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Make it go away’ problem solving

One of the times in my life when I was a graduate student, the school I attended in Montreal used to have visiting lecturers every other Friday or so.

One of the times in my life when I was a graduate student, the school I attended in Montreal used to have visiting lecturers every other Friday or so. They came on Fridays because there were no regular classes that day, it being a tenet of the school that long weekends encouraged good study habits, not to mention providing faculty with three days off to think weighty thoughts. Sometimes I’d attend these lectures because there was an interesting topic being kicked around, sometimes I’d go out of bored curiosity; but usually I’d go because there were free sandwiches and cookies and the word “free” was as Pavlovian to graduate students as powder is to skiers.

On one Friday there was a learned professor of organizational behaviour from Romania whose talk was titled “Management by Dracula.” Imagine, if you will, the combined pull of that title, a dreary February Friday in Montreal, free sandwiches and a warm place to kill a few hours waiting for the grad student union to open its doors and start pouring ninety cent beers. Of course I went.

The man himself was quite ghoulish looking. Short, with bad teeth, mottled complexion and dandruff that made him look as if he’d just walked in from a snowstorm, he could have been the offspring of a bizarre coupling between Roman Polanski and Bela Lugosi. He dressed fashionably in pre-Gothian black and spoke in a thickly accented, comic-book Nazi voice.

The kickoff to his lecture was a story about a 17th century landowner who was having no end of problems with his peasant farmers. They cheated him out of his rents, stole the best crops for themselves, poached game from his lands and generally dissed him like he was one of them and not the lord of the manor. His threats and reprisals went unheeded as he tried first one then another scheme to bring them into line.

Finally, despairing of ever prevailing through the use of threats or bribes, he held a party for all his peasants. On a promising spring day, a banquet was prepared. Barrels of wine were toted up from his cellar; lambs were slaughtered, delicacies brought in for the occasion. The food was piled high on groaning boards inside a large barn to protect it in case the weather turned inclement.

When the peasantry was well on its way to feeling no pain, the dinner bell was rung and all rushed expectantly into the barn to gorge themselves on the master’s largesse. Once they were all inside, the doors to the barn were bolted and the barn torched and burnt to the ground with everyone inside. Except, of course, the master, who had already arranged to import new peasants from nearby lands to replace those just lost.

Neat. Efficient. Bloodthirsty, but neat.

In business, in life, in society in general, the way people deal with their problems says a lot about how far they’ve evolved from the primordial ooze of single-cell life. As the Christian world awaits the dawning of its third millennium, we’re still stuck in the “make it go away” phase of problem solving. Some of the methods are spectacularly advanced, but many are just a flush away.

The answer to global warming isn’t to turn down the thermostat in your house and chill out in refrigerated air, although you couldn’t be scolded for thinking it might be. The only evidence of collective will among the world’s leaders to actually deal with it hasn’t amounted to much more than a room full of hot air. What the hell, new beachfront property for a new generation and it just may solve the traffic problem in Vancouver once it becomes a city of canals.

In Canada, for the moment, we’ve decided it’s both inhumane and stupid to kill people for their crimes. In the US, a record number of criminals were put to sleep last year. Before we hurt our arms patting ourselves on the back, there are any number of Reform Party yahoos and like, small-minded people — some of whom don’t live in Alberta — who’d like to change that. I could almost be won over to their way of reasoning (?) if it weren’t for the irony of the death penalty. In killing a criminal for killing a victim, isn’t the state just validating his original point of view? That there are some problems so big, so insoluble that the only solution is just to kill the bastard? And then there’s the problem I always have with the death penalty — where to stop? Intermediate boarder plowing fresh pow off the steep bits of Cockalorum... waste him?

Whistler’s got a long — relatively — and illustrious history of downloading its problems. For most of the last decade, we downloaded our housing problems to Pemberton and Squamish and to a large extent, we’re still doing that. But that’s okay; it’s the millionaires that pay the freight, not the eight buck an hour kids.

We download our problem of creating a sustainable society on wave after wave of seekers who we use for a season or two, then boot out of here to go back home and make a life for themselves someplace that pays a wage more in line with its cost of living. No offense, after all, we really needed you to get us through the hustle part of the season.

Now we’ve downloaded our nasty little paedophile on... where the heck did that boy go? Who knows? Who cares? No one here, that’s for sure. He’s gone and that’s all any of us care about. Loser. Misfit. Degenerate piece of human rubbish. Good riddance.

I wonder what his story was. What nastiness in his own life may have contributed to the crimes he committed. I wonder if he was trying to go straight. I wonder if the good citizens in his new home will run him out of town. I wonder how many towns he’ll have to be run out of before he decides there’s no place left for him to go and nothing to lose by ratcheting his deviant behaviour up a few notches to embrace violence, maybe murder. I wonder why, in a society where we go out of our way to sexualize images of children for culture and commerce, we’re so shocked when someone acts out our fantasies.

I wonder what made the cops and the corrections people believe he was at a high risk to reoffend, other than the ipso facto circle that paederasts have a high recidivism rate, he’s a paederast, ergo, well you get the point. We don’t know and they won’t say. Trust them. Take their word. After all, they’re the ones who have to deal with trash like him.

I wonder why it’s okay for us to publish his name, his picture and where he lives because we fear what he might do, while we have too much sensitivity to publish the names and faces of the two lowlife losers who beat their spouses on New Year’s Eve and who are still living among us.

I wonder what we were thinking a couple of weeks ago when we sang about peace on earth and goodwill towards men.



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