to find it a home, for very important reasons. Part of that is the accessibility factor--when I write I'm carrying the world around in my head, and it's something I understand well enough that important things may not make it on the page because I don't think to put them there. Another, even more critical, part is the matter of perspective; someone looking at your work from a different angle may see something entirely different from what you intended to write.

I have direct experience with this myself, and it wasn't fun. Last year I was working on the draft of a story (which has yet to find a home, alas) where the antagonist relied on illicitly-obtained medication to endure in a specific environment. Now, when I'd been writing, what I was carrying around in my mind was the notion that this medication was a poor solution to a problem that could have easily been corrected by a simple medical treatment, but the antagonist refused to do this out of pride or fear. When I passed the story to a beta reader whose opinion I put great stock in, what I got back was an understandably ruffled comment about how the notion was insulting to people on medication, and how it was essentially saying "not only are drugs bad, but so are the people who use them."

My first, gut reaction was to get my back up and fulminate about how that wasn't what I meant at all. Fortunately that only lasted  a fraction of a second before the cool winds of Not Being a Dick blew in and I rewrote the thing, because fuck, that isn't what I wanted to say at all. I suspect this is the same way the original Bulletin flap started up, except Resnick and Malzberg had the window closed that day. Some people act like they think apologizing means weakness and that you're wrong, and that's something that they could never do. Hell, the entire reaction feels like it could be boiled down to "what's the matter with you, don't you understand we're PAYING YOU A COMPLIMENT, YOU STUPID FUCKING BITCHES?"

Once you get to that point, it's real easy to keep the train going. Braking? Less so.

I even have experience with the whole "need for editorial oversight" thing. Back in university I was editor-in-chief of the Absynthe newspaper for two years, and though we were directly funded by the student body, that didn't mean any frood with a student card could send us whatever they wanted and they had to publish it. In fact, I remember a bit of a flap that emerged as a result of insufficient editorial oversight, and while it eventually blew over it wasn't particularly fun to live through.

What oversight is _not_ is censorship, despite the petition's cover letter suggesting that SFWA is about to experience a "censorship explosion." By that logic, every rejection letter I've ever received is censorship, because the Bulletin is no more obligated to print my stuff than is Clarkesworld. What's more, it's ridiculous coming from science fiction writers, of all people. Not only do we live in the goddamn future, it is a future where it is easier to get one's message out than EVER BEFORE. Setting up a weblog is free and takes two minutes, and all of a sudden you have your place to publish "the article that the Bulletin refused to take!" for all the world to see.

I can't help but feel like this is the sort of thing that happens when authors gain Protection from Editors--they forget that the perspective they're writing from isn't the only valid one.

Photo: Bronze Jack

It's been just over two years since the death of Jack Layton, the politician who led his party to the promised land of the Official Opposition but who couldn't go there himself. This past week a memorial statue of him was unveiled outside the ferry terminal to the Toronto Islands, depicting him on the rear seat of a tandem bicycle. There's a lot of symbolism tied up in this one, and really, there aren't very many other Canadian politicians actually worthy of being memorialized in such a way.

Thinking about it, though--I have to wonder if whether, at least in terms of image, it was for the best that Layton went as he did. Having gone out at the top of his game, leading the New Democratic Party to greater success than it had ever achieved before, becoming a symbol in and of himself: had he lived, perhaps to become Prime Minister in 2015, he couldn't have lived up to himself. No "transformative" politician can live up to their hype; witness the idea of Barack Obama against Barack Obama in practice.

The memorial is called "Jack's Got Your Back," and that can be true now. Jack Layton, as an idea, as a symbol, can't be battered by politics--he can't disappoint the people who follow him.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: Free Stress Relief

I came across this taped-up bill offering free stress relief on a glass-walled enclosure next to Union Station a little while back. For those who don't recognize, the face at the bottom appears to be a caricatured version of hizzoner Rob Ford, and a good deal of them have already been ripped off... though I'm not sure how it's supposed to be particularly relieving of stress. I mean, I suppose you could tear it into little shreds or wad it up into a ball, but... that doesn't seem particularly cathartic to me.

