Julien McArdle

Alright, so a number of years ago, I caught the book-reading bug. Turned off by all the literature we were forced to digest in high school, I had got sick of books and had stopped reading altogether. Then I go the bug, and started reading once more.

Things changed in the last few years. Work started to mentally drain me. I would come home, and the last thing I wanted to do was to think. I just wanted to relax to some mind-numbing activity, such as reading sites like Reddit or playing video games.

I never stopped buying books, mind you, I just stopped reading them. So I would keep visit Chapters and purchase titles that interested me. Most recently, this included a splurge on math books where I bought a book on irrational numbers, another on prime numbers, and a tome on the history of algebra.

Finally, a few days ago, I caught the book-reading bug once more. I’ve been reading two books. One is a collection of real-life short stories by super-cool-lesbian-Yukoner Ivan Coyote called The Slow Fix. The other is a book on Africa that I picked up at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. I figured if the museum carried it, that it was likely the least likely title to depict things inaccurately.

*Hugs Books*

This weekend, Jay, Jon and I made a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally. It took 10 hours of driving to get down there, but we all found it well worth the travel time.

The purported point of the rally was to focus on what was good about America and celebrate it. It was espoused as being non-partisan, with Glenn specifically asking the participants not to bring political signs. For the most part, the audience complied.

However, this lack of signs did not change the fact that this was a rally specifically for Tea Partiers, by its most recognizable spiritual leader – Glenn Beck. The second he got on stage, Beck took a pot shot against what Tea Partiers see as the “liberal media”, which is to say all outlets that aren’t the ultra-conservative FOX News or radio personality Rush Limbaugh. He then spoke out against progressivism and liberalism of 1960s onwards, telling his audience to bring America back to how it used to be.

Beck called on his audience to inspire themselves on the Founding Fathers, virtual deieties amongst Tea Partiers. Their words are second only to those written in the Bible: unfaltering, regardless of cultural advances. This kind of idolization was somewhat eerie, as it bordered on a personality cult.

God was also referenced multiple times during the event. This rally, according to Beck, was the will of God. The Lord, he revealed, had spoken to him. Naturally, a pastor was brought on for a morning prayer. As Beck and the Tea Partiers see it, America is a Christian nation, and should be run with Biblical ideals. He spoke of bringing “God back to America”, and would later speak out against the exclusion of the Church from government. As for the prayer, the pastor took the opportunity to speak out against gay marriage, likely in reference to the recent advances of marriage equality in California.

Another theme was the military. Sarah Palin came on, and praised herself for having raised a combat veteran, her twenty-year old son. She said she came on not as a politician, but as a mother of a soldier. There was then talk about the greatness of America’s military, about how it shouldn’t be questioned, and three soldiers with heroic stories were talked about. Palin’s speech was essentially otherwise fluff, filler material.

The event was well attended. I’d venture a guess at 100,000 participants. The aura was decidedly anti-Obama, pro-Palin, pro-Reagan, pro-guns, and pro-Christianity. A number of people had “NRA” hats, while others sold off buttons that painted Obama as “socialist.” There was also “Don’t tread on me” flags abound.

The attendees were almost exclusively white – I only saw one black person, and she was there with her white boyfriend. The people there were also almost all certainly over 45 years of age. The only younger people I saw were children and teens brought along with their parents, and a group of twenty-somethings holding signs.

All in all, I’m really glad I went. This was double-digit IQ in action, as my friend Jon put it, and I look forward to repeating the experience once again. Perhaps during 2012, when the Tea Partiers hope that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck will team up and vie for the presidency.

Rogers has just launched another wireless carrier to compete with the new generation of cheap cellular providers, a la WIND and Moblicity. It’s called Chatr, and it will offer a $45/month plan featuring unlimited talk/texting Canada-wide.

We’re getting into an interesting stage where we have three levels of carriers. Rogers/Telus/Bell for the expensive end, Fido/Solo/Koodoo/Virgin for the mid-range end, and now this budget-oriented grouping of WIND/Chatr/Moblicity.

The thing is though that nothing changes between these carriers except price. It’s like shopping at Food Basics instead of Metro: it’s owned by the same people, and they sell the same stuff, but one is cheap and one is pricey. If it wasn’t for the CRTC opening up Canada’s wireless sector to competition, WIND would not exist and Roger’s would have been content to not implement something like Chatr.

Instead, we now have competition. And we all win.

Artist: Sam from Rooster Tail Comics

I’m so happy and proud to be Canadian. Despite the fact that I deal with a bit of shit here and there in public for being in a gay relationship, legislatively, we’re all equal. The situation south of the border is what this country was at three decades ago. We got rid of homophobic military policies right when the Americans enacted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” We enacted marriage equality before same-sex marriages were outright banned in some states.

This is a photo from an anti same-sex marriage rally in Maine the other day. For some reason, it gives me hope that things will change in the US. Full album here.