ma parole

Democracy For Hire

New term for the day - astroturf lobbying refers to the practice of manufacturing grassroots support. For a fee, these PR companies use boiler room phone operations to locate "less-informed" activists willing to send letters to their government representatives on whatever the PR firm's client's cause may be.

According to this page, astroturf techniques have been used to:

• defeat the Clinton administration's proposed health care reform, through a front group called "Rx Partners" created by the Beckel Cowan PR firm, and the Coalition for Health Insurance Choices, created by public relations consultant Blair Childs
• harass environmentalists through the Wise Use movement
• loosen automobile fuel efficience standards
• support clear-cutting American forests, through a front group called Citizens to Protect the Pacific Northwest and Northern California Economy
• oppose restrictions on smoking in public places, through a front group called National Smokers Alliance, which was created by Burson-Marsteller

Democracy for hire. But I'll bet it ain't cheap.

More about love

My love runs by like a day in June,
    And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
    In the pathway or the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start
    Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart —
    And I wish somebody'd shoot him.

Our Army.

Technically, I am an immigrant. We moved to Canada just before my sixth birthday and though I have some memories of the country in which I was born, a young child's identity is sufficiently elastic (or perhaps the memory sufficiently pliant) that I remember always thinking of myself as Canadian.

My father says he remembers well the day this fact dawned on him, that I was Canadian. I had asked him how big our army was, and he realised that I meant the Canadian one, not the one of the country we'd left behind.

This is our army. Je me souviendrai.

On Deadlines

I've been doing a lot of ducking, lately.

Martinis and Madonna

I love this album - it is, for me, a real break-through in Madonna's work. But that is not why I love it. I love it for the associations: a mid-summer's eve in San Francisco; the sun slanting down on the back of the house, warm and yellow; crowded on a tiny fire escape just off my bedroom window; martinis in hand, cold and white.