I guess we all have our methods of stress relief.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Planning and the Scarborough Subway

The idea of an extended Scarborough subway is sort of like the phoenix: it never dies. Alternatively, it's a hydra; every time the debate seems to settle and an agreement appears to be reached, it comes back and starts biting just when you've started to relax. First it was Hizzoner Rob Ford's refrain of subways subways subways during the last mayoral election and the first year or so of his term, when a build-out of the Sheppard line to Scarborough Centre was decreed to be Toronto's #1 transit priority. Last year saw the OneCity proposal by TTC chair Karen Stintz and Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaker, which would have extended the Bloor-Danforth line east and north from its Kennedy terminus to a link-up with the planned Sheppard East LRT--which, I will remind you, was originally planned to have been completed last year--only for the plan to collapse in a council vote less than a month after being introduced.

Yet it seems that you can't keep a thing like the Scarborough subway down. It's come back in the news again in the past week or two, with Stintz pushing what appears to be pretty much the same thing she pushed with OneCity. The main point of contention is, as always, money: the planned replacement of the Scarborough RT with an LRT line already has committed funding from the province, while a subway extension has... maps with longer green lines on them.

I'm not really interested in going over the pros and cons of a Scarborough subway extension here. I've probably done so at some point in the past, and there are plenty of other places you can go for that kind of analysis. What I'm more concerned about is what got us into this situation in the first place--the planning in Scarborough, or rather, the lack of such. From my new digs in southern East York, I can see Scarborough from my balcony. When I go for a walk, it's still clearly evident where the old Bloor streetcar stopped running, even fifty years after it was replaced by the subway.

Pictured: Scarborough. Not pictured: allowances for the installation of rapid transit.

Until the postwar suburbanization boom, Scarborough was essentially farmland with isolated pockets of development here and there; I like to think that it resembled eastern Lulu Island or the undeveloped parts of Surrey's Agricultural Land Reserve today. With no constraints save those imposed politically, Scarborough's reeves and mayors oversaw the plowing under and paving over of more than a hundred square kilometers of land with new developments designed and built in accordance with the prevailing wisdom of the time: namely, that the car was king and everyone would be driving everywhere. What there wasn't any planning for--what there wasn't even any thought spared for, apparently--was how to integrate transit with the city once it reached the size to warrant it.

Even in the wake of the general streetcar abandonment of the 1950s and the rush to cars across much of the West, it's not as if cities didn't plan for the future. In Calgary, separated rights-of-way were reserved for transit usage decades before the city's C-Train system started rolling. In Los Angeles, Pacific Electric's rights-of-way were maintained even after the streetcars were removed, and today the modern Expo Line runs along one of them. In Coquitlam, where the in-progress Evergreen Line extension will finally bring SkyTrain service, development has been oriented around the expectation of rapid transit service since the 1990s. In Scarborough... in Scarborough, looking on Google Maps, the only empty corridors I can find are two hydro corridors, one paralleling McNicoll Avenue and another reaching from Victoria Park to Meadowvale.

To put it bluntly, Scarborough was not built for transit. Scarborough was built for the car, and we're now in the position of trying to find some way to haphazardly cram it in there. It's not an easy task; just as you can't unring a bell, you can't unbuild a city. We're stuck with the built forms bequested to us by past generations. It's up to us to find a way for them to keep working, despite it all.

Sides and Subjects

The thing about governments is this: they're supposed to look out for their people. That's one of the key differentiating factors in the whole public/private foofaraw, as the private side of the equation is supposed to extract as much wealth from the people as said privateers can get away with. Really, though, that's an idealistic view of government, and governments rarely live up to the ideals. Still, though, I'd appreciate it if they pretended to care.

But of course they won't.

Case in point: the upcoming Labrador by-election, which in nine days may well introduce a new splotch of red into the House of Commons. From the 2011 election until March it was represented by Conservative MP Peter Penashue, who resigned due to his campaign accepting more than twenty-five illegal campaign donations--and yet he's running for his old seat in the by-election, because why the hell not? Still, for my purposes that's a sideshow--and, considering the Pierre Poutine scandal, hardly unprecedented. No, what really drew my attention was one of the quotes in a Globe and Mail article about it.

