September 7th, 2001

Actually, I don’t have time to respond to all the distortions in this week’s Economist but I couldn’t let this one stand. Here is a letter to the editor I just sent.

September 5th, 2001

Part of the tourist ritual of traipsing through Italy in August is marvelling at how the locals have mastered the art of living—and then complaining bitterly about how everything is closed.

August 30th, 2001

When Rio hosted the first Earth Summit in 1992, there was so much goodwill surrounding the event that it was nicknamed, without irony, the Summit to Save the World. This week in Johannesburg, at the follow-up conference known as Rio + 10, nobody is claiming that the World Summit on Sustainable Development can save the world—the question is whether the summit can even save itself.

July 10th, 2001

“This conference is not like other conferences.”

That’s what all the speakers at “Re-Imagining Politics and Society” were told before we arrived at New York’s Riverside Church. When we addressed the delegates (there were about 1,000, over three days in May), we were to try to solve a very specific problem: the lack of “unity of vision and strategy” guiding the movement against global corporatism.

June 20th, 2001

In the aisles of Loblaws, between bottles of President’s Choice Memories of Kobe Sauce and Memories of Singapore noodles, there is a new in-store special: blacked out labels on organic foods. These boxes used to say “Free of Genetically Modified Organisms” but then Canada’s largest grocery chain sent down an edict that such labels were no longer permitted.

June 13th, 2001

I’ve never joined a political party, never even been to a political convention. Last election, after being dragged by the hair to the ballot box, I was overcome by a wave of ennui more acute than the pain suffered by my friends who simply ingested their ballots.

June 6th, 2001

A woman with long brown hair and a cigarette scratched voice has a question. “What does this place look like to you,” she asks, with the help of an interpreter. “An ugly ghetto, or something maybe beautiful?”

May 30th, 2001

When I was 17, I worked after school at an Esprit clothing store in Montreal. It was a pleasant job, mostly involving folding cotton garments into little squares so sharp that their corners could take out your eye.

But, for some reason, corporate headquarters didn’t consider our T-shirt origami to be sufficiently profitable. One day, our calm world was turned upside down by a regional supervisor who swooped in to indoctrinate us in the culture of the Esprit brand—and increase our productivity in the process. “Esprit,” she told us, “is like a good friend.”

May 23rd, 2001

A little over a year ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a major feature about poverty in the United States headlined “The Invisible Poor.” It was a well-reported piece, with beautiful photographs, but there was something strange about it. It was as if, at the height of the high-tech boom, in the richest country in the world, “the poor” inhabited an exotic foreign country, there for journalists to discover, but not to cover.

May 2nd, 2001

The idea of turning London into a life-sized Monopoly board on May Day sounded like a great idea.

The most familiar criticism lobbed at modern protesters is that they lack focus and clear goals such as “Save the trees” or “Drop the debt.” And yet these protests are a response to the limitations of single-issue politics.

April 25th, 2001

Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, is condemned for not calling off Maude’s Mob. Activist Jaggi Singh is in jail for allegedly possessing a weapon that he never owned or used—a theatrical catapult that shot stuffed animals over the infamous fence in Quebec City during last weekend’s Summit of the Americas.

April 21st, 2001

“Where are you,” I screamed from my cellphone into his. There was a pause and then, “A Green Zone—St. Jean and St. Claire.”

Green Zone is protest speak for an area free of tear gas or police clashes. There are no fences to storm, only sanctioned marches. Green zones are safe, you’re supposed to be able to bring your kids to them.

“Okay,” I said. “See you in 15 minutes.”