Email from John Barlow

Today was supposed to be the bye bye day for FSC but I haven't finished the Denis Roche "bootleg" which I was hoping would be the last offering here. But I got this email from John Barlow, a writer in Canada, which seemed to succumb to line breaks fairly easily (many of them are his own), and become a nice poem, or perhaps a monologue from a Mac Wellman play. Tonight I'll be at Galapagos watching the "Little Theater" event that I guess is usually held at Tonic.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Barlow
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 6:36 PM
Subject: DEBATETERFUGE

I swear ( ... ) when Walkerton first hit the news,
on a local broadcast, they called it, with some hesitation,
Watertown, which I still find murkily funny.
Well, the town of Wiarton must have an in
you say, on this matter, and it does, in that it has
“Wiarton Willie” who, like Wiarton, has - or, had –
two similar fellows himself, in the form of
two other groundhogs. News broke today that
tragedy befell them though. An underground tunnel
had been constructed between their indoor cage and their
outdoor cage playpen, where they built nests
from straw. So near watertable is this section of Wiarton,
they drowned when their tunnel filled up.
The now deeply troubled groundhog handler

kept this a secret until recently. All these
months the handler's been claiming
to believe only one of the groundhogs at a time was showing
itself. Wiarton town council is furious, and disgusted
that Wiarton Willie has had to sleep
in his tunnel with his two dead companions,
all this time. But the theory was plausible,
and this world is in fact rife with plausible theory
just as poorly construed. In today's
Star, a story arises, How to read the polls. The author
lists off some six polling results,
for Ontario, ranging from dead heat (43-42 for
Liberals) to recent landslide 49-33
but the author then points out that steep
differences in the numbers depends on whether
one reports only the percentage support
from decided polled-folk, or the percentage of all
decided and undecided.
          Then the author writes this:
“If we recalculate the results used by Decima
so that they match the method reported by
the others, we find that the Liberals have 39 per cent
of support among decided voters, as
do the Tories.” Though the six polls quoted
were all different, none showed a tie,
among decided; undecided would not effect
the difference between the two “parties”. Incredibly
the author later concludes:
“The more informed the voter, the more likely
that the polls will enlighten rather than confuse
debate.” BOOOOOONNNNEEESSSSSSSSS.HOGGGGGG BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNEESSSSSS.

In a similar moment of unbridled if milder irony,
Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty campaigned
for both the Liberals and the NDP yesterday. Asked
where the money would come from,
for proposals, he said: “If we don't put $3.2 billion into tax cuts
for corporations, and we don't put half a billion
into private schools, if we don't put $400 million
into self-promotional government advertizing,
if we don't put $400 million into private-sector consultants,
if we actually collect unpaid corporate taxes, then we
can actually do something.” All day nursing this information
as I worked, I wondered where to email it.
Local softbrain politics is so passe. So I thought I'd just
send it to you to wonder about, and you can forward it if you wish.

The three newspaper articles mentioned are all from
the Toronto Star, yesterday or today. In the case
of two, I wish to cause the authors no further
embarrassment than their produce already caused.
The third is pretty general anyway. It's just an email. They can delete it.

meneninkenlkniienoinoinlkenlknknenononen ~ end ~ 0 ~

Posted by Brian Stefans at September 29, 2003 05:00 PM | TrackBack