"Labradorians have a choice, [Penashue] likes to say: a voice in government for the next two years or another loud but ineffectual opposition member." Or, in Penashue's own words: "I think [Labradorians] will decide that it is much better to be on the government side than to be on the opposition."

That really gets to the core of it, doesn't it? I know there's a long tradition in Canadian politics as viewing the Opposition as a collection of windbags who have nothing better to do than obstruct the government--I mean, it wasn't that long ago when the Bloc Quebecois was the Official Opposition; remember them? Whether Conservative or Liberal, once a party carves out a majority government, the last thing they want to do is give consideration to the other side of the House.

But it's bullshit.

What infuriates me is when politicians treat politics as a game. That's exactly what I'm getting from this: a sense of "us versus them," and if people go with them instead of us, the people will be punished, even if it's just being frozen out of the system. Which, in a democratic country like this one, is bullshit. I, as someone who voted for a non-Conservative party, do not get to freeze the government out of my life. If I didn't pay my taxes, they wouldn't just let it slide. This attitude is that of the people as a resource; a resource the government can tap whenever it wants to build billion-dollar gazebos in Muskoka or to send mailouts attacking Justin Trudeau, paid for with taxpayer dollars.

I can sum it up a different way in light of what I've observed. If you live in a Conservative riding, you're a strong, proud, citizen with a strong voice in government; otherwise, you're just a subject. Here's hoping you paid your taxes, fellow serfs and peons.

PS: it's been two years since the election that propelled the Conservatives to their majority. Only nine hundred and one days to go until we find out if they can manage to keep it.

One Hell of a Trump Card

The world would have been a much better place if Donald Trump had just stayed in the 1980s, where he belonged. That was his time--that was when he was aligned with the world, or more appropriately, when the world was aligned with him. Things have moved on in the last thirty years, thankfully, and more and more Trump is looking like a pathetic remnant of a bygone age, a person that has been left behind.

It's no wonder he'd be looking for something to re-establish his relevancy and get his name back in the news cycle. You may have heard rumors of his October Surprise earlier this week, and you've probably heard of just what that surprise entailed. Evidence that President Obama is actually a humaniform robot sent back in time to prepare the world for the rise of the machines? Proof that Mitt Romney found the leprechauns' secret gold reserves or job factories? No!

He's going to give $5 million to a charity of President Obama's choice... if, by October 31st, President Obama reveals his passport applications and college transcripts.

Now that's a hell of a surprise, isn't it? Truly, this is the sort of information that will blow this election wide open. Except it's not. This is Donald Trump flailing around like a man on fire, desperately trying to remind people that he exists and breathlessly trying to convince us that he has anything worth saying.

As far as I know, as I write this there has been no acknowledgement of Trump's magnanimous offer from the President or his staff--and that's how it should be. At first I thought it was a simple slam dunk; there's no question that President Obama went to college or has had to hold a passport. A simple show of documentation, and that's a quick $5 million to a charity... but things are never that simple.

This isn't about charity. This is about Donald Trump, a private citizen, trying to make the President of the United States dance to his tune. To serve him. As ridiculous as the whole brouhaha over the long-form birth certificate was, at least there was a veritable legion of idiotic birthers--a tautology, I know--constantly jawing about it. Nobody is talking about passports or transcripts but Trump. Nor do I have any faith that Trump would actually follow through with his charity commitment.

Imagine if something like this had been done in October 2004; say, if Michael Moore had pledged to give $5 million to a charity of President Bush's choice so long as he presented, say, his full National Guard service record. Sure, Fox News and the conservative blogosphere would have been apoplectic, but I can guarantee you that Bush would have ignored it completely. The President of the United States has far more important things to deal with than self-important blowhards trying to manipulate him like a marionette.

It's just telling, really, about the sort of world that's unfolding before us. Personally, I think Trump should accept Stephen Colbert's counteroffer.

