Bruce Wark

The multi-media rampage that followed last week’s Virginia Tech massacre reminds me of some sage advice, “pity this busy monster, manunkind, not,” the poet ee cummings counselled. “Progress is a comfortable disease.” Cummings, who refused to own a radio or TV, died almost 45 years ago—decades before the technological “progress” bestowed upon manunkind by the […]

Ron Chisholm’s mysterious encounter with a woman in Dartmouth last month reminded me of my own recent adventure in the City of Lakes. The provincial fisheries minister says a woman tapped on his car window at Tim Hortons and asked for a drive home. “I said no at first, but she started pleading with me,” […]

On March 6, the day the round-faced French philoso-pher Jean Baudrillard stopped breathing, the US lottery Mega Millions got set to hand out the world’s biggest-ever jackpot. Baudrillard, who argued that illusion and emptiness lie at the heart of consumer society, would surely have hooted at the thought of that $390 million prize. “Americans may […]

One of the most dangerous men in America zipped across the Canadian border last week to deliver a speech in Ottawa. John Walters, chief propagandist for the disastrous US war on drugs, praised Stephen Harper’s plan to put more drug offenders in jail. He also lauded George Bush for pushing random drug testing in American […]

The controversy over terrorism and torture as depicted on the Fox show 24 calls to mind the quotation: “I wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s a knob called ‘brightness,’ but that doesn’t work.” 24 stars Kiefer Sutherland as a hard-boiled US anti-terrorism agent who routinely tortures bad […]

Let’s say that the twin towers of climate change are global warming and global dimming. By now, everyone’s heard of global warming, twin tower number one. Experts have been warning for decades that unless we kick our addiction to burning fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, rising temperatures will generate more intense hurricanes, tornadoes, ice […]

The Coast Valentine’s Day issue lets us celebrate love and sex. But it also gives us a chance to honour power and money. After all, power is the great aphrodisiac and money is the universal lubricant. If love and sex are kissing cousins, money and power are their fraternal twins. Me, cynical? No way. All […]

Four years ago, Stephen Harper angrily accused the federal government of hitting “the snooze button” instead of protecting Canadians from a “suspected terrorist” named Maher Arar. Stockwell Day called Arar “dangerous.” Both were speaking shortly after the Americans deported Arar to Syria. At the time, Harper and Day were opposition members of the Canadian Alliance. […]

In the fall of 2001, just after 9/11, the Daily News ran ads promoting Halifax police and the RCMP. The ads, co-sponsored by a big coffee chain, peddled trading cards with photos of police officers on them. Kids who collected all 24 cards could win “cool prizes.” Under the headline “To serve, protect and collect,” […]

If a sailor falls overboard, should a journalist standing on deck throw down her notebook and try to save him? Or should she calmly record the dramatic scene as he drowns? The answer’s a no-brainer. The reporter should try to rescue the unfortunate sailor. So why aren’t I dropping my pencil and throwing a safety […]

“One cannot hope to bribe or twist/Thank god! The mainstream journalist,” runs an adaptation of Hillaire Belloc’s famous satirical verse. “But seeing what news hounds will do/Unbribed, there is no reason to!” Those lines sprang to mind last week as I perused Christie Blatchford’s teary rant in the Globe about spending her most meaningful Christmas […]

The 9/11 hijackers created a real-life Towering Inferno in midtown Manhattan. But televised images of smoke and fire don’t mean much on their own. All movies, even real-life disaster flicks, need soundtracks to help viewers make sense of them. And for some reason, the hijackers left the sound track to George W. Bush and his […]