Don't Implausibly Mess With Texas

You've probably heard about what's come out of Texas lately. If you haven't, well, you're in for a hell of a trip to the other side of the looking glass. In recent television and radio interviews, Lubbock County Judge Tom Head--who, despite his title, is in fact the county's chief executive--attempted to justify the tax increase his government is trying to levy by saying that it's necessary to properly equip Lubbock County's law enforcement personnel so they can resist a United Nations invasion.

Let that one just sink in for a minute.

Fear of the United Nations has a long provenance in certain parts of the United States. I really have difficulty understanding why. If the United States had, say, turned over its nuclear weapons to the organization in 1946 to give it the necessary teeth to enforce world peace, as people such as Robert Heinlein advocated at the time, it would make sense--after all, I mean, when words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS they're not quite as easy to ignore. But words are all the United Nations is about. It's the biggest debating society on the planet. So, instead, it seems that much of the anti-UN fear has coalesced around the concept of the UN leading a "one world government" charge in line with some Biblical prophecy of the End Times or another.

Fear because if President Obama gets re-elected, he's going to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations and become a dictator, even though I always thought that in order to be a dictator of something you had to retain sovereignty over it. Maybe he means that Obama would instead become the dictatorial viceroy, like the Vice President in Metal Wolf Chaos. Sure, that would trigger civil war, and so Obama would call in the UN troops. Yes, the 124,000 UN peacekeeping troops, significant chunks of which are provided by such cutting-edge military powerhouses as Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Senegal. I can certainly see such a force making progress in a country where there's a rifle behind every blade of grass.

But he's serious. Judge Head wants to keep the UN invaders out of Lubbock County, and so his brilliant plan to defend American liberty is to "[stand] in front of their personnel carriers and say, 'You're not coming in here.'"

Yeah, I think the gas pedal over here has something to say about that.

There's a certain amount of doublethink that's necessary for people who think like this. First off, there's the simple fact that the United States is a juggernaut, commanding the single most powerful military force that has ever existed. Yet, nevertheless, it must also be vulnerable. How? Well, that's the crux of it, isn't it? The new Red Dawn had to give its North Korean invaders a way to turn off technology, and even then it's still ridiculous.

To put it simply, people who believe that this sort of thing is possible, that this sort of thing is a legitimate threat, do not live in the same world as the rest of us. I mean, where are all those UN troops going to come from? How are they going to be brought to the United States? How are they going to be supplied in the United States? Why not just nuke a few American cities to demonstrate that they mean business?

The killer part of it is, Head's plans don't even make sense in the context of his fears. If he was seriously worried about an invasion, he should be organizing things like hidden ammo dumps and supply caches out in the countryside, known to the local defenders but not officially marked, so that they could have equipment reserves to fall back on once the invaders arrive in force. He should be arranging things so that a county police force has the equipment it needs to fight a military. Most importantly of all, he shouldn't be bloody well telling people about it! The United States government is intelligent enough to hide its black ops budgets underneath $30,000 wrenches. I mean, do you think the activities of Area 51 are going to show up as individual line items in a publicly-available budget?

The other possibility is that Head knows this is all bull, but is using it as a necessary smokescreen to get the voters to approve a tax increase. If that's the case, well... if that's the case maybe Texas would be better off invaded by the UN.

From the Gardiner to Kelowna, A Flagging Link

What do Rob Ford and Kelowna, British Columbia have in common? Considering that one is a man and the other is a city in the BC Interior, probably not all that much. Nevertheless, some isolated bits of recent news have drawn a connection between them that's all the more important for being not immediately obvious.

The first news: earlier this week, Rob Ford was photographed reading papers while driving on the Gardiner Expressway, and after the photo appeared on Twitter it quickly spread through the Greater Toronto mediascape. It's easy to understand how this came about if you know anything about the man--not only does he have mayoral responsibilities, but he's practically allergic to delegation. He made his name in city politics by eschewing perks like "office budgets." He's not going to let 80 km/h traffic keep him from absorbing the information he needs to absorb.

Fortunately for Ford, reading while driving isn't illegal in Ontario, but soon enough he's going to be given a driver--causing an accident while distracted by mayoral papers would not be good for his reelection prospects. The media is on him, the police are on him, even his brother and other mayor Doug Ford is on him to accept a driver. Sure, some people are capable of coping with that sort of split attention in ideal situations, but situations aren't always ideal and lives are more important than documentation that can be dealt with just as easily inside City Hall.

Now, the second news: Kelowna is currently considering whether or not it will fly a pro-life flag over City Hall during its Protect Human Life Week, and when I Google that phrase the first hit is of Pro Life Kelowna, a site of the sort that comes as no surprise at all, featuring stories of "abortion caravans" and a ticker of "Babies Killed Since 1969." According to Kelowna Community Resources this is the website of the Kelowna Right to Life Society, the same agency whose executive director is quoted by CBC News as saying that "there's nothing controversial there's nothing particularly political or religious" about a pro-life statement.

I'm not questioning the city of Kelowna's right to fly a flag in honor of whatever time it chooses to recognize. After all, it's flying a rainbow flag right now. In this case, I'd say the important issue is the source of the flag. It's not something that already existed that Kelowna is just going to run up the pole--it's something that's being created for this specific function, the first version of which has already been rejected by the city.

If you're looking for a flag that's "for human life," why not just fly the World Health Organization flag? Oh, wait, it's part of the UN, and they've distributed contraception...

I said there was a commonality here, and there is--it's the necessity of using good judgement in politics. Rob Ford may have been a busy man, and he may have thought there was no problem reading and driving, but he demonstrated poor judgement by actually doing it. Likewise, when it comes to the flag situation, the Kelowna city government's judgement is of paramount importance. The politics of pro-life and pro-choice are lightning rods here as they are in the United States. So is the whole issue of gay rights, but they're fundamentally different issues--the rainbow flag represents an entire group of people that were systematically discriminated against for generations. The pro-life flag, in contrast, represents an organization with an axe to grind about that specific issue.

If the situations were reversed, and Kelowna was considering flying a pro-choice flag over City Hall, I don't think it would be appropriate. The whole issue is a fundamentally personal one that should be dealt with at the personal level, not at the level of the state. It all comes down to exercising proper judgement, and demonstrating that the people holding positions of power are worthy of having been placed there.

Besides, when you get down to it, the flag design itself is horrible. Writing "PRO-LIFE" on the flag defeats the whole purpose of having a flag--it's supposed to be a simple but standing-out design easily recognizable from a distance. Don't these people know the first thing about vexillology?

How Not to Invade the United States

It's been with us since the beginning: a nagging fear that no matter what we've earned, no matter what we've achieved, there's a stranger out there in the darkness who is waiting for the opportunity to take it all away. It manifests in a thousand different ways, depending on culture and context, but it's always there in the background guiding the actions of everyone from individuals to international alliances. The invasion literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was one manifestation of this expectation that the other shoe had to drop sometime, and another is the modern remake of Red Dawn, at last removed from the vaults and scheduled for release in November.

The original Red Dawn was memorable; not only was it a rah-rah patriotic cornball action movie, but it was a high concept film that even now still doesn't have much in the way of spiritual competition. "The Russians invade the United States" isn't exactly a common movie plotline--the only thing similar to it I remember crossing the screens in the last ten years is Tomorrow, When the War Began, with the plot of "countries that are TOTALLY NOT Indonesia and/or China invade Australia." Nevertheless, those two movies are reflective of certain national fears. Australia has historically had a rather uncomfortable relationship with its neighbors, being a large and thinly populated country surrounded by potential rivals overflowing with people. In 1984, when the original Red Dawn came out, the Cold War was heating up again after the 1970s détente. Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" only a year before, and a significant chunk of the world was formally aligned against the democratic powers.

Red Dawn was hardly the only example of 1980s American invasion literature. There are plenty of lesser-known adventure stories and science fiction novels that depict America under the Soviet heel, enough that "post-cataclysmic rag-tag armies struggle to kick the Rooskies out of the good ol' US of A" is the very first entry in the Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches. They were products of their time--sure, the Soviet Union was being pushed to the brink of collapse, but people didn't realize it at the time. The abrupt end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later pulled the carpet out from under invasion literature quite neatly.

Now, though, times have changed. We're nervous again, especially in the United States. People have lost a lot of what they had and are afraid that they'll lose even more, and they're feeling compromised and vulnerable... in other words, people are in a receptive state of mind for invasion literature. How fortunate the new Red Dawn is there to come along. Here, have a trailer.


WOLVERIIIIIIIIIIINES

Lookit all those explosions of patriotism. Also a typo in the very first written thing we see. But I digress.

First off, keep in mind that the concept of Red Dawn is utterly ridiculous. Not only does it depict an invasion of the United States, which is hard enough to believe--the original movie began with a brief explanation of how NATO fractured and the United States became isolated just to help justify the premise--but it depicts an invasion of the United States by North Korea. Originally it was China, but there are the Chinese box office receipts to consider these days, and not many North Koreans go to the movies. The recent video game Homefront tried to do things this way too, making North Korea into a new evil empire by absorbing South Korea and Japan and bits of China and so on, but that didn't make it any less ridiculous. Just the opposite, in fact. The trailer implies that the invaders have some new weapon that enables them to turn off equipment, or something, but even something like that ignores the fact that a state like North Korea doesn't have the means to invade the United States even if it wanted to.

Logistics are important--an army without supply can't fight, and neither can it fight if you can't move it to where the war is. In the modern world of satellite surveillance and a dominant American military, the preparations to transport an army capable of putting a dent in the United States couldn't be overlooked. I suppose you could posit a world where things had changed, where the United States was isolated and unable or unwilling to respond until it was too late... except that world would not closely resemble our own. This is the sort of thing they did in the strategy game Red Alert 2, in which the United States remained quiescent as even Mexico joined the camp of its opponents... and even then, Red Alert 2 was a cornball strategy game with military dolphins and battle squid and combat zeppelins and psionic mind control and time machines built by Albert Einstein.

Because in this day and age, that's what it takes to invade the United States.

Works like Red Dawn are indeed telling; they illuminate aspects of the American psyche that aren't generally spoken about. They reveal America's fears. In Red Dawn, you don't see a country that spends five times more on its military than its closest competitor, and whose military budget is more than the rest of the top 15 countries put together. You see an idea of the United States of how it sees itself--a newcomer to the international stage, still convinced that everyone's gunning for it and trying to knock it off its perch. Maybe that's so. Still, attitudes like this reinforce uncomfortable memes. Spending $700 billion a year on defense isn't sustainable, not with the condition the US economy is in, but movies like this help to reinforce the notion that there are always enemies out there, and that the United States has to be armed to the teeth to keep them at bay.

Politics in the Pipeline

One thing I like about Twitter is the way that it's democratized communication, person-to-person and citizen-to-government. Once it achieved critical mass with people signing up left and right, politicians started creating their own accounts so they could have a new way to spew talking points at the people. Yesterday BC's embattled Premier Christy Clark--or some government functionary responsible for impersonating her on Twitter--used it to signalboost an op-ed in the Globe and Mail about the ongoing Northern Gateway Pipeline back-and-forth, and the five points that would be necessary to get British Columbia behind the project.

The only natural thing to do was to call her out. Of course I didn't get any reply. That, at least, hasn't changed since the pre-Twitter days. It's still just as necessary. The one thing politicians must not be allowed to do is believe that the average person agrees with them unless demonstrated otherwise. We need to register our opposition, again and again, whenever the opportunity rises--because this is all just the preshow to the BC Liberals' spectacular annihilation next year.

Back to Premier Clark, though--what's she saying? Whatever it is, it includes a lot of buzzwords. Her fifth point, about British Columbia getting "its fare share of the fiscal an economic benefits" resulting from the pipeline, has gotten the most traction in media so far, but what I was most interested in was her second and third points. Namely, the institution of "world-leading marine oil-spill prevention and response systems" and "enhancement of our on-land spill response to world-leading standards."

That's great, when it comes to irrelevant puff. Still, in keeping with all the finest traditions of political discourse, it doesn't actually mean anything.

Pictured: a world-leading decision-making tool for politicians everywhere.

Can you define what "world-leading" means here? That was the question I put to Christy Clark over Twitter, and I doubt if she'll answer me or anyone on that subject without a fight. It's nebulous and stripped of context, but it has "world" in it so you know it's good, just like how a "world-class city" is something to aspire to even though everyone defines it differently. This is a big problem.

Why? Because it gives the appearance that Clark and the BC government are holding out for the strongest assurances that there are, but in reality, it provides an out to take the economically expedient course and call that "world-leading" after the fact. The Liberals hardly have any motivation to do otherwise. If the Northern Gateway Pipeline is built, they will already have been turfed out of office by the time construction starts, and once the Northern Gateway Pipeline starts leaking it won't be the Liberals' problem--politically speaking, that is. But then, how many politicians in a position of power do you know who give a shit about anything else?

Lest you think I'm drawing long conclusions, keep in mind that Clark is the same premier who, just last month, announced that natural gas would be classified as a "clean" energy source because otherwise BC wouldn't be able to meet its clean energy targets once the liquified natural gas industry really starts going. Not that I'm saying expanding LNG trade to Asia would necessarily be a bad thing; I'd rather have China powered by natural gas than coal, if that was the choice, and cheaper natural gas would make that choie a hell of a lot easier for China.

The point here is that Clark has already demonstrated that she's more than willing to switch around definitions if she considers it advantageous to do so. Who's to say that, left vague and undefined, these "world-leading" prevention and response systems would be anything of the kind? What do you think is more likely--a government, especially this British Columbia government, doing the legwork and in-depth evaluations to ensure that the methods used are of the highest quality as per a carefully crafted, publicly transparent list of requirements to ensure the highest standard of pipeline safety... or for money or favors to change hands, so that whatever methods that end up being used end up being called "world-leading" because, well, who says what "world-leading" is anyway?

Three guesses as to what I think is more likely to happen. First two don't count.

It's Not Easy Being A Pro-Nuclear Environmentalist

The manner in which you, the reader, reacted to the idea of a "pro-nuclear environmentalist" may well illustrate just why I say that. If you're looking for a position that leads you to believe the rest of the world has gone somewhat askew, that enemies have made common cause to frustrate you, then I suggest you give it a try. You'd certainly have a greater understanding of things, at any rate, and understanding is one of the most vital things in the world. The lack of it is a problem--since I'm sure that if I was writing in a newspaper with any sort of circulation, the preceding paragraph would have been more than enough to spark angry comments about how I'm obviously a nuclear industry shill and "no nukes is good nukes."

Like I've said before at other times, there's something about nuclear power that twists plenty of people. I get the impression that a lot of folks think of it the way our ancestors thought of witchery and black magic, almost as if the reactor cores are really portals to Hell and everything that comes out of them is inherently evil and bad. Those attitudes show through fairly easily, particularly when I see newspapers oh-so-innocently drop references to atomic power. It's like they're saying "we're just presenting the facts, and by the way, you do remember what else was atomic, right?"

Sometimes I don't even have to look particularly hard to find it. Like, say, the cover of the Georgia Straight that's on the streets of Metro Vancouver right now, a very obviously unbiased design involving "fresh fish" that happen to have three eyes, are lying in flourescent slime, and are setting off a Geiger counter... because the average levels of radioactive cesium in Japanese fish were thirty-six becquerels per kilogram in June, below Japan's own ceiling of 100 Bq/kg and well below the Canadian ceiling of 1,000 Bq/kg. Less than ten percent of catches in June exceeded the ceiling--but hey! Nuclear. Not that anything is entirely free of radiation, of course--thanks to the decay of potassium-40, your body probably registers somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand becquerels.

Still--the environmental movement and the anti-nuclear movement have gone hand-in-hand for quite a long time. I could understand the rise of an anti-nuclear movement after Chernobyl and Fukushima. After all, these were significant events with lasting legacies, and there's nothing unusual about things like that giving people pause. It's only natural to react like that, right?

That's not how it happened, though. Instead, the modern anti-nuclear movement grew out of the understandable and sensible opposition to nuclear weapons during the height of the Cold War... afterward, of course, it transformed into what we know today. The first protests against nuclear power emerged in the 1960s and started gaining steam in the mid-1970s, well before Three Mile Island. Chernobyl and Fukushima only energized the opponents, but really, it's not as if tens of thousands of people protesting against nuclear power is something that's started just in the last year. It's been going on for longer than I've been alive.

The movement even has a logo: the Smugging Sun... no, wait, the Smiling Smug... sorry, I meant the Smiling Sun, accompanied in English by "Nuclear Power? No Thanks." This was designed in 1975, a full eleven years before the first accident that I feel could have prompted rational opposition. The fact that the Sun is, itself, a gigantic nuclear reactor is conveniently ignored.

It's been going on for decades, and today I feel like I was betrayed by people who should have been looking out for me before I was even born.

NO NUKES! NO--wait, you're saying that's a COAL power plant? No uranium? Not even with the cooling towers? Whoops, terribly sorry for the mistake, just keep on doing as you're doing. We thought this was Three Mile Island.

Let me ask you something: when's the last time you remember hearing about tens of thousands of people protesting the construction of a new coal-fired power plant? How often do you hear of Greens in government using what clout they have to engineer fossil fuel phaseouts? When was the last time you heard about a coal power plant being closed well before its intended lifespan ran out because of environmental concerns? For me, the answers to all three are "never." The closest thing to a coal protest I can remember is the event a couple of months ago, when people blocked a coal train near the border. Among all the jurisdictions in the world, Ontario is the only one I know of that has actively legislated an exit from coal power.

I could be wrong--I could just not be hearing about these things... but that's part of the problem. I take an active interest in informing myself. I go out of my way to look things up and expose myself to information. I read newspapers from across the world, and yet I'm not hearing about any of this stuff. Simply put, then, if I'm unaware of this sort of thing, how aware would the average person who only reads the sports and comics sections be? Events like nuclear protests are transcendent, in their way--they gather attention. They're things people talk about. It gets its own inertia.

Meanwhile, the real problem chugs on. Meanwhile, coal power stations continue to belch their waste into the atmosphere. Even ignoring the issue of carbon dioxide emissions, the fact remains is that coal is the dirtiest source of power in existence. Coal plants emit sulfur dioxide, the main agent of acid rain. They emit hydrochloric acid. They emit fine particulates that can be inhaled and cause lung disease. They emit mercury. Some of these things, they emit tens of thousands of tonnes of it every year. when everything is working exactly as it's supposed to. They emit, and if they could I'm sure they would laugh as environmentalists furiously unload their chambers against nuclear, keeping their back to a force that's been steadily polluting the world for more than a century.

I would be disturbed, but I would not be particularly surprised, to find that environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club and so on have been financed in part by coal companies--because over the past forty years they've sure done a hell of a job to ensure that nobody cares about pollution from coal.

So it feels lonesome, like I'm one of the only ones who recognizes that even if a tool can be dangerous when it's not treated with the respect it deserves, it's still better to use it than try to get along without it. I wouldn't even have a problem with a world that managed to move beyond nuclear fission... so long as it had already moved beyond coal, oil, and natural gas. Sure, there is Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, but it's a fringe thing--its website literally looks like something you would have found on Geocities in 1998, from the animated flag gifs to the frames.

Don't expect new technology to come without a fight, either. Sure, the Sun is actually a nucelar fusion reactor... but remember, nuclear fusion is still nuclear! When it comes to fusion and organized environmentalism, it seems, don't hold your breath on any kind of accord - back in 2005, the French group Sortir du nucléaire criticized ITER as dangerous because scientists didn't yet fully understand how to control the fusion process... you know, exactly the sort of thing that you would build a research reactor to discover! Greenpeace got in on the dogpile as well, criticizing the investment of time and money into ITER because if ITER ends up being successful, it won't be until midcentury... so I guess the implicit position there is "cross your fingers that the world can be powered by wind, solar, and hydroelectricity, because we're certainly not going to support any potential way out if it can't."

I'm of the opinion that actions speak louder than words... and in that respect, it's clear to me that the anti-nuclear movement backs fossil fuel energy 100 percent.